Metaphor and the Flux of Human Experience

Abstract

Human experience is flux, process, change. It is in the nature of human beings to try to understand this experience (is this not man’s eternal quest for meaning?), but how can we understand this experience, or even talk about it, if this experience is in continual flux? This problem is rendered even more complex with the realization that any attempt to understand human experience becomes, itself, part of the experience. We seem caught, then, much like Virginia Woolf’s record player needle, in a vicious circle that is endlessly retracing itself, a movement which underlines the hopelessness of our ever grasping its significance. Even if some way were found to stop this movement in order to explore it, that too would be futile since the experience would no longer be the same one (flux, process) that we had sought to understand, but some other.