Philosophical Commentary through Interpretive Media and Metaphorical Art

The inspiration for this post came from something I heard a panelist mention at a convention on Japanese anime that I recently attended. Specifically, he attributed the enduring popularity of the genre classics to their effectiveness at making social commentary through interpretive media and metaphorical art.

Beyond my immediate appreciation of what was strictly said—as a lay philosopher, particularly one who found his way into philosophy through studying filmic analyses—I could not help but think immediately of interpretive media and metaphorical art’s capacity to make philosophical commentary. In order to better grasp the implications of my assertion, it behooves me to offer a cerebral explanation of the meaning of “interpretive media” and “metaphorical art.”

The key to epistemically understanding “interpretive media” is that it includes the word “interpret;” it allows one to interpret what is being shown or heard in one’s own terms. Interpretive media helps offer deeper insights into the subject matter of the media. It allows a given consumer of media to have a personal emotional and intellectual take on the subject matter rather than to have just a dry, matter-of-fact acknowledgment of the matters discussed therein. In other words, interpretive media has the capacity to allow each individual consumer to have their own subjective interpretation of the subject matter based on their personally-accumulated knowledge and experience. This is an intended result of the artification of factual and routine matters.

Interpretive media, as the name suggests, can be any medium. Though this post is written with anime in mind, all types of media (e.g., music, creative writing etc.) can be interpretive in nature.

“Metaphorical art” is where we get into a little more abstraction. A metaphor is a figure of speech that asserts that something is figuratively—however, not literally—something else. In other words, a metaphor says that something is something that it actually is not (e.g., “It’s raining cats and dogs” or “He has a heart of gold”).

With a more concrete understanding of metaphors, one can infer that metaphorical art is art that uses something as a stand-in for something else. A very good example of metaphorical art (and, incidentally, interpretive media!) is Godzilla from the original 1954 Japanese film that was a direct metaphor, replete with profound philosophical implications, for the nuclear bomb that caused so much devastation and human tragedy in Hiroshima.

Based on my current reasoning, art is also media but not all media is art. In other words, art is seemingly a subset of media and not the other way around. For example, while it stands to reason that the media of film and music constitute art, it is challenging to make the same claim for the written word. Books and manuscripts, at least in my observation, are generally excluded from the definition of art.

Ultimately, the takeaway from this discussion is that the combination of interpretive media and metaphorical art has an emotional resonance and, therefore, a highly capacious didactic quality that raw information and statistics simply do not. Consider one of the staple lessons of learning specialists and academic coaches that in order to learn something well, one must combine information with emotion. And this is where metaphorical and interpretive art excel.