The Meaning of the Body

Aesthetics of Human Understanding

Mark Johnson

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780226401935, 9780226401928
• eBook ISBN: 9780226026992
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Language in Philosophy

A groundbreaking new way of thinking about how we generate meaning through our bodies and our phsyical encounters with the world

In The Meaning of the Body, Mark Johnson continues his pioneering work on the exciting connections between cognitive science, language, and meaning first begun in the classic Metaphors We Live By. Johnson uses recent research into infant psychology to show how the body generates meaning even before self-consciousness has fully developed. From there he turns to cognitive neuroscience to further explore the bodily origins of meaning, thought, and language and examines the many dimensions of meaning—including images, qualities, emotions, and metaphors—that are all rooted in the body's physical encounters with the world. Drawing on the psychology of art and pragmatist philosophy, Johnson argues that all of these aspects of meaning-making are fundamentally aesthetic. He concludes that the arts are the culmination of human attempts to find meaning and that studying the aesthetic dimensions of our experience is crucial to unlocking meaning's bodily sources.
           

Throughout, Johnson puts forth a bold new conception of the mind rooted in the understanding that philosophy will matter to nonphilosophers only if it is built on a visceral connection to the world.

 

PART I

Bodily Meaning and Felt Sense

Discovering, making, and communicating meaning is our full-time job. We do it from the moment we are born until the moment we die. Sometimes we do it consciously and intentionally; but mostly, meaning emerges for us beneath the level of our conscious awareness. Meaning is happening without our knowing it. So, to figure out where meaning comes from, we have to look deeply into mostly nonconscious bodily encounters with our world.

I submit that if you want to understand human meaning-making, you should probably not start with theories of meaning put forth in contemporary analytic philosophy of mind and language. You will find there treatments of concepts, propositions, and various language-like structures, but you will not find any awareness of deep, embodied, vital meaning.

For this immanent or embodied meaning, you must look more deeply into aspects of experience that lie beneath words and sentences. You must look at the felt qualities, images, feelings, and emotions that ground our more abstract structures of meaning. In part 1, therefore, I dig down into our meaningful engagement with our world as it comes to us through our bodies. Chapter 1 focuses on the importance of felt bodily movement in how our world reveals itself. Chapter 2 explores the hypothesis that infants are learning the meaning of things and experiences, even though they are prelinguistic and are not little proposition-processing machines. Infant experience reveals the crucial role of patterns of felt experience—not just in the baby’s world, but equally in our adult sense of reality and in our ability to grasp the meaning of what is happening. Chapter 3 turns to the importance of emotions as one of our primary ways to monitor the nature and adequacy of our ongoing interactions with our environments. Emotions are not second-rate cognitions; rather, they are affective patterns of our encounter with our world, by which we take the meaning of things at a primordial level. In chapter 4 I argue, following John Dewey, that every situation we dwell in is characterized by a pervasive felt quality that is the starting point for all our perceptual discrimination and conceptual definition. This argument leads, in chapter 5, to evidence for the central role of feeling and emotion in human reasoning, along lines first laid out by William James.

Part 1 thus attempts to describe important dimensions of meaning that are typically overlooked by and excluded from views of meaning available in most Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Our first task is to unearth and describe these primary embodied sources of meaning that have been overlooked. Our second task is to begin formulating the larger philosophical picture of mind, thought, and meaning that goes along with this enriched and expanded conception of meaning. In particular, an embodied view of meaning requires an embodied, nondualistic, naturalistic view of mind and body as one process.

CHAPTER 1

The Movement of Life

Life and movement are inextricably connected. The movement of the fetus within the mother’s womb gives her the joyful news of new life. The word “stillborn” strikes horror in a parent’s breast. Eternal stillness—absolute absence of motion—is death. Movement is life. We are born into the world as screaming, squirming creatures, and through our movements we get “in touch” with our world, taking its human measure.

Attention to bodily movement is thus one of the keys to understanding how things and experiences become meaningful to organisms like us, via our sensorimotor capacities. It is not the whole story (temporality, for example, is equally primordial), but it is a good place to start our account of meaning-making. Movement is one of the conditions for our sense of what our world is like and who we are. A great deal of our perceptual knowledge comes from movement, both our bodily motions and our interactions with moving objects.

MOVEMENT AND MEANING

In The Primacy of Movement, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (1999, chap. 3) provides a phenomenological analysis of movement that can serve as a starting place for our account of embodied human meaning-making. Her account is phenomenological in the sense that it describes the origins, structures, and experienced qualities of human movement. It focuses on the felt qualities and patterns of our body movements and interactions with objects.

As animate creatures, we are born moving. It is originally through movement that we come to inhabit a world that makes sense to us—that is, a world that has meaning for us. Movement thus gives us knowledge of our world and, at the same time, reveals important insights about our own nature, capacities, and limitations.

In the beginning, we are simply infused with movement—not merely with a propensity to move, but with the real thing. This primal animateness, this original kinetic spontaneity that infuses our being and defines our aliveness, is our point of departure for living in the world and making sense of it. . . . We literally discover ourselves in movement. We grow kinetically into our bodies. In particular, we grow into those distinctive ways of moving that come with our being the bodies we are. In our spontaneity of movement, we discover arms that extend, spines that bend, knees that flex, mouths that shut, and so on. We make sense of ourselves in the course of moving. (Sheets-Johnstone 1999, 136)

Movement occurs within an environment and necessarily involves ongoing, intimate connection and interaction with aspects of some particular environment. This is a fact of monumental importance that should always be kept in mind in everything we say about the relation of self and world. From the very beginning of our life, and evermore until we die, movement keeps us in touch with our world in the most intimate and profound way. In our experience of movement, there is no radical separation of self from world. We move in space through constant contact with the contours of our environment. We are in touch with our world at a visceral level, and it is the quality of our “being in touch” that importantly defines what our world is like and who we are. What philosophers call “subjects” and “objects” (persons and things) are abstractions from the interactive process of our experience of a meaningful self-in-a-world. It is one of the primary facts of our existence that we are not now and never were, either as infants or throughout human history, alienated from things, as subjects over against objects. There is no movement without the space we move in, the things we move, and the qualities of movement, which are at the same time both the qualities of the world we experience and the qualities of ourselves as doers and experiencers.¹

QUALITATIVE DIMENSIONS OF MOVEMENT

What is it that we experience through our movement? Even though we are seldom consciously aware of the nature of our movement, what we are always experiencing are the qualities of things, spaces, and forceful exertions. We put things into and take things out of containers, and so we learn about containment. We experience linear versus nonlinear paths of motion, whereby we develop our understanding of trajectories. We feel various degrees of exertion and force, and we thus learn what level of exertion is appropriate for moving ourselves from one place to another and for moving objects of various weights. Feeling what it takes to cause an object to move from one place to another is a core part of our basic understanding of physical causation.

Movement is thus one of the principal ways by which we learn the meaning of things and acquire our ever-growing sense of what our world is like. This learning about the possibilities for different types of experience and action that comes from moving within various environments occurs mostly beneath the level of consciousness. It starts in the womb and continues over our life span. We learn an important part of the immanent meaning of things through our bodily motions. We learn what we can do in the same motions by which we learn how things can be for us.

Movements manifest a broad range of recurring structures and patterns that George Lakoff and I have named image schemas (Lakoff 1987; Johnson 1987; Lakoff and Johnson 1999). Typical image schemas of bodily movements include SOURCE-PATH-GOAL, UP-DOWN (verticality), INTO–OUT OF, TOWARD–AWAY FROM, and STRAIGHT-CURVED. Image schemas are discussed more fully in chapter 7. For now, my point is only that movements are not defined merely by the internal structure of image schemas, but also by their distinctive qualities. For example, my movement along a forest path is not defined only by the SOURCE-PATH-GOAL structure of my walking. In addition, my movement manifests dynamic qualities—it can be, for example, explosive, graceful, halting, weak, or jerky. Sheets-Johnstone (1999, 140–51) leads us through a phenomenological experiment designed to reveal the primary qualitative structures or parameters of all movement. For example, perform any simple movement, such as sitting down comfortably in a chair and then standing up. Next, vary the performance of this motion in every way you can imagine: do it first fast, then slowly; now with an explosive effort, next with carefully controlled, gradual exertion; first jerkily, then smoothly; with body held taut and stiff, or with flowing grace. What this experiment reveals are four recurring qualitative dimensions of all bodily movements: tension, linearity, amplitude, and projection.

1. Tension. Every movement a person makes involves effortful action, and effort requires some level of tension in the musculature. Different movements thus demand different degrees of exertion and energy. We learn to anticipate, usually unconsciously, the amount of tension required to perform various activities. If you go to pick up a medium-sized suitcase, you anticipate the amount of effort needed to lift it. If it is empty when you thought it was full, you will be surprised, and your effort will be inappropriate for the task. If the suitcase is full of heavy books, you will be equally surprised when your exertion is inadequate to the task, and so your planned motor program will be disrupted. When your initial effort to lift the suitcase fails (with that telltale jerk on your whole body as you encounter the unexpected resistance of the heavy books), you automatically recalibrate the exertion required, unconsciously make adjustments in the placement of your feet, lower your center of gravity, and lift again. Knowing your world thus requires exquisitely fine adjustments of muscular tension and exertion, calibrated via the tensive qualities that you feel in your body.

2. Linearity. Every move you make creates a path of motion. Those paths, actual and projected, are linear or curved, jagged or smooth, up or down. As we will see in the next chapter, infants learn to imagine possible trajectories of the motion of objects, based on speed, direction of motion, and previous location. They come to understand how a certain trajectory reaches forward into space and engages physical objects, and this understanding allows a person to be gracefully at home in their environment. People who are less successful in learning such projections are less skillful at negotiating space and tracking objects. Along with the tensive quality of motion, then, linear trajectories are an important part of an infant’s nascent understanding of causation. We learn the feeling, the different qualities, of these various types of trajectory.

3. Amplitude. Any motion can be performed with various amplitudes, depending on whether our bodies fill and use the space available to us in a tight, contractive fashion or in an expansive way. In her provocative essay “Throwing Like a Girl,” Iris Marion Young (1980) provides a phenomenological and sociological analysis of the socialization of girls and young women with regard to how their bodies should occupy and move within space. Young begins with Erwin Strauss’s report on an earlier study of the marked differences in the manner of throwing that is typical of boys on the one hand and girls on the other:

The girl of five does not make any use of lateral space. She does not stretch her arm sideward; she does not twist her trunk; she does not move her legs, which remain side by side. All she does in preparation for throwing is to lift her right arm forward to the horizontal and to bend the forearm backward in a pronate position. . . . The ball is released without force, speed, or accurate aim. (Strauss 1966, 157)

By contrast, according to Strauss, boys tend to throw a ball with sweeping, forceful motions that occupy more of the full space available to them, both vertically and laterally, and that involve more of their whole body and its potential force. Boys are taught to bring the ball back in a sweeping lateral motion, moving their “throwing” foot back as they twist their entire body in preparation for the throw. They utilize their trunk, legs, and arms in a forward thrust and follow-through. Young describes this striking difference in the amplitude of motion as applying not just to throwing, but to all sorts of forceful motions:

Not only is there a typical style of throwing like a girl, but there is a more or less typical style of running like a girl, climbing like a girl, swinging like a girl, hitting like a girl. They have in common first that the whole body is not put into fluid and directed motion, but rather, in swinging and hitting, for example, the motion is concentrated in one body part; and second that the woman’s motion tends not to reach, extend, lean, stretch, and follow through in the direction of her intention. (Young 1980, 146)

What Young is describing is how culture has often taught girls to confine their movements and their occupancy of space to a certain characteristic, highly restricted amplitude. Girls traditionally were not supposed to take up space, nor were they supposed to inject their entire bodily presence into a situation. That was considered unladylike. Culturally, such self-assertion and exertion of force have been reserved for males.

In the forty years since Strauss described these two gendered styles of throwing, certainly much has changed in the socialization of girls. Especially because of the emergence of training for girls in many sports at all levels, from preschool up through professional sports, and because of gradual changes in how girls are taught to stand, hold their bodies, and move, these amplitudinal differences are beginning to change in significant ways.² It is conceivable that the earlier observed socially and culturally imposed differences might someday cease to exist. I cite this analysis only to illustrate the notion of amplitude of bodily motions. Whether based on anatomical differences or on gender, class, or other forms of socialization, these variations in amplitude are very real and significant. They are experienced as qualitative differences in motion and bodily comportment. They define some of the ways that a person’s world is open to them for specific kinds of forceful actions.

4. Projection. In exerting force to stand up from a sitting position, I can vary the projective quality of motion. I can thrust myself upward with a violent initial propulsion, or I can raise myself with carefully monitored, deliberate speed. I can switch from smooth to explosive motion and back again. These different patterns entail quite different qualities of their corresponding bodily experiences; violent propulsion feels markedly different from gradual, continuous exertion of force.

MOVEMENT AS A BASIS FOR MEANING

The point I want to emphasize with Sheets-Johnstone’s phenomenological description of the four basic qualitative parameters of movement is that dimensions like these will play a crucial role in how things can be meaningful to creatures who have bodies like ours and move in environments like ours. They are part of what we mean by, and what we experience as, force, effort, manner of motion, and direction of action.

As a phenomenologist, Sheets-Johnstone focuses on how these qualities of movements are felt and experienced by us. However, even prior to conscious experience, our bodies are inhabiting, and interacting meaningfully with, their environments beneath the level of conscious awareness. I want to suggest that even at this nonconscious level, these characteristics of movement are forming the basis for both the meaning of our movements and, at the same time, the meaning of the world that we move within. I am thus using the term meaning in a broader sense than is common in most philosophy and linguistics.

In subsequent chapters, I will present a view of embodied meaning that recognizes conscious inquiry and conscious grasping of meaning, but also processes of organism-environment interaction that operate beneath our felt awareness and that make that felt awareness possible. The key to my entire argument is that meaning is not just what is consciously entertained in acts of feeling and thought; instead, meaning reaches deep down into our corporeal encounter with our environment. This expanded sense of meaning is the only way to preserve continuity between so-called higher and lower cognitive processes. The nonconscious interactive processes make possible and are continuous with our conscious grasp of meaning. At some point, these meanings-in-the-making (“proto-meanings” or “immanent meanings,” if you will) can be consciously appropriated, and it is only then that we typically think of something as “meaningful to us.” But notice that these meanings cannot just pop into existence (arise in our consciousness) out of nothing and from nowhere. Instead, they must be grounded in our bodily connections with things, and they must be continuously “in the making” via our sensorimotor engagements. There is a continuity of process between these immanent meanings and our reflective understanding and employment of them. For example, tension has a meaning grounded in bodily exertion and felt muscular tension. Linearity derives its meani...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: The Need for an Aesthetics of Human Meaning
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Meaning Is More Than Words and Deeper Than Concepts
• Part I: Bodily Meaning and Felt Sense
• PART II: Embodied Meaning and the Sciences of Mind
• Part III: Embodied Meaning, Aesthetics, and Art
• Notes
• References
• Index