My recent discovery of David Chapman’s c̶o̶n̶c̶e̶p̶t̶metaphor of nebulosity prompts this too-long yet too-brief attempt to describe how I unify the virtually boundless range of metaphors for the c̶o̶n̶c̶e̶p̶t̶metaphor of (Buddhist) emptiness that I’ve encountered.*
I’m hoping to open a conversation with David about his metaphor of nebulosity, but I realize I don’t have anything remotely resembling a short, coherent, written summary of how I unify these metaphors…except a tweet thread I posted last November. I was responding to a discussion of panpsychism, and I offered an alternative to the metaphor of panpsychism — a metaphor I initially called pantropism** (but later switched to metaphoricity). So what follows is a slightly cleaned up and clarified version of that thread.
Many have attempted to clarify the meanings of emptiness, especially Buddhist meanings of emptiness, resulting in the flowering of a wide variety of metaphors. I’ve been collecting these alternatives for a while:
- ambiguity
- boundlessness
- cosmical weather
- emptiness
- groundlessness
- incoherence
- nebulosity
- nothingness
- openness
- potentiality
- primordiality
- void
(And I’m not even including terms from other languages, such as sunyata, ku, Dao, kenosis, tzimtzum,…)
I think the term metaphoricity is a worthy addition to this list. Brook Ziporyn coined the term to help explain Tiantai Buddhism’s metaphor of emptiness:
Thinking of all concepts as metaphors, thinking of everything in terms of asness not isness helps remind me that ambiguity (or if you prefer nebulosity) is present in every word we use to make ourselves understood. It is also an invitation to think of anything — especially emptiness — in different ways by using different metaphors to describe it.
Some view this slipperiness (there’s another metaphor!) or ambiguity or nebulosity as a bug because it can lead to misunderstanding. But it can also be viewed as a feature because one metaphor may be more illuminating to some audience than another. To layer metaphor upon metaphor, one can think of metaphors (tropes generally) as nano-upayas: tiny skillful means for helping your audience better grok the nebulous thing you’re trying to describe.
One can even take the concept of metaphoricity beyond the realm of concepts to the physical world itself. Here’s a passage from a provocative book by Jeffrey Donaldson, Missing Link: The Evolution of Metaphor and the Metaphor of Evolution, which claims that a process that could be labeled metaphoricity (though Donaldson does not use that term) is driving the evolution of the universe:
Metaphoricity: It’s not turtles all the way down, nor consciousness, it’s metaphors! I’ve come to realize that whenever the expression turtles all the way down emerges in a conversation, it’s a manifestation of emptiness, or if its more illuminating for you as it is for me, a manifestation of metaphoricity. (So we should probably add TATWD to the list of alternative metaphors for emptiness.)
With all this groundwork laid, hopefully you’re ready to understand this cryptic punch line to my tweet thread on metaphoricity:
I understand primordiality az*** global ambiguity az universal emptiness az global incoherence az boundless openness [az metaphoricity az pantropism az substitutability az multiple realizability az Verwindung az nebulosity]. I understand the complement of global ambiguity az all forms of definiteness az local coherence az contextual definiteness az coarse graining az boundedness.
To bring this back to the metaphor of panpsychism I was responding to in the thread, I understand mind and non-mind az co-arising processes of recontextualization:
This is yet another upaya for understanding how ambiguity / nebulosity / emptiness permeate our c̶o̶n̶c̶e̶p̶t̶u̶a̶l̶metaphorical thinking:
To be something is to be something else. To be something is to be a trope. And the function of mind is to perpetually recontextualize such tropic ambiguity. And recontextualization is itself a process of turning (trope is rooted in turning) old things to new uses: recontextualization az metaphorization az exaptation az bricolage az abduction az Verwindung.
One practical impact of this unification of metaphors for emptiness is that I’ve let go of the desire to choose the ultimate label (metaphor) for emptiness. Instead, I use whichever metaphor seems clearest or most evocative in the context in which I am using it. For example, in my essay on the boundlessness of hope, I use the metaphor of boundlessness instead of the metaphor of emptiness because in the context of hope, I find the former more inspiring than the latter.
NOTES
* As I was writing this sentence, I suddenly realized that concept wasn’t quite the right word. Then I realized that since the title of this essay is Metaphoricity Az Emptiness, I should use the term metaphor instead. This sparked the epiphany that it may be more fruitful think of all concepts as metaphor, and therefore to use the term metaphor in place of the term concept throughout. This is why it can be so difficult for me to write such essays. Attempting to unify a set of related epiphanies in essay form sparks yet more epiphanies. This also shows that my relatively new metaphoricity stance isn’t completely second nature to me yet.
** Note that trope is a general term for any kind of figurative (i.e., non-literal) language, including metaphor.
*** What does az mean? Therein lies the story of how I discovered Brook Ziporyn and Tiantai Buddhism. Which takes us back to last March, when I tweeted my epiphany, There is no is, only as:
A few days later, in a separate thread, Ike recommends Ziporyn’s Emptiness and Omnipresence, and my world changed. I dove into Ziporyn’s writings on Tiantai and discovered that my epiphany was old hat in Tiantai:
Then in April I replied to a tweet about E-Prime, a restricted language that avoids all forms of the verb to be (it’s claimed to clarify thinking!). My alternative proposal, which at the time was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, is to replace is/isn’t with az/azn’t:
So I coined az to indicate a quasi-relationship between two concepts that lies ambiguously between the too rigid is and the too loose as. Perhaps someday, the latter two will fade from use, replaced by the former. Perhaps concept will fade from use, replaced by metaphor or trope.
