MMIIRR: "Reflexive Reflection In-Inter-action with MetaMetaphors"
Barnett Pearce puts the concept of Gadamer's horizon of understanding in the context of encountering “the other” who might want to challenge our horizon from his or her own social world, aware, or unaware, of his or her own horizon of understanding. The application of this concept to MMIIRR both bounds and opens it, and it reflexively prefigures the more specific notions in the image. The concept seems coherent with Wuji bounding the image of Taiji in Daoist philosophy. Wuji might be interpreted as our joint horizon of understanding. Anything beyond it is beyond us. In Daoism, human understanding begins with Taiji, the dynamic duality of the dualism yin and yang.
Within the horizons of understanding, we evolve concepts through displacement in a process of reflecting-in-inter-action. Our intimation that concept A is B-like balances methodical rigor with mysterious emergence in a process that we now know is enabled by our neural embodiment, phenomenal experience, and the cognitive unconscious. Guided by these structures of being, we are drawn to perceive our experience of this process and its outcomes as literal truth. If, however one of the two fish, or even both fish, retain an awareness of metaphor as metaphor, both as generative and embodied, the potential for reflexive displacement emerges where both concepts evolve their meaning as a result of their joint interaction. If only one of the two attains the meta-metaphor awareness, the potential can go in either of two directions: revelation of the metaphor for joint generative potential or a continued (intentional) hiding of the metaphor for directed persuasion. In this case, fish A, blinded by the light, fails to see what lies below, while fish B, seeing the light inside its horizon of understanding, is reminded of water as water and is able to remain reflexively aware of both B and A as metaphorical.
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