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Metaphor in the Raw

Michael Sinding
McMaster University
sindinm@mcmail.cis.mcmaster.ca

� 2000 Michael Sinding.

All rights reserved.
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Review of:
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The
Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York:
Basic Books, 1999.

1. This audacious project based in cognitive linguistics began its

career as a tentative collaboration between a linguist and a
philosopher, with Metaphors We Live By in 1980. George Lakoff
and Mark Johnson are key figures in what has become an
international collective enterprise studying the central role of
processes traditionally thought peripheral, if not deviant, with
respect to normal thought, pre-eminent among which is metaphor.
Lakoff and Johnson followed up their claims in 1987 with studies
of other elements of the embodied mind: prototype categorization
and image-schemata.[1] This latest opus sets out the current
state of the overall theory, then analyzes the metaphorical
structure of five basic philosophical concepts and eight
important philosophies from the Pre-Socratics to present-day
Rational Action Theory. With lucid, close argumentation and
well-organized evidence, it consolidates a powerful theory of
mind, provides answers to perennial intuitions about the
irreducible power of metaphor, and does justice to its ambition
to recast reason and philosophy.

2. In the past few decades, it has become common to draw on

findings in cognitive science in areas beyond the philosophy of
mind, where it emerged as a major force.[2] The Anglo-American
tradition of analytic philosophy has embraced cognitive science
more than has continental European-inspired postmodern thought.
Philosophy in the Flesh presents itself as a middle way between
these two main options (3), and while the former attracts more
attention than the latter, their literalism and objectivism,
stalled in "first-generation cognitive science" are similarly
ventilated. This is an appealing third path: asked to choose
between radical objectivism and radical subjectivism, one
replies with Melville's Bartleby, "I'd prefer not to." But
preferring not to is not very viable, despite the problems that
flow from settling for the estimated lesser of two evils. With
the new brew of the embodied mind, dissatisfied critics need no
longer hold their noses as they swallow their intellectual
commitments. Now they can say, with Shakespeare's Mercutio, "a
plague o' both your houses." Examples of Lakoff and Johnson's
approach are their highwire walks between analytic and
postmodern errors over signs and self: signs are not natural
reflections of reality nor arbitrary fabrications, but
"motivated" (464-66). We have no essence that is just autonomous
and rational or fractured and irrational; rather, we understand
ourselves through variations of a basic metaphorical schema
 relating two entities: "subject" and "self." By the end of the
book, that highwire has turned into a broad highway.

3. The first section, "How The Embodied Mind Challenges The Western
Philosophical Tradition," begins to do so by extrapolating from
empirical research to philosophical principles, instead of the
more usual reverse. Lakoff and Johnson's view of reason
conflicts with all the major philosophical accounts, and so also
rejects previous accounts of the human person (3-7). The stakes
of this debate are high, and we hear the ring of a manifesto at
times. Three abrupt opening sentences state the major findings
that buttress the authors' claims:

The mind is inherently embodied.

Abstract thought is largely metaphorical.
Most thinking is unconscious. (3)

Specifically, "second-generation cognitive science" proves that

a "cognitive unconscious" uses structures that emerge from
bodily experience to shape conscious thought at every level.
"Empirically responsible philosophy" must renounce "a priori
philosophizing" and incorporate these discoveries. That is, "the
very structure of reason comes from the details of our
embodiment. The same neural and cognitive mechanisms that allow
us to perceive and move around also create our conceptual
systems and modes of reason"; reason is "evolutionary, in that
it builds on... forms of perceptual and motor inference present
in 'lower' animals"; it is "shared universally by all human
beings"; and it is mostly unconscious, largely metaphorical and
imaginative, and emotionally engaged (4).

4. Chapters 1 and 2 lay the groundwork of the project and its

polemic. Chapter 3 begins to delineate the evidence for the
authors' theory, exploring concepts relating to color,
basic-level categories, spatial relations, bodily movement, and
event- and action-structure. Chapters 4 and 5 are the real meat
of the theory, bringing together recent findings in conceptual
metaphor. Chapter 4, "Primary Metaphor and Subjective
Experience," unifies a wide range of research into the
mechanisms of metaphorical reason's use of bodily experience to
"conceptualize and describe subjective experience" (46). This is
the "Integrated Theory of Primary Metaphor" (46-58), composed of
four theories: domain "conflation," primary metaphor (natural
minimal mappings), neural metaphor, and conceptual blending. The
latter is to molecules what primary metaphor is to atoms. It
occupies Chapter 5, "The Anatomy of Complex Metaphor," which
shows how blends are built out of combinations of primary
metaphors with each other and with forms of commonplace
knowledge such as cultural models and folk theories. This
chapter also investigates aspects of the rational efficacy of
metaphor, in relation to conventional versus novel metaphor,
mental imagery, multiple metaphors for a single concept, and the
dependence of concepts on their metaphors.

5. In Chapter 7, Lakoff and Johnson contrast their concept of

"embodied realism" to views of "direct" or "representational"
realism, which must deal with how symbols "correspond" to the
things they represent. They show how representationalism
founders on the problem of multiple "levels" of description and
 truth (such as the scientific level versus the phenomenological
level), since correspondence requires one consistent
level-independent truth (105), whereas embodied realism meets
the problem by making reality and truth relative to our various
levels of understanding. This chapter closes with a rejoinder to
an important objection, courtesy of John Searle, that merits a
closer look. Searle contends that the entities and processes
Lakoff and Johnson postulate are mere vague "background" without
the properties Lakoff and Johnson attribute to them. They insist
that the mechanisms of the cognitive unconscious do real
cognitive work; that is, they are "intentional,
representational, propositional, and hence truth characterizing
and causal," and thus meet Searle's own criteria for meaning and
rational structure (115-16). Basic-level categories are
intentional and representational, in that our mental image,
motor program, and gestalt perception for, say, "chair" both
represent and pick out the things that fit the concept. Semantic
frames characterize our structured background knowledge of
things like restaurants, and carry propositional information
that is inference-generating, and therefore relates to truth and
to causation of understanding: concepts like "waiter" and
"check" are defined relative to such frames, and enter into
propositional knowledge of situations (normal inferences about
"after we ate, we got up and left" are that the waiter brought
the check, and we paid him the right amount for the meal before
leaving). Spatial relations concepts are causal of
understanding, in that we use them to impose structure on scenes
(the cat is in front of the tree, the bee is in the garden) that
enter into our beliefs and expressions. And conceptual metaphors
are causal of truth conditions, in that they structure our
understanding of our experience. Under a conceptualization of
times as objects moving towards us in space, it is true that
Christmas day comes a week "ahead of" New Year's day, and the
reverse is false (116-17).

6. In this theoretical outline, confined to 129 pages, Lakoff and

Johnson omit some aspects covered in other studies, but they do
provide considerable new information--especially in the
"Integrated Theory of Primary Metaphor." The material here is
usefully organized. The Appendix on the Neural Theory of
Language Paradigm, for example, helps to explain key terms and
outlines the interrelation of different disciplines of cognitive
analysis such as linguistics and neuroscience. With respect to
the book's major goal of recasting "reason" itself, clearly
further study of scientific, mathematical and logical reasoning
is called for. The authors have attempted to explain elements of
math and logic as metaphor, but these abstract systems do not
take center-stage here.[3] Lakoff and Johnson present ingenious
image-schematic analyses of Aristotelian first-order formal
logic (the law of the excluded middle, modus ponens, and modus
tollens) (375-81), and brief discussions of intentional,
Meinongian, and Boolean logics. Chapter 6 comments somewhat
briskly on science, and there is an intriguing, even dazzling,
study of the mathematics connected with Rational Action Theory
in Chapter 23 (515-25). I should not dwell on what is left out
in an almost 600-page volume, but I would have liked the authors
to address more dialectical operations. Such "logic" is
informal; our concept of it may rely on image-schemas of
splitting, opposition, links, and balance. What about
 paradoxical encomiums and modest proposals? Perhaps there are
cultural models that supply the norms upon which irony depends.
These are problems for theories that focus on the internal
structure of concepts and frameworks. Analysis and contrast, as
well as synthesis, should be explained in embodied terms.

7. Part 2, "The Cognitive Science Of Basic Philosophical Ideas,"

commences the focus and contribution of this volume. This
section "uses the tools of cognitive science and cognitive
linguistics to study empirically concepts such as time,
causation, the self, and the mind... that is, studying basic
philosophical ideas as a subject matter for cognitive science"
(134). Each abstract idea has an

underspecified nonmetaphorical conceptual skeleton...

[that] is fleshed out by conceptual metaphor, not in one
way, but in many ways by different metaphors.... None of
them is monolithic, with a single overall consistent
structure.... The metaphors are typically not arbitrary,
culturally specific, novel historical accidents, or the
innovations of great poets or philosophers. Rather, they
tend to be normal, conventional, relatively fixed and
stable, nonarbitrary, and widespread throughout the
cultures and languages of the world. (134)

This may seem to reverse the typical order of explanation;

metaphorical language shows ideas "as they occur in the
cognitive unconscious of present-day speakers" (134).
Philosophers, like everybody else, must use the meanings and
concepts already in their human conceptual systems (136).

8. Lakoff and Johnson's chapter on time is a well-developed case of

how this works. Their earlier Metaphors We Live By became
exciting when its novel method demonstrated the coherence
underlying an apparent contradiction to metaphoric systematicity
in the fact that "the weeks ahead" and "the weeks following"
mean the same thing. In this volume, they show in greater depth
how we understand time metaphorically in relation to motion,
space and events (137). First, there is a basic observer
orientation with respect to time, whereby the present is the
observer's location, the future is in front of her and the past
is behind her. Then there are two variant metaphors for temporal
process, the "Moving Time" (141) and "Moving Observer" metaphors
(145). These are distinct metaphorical structurings of the
target domain that are inconsistent but coherent with each
other. In the first set of metaphors, time is a (divisible)
substance moving past us as stationary observers; in the second,
time is a series of locations through which we move. In the
first, but not in the second, future weeks "follow" past weeks.
What these sets of metaphors have in common is the relative
motion of the elements. Ekkehart Malotki's 1983 study refuting
Benjamin Lee Whorf's well-known claim that the Hopi language
contains no concept of time or metaphors declares the
trans-cultural relevance of the analysis. Lakoff and Johnson
discuss the metaphysical implications of our spatial metaphors
for time. With reference to the work of Zeno, Saint Augustine,
A. N. Prior, and Stephen Hawking, the authors describe the
puzzles that can result from failing to recognize metaphors as
metaphors (150-51). To illustrate the dangers of institutional
 reification of metaphors, Lakoff and Johnson cite a recent study
that posits employee "time theft" as the first crime against
American business, a perspective that mistakes the metaphor
"time is a resource" for literal truth. Time has some literal
structure from its characterization as a comparison of events,
such as directionality and irreversibility, but it is not
possible to think about time without metaphors; asking what time
is objectively will lead one down one metaphorical path or
another. Our constructions, however, are not merely subjective,
arbitrary, or cultural, but deeply "motivated" (157-69).

9. The other studies in this book have profound implications for

our understanding of events and causes, the mind, the self, and
morality. The cross-cultural data suggest a large body of
natural mappings. Still, questions arise about this view of
concepts and metaphors. The idea that a skeletal concept is
fleshed out by metaphors is more plausible for the self or
morality, which have obvious human dimensions, than for time and
events and causes. It is hard to accept that our ontological
foundations themselves, and not just our concepts of them, are
subject to multiple determinations. Is only the skeletal
structure "real" then, and are the metaphors just convenient
ways of grasping it? Should we not then extract the core from
the superfluous shell? But if metaphor is really inevitable then
we are up against limitations of knowledge about entities that
are to an unknowable extent humanly constituted.

10. How does the whole system of source and target domains hang
together? Metaphors are organized by target domain here, and
overarching conceptualizations uniting them are given--for
example, domains mapped onto thinking include Moving,
Perceiving, Object Manipulation and Eating, all of which are
forms of Physical Functioning With Respect To An Independently
Existing Entity (235-43). But do metaphors relate to one another
by source domain? Warmth is affection, but it is also anger and
lust. Each is a feeling, and each has a related but distinct
grounding in bodily heat. A different conception of the
source-domain for each suggests a regress of conceptualizations
(if in order to structure anger a certain way we need to
structure heat in one way out of many). Perhaps when the
source-target pairing occurs, it fixes a mutual structuring by
means of intervening image-schemas. Or the target's skeletal
structure may have priority in our mental economy--given that
the more value-laden concepts, morality and the self, seem less
metaphorically integrated than the others. But these are partly
speculative forays, as on the coherence of moral metaphors
(311-13); and one looks forward to further discoveries.

11. Part 3, "The Cognitive Science Of Philosophy," "employs methods

from cognitive science to study the structure and content of
particular philosophical theories" (134). Lakoff and Johnson
argue that philosophers select certain metaphors from the range
available, in order to give their theories consistency. Consider
their analysis of Noam Chomsky's key metaphors, who, as the most
philosophically advanced representative of analytic language
philosophy, gets the longest chapter (469-512). His theory has
two parts: an "a priori philosophical worldview... not subject
to question or change" (474); and his specific linguistic
theory, which has changed over his career. Lakoff and Johnson
 suggest that Chomsky's worldview is Cartesian, involving such
principles as separation of mind and body, an autonomous
rationality defining the essence of human nature,
mathematics-like formal reason, thought as language, innate
ideas, and an introspective method (470-71). The attribution of
mind-body dualism seems unfair. Chomsky has explicitly rejected
this, and has compared mental "modules" with bodily organs (81).
But Lakoff and Johnson do not mean belief in a "mental
substance," but rather that study of brain and body can give no
additional insight into language. Neither does Chomsky advocate
an introspective method, but by this Lakoff and Johnson
presumably mean the use of grammaticality intuitions as data,
not the idea that "reason/language is all conscious and... its
workings are available to conscious reflection" (472). Wedded to
the Cartesian frame are many aspects of the Formalist view of
language, including the Thought As Language and Thought As
Mathematical Calculation metaphors. These both turn up in
ordinary speech, as with "I can read her mind" and "I put two
and two together." They are considered central to the
"Linguistic Turn" in philosophy (244-247).

12. This worldview, Lakoff and Johnson claim, predetermines

linguistic conclusions, and is invulnerable to criticism because
it rejects any counterexamples as outside the definition of
linguistics. The introduction to cognitive linguistics claims
that it, on the other hand, makes only methodological
assumptions about integrating "the most comprehensive
generalizations,... the broadest range of converging evidence,
and... empirical discoveries about the mind and the brain"
(496). Lakoff and Johnson dispute the influential notion of an
innate autonomous syntax module, which demands separation of
mechanisms for perception and conception: it is an updated
version of an outdated faculty psychology (38). Linguistically,
they claim that syntax expresses meaning, accords with
communicative strategies and with culture, and arises from the
sensorimotor system, rather than being independent of all these
things (479). Neurally, "there can be no autonomous syntax
because there can be no input-free module or subnetwork in the
brain" (497). Grammatical categories and constructions result
from projection of meaning from a conceptual pole to a
phonological pole (496-506). These linguistic debates are
abstruse to the nonspecialist, but clear enough to make their
point.

13. Lakoff and Johnson demonstrate the overall coherence of

Chomsky's views by relating his assumptions about mind to his
politics. Thus, because minds are independent from bodies, we
can think and act freely of physical constraints. This defines
human nature, so that all people require maximum freedom, and do
not need excess material possessions. Therefore government rule
and capitalism tend to violate human nature, and an ideal
political system is anarchist and socialist. These
reconstructions may find little favor with specialist scholars,
since when it comes to fine points, we seem far from simple
mappings. But it is a strength of this method that it accounts
for the sense of large regularities linking distant parts in a
theory, even when they do not strictly follow one from another.
How might the logic of details conflict with the logic of their
governing metaphors? Chomsky says the two parts of his work are
 only loosely related, but accepts Harry Bracken's linking of
models of mind with ethics, in that rationalism erects a "modest
conceptual barrier" against racism because it proposes a
universal human essence (Chomsky 92-94). How does this square
with the fact that a racist could be a Chomskyan linguist? The
basic mappings provide an overall structure from our
prereflective source-concept, but presumably further
specifications can depart from that concept without changing it.
One could accept the linguistic metaphors without seeing reason
and freedom as the human essence, or one could apply other
metaphors of stable order as human nature. Perhaps everyone has
a system with a Kuhnian paradigmatic structure that stays in
place as long as it can, and a more literal periphery that
accommodates local demands for consistency with itself and with
new knowledge. Johnson has explored how Hans Selye, the founder
of modern stress research, viewed the body first as a machine,
then as a homeostatic organism, and how his inferences about
biology and medicine changed accordingly (Body in the Mind
127-38). We need similar research with the depth of the
specialist.

14. The continuity here from the founders of Western philosophy

through Descartes and Kant to analytic thought is a liability as
well as a virtue. Granted, Lakoff and Johnson must be selective
to do justice to their subjects, and this tradition supplies
their main opponents in the field. But the continental
traditions need better representation and need to be studied
more fully. The authors' theory strongly challenges some
familiar tenets of postmodernism. Lakoff and Johnson do not
allege that metaphors destabilize and deconstruct the "proper"
literal thought, conceived in terms of binary oppositions. They
deny that metaphor is indeterminate and explain how metaphors
are constitutive of thought, sources of unifying inferential
structure, and often very stable in themselves (543). By
metaphor we create and extend knowledge of abstract domains,
describe reality, and assert truths. Postmodern historicizing
blurs conceptual and ontological boundaries, showing categories
to be slippery by virtue of their shifting relations to other
categories within a matrix of power relations. There are no
foundational principles, but only "rules of thumb" as Stanley
Fish says. Against this Lakoff and Johnson argue that categories
have never been defined by necessary and sufficient conditions.
That concepts regularly admit of borderline and ambiguous cases
does not impugn the reality of clear cases, and no skeptical
conclusions about meaning or reality follow. But since
categories are not univocal and monolithic, we need research
that examines cultural specificity and semantic shifts in their
construction (467).

15. Psychoanalysis and Marxism have elevated imagination by

elevating irrationality. They dwell on unconscious drives and
downplay the conscious mind's excuses for itself. But to restore
imagination to its central place requires showing how it does
real cognitive work: an account of the mind as imaginatively
rational can still accommodate the irrational, but an account of
the mind as imaginatively irrational cannot explain the
successes of reason. This task requires changing our basic ideas
about reason. Philosophy in the Flesh goes a long way to this
end; in doing so, it shows how irrationalism leaves the
traditional picture of reason intact. A theory that invests so
much in metaphor should produce echoes within the padded walls
of literary academe. Embodied cognition conceived in this range
and depth informs the structure of culture, creativity,
narrative, imagery, figures and signification, belief and
ideology and the epistemological grid, empathic projection,
emotion, desire and the unconscious, and the elements of the
other arts. Lakoff and Johnson put the study of imaginative
processes on a new footing--keen attention to their work could
revitalize the study of culture.

Department of English
McMaster University
sindinm@mcmail.cis.mcmaster.ca

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Notes

1. Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things argues that recent

discoveries about human categorization overturn an "Objectivist"
view of categories that has been canonical since Aristotle.
Johnson's The Body In The Mind explores how "image-schemata"
that emerge from recurrent forms of experience function as
nonpropositional structures of meaning, and so undermine
"Objectivist" accounts of meaning that dwell on propositions and
belief.

2. In 1989 More Than Cool Reason, born from the collaboration of

Lakoff with Mark Turner, applied the conceptual theory to poetic
metaphor. Johnson's Moral Imagination (1993) and Lakoff's Moral
Politics (1996) apply the new view of mind to morals. And essays
in collections and journals have brought it into contact with
linguistics, anthropology, psychology, education, religion,
social thought, science, and math. The bibliography for
Philosophy In The Flesh lists a great number of important
studies and is helpfully divided into aspects of the theory of
embodied mind.
"Cognitivism" has also emerged as a stance competing with the
reigning psychoanalytic paradigm in film studies. See especially
David Bordwell's "A Case for Cognitivism" and the other papers
in the same volume, and Bordwell and Carroll's Post-Theory:
Reconstructing Film Studies, which bills itself as a herald of
the new stance. There are a number of websites dedicated to the
theory or its relatives: Mark Turner's "Conceptual Blending and
Integration" website at
<http://www.wam.umd.edu/~mturn/WWW/blending.html>, and the
"Center for the Cognitive Science of Metaphor" at the University
of Oregon at
<http://philosophy.uoregon.edu/metaphor/metaphor.htm> are good
places to start. On literature in particular, there is
"Literature, Cognition and the Brain" at
<http://www2.bc.edu/~richarad/lcb/>; Francis Steen's "Cogweb:
Cognitive Cultural Studies" at
<http://cogweb.english.ucsb.edu/>; Cynthia Freeland's "Cognitive
Science, Humanities & the Arts" at
<http://www.hfac.uh.edu/cogsci/index.html>; and a special issue
of the Stanford Humanities Review on Literature and Cognitive
Science at
<http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-1/text/toc.html>.

3. See Johnson's The Body in the Mind, especially chapters 2-5;

and Lakoff and N��ez's "The Metaphorical Structure of
Mathematics."

Works Cited

Bordwell, David. "A Case for Cognitivism." Iris 9 (Spring 1989):

11-40.

Bordwell, David, and No�l Carroll, eds. Post-Theory:

Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1996.

Chomsky, Noam. Language and Responsibility. New York: Pantheon

Books, 1979.

Johnson, Mark. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of

Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.

---. Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for

Ethics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.

Lakoff, George. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What

Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.

---. Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals

Don't. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago:

U of Chicago P, 1980.

Lakoff, George, and R. N��ez. "The Metaphorical Structure of

Mathematics: Sketching Out Cognitive Foundations for a
Mind-Based Mathematics." Mathematical Reasoning: Analogies,
Metaphors, and Images. Ed. L. English. Hillsdale, N. J.:
Erlbaum, 1997.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner. More Than Cool Reason: A Field
Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.