Her second essay collection, The White Album (1979) contained her most famous line: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

“For me, writing is a kind of exploration,” Didion told the Guardian in 2003. “I’m not sure that I have a social conscience. It’s more an insistence that people tell the truth.” — Guardian - Joan Didion

Even if you are a believer god is still a metaphor for something beyond human understanding. — Tom Storm

God is a metaphor. Or so goes a particular line of thought, as it struggles to make the idea of God meaningful. Metaphors, after all, are symbols used to obliquely describe a deeper reality, to give a sense of the color and flavor of it.

And so for some Jesus followers, steeped in the overripe epistemology of deconstructive academe, this seems like a viable way to approach the Divine.

"God," they will say, "is the word we use as a metaphor to describe our aspirations." "God," folks will say, "is just a word we use to get at other realities."

And, yes, the Divine and the oblique language of metaphor are necessarily related. You can't approach the inherently unknowable in any other way than indirection, as the ancient prophets and visionaries knew...

But...
When we say "God is a metaphor," we are either missing the point of metaphor, or missing the point of faith...

...Saying God is a metaphor is saying to your lover, My love for you is a metaphor. Or telling the court, The truth I'm speaking is a metaphor. Or telling the poor, the downtrodden, and the oppressed that justice is a metaphor.

We miss the point of faith because believing that our symbolic language is the goal of faith is no more and no less idolatrous than fundamentalism. The point of faith is not and has never been the symbols we use to express it. It is the reality towards which we orient ourselves.
— Christiancentury: Is God a Metaphor ?

I was just trying to say that Heidegger's use of a metaphor (if that's what it is) doesn't require that he use more than one word.

Or I could say that more than one word is always required to produce the metaphoricality of a metaphor, because a word spoken or written without context cannot be metaphorical.

Such a contextless word is likely meaningless anyway. But the requirement for contextual words does not negate the claim that the metaphor itself is a metaphor, whether it's one word or a few. — jamalrob

I deny your claim that because two "things" are present, a single word can't carry that complex idea. Yes it can... — god must be atheist

Metaphor goes deep...

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaphor/ — Amity

Philosophers need to elucidate (a) the nature of the difference between taking language literally and taking it metaphorically, the nature, if you will, of the reinterpretation language undergoes when we take it metaphorically, and (b) the nature of the division of expressive labor between a metaphor’s focus and its frame...

Literary theorists regularly acknowledge the existence of extended metaphors, unitary metaphorical likenings that sprawl over multiple successive sentences. There are also contracted metaphors, metaphors that run their course within the narrow confines of a single clause or phrase or word. They reveal themselves most readily when distinct metaphors are mixed to powerful, controlled, anything but hilarious effect:

Philosophy is the battle against [the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language]. (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §109) — SEP: Metaphor

Ancient philosophers and rhetoricians viewed metaphor as a temporary self-explanatory change in the usage of a general or singular term, typically a noun or noun phrase. When we resort to metaphor, a term that routinely stands for one thing or kind is made to stand for another, suitably related thing or kind instead, and this change in what the term stands for occurs on the fly, without warning and without special explanation. — SEP: Metaphor 2. The Ancient Accounts

On ancient rhetoric and poetics more generally, see the entries Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Plato on Rhetoric and Poetry in this encyclopedia. — SEP- Metaphor

I mean I have taken in too much literature data, esp. terms. I am not at all in the literature field, you see. — Alkis Piskas

Unfortunately my mind seems to have moved on to more verdant pastures. — jamalrob

But for me, all this is too much literary input! :grin: — Alkis Piskas

(Too many consecutive posts; this is what happens when you don't think things through) — jamalrob

Of course, there are deeper and more interesting levels of metaphor, as pointed out by Amity earlier:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/633114 — jamalrob

Metaphors are also ways of thinking, offering readers (and listeners) fresh ways of examining ideas and viewing the world. — ThoughtCo - Metaphor Definition and Examples

A conceptual metaphor—also known as a generative metaphor—is a metaphor (or figurative comparison) in which one idea (or conceptual domain) is understood in terms of another...

Conceptual metaphors are part of the common language and conceptual precepts shared by members of a culture....

The connections we make are largely unconscious. They're part of an almost automatic thought process....

Three Overlapping Categories of Conceptual Metaphors

Cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have identified three overlapping categories of conceptual metaphors:

1. An orientational Metaphor is a metaphor that involves spatial relationships, such as up/down, in/out, on/off, or front/back.

2. An ontological Metaphor is a metaphor in which something concrete is projected onto something abstract.

3. A structural Metaphor is a metaphorical system in which one complex concept (typically abstract) is presented in terms of some other (usually more concrete) concept.
— ThoughtCo -

Rather than defining what precisely metaphor is, the research is more concerned with the question of what it does, and how it does what it does. The key area of investigation is the interface between thought and language, their interplay, interaction and convergence.
— Creative multilingualism

https://www.creativeml.ox.ac.uk/what-metaphor-and-how-does-it-work/index.html — Amity

(Too many consecutive posts; this is what happens when you don't think things through) — jamalrob

Even with Dali, there must have been influences, conjunctions, and metaphors within his paintings that the artist didn't deliberately place there...

Watch short documentaries about: Metaphor and Linguistic Diversity, Metaphor and Emotion, Metaphor and Communication, and Metaphor and Creativity.

...so with "Geworfenheit" there is merely a tenor. there can be no mapping. Although it is understandable why one would think it is a metaphor, it seems technically not to be. — jancanc

Watch short documentaries about: Metaphor and Linguistic Diversity, Metaphor and Emotion, Metaphor and Communication, and Metaphor and Creativity.

The Creative Power of Metaphor conference: multimedia output (including films of keynote speakers and roundtables, plus short interviews with poster presenters)

The research project conducted in the context of Creative Multilingualism is designed to investigate metaphor as a phenomenon that is both cognitive and linguistic, and to engage with the movement between cognition and language that is involved in the production and reception of metaphor. Processes are harder to define than things, and a key challenge is that giving ‘cognition’ and ‘language’ separate names presupposes a division within the continuum that is at stake.

The concept of metaphor at the centre of this research project builds on an approach to the phenomenon that George Lakoff and Mark Johnson articulated in 1980 as follows, in a book programmatically entitled Metaphors We Live By:

Metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action. [...] We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. (G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, Chicago, 22003, p. 3)...

Our approach is programmatically holistic, and crucially concerned with metaphor as a phenomenon that involves linguistic diversity and action in diverse cultural contexts.
Rather than defining what precisely metaphor is, the research is more concerned with the question of what it does, and how it does what it does. The key area of investigation is the interface between thought and language, their interplay, interaction and convergence. — Creative multilingualism

...therein lies my problem with saying a mere word (in isolation) is a metaphor. — jancanc

"Geworfenheit" has no target/source domain, — jancanc

Well, you sure lit a fuse there! — tim wood

there is a right way to interpret, but always with respect to some standard of interpretation. Thus a book is about this wrt system A of interpretation, and at the same time about B wrt system B of interpretation — tim wood

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." — tim wood

My own understanding is a bit shallow but I'll just go with the flow. — Cuthbert

The word metaphor itself is a metaphor, coming from a Greek term meaning to "transfer" or "carry across." Metaphors "carry" meaning from one word, image, idea, or situation to another. — Metaphor

“Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? ... I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, environed with the deepest darkness, and utterly deprived of the use of every member and faculty.

Most fortunately it happens, that since Reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, Nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends. And when, after three or four hours' amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.”

― David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding — David Hume

A life in quotes: bell hooks

The groundbreaking feminist critic, poet, and intellectual on love, feminism, patriarchy, white supremacy, forgiveness and the power of art

bell hooks, author and activist, dies aged 69

Bell hooks, the feminist author, poet, theorist and cultural critic, has died at the age of 69 at her home in Berea, Kentucky. Her works, including Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, All About Love, Bone Black, Feminist Theory and Communion: The Female Search for Love, were beacons for a generation of writers and thinkers in academia and beyond.

Here’s a handful of her most memorable quotes: — The Guardian - Books - bell hooks

Make Some Noise is a campaign by Amnesty International that uses music by John Lennon to promote human rights. Well-known artists produce covers of solo-era John Lennon songs exclusively for Amnesty International. — Wiki -

The World Press Cartoon has returned to Caldas da Rainha, one of UNESCO's Creative Cities. Cartoonists from the four corners of the world are tracing a new chapter of humorous drawings.

This 2021 edition is strongly marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, but also by defending the freedom of press and expression, a major tradition at the event. — Euronews - World Press Cartoon 2021