Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought [Tapa blanda]

Lakoff and Johnson make strong claims for second-generation cognitive science as a potential revolution in philosophy. By and large, they are right in their general claims. (And they are not "reifying science," only telling us what's current in one branch of one science.) Indeed, the mind is in the body, and we use metaphors. The actual way we think is very different from what most philosophers assumed, and that is an important realization. However, they could do a better job with the execution. The other reviews have covered a lot of this ground, so I will stick to a few important issues. 1. Damasio. In spite of a couple of references to rather dated Damasio work, they do not take into account the genuinely revolutionary importance of A. and H. Damasio's findings about the inseparability of emotion and cognition in the human brain. This absolutely epochal finding has been largely ignored, due in part to Damasio's less than philosophically sophisticated writeup of it in DESCARTE'S ERROR. One would hope that L and J would supply the sophistication rather than joining in the ignoring. 2. Darwinian psychology. L and J's writeup on Darwin confines itself to an attack on pop-Darwinism of the TIME and NEWSWEEK species. Yet, their whole book would be enormously improved by consideration of serious evolutionary psychology (Cosmides, Tooby, David Buss, et al). The brain isn't just in the body; it, and the body it is in, have been shaped by a few million years of natural selection. That has created particular, and interesting, problems, such as: 3. Built-in biases. People find it exceedingly difficult to think according to the tenets of formal rationality, because our minds love to take shortcuts and make plausible assumptions. This makes sense in the context of everyday life (see Gert Gigerenzer on this) but sure plays hell with the sort of "rational thought" that economists claim we do all the time. Yet, no serious discussion of this in L and J. 4. Kant. Kant is badly misrepresented in the book. He (unlike most of his followers--I admit) was quite aware of the embodiment of mind and the physical limits on thought, and worked hard to figure out how we could reason in spite of all. He pointed out that we do somehow manage to carry out abstract reason when it comes to math, formal logic, and much else. So, why shouldn't we try to apply it to morals? And he was hardly a "strict father" in his morality; he was the architect of the arguments for freedom of speech and many of the other civil liberties we now take for granted (in the US). 5. Metaphors. Are we the slaves of our metaphors, or their masters? If we metaphorize "love" (read: amorous relationships) as a journey, does that mean we seriously think love is a journey? Relationships also "blow up," "break," "fold," "die," "strengthen," etc. We deploy metaphors strategically; we are sometimes their slaves but usually their masters, as Elizabethan writer and blues lyricists well know. Thus, when we try, we can think rather more accurately and abstractly than L and J allow.

I read the editors reviews above and the top customer reviews for this text. I don't feel I need to cover the same ground and I'm not going to. However, I have some personal thoughts that may be useful to add.

In my opinion, Philosophy in the Flesh is a monumental undertaking because it is an attempt to topple an existing paradigm marked by many unexamined assumptions about the nature of the mind, consciousness and the mind-body relationship. This is a very tall order and while the book has some shortcomings, it successfully makes a dent in this direction.

I agree with one reviewer's comments about not including and integrating work from researchers on the relationship between consciousness, the body and emotions such as Damasio. To get this background on your own, I would consider reading "The Feeling of What Happens" and other research in the field. I also agree with this same reviewer's comment about neglecting an evolutionary perspective and to get this I would start by reading David Buss. Understanding our cognitive biases is important and many of these do come from evolutionary psychology. For dramatic examples of these, you might try reading THE EVOLUTION OF DESIRE on sexual mating strategies or JEALOUSY by David Buss. There are also other many good books in this general genre and David Buss has written more than a few of them.

With respect to PHILOSOPHY IN THE FLESH itself, I found the first 136 pages most useful. This justifies the cost of the book because it lays out the author's basic theories, the disconnects between what we know about the mind and what is assumed to be true because of an enduring, but outdated concept of the mind-body relationship. In other words, the first 136 pages are like a nitty-gritty short book on the "must know" concepts.

The remainder of the book goes more deeply into specific examples of how the mind is embodied, the role of unconscious condition as the "hidden hand" that influences our actions, etc. It basically amounts to a defense of the first 136 pages, which in itself is convincing and compelling.

This book has implications for anyone who is interested in the mind-body relation and the body's role in cognition. Not everyone will want to read all of it, but I found that picking it up periodically and diving deeper into specific areas useful. It's not a bedtime story, so plowing through all 600 pages over a week or two might be a bit too much for someone who isn't a specialist in this area.

Lakoff has also written some interesting things on metaphor in dreams. If you have an interest in dreams, this book might be thought provoking and if so, you might also be interested in some of Lakoff's articles on interpreting dreams. If you want a nice introduction to dream interpretation that has a good article by Lakoff, consider DREAMS edited by Kelly Bulkeley. (Kelly also has a lot of other excellent books on dreaming and is quite a scholar in that area.)

I liked this book and I think it made a good dent in bringing down an outdated paradigm. I think anyone who is a cognitive therapist should read this and consider the implications. This would also be a good book for people who are more somatically-oriented therapists or who have a strong interest in mind-body medicine. I think Feldenkrais practioners and Rosen Bodyworks people would also benefit greatly from understanding this material.

Lastly, if you like this book, you might also like AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT (Feldenkrais), the EMBODIED MIND (Varela), THE ANATOMY OF CHANGE and The Body (Yuasa Yasuo). Some of these books are less mainstream than others, but they are ALL thought provoking in different ways.

First of all, despite the reference to 'flesh' in the title, the word 'sex' doesn't appear in the index. Maybe Freud said all there was to say about sex and philosophy.

Second, readers should know something of the relationship between Lakoff and Chomsky. About 35 years ago, Chomsky and Lakoff were having a cross town battle (Harvard versus MIT) over the fate of linguistics. Chomsky was the father of 'generative syntax' (aka universal grammar). Lakoff was the vociferous advocate of 'generative semantics.' Chomsky won.

Lakoff is now on the west coast, Chomsky on the east. Lakoff hasn't stopped fighting. In Philosophy in the Flesh, we read (pg 470) that Chomsky's work is an amalgam of old fashioned Cartesianism and ideas lifted from people that disagree with him (Lakoff explicitly included). In 1972, Lakoff wrote that Chomsky will "fight dirty when he argues. He uses every trick in the book." It doesn't look like Lakoff has changed his opinion, nor his book on arguing.

I suspect some of the fire directed by Philosophy in the Flesh at those horrible 'disembodied' logicians (Decartes, Kant, etc), is really aimed at Chomsky. This book might be about linguistics, not philosophy.

All this said, I still enjoyed the book, though it is an uneven read. The case for sensory-motor metaphors is done well and represents an important insight. There are a great number of philosophers convinced 'meaning' and 'mind' cannot be found 'from the skin in'(see Putnam, McDowell, Kripke, etc) so an argument for embodied logic is timely.

I found the first third of the book very intriguing. The early outline of an embodied logic has a lot of emotional punch. The first third was well worth the price of admission. The later sections seem to drift a bit, though. Once one recognizes the idea of an 'embodied logic,' it seems we should find a detailed set of scientific evidence describing the specific microscopic foundations for it. Unfortunately, the book stays in the linguistic domain, seeming a bit disembodied itself. Perhaps, Lakoff's vociferous character makes it hard to work his ideas into a larger system.