analogies

Every analogy fails trivially: one thing is not another thing. This tautology leads to tedious debates whenever an analogy is deployed, elegant or not. The unbridgeable gap of the like both obscures and illuminates the subject. As Gordin argues in scientific-babel, each language has its own reserves of analogies and metaphors, and by restricting ourselves to one we deprive ourselves of valuable stores of meaning. Art is fundamentally ironic, in the most general sense of the word: saying something but meaning another, perhaps several others. Just so are thought and understanding fundamentally analogous: we create meaning by connecting new experiences to older, more basic ones.