Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind
by George Lakoff
First posted December 2013
I re-read Rime of the Ancient Mariner twice while writing this review, so something good came out of this book. Also all the hair on the back of my neck stands up straight when I see the word “Dyirbal.”
At one point during The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: after the crossbow; after the pale woman; after the death of the crew; the Mariner shifts from being repulsed by the ocean’s strange creatures to being entranced by them, even though he is still under a curse that can trace some semblance of causality back to an oceanic animal. In spite of, or possibly because of, said curse, he can finally see the beauty inherent in the world and bestows blessings on all of creation. With that selfless, pointless gesture, the albatross—the in-narrative tangible curse-proxy and eventual übersymbol for personal baggage and regret—slides free.
So it’s a story of acceptance of the world and in all things great and small. That’s nice. But why give the moment to the water snakes? You have the Mariner looking over the side of the ship already, looking down into the ocean. His reflection, replete with Albatross accoutrement, could reasonably be visible to him. Why wasn’t it the Albatross that the Mariner “blessed unaware”? Are we to suppose that the magic wonder of ultimate peaceful blessings that the Mariner is radiating extends to the Albatross too? No. No, specifically he calls out “happy living things” during his vatic revelation. And that Albatross is as dead as his old crewmates. That he killed. Via his curse.
Shooting the albatross created the Mariner—he’d just be some guy on a boat, never the person that wanders the world spreading the tale so that renders you, the reader, “a sadder and a wiser man.” So shouldn’t he learn to love the albatross, not the gaudy water snakes? Albatross as is, too; not the sleek and flying good sailing omen from the sky, but the dead, weighty metaphor hanging around his neck?
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.
Now, I’m not calling Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind a capital-A Albatross, though after nearly six weeks of dragging this hefty tome all over the city I can certainly relate to the physical burden of traipsing across the sea with an unwieldy bird-corpse stuck to you. No, I’m calling it my apple juice seat. And much like the intriguing mystery that is the title of this book, I assure you that apple juice seat will make sense by the end of this review.
For now, let us return to the sea and the impropriety with which the dead Albatross was treated. What bothers me about Rime is that the Mariner never really thinks about the Albatross again. It’s been part of his life for, let’s say, oh don’t know, let’s pick six weeks as an arbitrary amount of time that is not representative of anything in particular. And this albatross is always just there, you know? He’s lugging it all over creation. And sure, it feels like a burden while you’re carrying it, but you sort of get used to the weight. You become “That guy that’s always wearing that Albatross. What do you think his deal is, did he lose some sort of bet?” And even if you complain about it all the time, because it kind of sucks and there are hundreds if not thousands of other birds you could be sporting—why even limit yourself to birds, right? Maybe take a month and wear not a single bird at all, but focus your style on wearable marmots—but once it’s gone, you sort of miss it. I mean, it’s over, really over. That damn thing has sunk like lead into the sea. Even though you were pretty unhappy while actually, because it wasn’t really fun…still, the Albatross taught you some things. About yourself. About what categories reveal about the mind.
Okay, you caught me. I am blatantly comparing Women, Fire to the Albatross. With zero subtlety. But never more so has a “spring of love gushed from my heart ” than the moment I closed this for the final time. If you’re not up on your Coleridge, yes, that’s the line that directly precedes the release of the Albatross pendant and, with it, assumedly the curse. And now that I’m free from the weight of this book, I don’t know how to even begin reviewing it. I’ve carried it nearly everywhere for six weeks. My morning and evening commutes—depending on subway crowds—offered the chance for about eight to ten pages. Fewer still if I was deep into an objectivism vs. experientialism section, because those pages required perfect attention or, failing that, brute repetition, to absorb even one iota of information. And objectivist versus experientialist was about a third of the book. It felt like my pet that could never be left home by itself. Or my mascot for the month of January. And late December. And the first half of February. See? Six weeks. Perhaps it is unfair to lay this at the feet of Women, Fire, but I was able to renew it nine times from the library. Nine. It almost wanted to try for the tenth before I returned it, but I don’t want that on my library record: it feels too self-indulgent. What I’m saying is that, anecdotally, people aren’t exactly beating down the doors to get their hands on a copy.
I’m of the mind it might be good if more people did try to read it, though it might damage the publishing industry if their sales drop to zero while the entire world struggles through six weeks or more of taxonomic synapomorphies. I definitely picked up some accessible pieces of information:
The MORE IS UP metaphorical model constitutes conceptual scaffolding for, say, discussions about economics—price rises, depressions, downturns, etc. It is not believed. No one thinks MORE really is UP; it is just used in understanding. But there are people who really believe that TIME IS A RESOURCE, and who live by it: they budget their time, try not to waste their time, etc. As we saw above, there is a movement to conventionally extend the RESOURCE (or MONEY) metaphor for TIME, so that the concept of STOLEN TIME will become believed and lived by and not merely pondered, as it is now. Metaphorical concepts can also be lived by without being believed. For example, no one believes that SEEING really is a form of TOUCHING, in which there is a limblike gaze that goes out from the eyes and seeing occurs when the gaze touches something. There used to be a scientific theory of “eye-beams” that was of this sort and was widely believed, but not anymore. Yet we still use such a metaphor to comprehend vision, and that us is reflected in expressions like I can’t take my eyes off of her. Her eyes picked out every detail of the pattern. Their eyes met. And so on.
These sections keep you moving forward, just like every non-fiction book worth its salt—there are some tidbits that you can pull out and say, “Hey, yeah. I learned that. That’s a cool fact.” In the above example, treating time like a resource has become so commonplace, has always been so commonplace for my entire lifespan, that it never even occurred to me that there is nothing inherent within time that makes one treat it the same as money.
Our every day folk theory of the world is an objectivist folk theory. We create cognitive models of the world, and we have a natural tendency to attribute real existence to the categories in those cognitive models. This is especially true of conventional metaphorical models. Take, for example, our cognitive model in which time is understood metaphorically as a moneylike resource. Thus, time can be saved, lost, spend, budgeted, used profitably, wasted, etc. This is not a universal way of conceptualizing time, but it is very pervasive in American culture, so much so that many people lose sight of its metaphorical character and take it as part of an objective characterization of what time “really is.”
I really liked these discussions, and there were a number of them spread throughout Women, Fire. Treating time like a resource leads people down some really strange post hoc rationalizations, which seem perfectly natural until you actually parse time as metaphor from time as actual experience. But you sort of have to function as if time is a resource in a society that takes it as a predicate truth. In Search of Lost Time sounds deep and enthralling; In Search of Lost Gravity sounds like a direct-to-home SciFi film. You can’t, in actuality, save time any more than you can save gravity, nor spend some gravity relaxing, or even kill gravity by just doing nothing. You can’t really do those things to time, either. But if everyone acts like we can, does the distinction contain value anymore?
Folk theories can be more than just misleading: they can be dangerous:
A particularly important fact about the collection of metaphors used to understand lust in our culture is that their source domains overlap considerably with the source domains of metaphors for anger. As we saw above, anger in America is understood in terms of HEAT, FIRE, WILD ANIMALS and INSANITY as well as reaction to an external force. Just as one can have smoldering sexuality, one can have smoldering anger. One can be consumed with desire and consumed with anger.
This comes from one of the case studies that make up the second half of the book: much like how the functional metaphors that rely on “eye-beams” still persist long after the scientific acceptance of the actual “eye-beam” principle has waned, the conceptual metaphors that bridge anger and lust create space to rationalize some particularly heinous acts. I am opting out of discussing them in depth here, but if the penciled underlines and asterisks in my copy of Women, Fire were any indication, there is no shame in skipping over the first half of the book and diving directly into the case studies.
Even though nearly half the pages are devoted to case studies, this book proper leans more heavily on gestalts than direct potable facts. If, like me, you bring almost no outside knowledge of cognitive psychology (or gestalts, or even the meaning of gestalt), when the curse lifts and that albatross finally drops into the sea you may be left with a lingering sense of new structures with which to view language:
“Take the sense in which I talk of a cricket bat and a cricket ball and a cricket umpire. The reason that all are called by the same name is perhaps that each has its part—its own special part—to play in the activity called cricketing: it is no good to say that cricket means simply ‘used in cricket’: for we cannot explain what we mean by ‘cricket’ except by explaining the special parts played in cricketing by the bat, ball, etc.” [citation removed]
Austin here is discussing a holistic structure—a gestalt—governing our understanding of activities like cricket. Such activities are structured by what we call a cognitive model, an overall structure which is more than merely a composite of its parts. A modifier like cricket in cricket bat, cricket ball, cricket umpire, and so on does not pick out any common property or similarly shared by bats, balls, and umpires. It refers to the structured activity as a whole and the nouns that cricket can modify form a category, but not a category based on shared properties. Rather it is a category based on the structure of the activity of cricket and on those things that are part of the activity. The entities characterized by the cognitive model of cricket are those that are in the category. What defines the category is our structured understanding of the activity.
Unlike cricket, which technically I suppose I only vaguely understand, the category termed objectivist means almost nothing to me. Meant. Meant almost nothing to me, before this book. So when I say a solid third of this book is spent dismantling objectivism, well, it’s not fun for the neophyte. Have you ever heard someone talking—at length—about why Sachin Tendulkar, given modern bowls, should be considered as good a batsman as Don Bradman? You might end up knowing a bit about both Bradman and Tendulkar if you put your mind to deciphering their discourse, but you probably won’t walk away learning any fundamentals of cricket, the sport of choice for the two I just mentioned. You generally need at least a little context to even know where to begin in high-level discourse, and this book is no exception.
Women, Fire isn’t a new book. I have already confessed to not knowing current perspectives of the objectivist standard, though I did read Bentham in undergrad and still maintain a few bits from Kripke on my physical shelves. But even if every fact from this book has been excised from the modern grimoire of literary diegesis and obliterated from the entire field of cognitive theory, the exercise in perspective might be worth the effort:
The objectivist paradigm also induces what is known as the literal-figurative distinction. A literal meaning is one that is capable of fitting reality, that is, of being objectively true or false. Figurative expressions are defined as those that do not have meanings that can directly fit the world in this way. If metaphors and metonymies have any meaning at all, they must have some other, related literal meaning. Thus, metaphor and metonymy are not subjects for objectivist semantics at all. The only viable alternative is to view them as part of pragmatics—the study of a speaker’s meaning. Moreover, it follows from the objectivist definition of definition itself that metaphor and metonymy cannot be part of definitions. They cannot even be part of concepts, since concepts must involve a direct correspondence to entities and categories in the real world (or a possible world). These are not empirical results. They are simply further consequences of the objectivist paradigm.
This section—and it was a very large section indeed—was the hurdle that made a six-week odyssey for me. Honestly, an objectivist understanding of the mind is something I still don’t know if I totally understand. So being dragged along as an expert dismembers it bit by bit—well, it’s a bit like inviting yourself to play with the Boston Philharmonic because you’ve seen The Music Man a dozen times. I am certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there were pages upon pages that I simply didn’t comprehend. It was humbling. I pulled something away from all those pages: that concepts cannot be merely internal representations of an external reality; that linguistic symbols are not inherently meaningless and do not simply correspond with things in the world. But ask me in six weeks why the conceptual categories of myths and metaphors prove that the mind is more than an isolated symbol-translating machine, and I might struggle with the details of focal blue being perceived when the blue-yellow neurons show a blue response and when the red-green cells are firing at the neutral base rate. I’ll probably remember that people within the same language culture typically perceive and name focal blue the same way—which destroys the collegiate aphorism, “Duuude, what if my blue is your green…?!”—but that languages with different color categories might center the category that covers the “cool” colors—blue, green, black—into focal green. Even though focal blue elicits the same neurophysiological response, it would be interpreted as green.
As wild as bits like that are—and I’m sure I didn’t do the focal blue discussion justice—I cannot recommend reading this book to a normal person. I just can’t. The ratio of dross to gem is too high—the work required to put in is too demanding. Maybe if you’re going on a long trip and you can only have one book. There are great things to pull from it. Read a synopsis. Take a course at a local college, where the adjunct’s job is to edit down the text into readable sections. Trust a professor to create a photocopied packets of the good bits. It’s probably all digital now, anyway. Does it follow that—as digital photography has obliterated the cost of snapping dozens of pictures where one once sufficed—professors feel free to assign full texts rather than annotated pages since it doesn’t require four trees per student? Even given the relatively limitless expanse of the internet, I believe Women, Fire would still be edited down. Substantially.
Look, we all acknowledge the reason the book seems cool is the title: Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. It is an appealing puzzle. The author gives a shorthand summary, and admits that grouping those three words together will cause more people to stop and give the book a shot. It’s a bit frustrating. If you do get into the meat of the discussion, much later on, it turns out to be worth it. Sort of like how shoving enough broccoli down a kid’s throat will eventually lead to him seeking it out on his own (your mileage may vary on this particular example).
The secret insight regarding women, fire and dangerous things is that, well, in the aboriginal language of Dyirbal, they’re in the same category. Then, there is a close dissection of Dyirbal, a language which is probably extinct by the time you’re reading this. It is fascinating, though you can never quite shake the feeling that the title remains thoroughly misleading. I’m not in the position to parse Dyirbal here and now, but I feel comfortable saying that the title could just as easily be Money, the Moon, and Animate Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind for exactly the same reasons, minus those of marketing panache.
As the end of the book loomed ever closer, I began to fear and distrust the world post Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. I’d grown used to the weight of my albatross: the daily struggle against four or five pages; the fear of its heft smushing the remnants of my lunch as I returned home each night. What I’d begun to realize—in part from the literal weight of the book itself, in part from the figurative density of the material—was that the weight, the cultural weight, of albatross as a metaphor sprung from nothing. Before Coleridge, before The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, it meant nothing. There is nothing inherently ominous, curse-worthy, or redemptive about it outside of the context of Rime. Coleridge is the Weird Sisters for albatrosses—only through his proclamation would they reach what seemed an inevitable fate—quintessential regret metaphor. Now it’s used like it really means something, in and of itself. It is something that never did and never will exist in our world. But we get it, it makes sense. Because of context. It has slipped the surly bonds of its own narrative origin and risen in the real world free, reborn free from its own contextual baggage.
When an appropriate Idealized Cognitive Model is provided by context, a compound can be made up spontaneously. Pamela Downing provides the classic example of apple juice seat, an expression actually used by a hostess to an overnight guest coming down to breakfast. There were four place settings at the table, three with glasses of orange juice and one with a glass of apple juice. She said Please sit in the apple juice seat, and the new compound made perfect sense given what was understood about the setting.
I doubt completing Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things will send me on a round-the-world journey sharing my tale and turning any who will listen into “wiser and sadder” people. But if you’ll recall, the Mariner never suggests one takes up the mantle of the Albatross themselves; rather, listen and learn from the story as he tells it. Save yourself from shooting the albatross. Learn what you want of this book from someone else’s abridgement.