While mindfulness meditation shows us that language pervades our mental experience, some of those who analyze human experience have long felt there was even more to it than that. Recent analyses of language suggest that metaphor is not just a type of language use but the very structure of language—and therefore thought—itself.

From there, we are not far from seeing that what we regard to be “self” is largely constructed through language. Craving, clinging, and attachment are much stronger once they manifest as language. David Loy reminds us, “When we understand how craving and language work together, we gain insight into how saṃsāra, the world of suffering, is constructed—and how it can be deconstructed into an awakening that liberates us.”

This article investigates four philosophical claims regarding language, concepts, metaphors, and self. The first proposition is that our sense of self is largely constructed out of language. As the Buddha went to great lengths to describe, this sense of self is an illusion and adherence to it generates dukkha. The second proposition is that language is constructed out of conceptual metaphors. Following this is the radical proposition that what we understand to be the self is a metaphor. The upshot of these first three propositions is that we cannot understand or change our relationship to self, i.e., realize anattā (“not self”), without understanding the metaphors involved in the language of self and the metaphorical nature of self itself.

The value of metaphor was not lost on the Buddha. Upon his awakening, he taught the dharma largely through metaphors and used them as upāya (“skillful means”). It all started with dukkha. We often see this translated as “suffering” but it translates literally as “bad-wheel,” like that on an ox-cart, broken or off its axle. The resulting ride is wobbly, off, and unsatisfactory in a pervasive way. There is no getting around this if you are on that ox-cart, as we all are. That metaphorical image captures the sense of dukkha that cannot be captured in words themselves. It pervades everything and biases how we think and feel.

Categories

Many of these concepts function as categories and we could not get far without them. We need some way to navigate the gargantuan amounts of information inundating us in every moment. If we did not have categories we could not walk into a room that we have never been in before, see a chair that we have never seen before, and know what to do with it. Remarkably we do this every day: recognize objects we have never seen before and work with them adaptively without, perhaps, a conscious thought. Nietzsche provided a conceptual framework for understanding how we construct our world out of categorical metaphors.

Let us give special consideration to the formation of concepts. Every word immediately becomes a concept, inasmuch as it is not intended to serve as a reminder of the unique and wholly individualized original experiences to which it owes its birth, but must at the same time fit innumerable, more or less similar cases—which means, strictly speaking, never equal—in other words, a lot of unequal cases. Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal. No leaf ever wholly equals another, and the concept “leaf” is formed through an arbitrary abstraction from these individual differences, through forgetting the distinctions; and now it gives rise to the idea that in nature there might be something besides the leaves which would be “leaf”—some kind of original form after which all leaves have been woven, marked, copied, colored, curled and painted, but by unskilled hands, so that no copy turned out to be correct, reliable, and faithful image of the original form.1

As Nietzsche explains, this process of category formation removes us from the “unique and wholly individualized original experience” that just occurred. Applying this insight to the matter at hand, just as one leaf never equals another leaf, no moment of self wholly equals another. We project through the process of metaphor one experience of “me” to the next experience of “me.” In this way, a sense of self is perpetuated, but it is a conceptual self and not an experiential one.

The adaptive function of categories is helping us to figure out what is salient. One of the primary considerations is the me/not me consideration. David Loy says, “with language as our lens, we perceive the world as a collection of separate things that interact with each other in objective space and time.” What we pay attention to and how we pay attention to it will be determined by what is deemed salient. For instance, the ant that crawls in front of my cat is not regarded by him as salient, compared with the mouse that is hiding in the baseboard.

We carve up experience according to what is salient, and salience varies from individual to individual and moment to moment. Neuroscientist Nor Torreanders reminds us that we are only consciously aware of sixteen of the eleven million bits of information available to us in any given moment; salience will determine allocation of the scarce resource of attention.

In rare cases these days, salience will be determined by pressing matters of consequence, such as the crisis occasioned by a car accident. In the legacy days of humanity long before agriculture, salience was determined by events with life or death consequences, such as starvation, predators, temperature regulation, or the threats from other nomadic bands of humans. Life in the Stone Age may have contained just as much suffering, but perhaps not as much because language and concepts were simpler. We suffer because we allow language-based categories to determine salience in our moment-to-moment existence. For example, we are driven by fears that stem from contingent self-worth: “I’ll only be OK if this person likes me or approves of me.” We suffer because we are engaged in ceaseless definition of and protection of the imagined self.

Nietzsche cautioned, “We do not only designate things with [words and concepts] we think originally that through them we grasp the true in things. Through words and concepts we are continually misled into imagining things as being simpler than they are, separate from one another, indivisible, each existing in and for itself. A philosophical mythology lies concealed in language that breaks out again every moment, however careful one may be otherwise.” This sentiment is also captured by the poet Pablo Neruda:

They have talked to me of Venezuelas

of Paraguays and Chiles

I don’t know what they’re talking about

I’m aware of the earth’s skin

and I know that it doesn’t have a name.

When we let go of this designation process we find ourselves in shunyata (emptiness of individual essences). To the extent that we can, our brains process things as they are.

Language is constructed of conceptual metaphors

The linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson have articulated just how much of what we consider to be literal language is actually composed of conceptual or primary metaphors. From understanding “argument” through war, to “love” as a journey, from “happiness” is “up” to “sad” is “down,” our language depends on metaphors.