On Temperature

[holland]

Temperature is an existential concept relating our sense of how warm or cold something is, i.e. how much heat is present. Because it is so fundamental to the human experience and survival, we have countless different spectrums where we have applied the concept of temperature to other areas of interest. Sometimes, this is purely a metaphorical application of the concept, but usually, it does relate back to the actual human experience of temperature itself.

For example, in color, we describe high-frequency colors as being cold and low-frequency colors as being warm. This, initially, doesn't make sense, because light is the same energy as heat, and high frequencies are hotter. But our ancestors didn't know about light frequencies. They just knew that most things that look reddish are warmer to the touch (such as fire and wood), and most things that look blueish are colder to the touch (such as snow and metal).

There is a similar spectrum in music. We consider high pitches to be cold and low pitches to be warm. If you compare the sounds of hitting something cold together (like rocks or metal) versus hitting something warm together (like wood or dirt), the distinction is understandable. Warming up a piece of metal physically will even lower the pitch it makes when it hits against the same surface. And warm fleshy things, like heartbeats, are also lower pitched than most cold artificial ones.

In literature, we use warmth and coldness as a metaphor to describe how comforting or alienating something is. But even as a metaphor, its associations make sense. We would experience literal warmth while in the arms of our mothers as children or bundled up by the fire by people who love us, versus experiencing coldness when we are out on our own in the winds of a storm or the chill of winter, away from the fire, acting independently.

Of course, exactly how these metaphors present themselves can vary depending on what region of the world we are in. Something that is cold in one place may be warm in another. But the underlying concepts tend to have some consistent logic to them.