It makes the assumptions that we can tell work from play and productive activity from nonproductive activity. In viewing labor as a kind of activity, the metaphor assumes that labor can be clearly identified and distinguished from things that are not labor. We can see what both metaphors hide by examining what they focus on. In doing this, they also deemphasize or hide certain aspects of labor and time. These metaphors highlight those aspects of labor and time that are centrally important in our culture. They emerged naturally in our culture because of the way we view work, our passion for quantification, and our obsession with purposeful ends. “LABOR IS A RESOURCE and TIME IS A RESOURCE are by no means universal. To live by theĬHEMICAL metaphor would mean that your problems have a different kind of reality for you.” To treat them as things that can be “solved” once and for all is pointless. The CHEMICAL metaphor says that problems are not the kind of things that can be made to disappear forever. It is appropriate to the experience of finding that problems which we once thought were “solved” turn up again and again.
The CHEMICAL metaphor gives us a new view of human problems. The best you can hope for is to find a catalyst that will make one problem dissolve without making another one precipitate out.
All of your problems are always present, only they may be dissolved and in solution, or they may be in solid form. It gives us a view of problems as things that never disappear utterly and that cannot be solved once and for all. And well he might be, for the chemical metaphor is both beautiful and insightful. He was terribly disillusioned to find that the residents of Berkeley had no such chemical metaphor in mind. The expression was “the solution of my problems”-which he took to be a large volume of liquid, bubbling and smoking, containing all of your problems, either dissolved or in the form of precipitates, with catalysts constantly dissolving some problems (for the time being) and precipitating out others. Among the wondrous things that he found in Berkeley was an expression that he heard over and over and understood as a beautifully sane metaphor. An Iranian student, shortly after his arrival in Berkeley, took a seminar on metaphor from one of us.
“Another example of how a metaphor can create new meaning for us came about by accident.
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