Think with your liver

Following a post I wrote to the cognitive linguistics list* about metaphorical mapping of organs and emotions in Turkish (e.g. "he has no liver" for someone who is too cowardly or self-interested to stick up for a friend), my thoughts returned to one of the lines I love to hate: "think with your heart, not with your head."

Kaminer (that author I keep quoting these days) observes its prevalence in the language of self-help groups, new agers and the like. Like her, I get the impression that it boils down to "don't think". It's an example of how the kind of metaphor I mentioned gets diluted and dumbed down. Sufis, for example, often talk about "speaking from the heart," and I have no problem with that. I'm not always sure exactly what they mean by it (and their other, often complex, heart symbolism) but I'm pretty sure that they know exactly what they mean. In contrast, the current popular version of the heart metaphor seems stripped of meaning or resonance - fine for pop songs, but questionable in debate.

So to all those who say "think with your heart, not your head", I say "pump blood with your brain, not your heart."



* I used to abbreviate that to "cogling", but some readers thought it was a gerund.