Torrey Seland's book referenced another book I've had on my shelf for a while: Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Another close friend of mine had recommended it long ago--Bill Patrick who teaches at the Asbury Florida campus. If I ever get filthy rich I hope to set up Bill on a stipend to write whatever he wants... as long as he actually writes something :-) He's brilliant... and wasted teaching Greek :-).
I finally opened it and discovered that it is my kind of book! There are 29 chapters, but they're like three pages each! It's like a philosophy devotional :-)
So the basic point of the first chapter is that most of the way we conceive of the world is metaphorical--not just in our language, but in our concepts themselves. Meanwhile, "the essence of a metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another" (5).
The example they give is argument. Our conception of argument, they argue, is patterned after the metaphor of war. We defend our claims, some of which are indefensible. We win or lose arguments. Criticisms can be right on target and we attack others' positions, etc.
This, they argue, is the normal way of conceptualizing arguments and, thus, arguments are fundamentally metaphorical on a conceptual and not "merely" linguistic level.
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True that the conceptual is the universal...while the language is specified and contextualized understanding of the concept....such is the concepts of beauty, goodness, justice, etc....
How do we judge the contextualized specific unless it demonstrates such a universal such as love of neighbor? and neighbor's understanding of those concepts? So, we defend our positions and the resulting commitments of life through argument based on value clarification....
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