[PairTheBoard]

I'm always puzzled why the self appointed pundits around here routinely dismiss your views as unworthy of serious consideration when you are in fact one of the most well read and deepest thinkers posting at SMP.

"Just as many moderns think of quantum complex wave functions as providing a cognizant appreciation of physical reality. Nevertheless, both your ancients and quantum moderns respectively employ metaphors to point to the true reality that lies beyond them. Just because they are not aware of this doesn't mean we shouldn't be. Realizing our limitations in categories of thought does not diminish the reality of what our metaphors are pointing to.

You also missed my point about an individual's response to a metaphysical metaphor being integral to its meaning."
- PairTheBoard

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I think you're heading in the direction of the debate between nominalism and realism.

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I don't think so. The door is open to the possibility that human concepts have a life of their own per Medieval Realism. That human thought is part of reality. Part of the supersensible world as you put it. Granting this, however, I don't see nominalism and Medieval realism as being mutually exclusive. Or at least there is the possibility of a middle way between the two.



“God is a metaphor for a mystery that absolutely transcends all human categories of thought. Even the categories of being and non-being; those are categories of thought. So it depends on how much you want to think about it. Whether it's doing you any good. Whether it is putting you in touch with the mystery that is the ground of your own being; if it isn't, well, it's a lie. So half of the people in the world are religious people who think that their metaphors are facts; those are what we call theists. The other half are people who know that the metaphors are not facts, and so they're lies; those are the atheists.”
-Joseph Campbell

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as I read Campbell's statements he uses metaphor in the negative and includes it in a pragmatic manner. He gives no life to it and states that we can use it in a negative or positive sense(Pragmatism or "as if"

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I don't see this myself. What Campbell asks is this. "Is (it) putting you in touch with the mystery that is the ground of your own being"? What Campbell is doing is freeing the individual from the tyranny of abusive authoritative imposition of religious metaphors. As you yourself point out in your post, it's not only what is spoken but how it is spoken.

For example, we have written, unspoken translations of words purportedly spoken by Jesus. Each word that he spoke was a metaphor with its own life in its own language in its own time, spoken with all the additional meaning conveyed by the way he said it. That's what his disciples had available to them. What do we have today? For many it's dead words in another language printed in a book thumped on by an authority figure who preaches on them in a way many people intuitively recoil from.

How are people to form a judgement on the validity of such metaphors? Campbell advises them to search the supersensible world themselves and ask if they are "putting you in touch with the mystery that is the ground of your own being". I don't see anything negative or cynically pragmatic in that. To the contrary.

PairTheBoard