The Meaning of The Body
A couple of weeks ago I obtained a copy of a new book by Mark Johnson, called The Meaning of The Body. Its a great read, and has really helped me to understand more concretely, many of the issues we are dealing with when we talk about thinking through the body in relation to our various practices – thinking and meaning being defined more broadly, as processes and constructions that enable us to adapt to the worlds around and within us. Its only available in hardback at the moment, but I’ll see if I can send all you TTTB-Artlab researchers some excerpts soon.
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.
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.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.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.