Essay
Zen, Metaphor and Ethics
Forgetting as the Origin of Conflict
Introduction
Two people argue about a subject. At first they exchange arguments, but little by little they stop arguing about ideas and begin to defend themselves, until the other person ceases to be someone who thinks differently and becomes someone who is wrong. History shows that this same process, amplified socially, can end in persecution, wars or extermination. What has happened?
Ideas do not fire rifles and words do not produce violence by themselves. How, then, can we explain that they seem to be found time and again at the origin of numerous conflicts? Perhaps the problem does not lie in them, but in the way in which they come to be experienced. There is a moment, difficult to pinpoint, when a word ceases to be recognised as the representation that it is and begins to be confused with reality itself.
From very different perspectives, Western philosophy and Eastern philosophy seem to have pointed to this same phenomenon: the human tendency to forget the difference between thought and reality. This essay brings these traditions into relation in order to explore what happens when thought ceases to recognise itself as representation and begins to be confused with the reality it seeks to represent.
Could this forgetting lie at the origin of a large part of human conflicts?
I. Thought as Representation
In 1933 Alfred Korzybski, in Science and Sanity, formulated a statement that became one of the fundamental principles of General Semantics and, over time, an expression widely disseminated far beyond that field: “The map is not the territory.” The phrase seems trivial. No one literally confuses a map with a forest. Yet we continually confuse our representations of the world with the world itself.
Concepts function as maps. Theories function as maps. Religions, ideologies and sciences also function as maps. A map is not false because it is not the territory; precisely because it simplifies reality, it can help us to find our way through it.
The problem begins when we forget that difference. Korzybski was not proposing that we abandon maps, but that we constantly remember their abstract character. This idea constitutes the starting point of the path developed in these pages.
Nietzsche took this question a step further. In On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense, he presents a conception of truth closely linked to metaphor. “What, then, is truth?” the philosopher asks, answering:
A changing host of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms. In short, a sum of human relations which were intensified, transmitted and adorned with poetry and rhetoric, and which after long use seem to a people fixed, canonical and binding. Truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors that have become worn out and have lost their sensuous force, coins that have lost their image and are now considered only as metal, and no longer as coins.
Concepts are born as metaphors, human attempts to orient ourselves in a reality that is always richer than any description. With time we forget that origin and the metaphor ceases to be perceived as metaphor; it acquires ontological consistency: it ceases to point and takes the place of that to which it pointed. It becomes truth.
Jacques Derrida developed this line of reflection by showing that Western philosophy has frequently forgotten the metaphorical origin of many of its concepts. In his essay White Mythology, he points out that the distinction between literal language and metaphorical language is never as clear as we usually imagine. Even the most abstract philosophical concepts retain traces of old metaphors whose origin has become hidden.
Metaphors, then, constitute a permanent condition of thought. There is no point from which we can completely abandon representations in order to contemplate reality “as it is.” Every meaning always refers to other meanings, and all understanding remains inevitably mediated by language. This observation does not invalidate the distinction between representation and reality. On the contrary, it makes awareness of that difference even more necessary. Precisely because we cannot cease to think through representations, the risk lies in forgetting their constructed character and ending up confusing them with reality itself.
Emmanuel Lizcano develops these ideas from a perspective particularly close to the purpose of this essay in his book Metaphors That Think Us. His proposal is especially suggestive:
We do not only use metaphors to understand the world; to a large extent, they are also what organise our way of thinking about it.
In other words, metaphors are not merely resources of language; they form part of the very structure from which we interpret reality. This is why they organise economics (“the market moves”), politics (“the left and the right”), science (“the genetic code”), psychology (“mental mechanisms”) or argumentation (“defending an idea”). Even before any conscious reflection, we inhabit a world already configured by images and representations that orient our way of perceiving and understanding reality.
In continuity with this tradition of thought, Lizcano pays particular attention to the difference between living metaphors—those that still visibly retain their figurative character—and dead metaphors—those whose metaphorical origin has become hidden. The former continue to show that they are a way of looking at reality and not reality itself. The latter, by contrast, are no longer recognised as metaphors and come to be experienced as objective descriptions of the world.
II. The Net and the Limits of Language
Ludwig Wittgenstein, with a different purpose, also draws attention to the relationship between language and reality. In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein maintains that a proposition is a picture (Bild) of reality. Language does not reproduce the world; it represents it. Between words and that of which they speak there is always a distance that no description can completely eliminate.
This idea is condensed in one of his best-known statements: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Wittgenstein thus links the limits of what we can say with the limits of what we can describe and think.
The metaphor of the net offers a particularly suggestive image of this relationship. Wittgenstein imagines a mesh cast over the world to show how different systems of description allow the same reality to be organised in different ways. We can construct nets with different mesh sizes and consequently obtain different descriptions of the same reality. None of those nets belongs to the world itself; they are instruments through which we describe it. The different nets do not modify reality; they modify the way in which it can be described. The regularities we discover tell us as much about the world as about the way in which we have organised it in order to understand it.
The problem does not consist in using a net—or a language, a theory or a metaphor—since all understanding seems to require some form of representation. The problem begins when we forget that we can only gain access to reality through those nets and end up confusing the net with what it seeks to show.
Wittgenstein himself later shifted his reflection from representation towards language-games, showing that the meaning of words depends on their use and on the forms of life in which they appear. Although this turn belongs to a different stage of his thought, it retains the same warning: language is not a transparent mirror of reality.
Read from this perspective, Wittgenstein does not invite us to abandon language, but to recognise its limits. And that recognition prepares, in a surprising way, the dialogue with Eastern thought, where awareness of the limits of language and thought also constitutes a starting point, rather than a conclusion.
III. Eastern Thought and the Representation of Reality
The ideas we have encountered in Korzybski, Nietzsche, Lizcano, Derrida and Wittgenstein find an especially significant development in Eastern thought. From Laozi to Zen, the same warning appears: the forgetting that representations are only representations.
The Dao De Jing begins with words that run through the entire Chinese tradition:
The Dao that can be named is not the eternal Dao.
For Laozi, language has a limited value. Words orient us towards reality, but they never exhaust it. The Dao cannot be identified with the representation that words make of it.
The problem appears when we forget that limit. Then the name ceases to be experienced as a representation and begins to be confused with the reality towards which it points. Thought ceases to notice the distance between the two and ends up moving within its own representations as though they were reality itself.
Zhuangzi radicalises this suspicion through stories and paradoxes. The most famous says:
Once I dreamed that I was a butterfly. When I awoke, I did not know whether I was Zhuangzi who had dreamed of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that it was Zhuangzi.
The question is not to decide which of the two possibilities is correct. The story undermines confidence in our habitual distinctions between dream and wakefulness, subject and object, reality and appearance.
In another passage, Zhuangzi argues with Hui Shi about the happiness of fish. The discussion ends by showing that both interlocutors are trapped within different conceptual presuppositions. The problem becomes the very fact of being enclosed within a position that is taken as absolute. Zhuangzi uses humour and paradox to prevent his own words from becoming doctrine. He is, in a certain sense, a great preserver of living metaphors.
With Nāgārjuna we enter Mahāyāna Buddhism. His method consists in showing that any assertion about ultimate reality leads to contradictions when it is taken as an absolute description. He does not simply say that things are empty. Emptiness itself is also empty. For this reason his philosophy cannot coherently become a new metaphysics. Every time a position attempts to crystallise, dialectic dissolves it. Nāgārjuna acts as a systematic solvent of dead metaphors.
Zen has traditionally expressed this orientation, which points to the limits of words and concepts in reaching reality, in one of its best-known teachings, attributed to Bodhidharma:
A special transmission outside the scriptures, not founded on words and letters, pointing directly to the human being; seeing one’s own nature and realising Buddhahood.
This brings out the limits of language. It is not a rejection of words, but a recognition that they cannot transmit, ground or replace the reality towards which they point.
The Eastern tradition seems to orient itself towards a transformation of our relationship with reality, rather than towards the elaboration of more precise language, deeper concepts or more convincing arguments.
IV. Satori and the End of Forgetting
The core of Zen is satori. Yet Zen masters rarely attempt to define it. Instead of saying what it is, they usually point to what happens when it occurs and to the consequences that follow from it.
They affirm, for example, that in satori reality as it is is revealed with clarity. Likewise, they insist that it is not an intellectual understanding, a conviction reached through reflection, the cessation of thoughts, or a state without thought. Satori is described as a radical transformation in the way reality is seen.
In this sense, satori is not presented as a new interpretation of reality, but as an experience in which reality reveals itself as it is. This essay cannot verify that claim, nor does it seek to describe that experience. It proposes only one possibility: if, as has been suggested throughout these pages, thought is essentially representative in character and the problem lies not in representing but in forgetting that quality, then an experience that allowed reality to be seen as it is would make it impossible to maintain that forgetting. Consequently, that experience could not consist in a new description or a new interpretation, since both would still be representations.
Or, viewed from another perspective, suppose that after satori someone continued to confuse their thoughts with reality. In that case, the experience would not have altered precisely that which prevented reality from being seen as it is. Satori would then be reduced to a new interpretation of reality, something that Zen masters themselves expressly deny because, in that case, there would be no satori.
After satori, the map would once again be simply a map, and the territory would cease to be hidden behind our descriptions. Metaphors would continue to exist, but they would never cease to be metaphors. Zen sums up this transformation in the relationship between thought and reality, with great simplicity, in the well-known saying:
Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.
TFacts do not change; they remain the same. What changes is our relationship to everything that thought constructs around them. In the sense in which this essay uses the term “representation”—whether words, concepts, meanings, explanations, or evaluations—we can distinguish between what happens and the representations that thought constructs about it. In this context, when we speak of a fact, we do not mean something isolated from experience or independent of the functioning of the organism. A fact is always embodied, together with visual perception, sounds, smells, sensations, and the other functions through which the organism relates to what happens, in a concrete and unrepeatable situation. For example:
- "chopping wood": fact
- “it is hard work”: representation.
- “it is a humble task”: representation.
- “it is a spiritual practice”: representation.
- “it is a waste of time”: representation.
In this case, “chopping wood” ceases to be hidden behind the meanings that thought constructs upon that fact. The representations remain, but they are once again experienced as representations. The map remains, but it no longer takes the place of the territory.
We can find a similar distinction in the way we think about temporal succession. Imagine a cup that is on a table; we pick it up and place it somewhere else. In describing what happened, we say: “before, the cup was on the table, and afterwards we placed it somewhere else.”
But what exactly are that “before” and that “after”? They are not something that can be pointed to alongside the cup. What appears is a cup in a particular position and, at another moment, the cup in a different position. “Before” and “after” are concepts through which thought relates those two situations.
The difference can be expressed as follows:
- a cup in one position: fact
- a cup in another position: fact
and, on the other hand:
- “before”: representation
- “after”: representation
Succession itself is already a way of relating those two facts. We do not find, alongside the cup, a thing called “temporal succession.” It is thought that establishes between them a relation of anteriority and posteriority and expresses it through concepts such as “before” and “after.”
At this point a more radical question appears: does temporal succession really exist independently of the forms through which thought organises experience, or is succession itself a construction of thought? What we call “before” and “after” might not be something we find in reality, but a way through which thought establishes relations between what appears. In this way, time, understood as the succession of a before and an after, belongs to the realm of representations and not to reality itself.
Also in this case, the difference between the fact and what thought adds to it is forgotten. Just as “it is hard work,” “it is a humble task” or “it is a spiritual practice” is added to the fact of chopping wood, so too is the relation of anteriority and posteriority added to what appears. Once this difference is forgotten, the representation ceases to be experienced as something thought adds and comes to be experienced as a property of what appears.
Perhaps this is the most radical consequence of satori: that thought continues, but without our forgetting its metaphorical character and without metaphors ever coming to die.
Here Nietzsche’s intuition that truths are metaphors of which we have forgotten that they are metaphors acquires a special meaning. If that formulation described the habitual functioning of thought, the effect of satori might consist precisely in that forgetting no longer occurring.
V. Ethics and the Absence of a Correct Attitude
If the interpretation developed in these pages is correct, an unexpected consequence appears: Zen cannot provide a foundation for any morality or any ethics. This idea may seem strange from a Western perspective, where we tend to identify spiritual transformation with the development of certain virtues. Yet a conversation between a Zen master and his disciple clearly illustrates another way of understanding the question.
Disciple: What happens if someone says to me: “you are an idiot”? Master: There is “you are an idiot” and it disappears. If you think “what?”, that also disappears. If there is “you are so intelligent”, that likewise disappears. Even if you think “really?”, that too disappears. Therefore there is nothing that must be done, and therefore there is no correct attitude that you must develop or maintain.
The answer is disconcerting because it seems to invalidate any attempt to cultivate virtues. Yet perhaps it is not denying the possibility of kindness or compassion. What it seems to deny is something deeper: even the image of “the correct attitude” can become another representation with which we end up identifying ourselves.
The moment the mind creates a model of the “correct attitude” and identifies with it, that model ceases to function as a representation and begins to be lived as reality. Even the idea of “being compassionate” can crystallise and become the measure from which we judge others and ourselves. It is not virtue that Zen seems to call into question, but the process through which any representation ceases to be recognised as representation.
Every conflict begins long before the first blow. It begins at the instant when a representation ceases to be recognised as representation and comes to be confused with reality. Once that confusion has occurred, the other person no longer thinks differently: they are simply wrong.
From that way of experiencing the situation, convincing, correcting or educating someone who thinks differently seems entirely reasonable. It is not necessary to experience any personal threat; it is enough to believe that one sees reality while the person who thinks differently remains in error.
When that conviction intensifies and has sufficient power at its disposal, persuasion can turn into imposition and imposition into violence. All of them are manifestations of the same mechanism: the forgetting that our representations are only representations.
If the effect of satori consisted in preventing that forgetting from occurring, this mechanism would lose its foundation. This is why Zen does not say “be peaceful.” Rather, it points to the process through which violence becomes possible. From this perspective, both violence and non-violence belong to the realm of representations; what matters is that neither should once again take the place of the territory.
VI. The Permanent Danger
The proposal developed in this essay does not escape the very danger it attempts to describe.
If every representation can cease to be recognised as representation, the same is true of the ideas set out here. An apt phrase can be transformed into doctrine. A living metaphor can die. Even the warning “do not confuse the map with the territory” can end up becoming yet another new map that someone believes to be definitive.
The problem, therefore, does not consist in replacing some ideas with others, nor even in abandoning thought; it consists in never forgetting that every formulation is a representation.
This is perhaps the most difficult demand, because thought is inevitably metaphor. The danger begins when we forget that it is.
Conclusion
TThis essay has sought to bring very different perspectives into dialogue, perspectives that, over the course of these pages, have ultimately converged on the same observation. They all point towards the same recognition, namely that we tend to forget the difference between what happens and the representations we construct in our relationship with it.
In the light of these perspectives, this essay proposes a possibility: if the Zen masters are right, one consequence of satori might be that this forgetting ceases to occur. Words, concepts and metaphors would not disappear; they would simply once again be experienced as representations. Here, “forgetting” does not mean ceasing to remember a distinction we once knew. It means that the distinction ceases to appear in experience, because the representations through which we organise what happens have become transparent and come to be experienced as though they belonged to what happens.
It is important to clarify that our representations do not prevent us from seeing reality. We continue to see it, but alongside it appear the representations that thought constructs. Confusion begins when we cease to distinguish between the two and come to experience those representations as part of reality itself. The first victim of that confusion is not reality, but our ability to see it as clearly distinct from our representations. The map then takes the place of the territory, the finger replaces the moon, and representation ends up concealing that which, at first, it merely intended to point towards.
Precisely for this reason, this essay must remain only a map. The day someone confused it with the territory, exactly the forgetting that these pages have attempted to describe would have occurred.
Complementary Texts
Some of the questions raised in this essay are developed
from other perspectives in a series of complementary texts.