[3 of 5] Detecting Growth in Language (pages 24-29) by James Moffett (1992)

Author: James Moffett Curated by Jonathan M. Marine and Paul Rogers

Moffett, James. “‘Both Modes of Knowing,' and 'Literal and Figurative' Detecting Growth in Language, Boynton/Cook Publishers, Inc., Portsmouth, NH, 1992, p. 24-29.

Both Modes of Knowing

There is another reason why growth must be toward greater implicitness as well as explicitness, and this may be the real reason for literature. Language must do justice to the two main ways by which, we said earlier, the hemispheres of the brain abstract experience. French, German, and other languages have two different verbs for these two modes of knowing (savoir and connaître, wissen and kön-nen), so well were they recognized centuries before modern brain research—intuitively at least! The one associated with the analytic hemisphere is the intellect, and the one associated with the synthesizing hemisphere is intuition. Interestingly, all cultures consider intuitive knowing “direct.” Intellect emphasizes parts and differences; intuition, wholes and similarities.

The analytic hemisphere sequences separate items in linear, cumulative fashion, moving in a time progression. It is digital and specializes in seriation. It is called the verbal hemisphere because language too is linear and analytic and seems to be essentially controlled by this half of the brain. But the two halves do work in tandem, after all, so that verbalization is significantly influenced by the mode of operation of the synthesizing hemisphere, even though that half is regarded as nonverbal.

The synthesizing hemisphere processes items simultaneously instead of sequentially and therefore is associated with space rather than time. It is analogical and specializes in classification. In holistic fashion, it fuses information coming from different sources at the same time. Because of its spatial orienting, it is associated with arts, sports, and crafts. It works by collecting diverse items together into a constellation based on some intuition of affinity among them. It is metaphorical. It links experience implicitly, whereas the analytic hemisphere names and states explicitly.

If language is to render thought effectively, it must somehow capture both of these modes of knowing—even though its own functioning is characterized by the analytic/linear hemisphere. Since growth occurs in both modes, and since language tries to do justice to both, we have to look at how it pulls off this feat.

To be explicit is to verbalize, to put into words rather than merely to imply. This difference between what is actually stated and what is left unstated strikes at the heart of our matter here, the rendering of thought into speech. The working of the analytic hemisphere naturally tends to make thought explicit in language, because it breaks thinking down into the kinds of items and relations that characterize language—the grammatical parts of speech, the types of sentence structures, and the kinds of discourse. Indeed, the fact that only humans have specialized hemispheres has prompted a hypothesis that specialization evolved to facilitate speech. But how does language render the thought that characterizes the synthesizing hemisphere?

Literal and Figurative

Literal refers to letters, figurative to figures of speech. When a gardener talks about how to prune roses, he speaks literally in using their name; he doesn’t, like a poet, refer to roses only as a way of referring to love or intellectual beauty or the house of Tudor. The difference here is between single and multiple levels of meaning. Gardeners, like scientists, don’t intend for the referent to refer in turn to something else. They mean nothing but a rose. Wishing to strip the poor overloaded rose of all its culturally accumulated burden of symbolism, Gertrude Stein said, somewhat testily perhaps in her rebellion against the philosophical poetry of the preceding generations, “A rose is a rose is a rose.”

A word used literally denotes one and only one thing. If the word normally has several possible meanings, like the word interest, only one of those is intended. Used figuratively, a word connotes more than its common meaning or any one of its meanings alone. It implies more than it says. So to speak literally is to be more explicit, to narrow down meaning precisely, whereas to speak figuratively is to refer simultaneously to several things at once. Equivocal means exactly this (equivocal implying several-voiced), and the useful counterterm is univocal (single-voiced). James Joyce tried to create a whole language of words such as “gracehoper” that would have meaning at two or more levels. But ordinary language is virtually like this, since the etymology of most words shows that they have or had a primal, concrete meaning upon which the more familiar one is overlaid. In this way Joyce’s language is like any other, but his also makes new connections among things as original metaphor always does. The root meaning of metaphor itself, for example, is to carry over.

Any metaphor links together two otherwise unconnected items. A person who speaks of a politician put at bay is referring by one term to two referents—some politician and some game animal that hunting hounds have closed in on and backed into an impasse. The term bridges two domains, synthesizes two items within some similarity. The receivers have to fill in some of the meaning from their own imaginations, because metaphors work implicitly. They must decide for themselves how far the comparison goes—perhaps even of what the comparison consists. There isn’t one term for each referent but one term for both. That is how metaphors operate implicitly. The same concepts that are serially conveyed over time, one concept per word in literal usage, can be conveyed in a single figure of speech, metaphor, or representative token. The term condensation has been used to denote this sort of multilevel expression when it occurs in dreams. It applies equally well to figurative language, which compresses several levels of thought into one language term.

The same is true for the symbolic figures and actions abounding in folk literature, novels, and other imaginative stories. Ostensibly, Beowulf or Moby Dick or Alice in Wonderland has a single level of meaning, since only one thread of language spins out the cumulative sequence, and, taken at face value, these works are productions of the analytic hemisphere. Items and actions are explicitly designated, and the subject matter is broken down and spread over parts of speech and sentence structures that dutifully dole it out according to conventional public categories. But what an extraordinary, original rendering of experience and thought! The authors have embodied their ideas in representative figures and deeds that stand for more than themselves. So a whale and a sea chase manage to carry along several levels of meaning simultaneously—psychological, physical, sociological, anthropological, theological—in exactly the way that the synthesizing hemisphere asserts simultaneously and implicitly a complex of different things.

The verbal work does not have to be fictional, however. Most case histories are cases because the central figure or group or experience is typical, that is, acts not just as referent of the words but refers in turn to other things in the common experience of reader and writer. A token represents a type, so that referring to the token automatically refers to the type as well and hence to all the other members of it. For example, Melville’s white whale is a symbol. What is said about it at one level applies to other levels in the story as well.

This amounts to compressing generality and illustration into one entity. To the extent that it is literal, standing only for itself, a case at hand is only an instance that might be used to illustrate a general point; but to the extent that it is figurative, standing for others of a class, the case states a generality and illustrates it at once, though the generality, like the symbolism of the white whale, may never be stated in so many words. Literal discourse works by embedding generalities as particular sentences, strategically positioned in a discourse, which are supported by examples separately stated. Figurative discourse works by embodying generalities throughout the whole in recurring tokens invested with extra meaning by a web of suggestive details.

Compare literal meaning to melody, in which one note at a time is struck sequentially, and figurative meaning to chords, in which several related notes are struck simultaneously. Figurative language has overtones and undertones because several things are being referred to at once. Neither use of language is good or bad but has its own function. Both must be practiced. When people speak literally, they take one meaning at a time and build some kind of linear, cumulative abstraction, the way they play a tune by sounding one note at a time. When people speak figuratively, they express several meanings together in a complex, the way they strike a chord.

Literal language parcels out thought into speech in such a way that each concept is assigned its own term. In making language commensurate with the thought it conveys, this mode takes longer and allows only one connection among concepts at a time but makes each concept stand out separately, as the notes do in a melody. Figurative language is more economical and emphasizes the kinship and the totality of the concepts considered at once but makes it hard to single out any one of them from the rest and to make explicit what the relations are among them. A chord is like a fundamental, general idea in that it contains many possible melodies, as an idea contains implications and ramifications that can be spun out separately. Each melody is an elaboration of a chord, and each chord is a complex of potential melodies united by some intuition of vibrational affinity. Such is the resonance of the experiences Moby Dick stands for.

Figurative use of language answers the question how language can manage to serve at once both modes of knowing though controlled itself essentially by the linear/analytic hemisphere. The secret seems to lie in a certain kind of close collaboration between halves: intuition synthesizes experience into metaphorical complexes and feeds them in explicit sequences. It’s as if the analogical half, specializing in classification, makes up the collections or categories of experiences, while the digital half, specializing in seriation, names and chains these categories. The digital half processes literal and figurative names the same way, so that it can be fooled if the names are equivocal, not univocal. It is not concerned with what isn’t said.

The analogical halves of sender and receiver have to conspire, in a sense, to put in and take out of the words what isn’t said. This is why shared experience must be assumed. Assuming is dangerous, as we have implied, but the only alternative is to limit communication to one mode of knowing. At any rate, communicating the analogical perceptions through the digital mode is like sending a coded message by means of an unwitting messenger.

The linear half performs its work not on raw material but on material as abstracted already by the holistic half. This same coordination occurs in music when a melody is played out a note at a time as the harmony sounds with and includes these notes in chord progressions, which are sequenced complexes. (See Figure 1.)

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