Michael Sinding

Department of English
McMaster University
sindinm@mcmail.cis.mcmaster.ca

 

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

 

This audacious project based in cognitive linguistics began its career as a tentative collaboration between a linguist and a philosopher, with Metaphors We Live By in 1980. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson are key figures in what has become an international collective enterprise studying the central role of processes traditionally thought peripheral, if not deviant, with respect to normal thought, pre-eminent among which is metaphor. Lakoff and Johnson followed up their claims in 1987 with studies of other elements of the embodied mind: prototype categorization and image-schemata.¹ This latest opus sets out the current state of the overall theory, then analyzes the metaphorical structure of five basic philosophical concepts and eight important philosophies from the Pre-Socratics to present-day Rational Action Theory. With lucid, close argumentation and well-organized evidence, it consolidates a powerful theory of mind, provides answers to perennial intuitions about the irreducible power of metaphor, and does justice to its ambition to recast reason and philosophy.

 

In the past few decades, it has become common to draw on findings in cognitive science in areas beyond the philosophy of mind, where it emerged as a major force.² The Anglo-American tradition of analytic philosophy has embraced cognitive science more than has continental European-inspired postmodern thought. Philosophy in the Flesh presents itself as a middle way between these two main options (3), and while the former attracts more attention than the latter, their literalism and objectivism, stalled in “first-generation cognitive science” are similarly ventilated. This is an appealing third path: asked to choose between radical objectivism and radical subjectivism, one replies with Melville’s Bartleby, “I’d prefer not to.” But preferring not to is not very viable, despite the problems that flow from settling for the estimated lesser of two evils. With the new brew of the embodied mind, dissatisfied critics need no longer hold their noses as they swallow their intellectual commitments. Now they can say, with Shakespeare’s Mercutio, “a plague o’ both your houses.” Examples of Lakoff and Johnson’s approach are their highwire walks between analytic and postmodern errors over signs and self: signs are not natural reflections of reality nor arbitrary fabrications, but “motivated” (464-66). We have no essence that is just autonomous and rational or fractured and irrational; rather, we understand ourselves through variations of a basic metaphorical schema relating two entities: “subject” and “self.” By the end of the book, that highwire has turned into a broad highway.

 

The first section, “How The Embodied Mind Challenges The Western Philosophical Tradition,” begins to do so by extrapolating from empirical research to philosophical principles, instead of the more usual reverse. Lakoff and Johnson’s view of reason conflicts with all the major philosophical accounts, and so also rejects previous accounts of the human person (3-7). The stakes of this debate are high, and we hear the ring of a manifesto at times. Three abrupt opening sentences state the major findings that buttress the authors’ claims:

 

The mind is inherently embodied.
Abstract thought is largely metaphorical.
Most thinking is unconscious. (3)

 

Specifically, “second-generation cognitive science” proves that a “cognitive unconscious” uses structures that emerge from bodily experience to shape conscious thought at every level. “Empirically responsible philosophy” must renounce “a priori philosophizing” and incorporate these discoveries. That is, “the very structure of reason comes from the details of our embodiment. The same neural and cognitive mechanisms that allow us to perceive and move around also create our conceptual systems and modes of reason”; reason is “evolutionary, in that it builds on… forms of perceptual and motor inference present in ‘lower’ animals”; it is “shared universally by all human beings”; and it is mostly unconscious, largely metaphorical and imaginative, and emotionally engaged (4).

 

Chapters 1 and 2 lay the groundwork of the project and its polemic. Chapter 3 begins to delineate the evidence for the authors’ theory, exploring concepts relating to color, basic-level categories, spatial relations, bodily movement, and event- and action-structure. Chapters 4 and 5 are the real meat of the theory, bringing together recent findings in conceptual metaphor. Chapter 4, “Primary Metaphor and Subjective Experience,” unifies a wide range of research into the mechanisms of metaphorical reason’s use of bodily experience to “conceptualize and describe subjective experience” (46). This is the “Integrated Theory of Primary Metaphor” (46-58), composed of four theories: domain “conflation,” primary metaphor (natural minimal mappings), neural metaphor, and conceptual blending. The latter is to molecules what primary metaphor is to atoms. It occupies Chapter 5, “The Anatomy of Complex Metaphor,” which shows how blends are built out of combinations of primary metaphors with each other and with forms of commonplace knowledge such as cultural models and folk theories. This chapter also investigates aspects of the rational efficacy of metaphor, in relation to conventional versus novel metaphor, mental imagery, multiple metaphors for a single concept, and the dependence of concepts on their metaphors.

 

In Chapter 7, Lakoff and Johnson contrast their concept of “embodied realism” to views of “direct” or “representational” realism, which must deal with how symbols “correspond” to the things they represent. They show how representationalism founders on the problem of multiple “levels” of description and truth (such as the scientific level versus the phenomenological level), since correspondence requires one consistent level-independent truth (105), whereas embodied realism meets the problem by making reality and truth relative to our various levels of understanding. This chapter closes with a rejoinder to an important objection, courtesy of John Searle, that merits a closer look. Searle contends that the entities and processes Lakoff and Johnson postulate are mere vague “background” without the properties Lakoff and Johnson attribute to them. They insist that the mechanisms of the cognitive unconscious do real cognitive work; that is, they are “intentional, representational, propositional, and hence truth characterizing and causal,” and thus meet Searle’s own criteria for meaning and rational structure (115-16). Basic-level categories are intentional and representational, in that our mental image, motor program, and gestalt perception for, say, “chair” both represent and pick out the things that fit the concept. Semantic frames characterize our structured background knowledge of things like restaurants, and carry propositional information that is inference-generating, and therefore relates to truth and to causation of understanding: concepts like “waiter” and “check” are defined relative to such frames, and enter into propositional knowledge of situations (normal inferences about “after we ate, we got up and left” are that the waiter brought the check, and we paid him the right amount for the meal before leaving). Spatial relations concepts are causal of understanding, in that we use them to impose structure on scenes (the cat is in front of the tree, the bee is in the garden) that enter into our beliefs and expressions. And conceptual metaphors are causal of truth conditions, in that they structure our understanding of our experience. Under a conceptualization of times as objects moving towards us in space, it is true that Christmas day comes a week “ahead of” New Year’s day, and the reverse is false (116-17).

 

In this theoretical outline, confined to 129 pages, Lakoff and Johnson omit some aspects covered in other studies, but they do provide considerable new information–especially in the “Integrated Theory of Primary Metaphor.” The material here is usefully organized. The Appendix on the Neural Theory of Language Paradigm, for example, helps to explain key terms and outlines the interrelation of different disciplines of cognitive analysis such as linguistics and neuroscience. With respect to the book’s major goal of recasting “reason” itself, clearly further study of scientific, mathematical and logical reasoning is called for. The authors have attempted to explain elements of math and logic as metaphor, but these abstract systems do not take center-stage here.³ Lakoff and Johnson present ingenious image-schematic analyses of Aristotelian first-order formal logic (the law of the excluded middle, modus ponens, and modus tollens) (375-81), and brief discussions of intentional, Meinongian, and Boolean logics. Chapter 6 comments somewhat briskly on science, and there is an intriguing, even dazzling, study of the mathematics connected with Rational Action Theory in Chapter 23 (515-25). I should not dwell on what is left out in an almost 600-page volume, but I would have liked the authors to address more dialectical operations. Such “logic” is informal; our concept of it may rely on image-schemas of splitting, opposition, links, and balance. What about paradoxical encomiums and modest proposals? Perhaps there are cultural models that supply the norms upon which irony depends. These are problems for theories that focus on the internal structure of concepts and frameworks. Analysis and contrast, as well as synthesis, should be explained in embodied terms.

 

Part 2, “The Cognitive Science Of Basic Philosophical Ideas,” commences the focus and contribution of this volume. This section “uses the tools of cognitive science and cognitive linguistics to study empirically concepts such as time, causation, the self, and the mind… that is, studying basic philosophical ideas as a subject matter for cognitive science” (134). Each abstract idea has an

 

underspecified nonmetaphorical conceptual skeleton… [that] is fleshed out by conceptual metaphor, not in one way, but in many ways by different metaphors…. None of them is monolithic, with a single overall consistent structure…. The metaphors are typically not arbitrary, culturally specific, novel historical accidents, or the innovations of great poets or philosophers. Rather, they tend to be normal, conventional, relatively fixed and stable, nonarbitrary, and widespread throughout the cultures and languages of the world. (134)

 

This may seem to reverse the typical order of explanation; metaphorical language shows ideas “as they occur in the cognitive unconscious of present-day speakers” (134). Philosophers, like everybody else, must use the meanings and concepts already in their human conceptual systems (136).

 

Lakoff and Johnson’s chapter on time is a well-developed case of how this works. Their earlier Metaphors We Live By became exciting when its novel method demonstrated the coherence underlying an apparent contradiction to metaphoric systematicity in the fact that “the weeks ahead” and “the weeks following” mean the same thing. In this volume, they show in greater depth how we understand time metaphorically in relation to motion, space and events (137). First, there is a basic observer orientation with respect to time, whereby the present is the observer’s location, the future is in front of her and the past is behind her. Then there are two variant metaphors for temporal process, the “Moving Time” (141) and “Moving Observer” metaphors (145). These are distinct metaphorical structurings of the target domain that are inconsistent but coherent with each other. In the first set of metaphors, time is a (divisible) substance moving past us as stationary observers; in the second, time is a series of locations through which we move. In the first, but not in the second, future weeks “follow” past weeks. What these sets of metaphors have in common is the relative motion of the elements. Ekkehart Malotki’s 1983 study refuting Benjamin Lee Whorf’s well-known claim that the Hopi language contains no concept of time or metaphors declares the trans-cultural relevance of the analysis. Lakoff and Johnson discuss the metaphysical implications of our spatial metaphors for time. With reference to the work of Zeno, Saint Augustine, A. N. Prior, and Stephen Hawking, the authors describe the puzzles that can result from failing to recognize metaphors as metaphors (150-51). To illustrate the dangers of institutional reification of metaphors, Lakoff and Johnson cite a recent study that posits employee “time theft” as the first crime against American business, a perspective that mistakes the metaphor “time is a resource” for literal truth. Time has some literal structure from its characterization as a comparison of events, such as directionality and irreversibility, but it is not possible to think about time without metaphors; asking what time is objectively will lead one down one metaphorical path or another. Our constructions, however, are not merely subjective, arbitrary, or cultural, but deeply “motivated” (157-69).

 

The other studies in this book have profound implications for our understanding of events and causes, the mind, the self, and morality. The cross-cultural data suggest a large body of natural mappings. Still, questions arise about this view of concepts and metaphors. The idea that a skeletal concept is fleshed out by metaphors is more plausible for the self or morality, which have obvious human dimensions, than for time and events and causes. It is hard to accept that our ontological foundations themselves, and not just our concepts of them, are subject to multiple determinations. Is only the skeletal structure “real” then, and are the metaphors just convenient ways of grasping it? Should we not then extract the core from the superfluous shell? But if metaphor is really inevitable then we are up against limitations of knowledge about entities that are to an unknowable extent humanly constituted.

 

How does the whole system of source and target domains hang together? Metaphors are organized by target domain here, and overarching conceptualizations uniting them are given–for example, domains mapped onto thinking include Moving, Perceiving, Object Manipulation and Eating, all of which are forms of Physical Functioning With Respect To An Independently Existing Entity (235-43). But do metaphors relate to one another by source domain? Warmth is affection, but it is also anger and lust. Each is a feeling, and each has a related but distinct grounding in bodily heat. A different conception of the source-domain for each suggests a regress of conceptualizations (if in order to structure anger a certain way we need to structure heat in one way out of many). Perhaps when the source-target pairing occurs, it fixes a mutual structuring by means of intervening image-schemas. Or the target’s skeletal structure may have priority in our mental economy–given that the more value-laden concepts, morality and the self, seem less metaphorically integrated than the others. But these are partly speculative forays, as on the coherence of moral metaphors (311-13); and one looks forward to further discoveries.

 

Part 3, “The Cognitive Science Of Philosophy,” “employs methods from cognitive science to study the structure and content of particular philosophical theories” (134). Lakoff and Johnson argue that philosophers select certain metaphors from the range available, in order to give their theories consistency. Consider their analysis of Noam Chomsky’s key metaphors, who, as the most philosophically advanced representative of analytic language philosophy, gets the longest chapter (469-512). His theory has two parts: an “a priori philosophical worldview… not subject to question or change” (474); and his specific linguistic theory, which has changed over his career. Lakoff and Johnson suggest that Chomsky’s worldview is Cartesian, involving such principles as separation of mind and body, an autonomous rationality defining the essence of human nature, mathematics-like formal reason, thought as language, innate ideas, and an introspective method (470-71). The attribution of mind-body dualism seems unfair. Chomsky has explicitly rejected this, and has compared mental “modules” with bodily organs (81). But Lakoff and Johnson do not mean belief in a “mental substance,” but rather that study of brain and body can give no additional insight into language. Neither does Chomsky advocate an introspective method, but by this Lakoff and Johnson presumably mean the use of grammaticality intuitions as data, not the idea that “reason/language is all conscious and… its workings are available to conscious reflection” (472). Wedded to the Cartesian frame are many aspects of the Formalist view of language, including the Thought As Language and Thought As Mathematical Calculation metaphors. These both turn up in ordinary speech, as with “I can read her mind” and “I put two and two together.” They are considered central to the “Linguistic Turn” in philosophy (244-247).

 

This worldview, Lakoff and Johnson claim, predetermines linguistic conclusions, and is invulnerable to criticism because it rejects any counterexamples as outside the definition of linguistics. The introduction to cognitive linguistics claims that it, on the other hand, makes only methodological assumptions about integrating “the most comprehensive generalizations,… the broadest range of converging evidence, and… empirical discoveries about the mind and the brain” (496). Lakoff and Johnson dispute the influential notion of an innate autonomous syntax module, which demands separation of mechanisms for perception and conception: it is an updated version of an outdated faculty psychology (38). Linguistically, they claim that syntax expresses meaning, accords with communicative strategies and with culture, and arises from the sensorimotor system, rather than being independent of all these things (479). Neurally, “there can be no autonomous syntax because there can be no input-free module or subnetwork in the brain” (497). Grammatical categories and constructions result from projection of meaning from a conceptual pole to a phonological pole (496-506). These linguistic debates are abstruse to the nonspecialist, but clear enough to make their point.

 

Lakoff and Johnson demonstrate the overall coherence of Chomsky’s views by relating his assumptions about mind to his politics. Thus, because minds are independent from bodies, we can think and act freely of physical constraints. This defines human nature, so that all people require maximum freedom, and do not need excess material possessions. Therefore government rule and capitalism tend to violate human nature, and an ideal political system is anarchist and socialist. These reconstructions may find little favor with specialist scholars, since when it comes to fine points, we seem far from simple mappings. But it is a strength of this method that it accounts for the sense of large regularities linking distant parts in a theory, even when they do not strictly follow one from another. How might the logic of details conflict with the logic of their governing metaphors? Chomsky says the two parts of his work are only loosely related, but accepts Harry Bracken’s linking of models of mind with ethics, in that rationalism erects a “modest conceptual barrier” against racism because it proposes a universal human essence (Chomsky 92-94). How does this square with the fact that a racist could be a Chomskyan linguist? The basic mappings provide an overall structure from our prereflective source-concept, but presumably further specifications can depart from that concept without changing it. One could accept the linguistic metaphors without seeing reason and freedom as the human essence, or one could apply other metaphors of stable order as human nature. Perhaps everyone has a system with a Kuhnian paradigmatic structure that stays in place as long as it can, and a more literal periphery that accommodates local demands for consistency with itself and with new knowledge. Johnson has explored how Hans Selye, the founder of modern stress research, viewed the body first as a machine, then as a homeostatic organism, and how his inferences about biology and medicine changed accordingly (Body in the Mind 127-38). We need similar research with the depth of the specialist.

 

The continuity here from the founders of Western philosophy through Descartes and Kant to analytic thought is a liability as well as a virtue. Granted, Lakoff and Johnson must be selective to do justice to their subjects, and this tradition supplies their main opponents in the field. But the continental traditions need better representation and need to be studied more fully. The authors’ theory strongly challenges some familiar tenets of postmodernism. Lakoff and Johnson do not allege that metaphors destabilize and deconstruct the “proper” literal thought, conceived in terms of binary oppositions. They deny that metaphor is indeterminate and explain how metaphors are constitutive of thought, sources of unifying inferential structure, and often very stable in themselves (543). By metaphor we create and extend knowledge of abstract domains, describe reality, and assert truths. Postmodern historicizing blurs conceptual and ontological boundaries, showing categories to be slippery by virtue of their shifting relations to other categories within a matrix of power relations. There are no foundational principles, but only “rules of thumb” as Stanley Fish says. Against this Lakoff and Johnson argue that categories have never been defined by necessary and sufficient conditions. That concepts regularly admit of borderline and ambiguous cases does not impugn the reality of clear cases, and no skeptical conclusions about meaning or reality follow. But since categories are not univocal and monolithic, we need research that examines cultural specificity and semantic shifts in their construction (467).

 

Psychoanalysis and Marxism have elevated imagination by elevating irrationality. They dwell on unconscious drives and downplay the conscious mind’s excuses for itself. But to restore imagination to its central place requires showing how it does real cognitive work: an account of the mind as imaginatively rational can still accommodate the irrational, but an account of the mind as imaginatively irrational cannot explain the successes of reason. This task requires changing our basic ideas about reason. Philosophy in the Flesh goes a long way to this end; in doing so, it shows how irrationalism leaves the traditional picture of reason intact. A theory that invests so much in metaphor should produce echoes within the padded walls of literary academe. Embodied cognition conceived in this range and depth informs the structure of culture, creativity, narrative, imagery, figures and signification, belief and ideology and the epistemological grid, empathic projection, emotion, desire and the unconscious, and the elements of the other arts. Lakoff and Johnson put the study of imaginative processes on a new footing–keen attention to their work could revitalize the study of culture.

 

Notes

 

1. Lakoff’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things argues that recent discoveries about human categorization overturn an “Objectivist” view of categories that has been canonical since Aristotle. Johnson’s The Body In The Mind explores how “image-schemata” that emerge from recurrent forms of experience function as nonpropositional structures of meaning, and so undermine “Objectivist” accounts of meaning that dwell on propositions and belief.

 

2. In 1989 More Than Cool Reason, born from the collaboration of Lakoff with Mark Turner, applied the conceptual theory to poetic metaphor. Johnson’s Moral Imagination (1993) and Lakoff’s Moral Politics (1996) apply the new view of mind to morals. And essays in collections and journals have brought it into contact with linguistics, anthropology, psychology, education, religion, social thought, science, and math. The bibliography for Philosophy In The Flesh lists a great number of important studies and is helpfully divided into aspects of the theory of embodied mind.

 

“Cognitivism” has also emerged as a stance competing with the reigning psychoanalytic paradigm in film studies. See especially David Bordwell’s “A Case for Cognitivism” and the other papers in the same volume, and Bordwell and Carroll’s Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, which bills itself as a herald of the new stance. There are a number of websites dedicated to the theory or its relatives: Mark Turner’s “Conceptual Blending and Integration” website at <http://www.wam.umd.edu/~mturn/WWW/blending.html>, and the “Center for the Cognitive Science of Metaphor Online” at the University of Oregon at <http://philosophy.uoregon.edu/metaphor/metaphor.htm> are good places to start. On literature in particular, there is “Literature, Cognition and the Brain” at <http://www2.bc.edu/~richarad/lcb/>; Francis Steen’s “Cogweb: Cognitive Cultural Studies” at <http://cogweb.english.ucsb.edu/>; Cynthia Freeland’s “Cognitive Science, Humanities & the Arts” at <http://www.hfac.uh.edu/cogsci/index.html>; and a special issue of the Stanford Humanities Review on Literature and Cognitive Science at <http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-1/text/toc.html>.

 

3. See Johnson’s The Body in the Mind, especially chapters 2-5; and Lakoff and Núñez’s “The Metaphorical Structure of Mathematics.”

 

Works Cited

 

• Bordwell, David. “A Case for Cognitivism.” Iris 9 (Spring 1989): 11-40.
• Bordwell, David, and Noël Carroll, eds. Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1996.
• Chomsky, Noam. Language and Responsibility. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979.
• Johnson, Mark. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
• —. Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.
• Lakoff, George. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
• —. Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don’t. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.
• Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980.
• Lakoff, George, and R. Núñez. “The Metaphorical Structure of Mathematics: Sketching Out Cognitive Foundations for a Mind-Based Mathematics.” Mathematical Reasoning: Analogies, Metaphors, and Images. Ed. L. English. Hillsdale, N. J.: Erlbaum, 1997.
• Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner. More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.