Philosophy in the Flesh George Lakoff and Mark Johnson

Zonce we have learned a conceptual system, it is neurally instantiated in our brains and we are not free to think just anything.... Because our conceptual systems grow out of our bodies, meaning is grounded in and through our bodies... truth is mediated by embodied understanding and imagination. That does not mean that that truth is purely subjective or that there is no stable truth. Rather our common embodiment allows for common, stable truths... The neural structures of our brains produce conceptual systems and linguistic structures that cannot be adequately accounted for by formal systems that only manipulate symbols.

Just as astronomy tells us that the earth moves around the sun, not the sun around the stationary earth, so cognitive science tells us that colors do not exist in the external world.... Visible light is electromagnetic radiation, like radio waves, vibrating within a certain frequency range. It is not the kind of thing that could be colored....The opposition between red and green or blue and yellow is a fact of our neural circuitry, not about the reflectance properties of surfaces. Color is not just about the internal representation of external reflectance. And it is not a thing or substance out there in the world.

mindless Metaphors

red appears to me out of the blue.
it's only a thing to see and occasionally feel
but never eat or taste or touch

the blue sky's setting sun fades yellow to orange
as the earth revolves its burning orb to its nocturnal abode.
blue sky's shorter waves lengthen to give its hue

near is not hardly so near as it might seem
but far is a distance more grand than I imagined

in front of me lies ahead what I had hoped to leave behind
while behind me lies all I had ever dreamt for

starting anew isn't like continuing along
it is more like resuming from where previously stopped

grasping and pulling, one draws closer to themselves
the very things that they themselves have pushed away

to get over something we must go through a lot
because that is how we find out what is in us.
if you are on the top it is only because you rose from below

struggling to gain control the greater self wrestles the lesser
as the true self, which resides deep inside, struggles to get out
and to express itself while suppressing the false self's latent urges.

plumbing the depths of my reasoning I seek for the real me
lost amongst the myriad reflections of a mind lost in mindless reflection.

the truth we seek is only the truth we can understand.
the truth we discover is always less than the one we don't.

Interdependent Meaning

looking out from inside of myself I see a world I don't comprehend
where things exist unto themselves regardless of my awareness,
and yet, while that might be, their being has no meaning without me.
there are no green trees, or hard rock, or hot sun, or fresh air.
these things, it is I who say they are so, and give them their meaning,
but I can only say so while relating one to the other.
I may give them meaning, but only after they have given it to me
each existing unto itself interdependent each upon the other.

salvation's grace

suddenly I feel my blood beginning to boil
it seems as if my head is going to burst
raging inside a pounding heart, the pressure builds

a fleeting moment, a chance to breathe, or explode
sitting on green grass, warm sunshine, gentle breeze, fresh air
I breathe. slowly the boiling subsides, pressure eases, intact I remain

image

seeing in the mind is like seeing with the eyes
an image resides upon the mind stage
whose act goes on even with curtains drawn
my eye's image dances with my mind's image
the curtain is drawn and behold the play

Symbolic Modeling

What is philosophically important about this study is that there is no single, unified notion of our inner lives. There is not one Subject-Self distinction, but many. They are all metaphorical and cannot be reduced to any consistent literal conception of Subject and Self. Indeed, there is no consistency across the distinctions. Yet, the multifarious notions of Subject and Self are far from arbitrary. On the contrary, they express apparently universal experiences of an "inner life," and the metaphors for conceptualizing our inner lives are grounded in other apparently universal experiences. These metaphors appear to be unavoidable, to arise naturally from common experience. Moreover, each such metaphor conceptualizes the subject as being person like, with an existence independent of the Self. The Self, in this range of cases, can be either a person, and object, or a location.

The ultimate philosophical significance of the study is that the very way that we normally conceptualize our inner lives is inconsistent with what we know scientifically about the nature of mind. In our system for conceptualizing our inner lives, there is always a Subject that is the locus of reason and that metaphorically has an existence independent of the body. As we have seen, this contradicts the fundamental findings of cognitive science. And yet, the conception of such a Subject arises around the world uniformly on the basis of apparently universal and unchangeable experiences. If this is true, it means that we all grow up with a view of our inner lives that is mostly unconscious, used every day of our lives in our self-understanding, and yet both internally inconsistent and incompatible with what we have learned from the scientific study of the mind.

Our metaphoric conceptions of inner life have a hierarchical structure. At the highest level, there is the general Subject-Self metaphor, which conceptualizes a person as bifurcated. The exact nature of this bifurcation is specified more precisely one level down, where there are five specific instances of the metaphor. These five special cases of the basic Subject-Self metaphor are grounded in four types of everyday experience: (1) manipulating objects, (2) being located in space, (3) entering into social relations, and (4) emphatic projection - conceptually projecting yourself onto someone else, as when a child imitates a parent. The fifth special case comes from the Folk Theory of Essences: each person is seen as having an Essence that is part of the Subject. The person may have more than one Self, but only one of those Selves is compatible with that Essence. This is called the "real" or "true" self.

It is not a trivial fact that every metaphor we have for our inner life is a special case of a single general metaphor schema. This schema reveals not only something deep about our conceptual systems but also something deep about our inner experience, mainly that we experience ourselves as split. 
   In the general Subject-Self metaphor, a person is divided into a Subject and one or more Selves. The Subject is in the target domain of that metaphor. The Subject is that aspect of a person that is experiencing consciousness and the locus of reason, will, and judgement, which, by its nature, exists only in the present.

Self Struggle 

gripping tightly I hold onto myself
so as not to lose myself.
it is one thing to let yourself go
but quite another to be blown away.

Self control is an action only I 
can take, no matter the force imposed.
wrestling with one self is the most 
severe struggle, there is no escape

you might be lifted up or held down by others
but ultimately you must lift yourself up
and only you can hold yourself down.
no matter the struggle, it is always with yourself.

What Exactly is a Metaphor?

In George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's mind-expanding book, Metaphors We Live By, they say:

"The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another."

 In Man and His Symbols Carl Jung noted there is always something more to a symbol than meets the eye and no matter how much a symbol is described, its full meaning remains elusive: "What we call a symbol is a term, a name or even a picture that may be familiar in daily life, yet that possesses specific connotations in addition to its conventional and obvious meaning. It implies something vague, unknown or hidden from us."

The way we relate to a symbol is all-important. Symbols such as national flags or religious icons may have a shared cultural meaning, but it is our personal connection with them that imbues them with significance. Even though we may use common metaphors, when these are examined more closely a uniquely personal meaning always emerges. Our personal symbolism connects us to our history, our spiritual nature, our sense of destiny and to the "vague, unknown or hidden" aspects of our life. The more this symbolism is explored the more its significance emerges, and the more we can use it as a guide to awareness and action.

cognitive unconscious = we have no direct conscious awareness of most of what goes on in our mind. Conscious thought is the tip of an enormous iceberg. It is the rule of thumb among cognitive scientists that unconscious thought is 95 percent of all thought - and that may be a serious underestimate. Moreover the 95 percent below the surface of conscious awareness shapes and structures all conscious thought.... All of our knowledge and beliefs are framed in terms of a conceptual system that resides mostly in the cognitive unconscious...What we call "the cognitive unconscious" is the totality of those theoretical cognitive mechanisms above the neural level that we have sufficient evidence for, but that we have no conscious access to.

There is no truth for us without understanding. Any truth must be in a humanly conceptualized and
understandable form if it is to be truth for us. If it's not truth for us, how can we make sense of its being truth at all?

Embodied truth = a person takes a sentence as "true" of a situation if what he or she understands the sentence as expressing accords with what he or she understands the situation to be... Embodied truth is not, of course, absolute objective truth...Embodied truth is also not purely subjective truth. Embodiment keeps it from being purely subjective...In sum, embodied truth requires us to give up the illusion that there exists a unique correct description of any situation. Because of the multiple levels of our embodiment, there is no one level at which one can express all the truths we can know about a given subject matter. But even if there is no one correct description, there can still be many correct descriptions, depending on our embodied understandings at different levels or from different perspectives.

What we mean by "real" is what we need to posit conceptually in order to be realistic, that is, in order to function successfully to survive, to achieve ends, and to arrive at workable understandings of the situation we are in. 

Disembodied scientific realism creates an unbridgeable ontological chasm between "objects," which are "out there," and subjectivity, which is "in here." Once the separation is made, there are then only two possible, and equally erroneous, conceptions of objectivity: Objectivity is either given by the "things themselves" (the objects) or by the intersubjective structure of consciousness shared by all people (the subjects).
The first is erroneous because the subject-object split is a mistake; there are no objects-with-descriptions-and-categorizations existing in themselves. The second is erroneous because mere intersubjectivity, if it is nothing more than social or communal agreement, leaves out our contact with the world.
The problem with classical disembodied scientific realism is that it takes two intertwined and inseparable dimensions of all experience-the awareness of the experiencing organism and the stable entities and structure it encounters-and erects them as separate and distinct entities called subjects and objects. What disembodied realism (what is sometimes called "metaphysical' or "external" realism) misses is that, as embodied, imaginative creatures, we never were separated or divorced from reality in the first place.

The concepts of cause and events is very much like what we said about time. The concepts of cause and event and all other event-structure concepts are not just reflections of a mind-independent reality. They are fundamentally human concepts. They arise from human biology. Their meanings have a rather impoverished literal aspect; instead, they are metaphorical in significant, ineliminable ways.

a cause is a determining factor for a "situation," whereby a situation we mean a state, change, process, or action.

Well-Being as Wealth and Moral Self-Interest 

Morality typically concerns the promotion of the well-being of others and the avoidance or prevention of harm to others. Thus, it might seem that the pursuit of one's self interest would hardly be seen as a form of moral action. Indeed, the expression, "moral self-interest" might seem to be a contradiction in terms. Yet, there is a pair of metaphors that turns the pursuit of self-interest into moral action.
The first is an economic metaphor: Adam Smith's metaphor of the Invisible Hand. Smith proposed that, in a free market, if we all pursue our own profit, then an Invisible Hand will operate to guarantee that the wealth of all will be maximized. The second is Well-Being is Wealth. When combined with Well-Being is Wealth, Smith's economic metaphor becomes a metaphor for morality; Morality is The Pursuit Of Self-Interest.
For those who believe in the Morality of Self-Interest, it can never be a moral criticism that one is trying to maximize one's self-interest, as long as one is not interfering with anyone else's self-interest.
The Morality of Self-Interest fits very well with the Enlightenment view of human nature, in which people are seen as rational animals and rationality is seen as means-end rationality - rationality that maximizes self-interest.

Moral Strength 

One can have a sense of what is moral and immoral and still not have the ability to do what is moral. An essential condition for moral action is strength of will. Without sufficient moral strength, one will not be able to act on one's moral knowledge or to realize one's moral values. Consequently, it is hard to imagine any moral system that does not give a central role to moral strength. 

But people are not simply born strong. Moral strength must be built. Just as building physical strength requires self-discipline and self-denial, so moral strength is also built through self-discipline and self-denial... By the logic of the metaphor, moral weakness is in itself a form of immorality. The reasoning goes like this: A morally weak person is likely to fall, to give in to evil, to perform immoral acts, and thus to become part of the forces of evil. Moral weakness is thus nascent immorality - immorality waiting to happen. 

Courage is the strength to stand up to external evils and to overcome fear and hardship

Willpower is the strength of will necessary to resist the temptations of the flesh.

Why the Traditional View Can't Work

Therefore, the empirical question of whether our moral concepts and reasoning are metaphoric is all - important. If they are metaphoric, then they are not univocal, they are not understood in their own terms, and there is not some autonomous, monolithic "ethical" domain with its own unique set of ethical concepts. There is no set of pure moral concepts that could be understood "in themselves" or "on their own terms." Instead, we understand morality via mappings of structures from other aspects and domains of our experience: wealth, balance, order, boundaries, light/dark, beauty, strength, and so on. If  our moral concepts are metaphorical, then their structure and logic come primarily from the source domains that ground the metaphors. We are thus understanding morality by means of structures drawn from a broad range of dimensions of human experience, including domains that are never considered by the traditional view to be "ethical" domains. In other words, the constraints on our moral reasoning are mostly imported from other conceptual domains and aspects of experience....

Basic possessions, normal bodily movement, and freedom from the infliction of pain seem to be, literally, where our notion of rights begin.
Correspondingly, abstract rights in adulthood are based on metaphorical versions of the earliest of rights. Abstract rights are conceptualized as (1) property rights, (2) freedom of action (via Action is Self-Propelled Movement), and (3) freedom from harm (both literal and metaphorical harm). Locke's rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of property" are versions of these abstract rights. Thomas Jefferson's substitution of "happiness" for "property" is based on the common metaphor Achieving A Purpose is Acquiring A Desired Object. Without these various metaphors, our concepts of rights is meager indeed.

What we do not, and cannot, have is some metaphor-free way of conceptualizing abstract moral concepts or entire moral positions. 

The whole point of having a pure moral reason was supposedly to generate pure concepts and rules that could define an absolute, universal morality. However, if we have no pure moral concepts that are defined only on their own terms, then the idea of a pure moral reason becomes superfluous.

Morality is Grounded

Consequently, our very idea of what morality is comes from those systems of metaphors that are grounded in and constrained by our experience of physical well-being and functioning. This means that our moral concepts are not arbitrary and unconstrained. It also means that we cannot just make up moral concepts de novo. On the contrary, they are inextricably tied to our embodied experience of well-being: health, strength, wealth, purity, control, nurturance, empathy, and so forth. The metaphors we have for morality are motivated by these experiences of well-being, and the ethical reasoning we do is constrained by the logic of these experiential source domains for the metaphors.

It just doesn't seem plausible to think of moral principles springing full-blown and unmotivated from pure reason, as though they were not defined relative to human purposes, good, and ends. Moreover, the cognitive evidence is against it.... There is no pure moral reason and there are no pure moral concepts that are understood solely "in themselves" or in relation only to other pure ethical concepts. Our moral understanding is metaphorical, drawing structure and inference patterns from a wide range of experiential domains that involve values, goods, ends, and purposes. Our system of moral concepts is neither monolithic, nor entirely consistent, nor fixed and finished, and certainly not autonomous.