Philosophy in the Flesh by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
What defines human mind? How is knowledge attainable? What is reason? Is logic universal? What constitutes truth? Whence do moral values emerge?
These perennial inquiries have occupied the central stage of Western philosophy for centuries.
Philosophers, in grappling with these questions, have traditionally anchored their explorations in certain assumptions— namely, the conviction in our ability to comprehend our minds through introspection, the notion that our contemplation of the world is predominantly literal, and the belief that reason is both disembodied and universal.
Yet, the veracity of these bedrock assumptions finds itself under scrutiny in the face of established findings in cognitive science.
The mind is inherently embodied.
Thought is mostly unconscious.
Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.
Philosophy can never be seen the same again.
In recent times, a consensus has emerged amongst philosophers and cognitive scientists, recognizing metaphor creation as a fundamental cognitive activity. Within their seminal opus, Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson illustrated the how subtly metaphors permeate our lives. These metaphorical constructs, intricately woven into the fabric of our daily discourse, not only govern the contours of our thought but also impact our comprehension.
Consider, for instance, after the rise of capitalism, we started the portrayal of “Time is money”—something subject to investment, expenditure, or squandering. In ancient agricultural societies, “Time is the rhythm of nature”— something that tells us when to do what. When the sunsets, an ancient farmer will less likely to feel guilty because it is time for rest, meanwhile a millennial may ponder if the time is “wasted”, as time being perceived as a commodity. The authors posited that metaphorical frameworks are intertwined with our cultural predispositions. The metaphorical depiction of the “State is a ship” navigating tumultuous waters implies a singular authoritative helmsman, in contrast to a democratically engaged crew. The metaphor of “argument is war” suggesting that we should defend, attack, counter, overthrow our opponents and thus finding common ground will not be the primary aim.
Metaphors construct our realities.
Metaphors as the architects of our cognitive landscape, consequently, challenge the notion of an “objective truth”, asserting instead that truth is inherently contingent upon the cultural tapestry of our conceptual frameworks.
I have read the authors’ earlier work, Metaphors We Live By, and the book laid the grounds for their later work, Philosophy in the Flesh.
Philosophy in the Flesh stands as a seminal treatise challenging conventional Western philosophical paradigms by presenting a cognitive science perspective that posits an inseparable nexus between human cognition, linguistic expression, and the corporeal realm.
Rejecting Cartesian dualism, the authors illustrated an embodied cognition framework, asserting that the very fabric of our conceptual understanding, metaphors, and reasoning are intricately tied to our bodily experiences and sensory-motor interactions with the external milieu.
Although we see all things through a network of blood vessels superimposed on our retinas, we tend to fancy ourselves to be transparencies, enjoying a direct, unmediated and unproblematic connection with our worlds. Throughout the book, the authors show us in painstaking detail, how the unity, structure and consistency of our phenomenal world are a construction effected by our unconscious conceptual apparatus.
For example, when we are in a conversation. Here is only a small part of what we are doing second by second:
Accessing memories relevant to what is being said. Comprehending a stream of sound as being language, dividing it into distinctive phonetic features and segments, identifying phonemes, and grouping them into morphemes. Assigning a structure to the sentence in accord with the vast number of grammatical constructions in your native language. Picking out words and giving them meanings appropriate to context. Making semantic and pragmatic sense of the sentences as a whole. Framing what is said in terms relevant to the discussion. Performing inferences relevant to what is being discussed. Constructing mental images where relevant and inspecting them. Filling in gaps in the discourse. Noticing and interpreting your interlocuto’s body language. Anticipating where the conversation is going. Planning what to say in response.
Cognitive scientists have shown experimentally that to understand even the simplest utterance, we must perform these and other complex form of thought automatically without noticeable effort below the level of consciousness. The very existence of the cognitive unconscious has important implications for the practice of philosophy. It means that we can have no direct conscious awareness of most of what goes on in our minds. The idea that pure philosophical reflection can plumb the depths of human understanding is an illusion. Therefore, most of the central themes of the Western philosophical tradition are called into question by these findings. The Cartesian person, with a mind wholly separate from the body, does not exist. The Kantian person, capable of moral action according to the dictates of a universal reason, does not exist. The phenomenological person, capable of knowing his or her mind entirely through introspection alone, does not exist. The utilitarian person, the Chomskian person, the poststructuralist person, the computational person, and the person defined by analytic philosophy all do not exist. Then what does?
The book delves into the far-reaching implications of embodied perspective on various philosophical domains, including the self, time, morality, logic and causation. The part that I found most interesting is an example of the birth of “logic”. The author explained how the birth of formal logic was based on the metaphorical construct of “categories as containers” which is derived from our sensorimotor experience of space.
Thus, we speak of members of a given category as being “inside” a metaphorically projected container. From this emerges the notion of predication, or “inclusion” “in” a category. So at the center of Aristotle's (and much of our) logic is the metaphor “Predication is containment,” by which we use the image schema of containment to pattern our linkage of statements. Logic uses our bodily experience of space and projects its pattern onto domains far beyond the source of the original experience.
What makes things very uncomfortable for a committed logician, is the relativity of these concepts we have to work with: multiple and potentially contradictory metaphorical construal emerge from our embodied sensorimotor experience of our environment, and they can all be true in different contexts. The authors demonstrated time and again how the same philosopher develops multiple lines of reasoning via multiple, inconsistent metaphorical mappings. They also showed how much weight these metaphors really carry in a philosophical system, and how each enables a different mode of reasoning.
Math and logic are not exempt from the general rule, according to the authors; they are also instruments that are heavily determined by cognitive unconscious metaphorical patterns of inference drawn from sensorimotor experience. This seems to suggest that our capacity for reason far exceeds the purview of these formalized systems, that the true principles by which we reason far transcend those currently statable by formal logic. Logic can thus not be the ultimate grounding for truth-claims, as it is not a ground of itself. Since these principles are as yet largely unknown to us, we are mostly driven by them unconsciously.
The are a lot to unpack but all in all this intellectual odyssey prompts a sweeping reexamination of diverse philosophical traditions, spanning from classical Greek ruminations to the moral constructs of Kant and onward to the countours of modern analytic philosophy. The book perfectly showed that the traditional model of disembodied, literal reason severely restricted the range of possible philosophical insight as well as impoverishing the materials of reason. The authors opened the way to a model of reason that can actually draw upon our capacity for insight and that more fully integrates the entire spectrum of our experience.
