Locke, Derrida, Johnson, Lakoff

Despite a nearly 300 year gap in their writings, by their very premises Lakoff and Johnson’s “Metaphors We Live By” (1980) and John Locke’s “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” (1690) address a very similar set of problems in our conception of language and understanding. One could easily argue that in trying to identify the origins understand the effects of human language on our knowledge of the external world, Locke lays the framework for the conversation by way of ‘modes,’ ‘substances,’ ‘relations’ and characteristics of effective communication, while Lakoff and Johnson expand this basis, fulfilling Locke’s attempts to dismantle doctrines of “received truth” and innate ideas by introducing the idea that the metaphor is more than an ornamental literary device, or simple characteristic of language. “Metaphors We Live By” makes the case that metaphors, like Locke’s modes, substances and relations, “govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details.” Both seem to be in agreement that our conceptual system is an internalized system of meanings that we more or less repress, or become numb to.

            Commerce provides an interesting point of intersection between the philosopher and theorists. Examples in each treatise devote effort to the language of commodity culture, but it should be noted that Lakoff and Johnson do so more directly. Without necessarily addressing economic self-interest or citing Marxist ideas, they refer to the metaphorical English expression “time is money” and associated, seemingly non-transactional expressions such as “I don’t have enough time to spare for that” to dispel the myth that metaphor is a mere “characteristic of language alone,” taking time instead to parse how it reflects the internalized basis of our conceptual system. This system, they argue, is founded on precepts that “time is money,” “time is a limited resource,” and “time is a valuable commodity” – ideas vital to survival in a capitalist system. Time is an abstraction, one which we, apparently, at one point made sense of via our relationship with money and finite resources. Metaphor in this case, is the language of survival, and a language that has been accepted over the course of capitalism’s increasingly pervasive sway on human life. As mentioned before, Locke by contrast does not identify commerce by name, but chooses in his examples of “substances” (‘mixtures of simple ideas’) such as liquor and gold. I would argue that “time is money” has its roots in his choice of substantive examples. Though basic and concrete, similarly reflect the economic or cultural mores of his time in a way that leads to the internalization of the metaphor in Lakoff and Johnson’s 1980’s.

            In his identification of substances, modes and relations, Locke argues that signs refer to ideas – they are the link between a concept and sound pattern in linguistics, or a concept and a conventional sign. Jacques Derrida, a forefather of post-structuralism, complicates this understand by introducing the idea that in language, there are no “identities, only differences” in time and space. To my understanding, this in a way supersedes the personal/universal binary explored by our other theorist. In many ways it identifies the anti-matter of language and significance – the idea that all significance and meaning comes from our ability to differentiate rather than compare. In the case of the metaphor “time is money,” I can only assume that this would apply by a lack of difference, which led to the creation of the expression.