More on Lakoff

[This post is a continuation of the previous one. Click to read it.]

It seems that Lakoff & Johnson's notion of "flesh" is limited to neurons and synapses. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whom they explicitly follow, used the same word to refer to the space between, the connectedness, the out-there of our perceptions. It is the folding and unfolding of our consciousness — which usually perceives outside our bodies — in play with other consciousnesses, in a social and environmental space so far from the cogito. Consciousness exists in open space, not enclosed in our brains.

Lakoff & Johnson have no sense of the social on this level. Instead, there's depends on the objectivism of the natural sciences. While I realize in the last chapter they qualify their dependence on cognitive science, Philosophy in the Flesh is overwhelmingly a book that uses science as its foundation. In so doing they sidestep the very critique of science made implicitly and explicitly in Merleau-Ponty's notion of flesh: for him, flesh is a primal way of being, that which we forget we forget, the very space and possibility of perception. Science is a self-consciously developed way of thinking and explaining that is many steps abstracted from this notion of flesh.

Objectivity is a construct distant from the flesh of the world.

Lakoff & Johnson would agree with the last sentence. However, that doesn't mean that their work isn't deeply dependent on science, rather than Merleau-Ponty's flesh, as the origin of its thought.

What it comes down to is that I am still, over a century after its inception, most sympathetic to phenomenology as a philosophy. This means that I feel Lakoff & Johnson's critique of science does not go far enough.

It does not account for the perception before the perception that we happen to notice. Instead, it uses cognitive science as an explanation for this subconscious.

But in Merleau-Ponty's hands, this subconscious must always remain part mystery, can only be approached in part, can never be fully explained.