Bored with Lakoff
While I might usually be tempted to alleviate boredom by huffing deck sealant and torturing stray cats, I recently managed to distract myself with a Lakoff's "Philosophy in the Flesh", which I found to be a comparable pasttime. There are two reasons I did this.
The first is that Lakoff regards himself as something of a revolutionary. The book styles itself as a "challenge" to the Western philosophical tradition. Take the opening sentences of the first chapter, for example:
"The mind is inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts of largely metaphorical. These are the major findings of cognitive science. More than two millenia of a priori philosophical speculation about these aspects of reason are over. Because of these discoveries, philosophy can never be the same again."
I take it that professional humility must have somehow met the same fate as "a priori philosophical speculation"*. In any case, I was a little curious to see what the big deal was.
The second reason I subjected myself to this has to do with the fact that Lakoff has variously been described as having been "influenced by" or "in the tradition of" Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. I mean, really?
Lakoff reminded a little of Rorty, who seemed, on one hand, to position himself against Western epistemology and characterize his thought as somehow being anti-representational and post-Cartesian, while at the same time assuming Darwinian naturalism from the outset. Similarly, Lakoff seems to simply assume contemporary neuroscience as a neutral starting-point, without really considering its phenomenological aspect at all. This is ironic given that he is often mentioned alongside phenomenology. But Lakoff would never say, for example, that a common experience of sight would predispose cross-cultural similarities in visual concepts. He would say that the physiological commonality of the visual cortex allow for common concepts relating to vision. In one sense these are just different ways of saying the same thing, but in another sense the first description is phenomenologically grounded in the experience of the body, while the latter description is grounded in one particular representation of embodiment. The latter is importantly mutable, while the former is presumably but unknowably fixed. All of this makes me wonder why anyone who has read both Lakoff and Heidegger would use them in the same sentence.
I also don't see how any of this challenges the presuppositions of Western philosophy. I have no doubt that guys like Lakoff and Damasio have made novel discoveries in their respective fields, but it seems that one could accept all sorts of new information from empirical psychology without abandoning a transcendentally real and basically Cartesian metaphysics.
There's this other thing that's kind of funny about this. There's a way of reading some contemporary philosophy, particularly where it concerns itself with natural science, in a way that sees the physically ambiguous as being problematic or stigmatized in the same way that the flesh and the body was stigmatized in the time of Descartes. By "physically ambiguous" I mean something like qualia -- everyone is rushing to either show how it is physical or to "explain away" its existence in terms of some kind of physicality. The same is true for value and normativity: you want to try to naturalize it. So there's a certain rush (among some) to return to the flesh and to construct a new monism from it, a naturalized monism that makes philosophy and psychology fully compatible and reducible to rest of the natural sciences using things like cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology.
But in this race to naturalize the shit out of everything, it seems like there's an important sense in which "the body", in the literal physiological sense, has been mistaken for the body in the phenomenologically grounded sense, which I think they would want to try to shed some light on, given it is the latter sense of being/having a body that is philosophically rich.
* (Incidentally, Lakoff's discussion of "post-structuralism" later in the book is extremely amusing, particularly as it precedes a treatise on "empirical responsibility".)
The first is that Lakoff regards himself as something of a revolutionary. The book styles itself as a "challenge" to the Western philosophical tradition. Take the opening sentences of the first chapter, for example:
"The mind is inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts of largely metaphorical. These are the major findings of cognitive science. More than two millenia of a priori philosophical speculation about these aspects of reason are over. Because of these discoveries, philosophy can never be the same again."
I take it that professional humility must have somehow met the same fate as "a priori philosophical speculation"*. In any case, I was a little curious to see what the big deal was.
The second reason I subjected myself to this has to do with the fact that Lakoff has variously been described as having been "influenced by" or "in the tradition of" Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. I mean, really?
Lakoff reminded a little of Rorty, who seemed, on one hand, to position himself against Western epistemology and characterize his thought as somehow being anti-representational and post-Cartesian, while at the same time assuming Darwinian naturalism from the outset. Similarly, Lakoff seems to simply assume contemporary neuroscience as a neutral starting-point, without really considering its phenomenological aspect at all. This is ironic given that he is often mentioned alongside phenomenology. But Lakoff would never say, for example, that a common experience of sight would predispose cross-cultural similarities in visual concepts. He would say that the physiological commonality of the visual cortex allow for common concepts relating to vision. In one sense these are just different ways of saying the same thing, but in another sense the first description is phenomenologically grounded in the experience of the body, while the latter description is grounded in one particular representation of embodiment. The latter is importantly mutable, while the former is presumably but unknowably fixed. All of this makes me wonder why anyone who has read both Lakoff and Heidegger would use them in the same sentence.
I also don't see how any of this challenges the presuppositions of Western philosophy. I have no doubt that guys like Lakoff and Damasio have made novel discoveries in their respective fields, but it seems that one could accept all sorts of new information from empirical psychology without abandoning a transcendentally real and basically Cartesian metaphysics.
There's this other thing that's kind of funny about this. There's a way of reading some contemporary philosophy, particularly where it concerns itself with natural science, in a way that sees the physically ambiguous as being problematic or stigmatized in the same way that the flesh and the body was stigmatized in the time of Descartes. By "physically ambiguous" I mean something like qualia -- everyone is rushing to either show how it is physical or to "explain away" its existence in terms of some kind of physicality. The same is true for value and normativity: you want to try to naturalize it. So there's a certain rush (among some) to return to the flesh and to construct a new monism from it, a naturalized monism that makes philosophy and psychology fully compatible and reducible to rest of the natural sciences using things like cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology.
But in this race to naturalize the shit out of everything, it seems like there's an important sense in which "the body", in the literal physiological sense, has been mistaken for the body in the phenomenologically grounded sense, which I think they would want to try to shed some light on, given it is the latter sense of being/having a body that is philosophically rich.
* (Incidentally, Lakoff's discussion of "post-structuralism" later in the book is extremely amusing, particularly as it precedes a treatise on "empirical responsibility".)