The American linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson hold that metaphor is not a figure of speech but the way much of our thinking works, and that our most basic metaphors grow out of the body: happy is up and sad is down because we droop when we are low, affection is warmth because we were held as babies. In Philosophy in the Flesh they go further, saying that the mind is embodied through and through. Their account of how “up is good” gets built into language sits close to Therapeutic Shamanism’s teaching on that spell, whilst their view that a Soul cannot leave the body is one the shamanic tradition does not share.
Who are George Lakoff and Mark Johnson? #
George Lakoff is a linguist, one of the founders of cognitive linguistics and Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught from 1972 after posts at Harvard and the University of Michigan. His other books include Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things and, on political language, Don’t Think of an Elephant!.1 Mark Johnson is a philosopher, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Oregon, and the author of The Body in the Mind (1987) and other books on how meaning arises from bodily experience.2 Both have written for decades on how the body shapes meaning, one from linguistics and one from philosophy.
Together they wrote Metaphors We Live By (1980), the founding book of what is now called conceptual metaphor theory, and Philosophy in the Flesh (1999), which restates it with twenty years’ more research and turns it on the whole of Western philosophy.
What did Metaphors We Live By show? #
That metaphor runs through ordinary thought and action, not only through poetry. The concepts that govern our thinking also govern everyday life, “down to the most mundane details”, so that “the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor”.3 English speakers treat argument as war, with positions to attack and defend, and time as money, to be spent, wasted, saved or invested. That second way of thinking is tied to modern industrial societies, and there are cultures in which time is none of these things.4
Because a metaphor shows one side of a thing and hides the others, it guides what we notice without our knowing. Most of our metaphors have grown up in a culture over a long time, but many “are imposed upon us by people in power”, political and religious leaders, business, advertisers and the media, and those who get to impose their metaphors get to define what people take to be true.5
Why do they say metaphor comes from the body? #
Because the most basic metaphors match the way a body lives in the world. Happy is up and sad is down, because drooping posture goes with sadness and an upright one with a good mood. Conscious is up and unconscious is down, since people and most other mammals lie down to sleep and stand up when they wake. Health and life are up, and sickness and death are down.6
In Philosophy in the Flesh this becomes a theory of ‘primary metaphors’, learnt in early childhood. A baby’s experience of affection comes together with the warmth of being held, and the link persists, so that the same person later speaks of “a warm smile”. More is up because, again and again, pouring more water into a glass makes the level rise.7 We pick up hundreds of these simply by living in a body, in a world, from our earliest years. “We have no choice in this,” they write. Where bodily experience is the same everywhere, so are the metaphors, though they are learnt, not inborn.8
What is the ‘embodied mind’? #
The claim that thinking is done by bodies and brains, not by a mind that merely happens to live in one. Philosophy in the Flesh opens with three findings of cognitive science as the authors read it: “The mind is inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.”9 Taken together, they say, these overturn the long Western picture of reason as pure, conscious and detached from the body, running from Descartes to Kant. “Your body is not, and could not be, a mere vessel for a disembodied mind.”10
What do they say about spirituality and nature? #
More than readers might expect from a book of cognitive science. In the closing chapter they write that “the concept of spirituality in our culture has been defined mostly in terms of disembodiment and transcendence of this world”, and call instead for an embodied spirituality.11 How body and brain give rise to spiritual experience, they add, is a question for cognitive science that lies well beyond their book. It needs, in their words, “an understanding that nature is not inanimate and less than human, but animated and more than human”, with joy in the bodily connection with earth and air, sea and sky, plants and animals, and an ethical relationship to the world that goes beyond spiritual experience.11 “The environment is not an ‘other’ to us,” they write; it is part of our being, the place of our existence and identity.11
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
At two points especially. The first is ‘up is good, down is bad’. In Therapeutic Shamanism this value judgement is a spell, soaked deep into our culture and seeped into everyday language, so that ‘animal nature’ is ‘lower’ and humans place themselves ‘above’ the rest of life. It shapes religions and institutions and our relationship with the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer itself, and breaking it begins with seeing that it is simply not true.12 Lakoff and Johnson lay out, with no spiritual frame at all, the machinery by which this happens in English: good is up, virtue is up, health is up, control is up. They explain the pattern by how bodies stand and fall. Therapeutic Shamanism looks at what has been done with it, a ranking of worth taught and reinforced by the sky religionsSky-religion. The vertical, hierarchical reordering of the sacred that the Fall installed, governed by the spell ‘up is good, down is bad’: transcend the body, escape matter, purify upward. The conditioning Therapeutic Shamanism works to undo. More about this, which tell us that animals are further from ‘god’ than we are. The two accounts can be read side by side, one of how the metaphor arises and one of how it has been used. See How has spirituality been used to justify domination?
The second is the body. Therapeutic Shamanism treats the body as a conscious part of us with its own wisdom and intelligence, one that knows the truth, keeps the score and never lies, unlike the middle-world selfMiddle-world self. The everyday self (ego, persona, head-and-heart), made of our stories and experiences. A genuine and needed part of the Inner Tribe: of service, not in command. Read the full answer, which makes up stories. Lakoff and Johnson’s refusal to see the body as a vessel, and their call for a spirituality that is embodied and open to an “animated and more than human” world, run in the same direction, though they arrive there through cognitive science rather than through shamanic practice. See What are Soul, Spirit, the middle-world self and the body?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
On the Soul and on the shamanic realms. Lakoff and Johnson hold that anything that thinks and is “free-floating” is a myth, “whether you call it mind or Soul”, and they say outright that this contradicts the religious traditions in which the Soul can leave the body in sleep or in trance.13 Shamanic journeying is one of those traditions. In Therapeutic Shamanism the shamanic realms are real places, full of real beings, and a journey is an encounter with them, even though what we experience there is co-created and clothed in imagery we can make sense of. See What is shamanic ecstasy or soul flight?
They also mean something different by metaphor. For them it is a mechanism of all human thought. Therapeutic Shamanism speaks of mythosMythos. Metaphorical, symbolic, felt truth: the truth of art, poetry and shamanic journeys. Shamanic reality is mythologically true, not literally true, which is why journeys are interpreted, never taken at face value. More about this, something metaphorically true but not literally so, as one of two kinds of truth, alongside logosLogos. Literal, factual, analytical truth: the truth of facts you can check. One of the two modes of truth, alongside mythos. More about this, literal truth.14 Modern culture tends to confuse the two, taking myths as literal fact or dismissing them because they are not, when what is needed is to hold both.15 Lakoff and Johnson also hold that metaphor and myth deserve to be taken seriously as ways of understanding, but they do not treat mythos as a register of truth for the shamanic realms.
What do critics say about the bodily basis of metaphor? #
Some linguists think it assumes too much about the body. The linguist Juliana Goschler, as the linguist James Underhill reports her argument, found the idea of embodiment unclear, and objected that Lakoff and Johnson treat the body as simply given, when the body is to a large extent a cultural construction, shaped by bodily and cultural practices.16 Comparing languages, she also found body metaphors working in both directions, with the body as the thing explained as well as the thing explaining. Underhill adds that Goschler also found much evidence to back up the theory, and that her points do not question the usefulness of embodiment as a tool of analysis, only show that it needs refining.16
Underhill himself thinks this somewhat unfair, since Lakoff and Johnson “repeatedly insist that the concept of the body differs from culture to culture”, whilst arguing that some bodily experiences, such as above and below or in front and behind, are shared by everyone.16 On Underhill’s account, then, their position is a middle one, with some bodily experience shared by all and much else varying between languages.
