Virtual reality metaphysics
Arthur Gibson · 2004
Cavell (1979: 156) had just remarked that film ‘escapes Aristotelian limits according to which the possible has to be made probable’. I wish to propose that this escape is also present in certain counter-intuitive complex transcendent concepts that mirror the remotest boundaries of actual states of affairs, one of which is the metaphysics of divine transcendence, a subset of which is revelation. It will be argued below that such phenomena can benefit in the way we attempt to depict them by employing film – in the sense of its being a subset of virtual reality simulation – as a version of extended live metaphor. Although the following concentrates on how live metaphor in language might be depicted as a vehicle for revelation and/or the expression of a transcendent metaphysics, its purpose is not to restrict the approach only to language as the medium for expressions of such realms. Rather, here language is taken to be a complex live metaphor of which linguistic expression is but one of many domains of semiotic function; others include music, dramatic contexts, etc. In a more extended scenario, a human’s life, and certainly the incarnation, is presupposed here as a, or the, totalised group implementing these expressions.