Metaphors We Live By

As a philosophy nerd, language-lover, and literary geek, this book converges in all the right places for me. The authors explore how metaphors are not merely literary constructs, but rather entire conceptual frameworks that govern our understanding of the world. Example: good is up, bad is down: “I'm feeling down today,” “my spirits are up” etc – these kinds of phrases are so rote, we fail to recognize they are metaphorical, and that the up/down spatial metaphor applies to so much more. I would extrapolate, but then why would you read the book? (She says, realizing most people will not want to read this book).

If you do read it, I would only recommend the first 15 or so chapters; after that, the argument is reiterative and less compelling.

Did not finish.

Why did I pick it?
This book is about metaphors we (subconsciously) use in our language. I find it a very intriguing topic and after I had it recommended multiple times decided to pick it up from the local library.

The book
As I said it's about metaphors that we use in our everyday language. One interesting example is how we use the metaphor of war for arguing: he won the argument, that argument is weak, etc.
Breaking from this specific example means an argument can become a moment to learn from one another, and collectively seek the truth, rather than win a possibly invalid argument.

The book is structured in quite a few short chapters. Maybe on average 6-10 pages. These are structured around a statement the authors want to explain. It's a very structured way of bringing their idea across and easy to skip some info or dive into a certain topic.

My recommendation
As much as I was interested in the topic, I did not really like the book and decided not to finish it. It has a really informational/scientific way of bringing the information, while I had expected (/hoped) for a more entertaining read.
For me each chapter is a small essay/paper on a certain hypothesis that the writers want to argue for. It goes really deep into the matter and the nitty-gritty of language construction.
I would therefore recommend the book for people who use language in their profession to get a deeper/broader understanding of how to construct complex structures.
For the casual reader I would skip to something else...

I found this book to be a little duplicitous, in that I absolutely adored the first 60% and uncontrollably hated the second half. The first half focuses on the very strong and well-argued thesis that humans live by metaphor, and indeed that metaphor is our only means of understanding abstract, non-directly-experiential concepts. It's repetitive at times, but not distractingly so.

The second half, however, is where everything falls apart. The authors ironically fail to notice their mind-projection of human-understanding-as-metaphor to the external world, and spend the remainder of the book arguing that because humans experience the universe through metaphor that there can be no absolute truth in the universe. It's nice that Lakoff and Johnson are arguing against the contemporary philosophical stance on this, and, while they get some things right, they're significantly further off-course than the Bayesians on the same subject matter.

Perhaps more heinously, the authors spend a good deal of the second half of the book arguing with straw-man objectivists in an attempt to drive home their conclusions, at one point quoting philosophers as far back as Plato to argue their claims (despite the fact that one of their central arguments is that western philosophy is impossibly flawed as it stands). It's a terribly disappointing end to an otherwise fantastic book.

If I had the ability, I'd rate this 3.5 stars, but alas, I do not.