The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought

The Bodily Roots of Philosophy, Science, Morality, and Art

Mark Johnson

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780226538945, 9780226538808
• eBook ISBN: 9780226539133
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

All too often, we think of our minds and bodies separately. The reality couldn't be more different: the fundamental fact about our mind is that it is embodied. We have a deep visceral, emotional, and qualitative relationship to the world—and any scientifically and philosophically satisfactory view of the mind must take into account the ways that cognition, meaning, language, action, and values are grounded in and shaped by that embodiment.

This book gathers the best of philosopher Mark Johnson's essays addressing questions of our embodiment as they deal with aesthetics—which, he argues, we need to rethink so that it takes into account the central role of body-based meaning. Viewed that way, the arts can give us profound insights into the processes of meaning making that underlie our conceptual systems and cultural practices. Johnson shows how our embodiment shapes our philosophy, science, morality, and art; what emerges is a view of humans as aesthetic, meaning-making creatures who draw on their deepest physical processes to make sense of the world around them.

PART 1

Philosophy and Science

There is a long, deeply entrenched tradition in the West in which philosophy is regarded as the ultimate exercise of reason to address the most general and fundamental human questions about the nature of reality, knowledge, truth, morality, and values. Reason is held to be universal and pure—the uniquely defining capacity of all humans, operating according to a transcendent logic and free from the entanglements of bodily passions. From this perspective philosophy’s theoretical focus is not to provide objective experimental knowledge of nature (that task is left to the sciences); instead, it uses reason to analyze the nature, possibility, and limits of various knowledge practices, types of judgment, and value systems. In the practical sphere, philosophy supposedly examines the source of our moral values and principles, whether in pure practical reason or in certain moral sentiments shared by all humans. On this view, then, philosophy allows us to understand how knowledge of the natural world and the imperatives of human morality is possible.

This popular and long-standing conception of philosophy and science, as the most eminent expressions of a universal understanding and reason, has been challenged from a number of philosophical and scientific perspectives over the past half century. Within philosophy—from traditions as diverse as analytic philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutics, pragmatism, feminism, and postmodernism—a critical onslaught has arisen, mostly from considerations of the nature and limits of knowledge practices. During the same period, within the cognitive sciences (e.g., biology, anthropology, psychology, sociology, linguistics, neuroscience, and computer science), the critique came in the form of accounts of the ways our bodies, brains, environments, and cultures give rise to conceptualization and reasoning, thereby providing a naturalistic explanation of mind. In short, significant parts of our traditional conception of philosophy and science as the ultimate rational endeavors, freed from the encumbrances of the body and supplying objective absolute knowledge, have been discredited by research on the bodily basis of mind, thought, knowledge, and values that is emerging from the recent cooperation of philosophy with the cognitive sciences (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991; Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Gibbs 2006; M. Johnson 2017).

An important basis for rethinking the nature of philosophy and science has been recent work on meaning, thought, and language that has dismantled the illusion of philosophy as the ultimate rational manifestation of pure reason. The research to which I am referring comes primarily from linguistics, psychology, and neuroscience, situated within an empirically responsible philosophical framework. It reveals that concepts do not work the way most people assume they do. Instead of there being literal concepts defined by necessary and sufficient conditions, our concepts tend to have a rich internal structure that lacks any single univocal core and is rooted in our bodies, brains, and social interactions (Lakoff 1987; Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Gibbs 2006). The empirical research shows that our abstract concepts are defined by multiple, often inconsistent metaphors, resulting in a complex radial structure of our concepts and categories, with central category members connected to noncentral members by various principles of extension (e.g., propositional, image schematic, metonymic, and metaphorical (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1987; Kövecses 2010; Dancygier and Sweetser 2014). Contrary to what most people think, reason is not pure and disembodied, but instead emerges from our bodily perception, action, feeling, and values (M. Johnson 2017). As a consequence of the embodiment of mind and thought, there can be no God’s-eye, omniscient perspective in any field of theoretical endeavor or practical engagement. We are situated, fallible, finite creatures.

In the chapters of part 1, I am thus interested in how we should conceive of philosophy and the sciences, once we take embodied cognition seriously. The introductory chapter (“The Aesthetics of Embodied Life”) has given an overview of some of the most significant work on the bodily aesthetic roots of meaning, cognition, and reasoning. Chapter 1 (“Pragmatism, Cognitive Science, and the Embodied Mind”) shows how this view of cognition as embodied and aesthetic makes it possible for pragmatist philosophy and embodied cognitive science to mutually critique, enrich, and expand each other through ongoing dialogue.

A growing body of empirical research on mind, thought, and language reveals that both our philosophical perspectives and our various scientific theories are built on systems of metaphors. These metaphors are grounded in aspects of our bodily perception, action, and feeling. Consequently, our understanding and reasoning about abstract notions is fatefully shaped by powerful metaphors, inextricably tied up with the aesthetic dimensions of our bodily experience. Chapter 2 (“Philosophy’s Debt to Metaphor”) gives examples of the ways in which philosophies are elaborations of particular sets of systematic conceptual metaphors that guide how we individuate, identify, and explain phenomena within particular philosophical systems. The metaphorical character of philosophy is not a problem to be overcome by some transcendental move; rather, the metaphors give us the only intelligent ways we have available for making sense of and reasoning about our experience. (Chapter 5 gives a similar account of how metaphors undergird our scientific theories and are inextricably tied to selected values.)

Chapters 3 and 4 argue that just as we have to choose our philosophical orientation carefully, in an empirically responsible way, so also we need to select the appropriate version of cognitive science that we draw on. I have argued elsewhere (M. Johnson 2007, 2014) that pragmatism provides the most comprehensive and insightful framework for understanding the implications of embodied cognitive science. However, chapter 3 (“Experiencing Language: What’s Missing in Linguistic Pragmatism?”) shows that all pragmatisms are not the same, and that what has come to be known as “analytic” or “linguistic” pragmatism tends to focus exclusively on language and thereby overlooks the crucial role of the body and of experience in the constitution of mind, meaning, and thought. At best, therefore, the newly emerging analytic pragmatism can offer only a considerably impoverished view of what philosophy can and should do in our lives. A more adequate theory would come from a classical pragmatist emphasis on experience (and not just language) as the starting and ending point of philosophical reflection. Such a view emphasizes the pervasive aesthetic dimensions of experience, showing how they shape what and how we understand, reason, and evaluate.

Turning then to the science side, chapter 4 (“Keeping the Pragmatism in Neuropragmatism”) argues that just as pragmatisms vary, so also do various conceptions of cognitive science. Each conception, with its attendant methods, has intrinsic limitations as to what it focuses on and what its resources are for explaining the selected phenomena. Consequently, not just any conception of cognitive science will do. Moreover, no cognitive science and no conception of neuroscience is able to provide a comprehensive and fully adequate approach to mind all by itself. That is why we need multiple methods of scientific inquiry and a philosophical framework that both recognizes the assumptions and limitations of a given science and also explores the broader implications of bodies of scientific research. To get an adequate theory of mind, thought, language, and action, we need to keep up a dialogue between pragmatism and cognitive science that is both appropriately critical of the limitations of various sciences and that also generates and sustains an ongoing co-evolution of science and philosophy.

Philosophy, then, is not what most have thought it is, and neither is science. They are both endeavors of inquiry grounded in systematic metaphors, which are in turn grounded in our embodied and culturally embedded experience. Working together, they can give rise to an empirically responsible philosophy that grows in tandem and co-evolves with the developing sciences of mind.

CHAPTER 1

Pragmatism, Cognitive Science, and the Embodied Mind

The approach to the view of mind, meaning, thought, and language that I develop in this book draws on cognitive science research over the past three decades, placed within a perspective on experience, nature, cognition, and values that I find most comprehensively and powerfully articulated in the pragmatist philosophy of William James and John Dewey. I begin, therefore, with an account of why I find pragmatism to be the most compelling philosophical framework within which to explore the bodily sources of meaning, understanding, and reasoning. There are similar insights on these important topics in the phenomenological investigations of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but in my own philosophical education I have felt the deepest resonances with James and Dewey, who paid considerable attention to the best science of their day as they addressed key problems about mind and thought.

Pragmatism and cognitive science have long had a rocky relationship, but recently it has improved dramatically. Early on, they were like two characters in the standard plotline of so many romantic comedies, who start off intensely disliking each other, noticing each other’s faults and disagreeable traits. Eventually, however, fate brings them together, the sparks begin to fly, and they realize that they had a deep connection all along, though they were both blind to it. The early days of their relationship were fraught with suspicion, misunderstanding, and even hostility. The cognitive scientists ignored pragmatist philosophy, and the pragmatists either ignored or actively criticized the sciences of mind as they understood them. The chief reason for this was that, in its early adolescent stages of development, cognitive science was grounded on assumptions that were mostly incompatible with classical pragmatism. The situation was made even worse by the fact that many pragmatist philosophers accused the cognitive sciences of scientism, fearing that scientific theories of mind were bound to be overly reductionist in spirit and would fail to plumb the depths of mind, thought, and language. Consequently, until recently there has been very little recognition—from either party—of the great potential for a mutually beneficial working relationship between pragmatists and cognitive scientists. Or, to put it in today’s somewhat pathetic romantic vernacular, it has only been in the last few years that the two have been able to “hook up.”

Such a suspicion of cognitive science among pragmatists is ironic, given that Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey each championed the integration and co-evolution of philosophy and the sciences. These classical pragmatists made extensive use of the best available biological and cognitive science of their day in developing their views of mind, knowledge, and value. If they were alive today, I have no doubt that they would appreciate the importance of cognitive science research for the philosophy of mind and language, and they would see the importance of a pragmatist framework within which to understand the contributions of the sciences of mind. I propose to explore some of the shared ideas and perspectives that underlie the promise for a creative relationship between pragmatism and contemporary cognitive science.

Two Different Conceptions of Cognitive Science

So, what was it that kept the future partners feuding for so long? Why couldn’t pragmatists and cognitive scientists get along together? The key to the answer is that earlier incarnations of cognitive science—which George Lakoff and I (1999) have dubbed “first-generation cognitive science”—rested on a somewhat disembodied conception of mind that was completely at odds with the embodied and action-oriented pragmatist understanding of mind, thought, and language. First-generation cognitive science was a blending of analytic philosophy of mind, information-processing psychology, generative linguistics, model theory, computer science, and artificial intelligence research. Its orientation was functionalist in the narrow sense that it took mental thought processes to be formal algorithmic operations on abstract meaningless symbols that could supposedly be run on any of a number of suitable hardwares (machines) or wetwares (biological organisms). Many functionalists are materialists who do not think “mind” and “body” are two separate ontological realities, but their view can still be labeled “disembodied,” insofar as they think that an account of mental operations does not depend on the particular makeup of the body or other material that instantiates the functional program they call mind (Fodor 1975). Consequently, they do not think that the very structures of our thought and reasoning are determined by the nature of our bodies and brains—at least, not in any deep way. Furthermore, most functionalists assume that sentence-like propositions are the core of meaning and thought, and so they employ formal logic, propositional attitude theory, and speech act theory to represent the range of possible mental states and operations.

It is no surprise, therefore, that many pragmatists tended to dismiss first-generation cognitive science as being reductionist and disembodied in character, while cognitive scientists of this persuasion returned the insult by either ignoring or rejecting what they perceived to be just one more speculative and scientifically unsupported philosophical worldview unconnected to their empirical research. In my romantic comedy analogy, we would say that, in their mutual ignorance, arrogance, and disdain, the two partners were all too ready to point out each other’s manifold faults, while remaining blind to their own faults and unappreciative of each other’s respective virtues.

Fortunately, by the mid-1970s, the plot took an unexpected turn. One of the characters began to grow and change. Cognitive science underwent a makeover of substantial proportions. This new “second-generation,” or “embodied,” cognitive science was naturalistic, antidualist, emergentist, nonreductionist, and aware of the need for multilevel explanator...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: The Aesthetics of Embodied Life
• part i:  Philosophy and Science
• part ii:  Morality and Law
• part iii:  Art and the Aesthetics of Life
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• References
• Index