Poets of system

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson ( Philosophy in the Flesh : The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought ) agree with Paul DeMan that metaphors lie at the heart of metaphysical theories.  They do not, however, believe that exposing the metaphorical ground of metaphysics destabilizes philosophy.  Rather, “conceptual metaphors ground abstract concepts through cross-domain mappings using aspects of our embodied experience and how they establish the inferential structures within philosophies . . . . Metaphors are the very means by which we can understand abstract domains and extend our knowledge into new areas.”

DeMan would be right only if there were some non-metaphorical substrate to thought.  But, Lakoff and Johnson say, there isn’t.  And this means that “philosophers are not simply logic-choppers who fine-tune what their culture already knows in its bones.  Instead, they are the poets of systematic thought.”