The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding
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In The Meaning of the Body, Mark Johnson continues his pioneering work on the exciting connections between cognitive science, language, and meaning first begun in the classic Metaphors We Live By. Johnson uses recent research into infant psychology to show how the body generates meaning even before self-consciousness has fully developed. From there he turns to cognitive neuroscience to further explore the bodily origins of meaning, thought, and language and examines the many dimensions of meaning—including images, qualities, emotions, and metaphors—that are all rooted in the body’s physical encounters with the world. Drawing on the psychology of art and pragmatist philosophy, Johnson argues that all of these aspects of meaning-making are fundamentally aesthetic. He concludes that the arts are the culmination of human attempts to find meaning and that studying the aesthetic dimensions of our experience is crucial to unlocking meaning's bodily sources. Throughout, Johnson puts forth a bold new conception of the mind rooted in the understanding that philosophy will matter to nonphilosophers only if it is built on a visceral connection to the world. “Mark Johnson demonstrates that the aesthetic and emotional aspects of meaning are fundamental—central to conceptual meaning and reason, and that the arts show meaning-making in its fullest realization. If you were raised with the idea that art and emotion were external to ideas and reason, you must read this book. It grounds philosophy in our most visceral experience.”—George Lakoff, author of Moral Politics Choice "This book continues a lively and interesting debate about the nature of human beings and their awareness of themselves and the world around them."-Choice
Preface: The Need for an Aesthetics of Human Meaning ixAcknowledgments xvIntroduction: Meaning Is More Than Words and Deeper Than Concepts 1Bodily Meaning and Felt Sense 17The Movement of Life 19Big Babies 33"Since Feeling Is First": Emotional Dimensions of Meaning 52The Grounding of Meaning in the Qualities of Life 69Feeling William James's "But": The Aesthetics of Reasoning and Logic 86Embodied Meaning and the Sciences of Mind 111The Origin of Meaning in Organism-Environment Coupling: A Nonrepresentational View of Mind 113The Corporeal Roots of Symbolic Meaning 135The Brain's Role in Meaning 155From Embodied Meaning to Abstract Thought 176Embodied Meaning, Aesthetics, and Art 207Art as an Exemplar of Meaning-Making 209Music and the Flow of Meaning 235The Meaning of the Body 263References 285Index 297
