What Makes a Body?

Mark Johnson

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, New Series Volume 22,

Number 3, 2008, pp. 159-169 (Article)

Published by Penn State University Press

DOI: 10.1353/jsp.0.0046

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 J S P

What Makes a Body?

MARK JOHNSON
University of Oregon

Rediscovering the Body

Judging from mainstream Anglo-American philosophy, thirty years ago people

did not have bodies. But today, it seems like almost everybody has one. They’re a
dime a dozen. It is as if a great embodiment tsunami swept over the philosophical
landscape and deposited incarnate minds as it receded.
What I mean when I speak of the days of bodies lost is that, were you to
survey mainstream logic, epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind and
language over the past century, you would not find anything very interesting being
said about embodiment. You would find lots of talk about propositions, concepts,
reference, truth conditions, justified true belief, logical relations, cognitive mean-
ing, and other intellectualized abstractions, but you would be hard put to show
me real flesh, bone, and blood doing the work of being human.
So, what happened to move the body from an afterthought to center stage?
How did we get our bodies back from the Body Snatchers? Well, the first thing to
acknowledge is that phenomenology, especially as practiced by Martin Heidegger
and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, never lost the body as the dynamic locus of human
thought, action, and language. Unfortunately, phenomenology got sat upon and
pushed aside for a while by the big gorilla in the room, that is, by philosophical
orientations harboring implicit ontological and epistemological dualisms. These
dominant perspectives directed attention away from the body by focusing on
the justificatory conditions of “X knows that P,” by accepting the computational
metaphor for mind, and by assuming rational actor models of thought and action.
In other words, the body was ignored in mainstream Anglo-American philosophy
of mind, language, and knowledge. There were too many philosophers who thought
that logic had nothing to do with our bodies and their environments, who regarded
“mind” as computational programs run on bodily wetware, and who thought of
reason as universal, pure, and abstract. This marginalization of phenomenology
consigned the body to the outer darkness.1
The good news is that phenomenology is creeping back in through the
enormous explanatory gaps left by the analytic philosophy of mind and language.

Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 22, No. 3, 2008.

Copyright © 2009 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

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Many younger philosophers are turning to the richer, more profound accounts of
bodily experience that they find in classical phenomenology and its more recent
offshoots. Other developments have also swelled the incarnation chorus, such as
feminist concerns with bodily difference, attention to the body in critical race
theory, and cross-cultural studies of bodily comportment. As a result, more people
are rediscovering, or discovering for the first time, the riches of phenomenological
descriptions of embodiment.
Another major factor in the upsurge of body mania has surely been the
rise of the cognitive sciences over the past four decades. The sciences of mind
are many and varied, ranging from biology and genetics to neuroscience, psy-
chology, and linguistics. The relatively new field of cognitive neuroscience
has made astounding progress in understanding how brains in bodies interact-
ing with environments give rise to human experience, thought, and symbolic
communication (Damasio 1999; Edelman 1992; Tucker 2007). Anyone who
has paid serious attention to recent research in this field will be struck by the
profound role of the brain and the body in shaping what and how we think,
feel, and act. Developmental psychology is studying how infants come to grasp
the meaning of their world through their bodily looking, listening, tasting,
sucking, poking, grasping, and moving (Gibson and Pick 2000; Stern 1985).
Cognitive psychology has moved beyond earlier simpleminded information-
processing models to embrace the complexity, richness, and bodily depth of
human experience and thought (Gibbs 2006; Overton, Muller, and Newman
2008; Wallace et al. 2007). Cognitive linguistics, developed as a principal alter-
native to formalist Chomsky-type generative approaches, is exploring the bodily
roots of meaning, conceptualization, and reasoning in natural languages around
the world (Feldman 2006; Gibbs 2006; Lakoff 1987; Lakoff and Johnson 1999;
Langacker 1986). This happy convergence of disciplines that give pride of place
to the body has even made it possible for there to be a journal, Phenomenology
and the Cognitive Sciences, that is predicated on the possibility of convergence
and cooperation among approaches that hitherto seemed separate travelers at
best and enemies at worst. Interdisciplinary engagement of this sort would have
been unthinkable thirty years ago.

Bodily Sources of Meaning

My own contribution to embodiment research has centered on the emergence of

human meaning, imagination, and reason from structures of bodily perception
and movement (Johnson 1987, 2007; Lakoff and Johnson 1999). In particular,
I have tried to show how patterns of sensorimotor interactions are a basis for the
meaning of concrete concepts and then how imaginative processes like conceptual
metaphor make it possible for us to do all of our most amazing feats of abstract
reasoning, from moral deliberation to politics to logic.

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 WHAT MAKES A BODY? 161

This body of work focuses on the ways human creatures with shared, generic
bodily structures and makeup engage recurring relatively stable aspects of their
shared environments, giving rise to patterns such as those of directed movement,
containment, balance, forced motion, up-down, front-back, right-left, and other
general structures of our ongoing encounters with our physical surroundings. Many
cognitive linguists have argued that it is just such shared sensorimotor structures
of generic bodies that underlie much of the syntax and semantics of our natural
languages and symbolic interactions, including spoken and written languages,
sign languages, spontaneous gesture, music, art, ritual practice, and many other
forms of symbolic expression (Hampe 2005; Johnson 2007; Ziemke, Zlatev, and
Frank 2007). It is not surprising to find shared dimensions of bodily experience
underlying all aspects of meaning and thought. Indeed, this is exactly what we
would expect, given our animal nature and our bodily capacities for perception
and action.
To give just one example of how an embodiment theorist might approach
human conceptualization and language, let us consider a small but important part
of the semantics of the apparently simple English word in:
1. In is conceptualized relative to a Container schema, which consists of the most
elementary structure of (a) a boundary, (b) an interior, and (c) an exterior.
2. Any human being will learn what containment means (that is, will acquire the
Container image schema) by hundreds of times each day physically interacting
with containers: cups, boxes, bodies, rooms, cars, and so forth.
3. In learning what containment is, you learn the corporeal logic of containment,
given the nature of our bodily perceptual and motor actions and the recurring
structures of the environments we inhabit. For example, if my keys are in my
hand, my hand is in my pocket, my pocket is in my pants, and my pants hap-
pen to be in this room right now, then my keys are you know where. There is a
transitive logic of spatial containment.
4. This Container schema structure is realized neurally in topologically invari-
ant features and structures of neural maps in the sensorimotor areas of the
brain. We have some promising neurocomputational models of how this might
work, but I will not address that speculative work here (see Regier 1996;
see also Feldman 2006).
5. Image schemas like Container and Source-Path-Goal can be blended to give
the semantics of more complex compositional terms, such as into. In English,
into consists of a Container schema with a Source-Path-Goal schema activated
and the Goal (of the Source-Path-Goal schema) mapped to the Interior of the
Container, while the Source is mapped onto the Exterior of the Container.
Into thus involves movement of a Trajector starting from outside a container
or bounded area across the boundary and ending up within the interior of the
container. All of our spatial relations concepts work via image schemas and
their spatial/bodily logics.
6. This seems simple and elementary for spatial relations terms, but if you have a
way of understanding the Container schema metaphorically, then you can recruit
the corporeal logic of spatial containment for abstract conceptions, such as when

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 162 MARK JOHNSON

we say, “We brought her into our secret organization, but we later had to kick her
out, because she violated our rules on privacy.” In other words, various abstract
“entities” can be conceptualized as metaphorical containers, thereby recruiting
the spatial logic of containment for reasoning about abstract containers, such as
institutions, logical sets, theories, minds, and categories.
7. Now, clearly, different languages may have different terms to express various
spatial relations, such as in and into, but our hypothesis is that languages around
the world will still utilize a core set of basic image schemas that arise from our
shared embodiment in interaction with shared aspects of the types of environ-
ments we inhabit. Eric Pederson and others (1998) have shown how various
languages use different frames of reference in their spatial systems. The first type
is an intrinsic frame of reference using so-called inherent features of an object.
Thus we would say, “She ran into the room,” in which the inherent containment
structure of the room is utilized. A second type is a more observer-relative type
of reference, such as when we say, “He ran in front of the tree.” In front of here
makes use of the front/back aspect of a Body schema, and the moving object
(a person) is perceived from the perspective of a particular viewer. A third type
of orientation uses what Pedersen calls an absolute framework, as in “He ran
north into the wilderness.” In short, different languages may vary in which of
these perspectival frames they employ and in just how they indicate the land-
mark, viewer, trajectory, and environment as a whole. However, it appears that
all languages use the same basic Container schema structures (and many other
shared image schemas) within these frames of reference.

Many cognitive linguists have pursued the hypothesis of shared generic

dimensions of embodiment as an extremely powerful explanatory assumption
that has yielded detailed semantic and syntactic analyses of key concepts in
languages and symbol systems around the world. I must confess that, for a short
while, the upsurge of work on the bodily grounding of our conceptual systems
made me feel like the cat who just swallowed the canary, going around with a
big smile, so pleased that here we were, at last, plumbing the bodily depths of
human meaning making.
However, about seven or eight years ago, I began to see that our “bodily
depths of meaning” were probably not nearly deep enough. I began to realize
that, beneath and within all of this sensorimotor structure, there were vast,
relatively uncharted dimensions of meaning that involved the very things
philosophers seemed to have little or no resources to talk about—qualities, feel-
ings, emotions, and other visceral aspects of experience. It soon occurred to me
that these dimensions had traditionally been treated primarily in aesthetics—
a field marginalized and devalued within mainstream philosophy. What was
required was to stop thinking of aesthetics as narrowly focused exclusively on
the nature of art and “aesthetic judgment” and, instead, to follow Merleau-Ponty
and Dewey in seeing that aesthetics pertains to every aspect of human experi-
ence and meaning making. Once we begin to take aesthetics seriously, we have
to look to phenomenology, cognitive science, neuroscience, developmental

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 WHAT MAKES A BODY? 163

psychology, and, yes, even art as a way of probing the most profound bodily
depths of meaning (Johnson 2007, Shusterman 2008).

What Do We Mean by “the Body”—Dimensions

of Embodiment
But here’s the rub. In all of this enthusiasm over embodiment, it is not very clear
just what we mean by “the body.” Gallagher (2005), for example, has shown that
there are many different, and not entirely consistent, senses that philosophers and
psychologists have ascribed to key terms such as body schema and body image.
This raises the problem of how we decide where to start looking for the body.
Consider this question: Where is your body? If I were to ask this question
of you face-to-face, you would answer by saying something like, “Right here
(said touching your chest, your trunk, or your arms). Right here’s where my
body is.” And that would be a perfectly acceptable answer, for most purposes.
Unless you are playing some sick game with me, I claim that even if you have
spent far too much time reading Derrida, you are not going to reply to me, “Well,
actually, Mark, you know, my body exists not as a pulsating flesh but, rather, it
is enmeshed in the cultural artifacts into which I am born. It is nothing but the
texts of embodiment I have inherited from the cultural traditions I find myself
inhabiting.”
There is surely something right about starting our inquiry with a reflec-
tion on this fleshy corpus that each of us intimately associates with who he or
she is. What we have to avoid, though, is our tendency to think of this flesh as an
object. It seems so obvious to most people that the body must be just an organized
collection of skin, bones, blood, organs, nerves, and fluids, made up of various
chemicals, all interacting together. We have natural sciences for studying these
physical things and processes, and so it would seem that the story of the body
could be told, more or less reductively, by science. This makes it very difficult for
most people to think of their mind (and identity) as thoroughly embodied, since
they conceive of the body as material thing, and they are utterly convinced that
they most certainly cannot be just a mere thing! Each of us believes, correctly,
that he or she surely is more than a lump of pulsating flesh that will someday stop
pulsating. Consequently, our commonsense view of the body as an object among
other objects in the world leads many people to dismiss the idea that meaning,
thought, and mind are inextricably tied to our bodies.
The challenge here, of course, is to stop thinking of a human body as
merely a thing. It was Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception that
helped us see why our bodies cannot be understood merely as objects interact-
ing with other objects: “My body appears to me as an attitude directed towards
a certain existing or possible task. And indeed its spatiality is not, like that of

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 164 MARK JOHNSON

external objects or like that of ‘spatial sensations,’ a spatiality of position, but a

spatiality of situation” (1962, 100). My body is never merely a thing; it is a lived
body—what Merleau-Ponty calls the “phenomenal body”—the situation from
which our world and experience flows: “It is never our objective body that we
move, but our phenomenal body, and there is no mystery in that, since our body,
as the potentiality of this or that part of the world, surges towards objects to be
grasped and perceives them” (1962, 106).
My first point, then, is that, although the body is not a mere object, the place
to begin thinking about the body is, indeed, with that flesh-and-blood organism
that you colloquially refer to as “my body.” Our commonsense view is at least
partially right when it focuses a person’s fleshy presence as the locus of his or
her being-in-the-world.
However, and this is my second point, if we never go beyond this starting
point in the physical organism of the self, we will overlook key aspects of our
embodiment. In Philosophy in the Flesh (1999) George Lakoff and I express
this by saying that any account of embodied mind that is even remotely adequate
to the complexity of human nature will require multiple nonreductive levels of
explanation. I suggest that there are at least five interwoven dimensions of human
embodiment:2

1. The Body as Biological Organism—My world extends out from, and is oriented
in relation to, this flesh-and-blood body of mine. It is a functioning biological
organism that can perceive, move within, respond to, and transform its environ-
ment (Dewey 1981). It is this whole body, with its various systems working in
marvelous coordination, that makes possible the qualities, images, feelings,
emotions, and thought patterns that constitute the ground of our meaning and
understanding. There is no living body without at least a minimally functioning
brain and nervous system.3 However, my body is quite obviously far more than
just my brain and central nervous system. It includes the preconscious capacities
for bodily posture and movement that Gallagher identifies as the body schema,
“a system of sensory-motor functions that operate below the level of self-
referential intentionality. It involves a set of tacit performances—preconscious,
subpersonal processes that play a dynamic role in governing posture and
movement” (2005, 26). The body schema defines your bodily openness to your
environment. It is an always developing set of structural patterns and capacities
for interacting with and transforming your physical environment. The biological
body is also the site of emotions and feelings without which the organism would
either cease to exist or else fail miserably in its attempts to pursue its own physical
and social well-being (Damasio 1999).
2. The Ecological Body—The body does not, and cannot, therefore, exist
independent of its environment. It is not even completely adequate to say that
the body “incorporates” its environment, for that way of speaking, although
correct enough, tends to reinforce an organism–environment duality. There are
not two things—organism and environment—each bringing its own structure
and preestablished identity into the interaction that is experience. It is better

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to conceive organism (or body) and environment in the same way we ought to
think of mind and body, as aspects of one continuous process (Dewey 1981;
Merleau-Ponty 1962). The brain and its body develop into human corporeality
only by virtue of the precise kind of organism–environment couplings and
their precise temporal sequencing that molds the neural development of our
species (Edelman 1992). We are thus left with the somewhat counterintuitive
idea that the body is not separate from its environment and that any boundar-
ies we choose to mark between them are merely artifacts of our interests and
forms of inquiry.
3. The Phenomenological Body—This is our body as we live and experience it.
There is a way it feels to be embodied as I am. Sheets-Johnstone (1999) rightly
emphasizes the “tactile-kinaesthetic body”—the living, moving, feeling, puls-
ing body of our being-in-the-world. We are aware of our own bodies through
proprioception (our feeling of our bodily posture and orientation), through our
kinesthetic sensations of bodily movement, and through our awareness of our
internal bodily states via feelings and emotions that constitute our felt sense of
ourselves (Damasio 1999).
Gallagher contrasts the pre-reflective body schema with what he calls the body
image, “a (sometimes conscious) system of perceptions, attitudes, beliefs, and
dispositions pertaining to one’s own body. It can be characterized as involving at
least three aspects: body percept, body concept, and body affect” (2005, 37). The
body image is meant to capture our more reflective and self-referential percep-
tions, attitudes, and beliefs about our bodies at this phenomenological level.
This phenomenological dimension of embodiment is extremely difficult to
describe, because it is not reducible to our conscious awareness of how our bod-
ies feel. In order to explain how we are conscious of our bodily comportment
and structure, we must explore also the pre-reflective, nonconscious structures
that make it possible for us to have any bodily awareness. In Gallagher’s terms,
we cannot adequately describe our body image without delving into our body
schema.
4. The Social Body—The human environment of which the body partakes is not
just physical or biological. It is also composed of intersubjective relations and
coordinations of experience. It is not just that we would have no body without
other people (our parents); rather, our bodies develop in and through our inter-
personal dialogical relations with our social others (Stawarska 2003; Stern 1985;
Trevarthen 1993). Infants learn their patterns of bodily engagement with their
intimate others—first their parents, then siblings, and eventually other people in
their larger social world. Some of our bodily capacities are either evolutionarily
selected for or merely adapted to the forms of social interactions that make us
who we are. The key idea here is that the body does not come fully formed prior to
entering into relations with social others; rather, the character of those relations is
crucial in shaping bodily modes of comportment. The brain and the entire bodily
organism are being trained up through deep interpersonal transactions.
5. The Cultural Body—Besides our physical, biological, and social environments,
our bodies are constituted also by cultural artifacts, practices, institutions, rituals,
and modes of interaction that transcend and shape any particular body and any
particular bodily action. These cultural dimensions include gender, race, class

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 166 MARK JOHNSON

(socioeconomic status), aesthetic values, and various modes of bodily posture

and movement. There may well be commonalities of bodily comportment across
cultures, but cultural differences in the shaping and understanding of the body are
real and significant. If there is a way to “throw like a girl” (Young 1980), that way
is certainly not a biological or physiological essence but, rather, a consequence
of physical, social, and cultural conditioning. That is why, as cultural attitudes
and practices surrounding women change (e.g., recent dramatic increases in
girls’ and women’s participation in sports), so also can their bodily comportment
change. The way a person stands, walks, and holds himself or herself often varies
noticeably across cultures and subcultures and at different times in history.
Cultural institutions, practices, and values provide shared (“external”)
structures—what Clark (1998) calls scaffolding—that influence the development
of our bodily way of engaging our world. It is popular today in various circles to
speak of culture as autonomous and independent of individual bodies. Culture
does have a relative stability and independence. But there is no culture without
embodied creatures who enact it through customs, practices, actions, and ritu-
als. Even though aspects of culture obviously transcend and outlive particular
individuals, those artifacts and practices have no meaning without people who
use the artifacts while engaging in complex social practices.
For this reason, I am not enamored of deconstructivist accounts of the body
as a fabric of textuality. The body is, and means, more than its capture in texts.
The body bleeds, feels, suffers, celebrates, desires, grows, and dies before and
beyond texts, even if it is forever caught up in webs of textual significance.

I regard these five dimensions of embodiment as offering a cautionary tale for

anyone who would assume a simplistic or monolithic reductionist conception of
the body. At one extreme, the “ordinary” person tends to focus far too heavily
on the physical flesh-and-blood locus of the self, ignoring the social and cultural
forces that shape and define our bodily engagement with our world and other
people. At the other extreme, the postmodern literary theorist tends to focus too
exclusively on the cultural fashioning of the body, as if the flesh were nothing
but a palimpsest upon which culture has inscribed its definitions of what counts
as body. Both of these extreme opposing views are reductive in their own ways.
The first leaves out large parts of what makes meaning and mind possible, and
the second leaves out many of the sources of, and constraints on, meaning and
mind that come from the character of our corporeal rootedness in the biological-
ecological processes of life.
The human body has all five of these dimensions, and it cannot be reduced to
any one (or two or three) of them. It would be foolish to hope that someday we will
stop speaking of “the body” in terms exclusively tied to the biological organism
and its felt sense of having and being a body. If we regard our conception of the
body as what George Lakoff (1987) calls a radial category, then our most central
sense of “human body” is the living biological-ecological body as we experience
it phenomenologically through proprioception, kinesthesia, and feeling. What I am
objecting to, and where the danger arises, is either when we take our commonsense

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 WHAT MAKES A BODY? 167

notion of “the body” as the basis for our entire philosophical, psychological, and
religious view of the body or else when we assume that it is no more than a text.
The problem, to repeat, is that our simplistic commonsense view tends to land us
in a philosophically and scientifically untenable dualism of body and mind. At the
other extreme, reduction of the body to culturally inscribed textuality destroys the
possibility of bodily feeling, experience, and action directed at both perceiving
and transforming our material, social, and cultural environments.
This complex view of multiple aspects of our embodiment thus requires
us to always entertain multiple methods of inquiry and levels of explanation
for anything pertaining to our body-mind. No single method of inquiry could
ever capture everything we need to help us understand the tightly interwoven
phenomena of body, meaning, and mind (Johnson 2007). For example, because
we as a species have evolved to the level of conscious experience, we are never
going to give up the phenomenological level of explanation. At the very least,
we are going to define many of the primary phenomena of mind on the basis of
our felt experience of our bodies and our world. Consequently, the adequacy of
explanations at other levels (such as accounts from cognitive neuroscience) are
going to be judged, in part, by how well they help us understand the phenomena so
described (i.e., the phenomenological body). What else could we expect, since all
explanations are explanations to and for ourselves, geared to helping us understand
our world relative to certain purposes and interests we have? Any explanations
are necessarily going to be evaluated by us relative to our body-based capacities
for meaning making, inquiry, and thought.
My point in surveying these five dimensions of embodiment has been to
emphasize that each dimension constitutes an appropriate, irreducible level of
explanation for the bodily dimensions of everything human. Unless talking about
“the body” gives us a way of explaining phenomena that we deem important, I can
see no point in all of this attention to embodiment.
In light of what I have just said, my answer to the question “Why does
the body matter?” is just this. Based on the evidence I have seen emerging from
all five of these dimensions of embodiment—empirical evidence garnered from
multiple methods in several disciplines—one is led to the view that what we call
“mind” (and everything that one could imagine as being part of mind, such as
perception, feeling, emotion, concepts, reasoning, planning, wishing, imagining,
dreaming, acting, valuing, and more) cannot be extricated from, and cannot exist
apart from, our embodiment. The locus of what and who we are is embodied. The
body is not just a site where cognition and feeling can occur, as if they could occur
elsewhere but just happen to hang out in bodies. Rather, our embodiment shapes
both what and how we experience, think, feel, value, and act. It shapes who we
are in such a way that it is implicated in all of our possible self-descriptions.
The empirical evidence I have encountered over the years I have studied
the body has led me to give up my prior views of the possibility of disembodied
mind. To some people, especially those favoring a scientific perspective, this will

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 168 MARK JOHNSON

be quite obvious—almost trivial. But to others, I am sure, it will be an outrage

and will sound like the worst reductionism and a denial of human freedom and
spirituality. But, for me, I have got to make sense of my spirituality, my moral
perspective, my identity, and whatever freedom I might have entirely in terms
that emerge from these dimensions of embodiment.

Notes
1. Some will no doubt protest that there are major Anglo-American analytic philosophers who
did recognize the body. I can only say that if you are thinking of examples such as Quine’s meager
references to the importance of sensory irradiations in an account of knowledge, then either (a) you
have not thought very deeply about what it means to be embodied or else (b) your standards for what
counts as an adequate account of the role of the body are remarkably low.
2. The following section is adapted, with some deletions, additions, and revisions from chapter 12
of Johnson 2007. For other ways of carving up the levels or aspects of embodiment, see also Rohrer
forthcoming, Gallagher 2005, and Anderson 2003.
3. Nor is my body merely a representation in my brain. No human is, or could ever be, merely a
brain-in-vat. The extensive philosophical literature on the so-called brain-in-a-vat thought experiment,
made famous by Putnam (1981), is interesting only insofar as it provides a way of thinking about what
goes into meaning and selfhood. Otherwise, the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis is laughable, as Putnam
showed, because it leaves out the critical role of our body-in-interaction-with-our-world that defines
human meaning, reference, and truth.

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