The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought: The Bodily Roots of Philosophy, Science, Morality, and Art

302 Pages·2018·1.01 MB·English

by  Mark Johnson

The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought

m a r k j o h n s o n
The Aesthetics of
Meaning and Thought
the bodily roots of philosophy,
science, morality, and art
The University of Chicago Press Chicago & London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2018 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical
articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press,
1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.
Published 2018
Printed in the United States of America
27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 1 2 3 4 5
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 53880- 8 (cloth)
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 53894- 5 (paper)
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 53913- 3 (e- book)
doi: https:// doi .org/ 10 .7208/ chicago/ 9780226539133 .001 .0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Johnson, Mark, 1949– author.
Title: The aesthetics of meaning and thought : the bodily roots of philosophy,
science,  morality, and art / Mark Johnson.
Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. |
Includes  bibliographical references and index.
Identifi ers: lccn 2017024330 | isbn 9780226538808 (cloth : alk. paper) |
isbn 9780226538945 (pbk. : alk. paper) | isbn 9780226539133 (e-book)
Subjects: lcsh: Aesthetics. | Meaning (Philosophy) | Experience. | Pragmatism. |
Philosophy and cognitive science. | Ethics.
Classifi cation: lcc bh39 .j63 2018 | ddc 111/.85—dc23
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/20170243304
This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48– 1992 (Permanence of Paper).
For Ted Cohen (in Memoriam),
who helped me see the arts as fundamental expressions of our
need for meaning; and for Tom Alexander, who taught me to
worship at the altar of pragmatist aesthetics of experience

contents
Introduction: The Aesthetics of Embodied Life 1
part i: Philosophy and Science 27
1. Pragmatism, Cognitive Science, and the Embodied Mind 31
2. Philosophy’s Debt to Metaphor 58
3. Experiencing Language: What’s Missing in Linguistic
Pragmatism? 80
4. Keeping the Pragmatism in Neuropragmatism 96
5. Metaphor- Based Values in Scientifi c Models 115
part ii: Morality and Law 135
6. Cognitive Science and Morality 139
7. Moral Imagination 159
8. Mind, Metaphor, Law 176
part iii: Art and the Aesthetics of Life 199
9. Identity, Bodily Meaning, and Art 203
10. Dewey’s Big Idea for Aesthetics 224
11. The Embodied Meaning of Architecture 242
12. What Becomes of Philosophy, Morality, and Art? 259
Acknowledgments 263
Notes 265
References 269
Index 281

introduction
The Aesthetics of Embodied Life
The Need for an Aesthetics of Human
Meaning and Understanding
We human beings are animals—h ighly complex, inescapably embodied,
intrinsically social, and sometimes even intelligent, animals—w ho live,
move, and have our being via our ongoing relations with our environ-
ments. As such, we have a deep visceral, emotional, and qualitative relation
to our world. As a result of our embodied nature, meaning comes to us via
patterns, images, concepts, qualities, emotions, and feelings that constitute
the basis of our experience, thought, and language. This visceral engage-
ment with meaning, I will argue, is the proper purview of aesthetics. Con-
sequently, aesthetic dimensions shape the very core of our human being.
Unfortunately, much traditional aesthetic theory has overlooked many
of these deeply embodied aesthetic processes. It is typically assumed that
experience can be divided up into distinct kinds (moral, political, eco-
nomic, religious, aesthetic, etc.), with each kind separate from the others
and having its own unique character. Having fragmented experience into
these types, aesthetic theory then focuses narrowly on the conditions of
possibility for, and the cognitive status of, these so-c alled “aesthetic expe-
riences” and the “aesthetic judgments” allegedly appropriate to “aesthetic
objects.” The fi elds that came to be known as aesthetics and the philosophy
of art in the twentieth century consequently end up limited mostly to
defi nitions of art, theories of beauty, attempts to explain “aesthetic” judg-
ment, and accounts of how aesthetic experience diff ers from other forms