On Metaphoring

On Metaphoring engages in a metaphor-way to communicate and inter-learn among cultures. Bundle A describes how metaphor bundles things similar into a group called a "notion", a "category", etc. How does metaphor bundle things? It familiarizes strange things with things that are familiar, to enrich old familiar things with new things newly made familiar. Such metaphoric bundling creates a new family of knowledge. In this order Bundle B characterizes metaphor as the origin of thinking, fit as a highway of intercultural communication where there is no shared way of thinking, for each culture is a specific way of thinking. Bundle C shows how effective metaphor is in interculturally handling various problems of life and thinking. How metaphor works to interculture exhibits in fact what metaphor is. Such is how cultures understand one another, a "cultural hermeutic".

Kuang-ming Wu, Ph.D. in Philosophy, Yale University, teaches Japanese Culture/Language at the University of Missouri-Columbia. His extensive publications include volumes on Chuang Tzu, On Chinese Body Thinking (Brill, 1997) and On the "Logic" of Togetherness (Brill, 1998). This volume completes "cultural hermeneutic" trilogy.