Philosophy, Flesh, & Metaphor: On George Lakoff

by Jefferson Hansen

George Lakoff is best known for his books on progressive politics. But he is also a philosopher. He has cowritten a number of books that explore the place of metaphor in our thinking. Lakoff, in his most thorough work, Philosophy in the Flesh, uses cognitive science to argue that metaphorical thinking is instantiated in the neurons and synaptical pathways of the brain. This brain matter is the flesh of most thinking, including philosophy. Language emerges from it.

Lakoff and his co-author, Mark Johnson, make no apologies for basing their philosophy on cognitive science. While they have a sophisticated view of science and consistently argue that it is impossible to objectively account for reality using language, mathematics or anything else, they nevertheless believe that science points to some fairly stable truths. They use the example of our knowing the earth is round; that's not going to change, they claim. While I am less convinced of this than they are, we'll let it go for now.

Using the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and John Dewey, they argue that there are some human universals. However, they are not based on anything transcendental. Rather, they are based in our shared bodily experience in the world. For instance, the metaphorical connection between proximity and intimacy stems from our experience of being held as a child. Neural pathways begin to be formed at this infant age, before language emerges, and these pathways remain throughout life.

This type of metaphor Lakoff and Johnson term "primary." This is a metaphor that almost all human beings share simply because we live in a body in a society on the planet earth. Indeed, they claim that almost all human languages contain the proximity equals intimacy metaphor. There are a whole host of such primary metaphors, including up equals good and down equals bad and so on. From these primary metaphors, languages develop secondary metaphors particular to themselves. For instance, we use the word "horses" as a metaphor for many things: "hold your horses," "get a rein on that," "pull back on our proposal," and so on. The authors argue that, since many of us now have little experience with horses, the metaphor remains useful because we see it on TV and in the movies.

Lakoff and Johnson, therefore, can be understood as building a tree-like philosophy. Subconscious, embodied metaphors serve as our primary way of being in the world and thinking. The trunk, branches, and leaves are the more conscious aspect of language, and it is composed of secondary metaphors. Any sort of subject-object distinction is derived from these metaphors, and is not in any way there in the world. Some languages develop it, and others don't. What is universal is the way certain metaphors instantiate themselves in the flesh of the brain through our shared, embodied experience in this world.

I have yet to read Lakoff's book on literary metaphors, More Than Cool Reason, which he co-wrote with Mark Turner. I will do that soon. However, I like the following about his philosophy:

• Experience, not language, is primary. Language is derived from our shared bodily experience in the world. This is counter to much Postmodernism, which posits language as the repository of all human meaning.

• His philosophy implies that literary language, rather than being a mere construct, a mere language game, instead ripples back into a pre-linguistic bodily orientation. In other words, good literature shakes us, stirs us, ripples through us at our most basic, fleshly level, one outside language.

• He does away with subject-object duality and replaces it with a notion of "embodied realism," one that emphasizes how the world is composed, primarily, of our interactions. We form a world because of our primary metaphors and their derivations, and that is where we live, not in an object world that is separate from our minds. What is most basic is relationship: between people, between individuals and society, between the ways the earth works and our brains and bodies.

This is what I don't like about their philosophy:

• They build a scaffolding of primary metaphors as a foundation and secondary metaphors built on top. Somehow, this seems too stiff to me. I feel a little claustrophobic as I read them. I wonder if there is another way to show how language reaches back to attach itself to our basic bodily experience. There is something too structured about their thinking. While I realize that this is hardly a rigorous critique, it is nevertheless something that I instinctively feel is right.

• At least in Philosophy in the Flesh, they place too much faith in science. As cognitive science shifts and turns, waxes and wanes, so does their philosophy. I wonder why they couldn't use it as a sort of parallelism to their philosophy, as a kind of musical counterpoint, rather than as a foundation. They create a philosophy that is deeply skeptical of "objectivism," yet they seem to unquestioningly accept the conclusions of an "objectivist" science. I realize that they are quite aware of this criticism, and they do address it, but I am not satisfied with the way they do. No, we will not go back to believing the earth is flat. But as science changes with the times, our whole understanding of what it means for the earth to be "round"—as they put it—will so wholly alter that the very "roundness" will change. Science is in constant flux, I believe.

That said, I appreciate the way the authors open up a way out of the "language-contains-all-meaning" school of thought. I also deeply appreciate that they have opened a way of thinking that allows literary language to do more than merely construct games out of words. With them, there is a way that language shudders into the very flesh, not because our flesh is made sense of through language, but because language emerges from and returns to the body.

[See a continuation of this post here.]