Lakoff and Johnson’s Embodied Realism and Embodied Mind

Philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson advance an embodied realism on which the mind is inherently embodied: we think with a brain that evolved to run a body, and so every concept—even color—is shaped by our sensorimotor makeup rather than read off a mind-independent world. On this account, most of thought is a cognitive unconscious of metaphors and frames, physically instantiated as neural circuits. Consequently, "the mind is the body": phenomenal consciousness is a real, brain-caused phenomenon whose structure and internal relations can be explained through embodied neural mechanisms. Yet its core—qualia and sheer awareness—remains, on Lakoff's own account, currently unmodelable and perhaps permanently beyond the reach of science (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999; Kuhn, 2009).

In other words, Lakoff and Johnson’s Embodied Realism/Mind theory holds that phenomenal consciousness is real and neurally grounded, but that its experienced contents, categories, unity, imagery, affective salience, and conceptual articulation arise through the embodied brain’s interaction with the world, structured by unconscious frames, image schemas, and metaphorical mappings rather than by disembodied reason, direct access to reality “in itself,” or a separable mental substance (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999; Lakoff, 1987, 2008; Lakoff & Núñez, 2000). As Lakoff puts the point directly, Western philosophy “got the mind wrong” because it assumed that “we can understand the world in itself” without bodily structuring. Against this, Lakoff and Johnson argue that thought is embodied: “you think with your brain,” and “every concept you have has to be instantiated in your brain,” but the brain is “there to run a body,” not to serve as a “general purpose concepts generator” (Lakoff, Closer To Truth interview in Kuhn, 2009).

The Embodied Mind and Embodied Realism

The program begins from a claim Lakoff states bluntly: "you think with your brain… and you have no choice, that's all you've got." Because "the brain is not a general-purpose concept generator" but "a structure that is embodied," the concepts available to a mind "can only come out of that body" (Kuhn, 2009). Lakoff's paradigm case is color, which is "not out there in the world" but created from four factors—wavelength and lighting in the world, and the color cones and neural circuitry in us—so that when one sees a red car, "the redness isn't in the car"; rather, "your brain and your body are creating color and color categories. They wouldn't exist otherwise." Experience is likewise organized by image schemas—bounded regions, source-path-goal, force, rotation—that the brain computes and imposes: even to say "the bees are swarming in the garden," he notes, is to impose "a container structure on the garden."

Lakoff is emphatic that this is neither skepticism nor naïve realism nor relativism: "I would call myself an embodied realist… Reality is real; it's there. And the body and brain are real, they're part of reality. But what's important is that our understanding is crucially that way." The decisive claim is that human understanding is always mediated by bodily and neural capacities. We do not apprehend the world from nowhere; we understand it “in terms of what we can do with our bodies.” The world has structure, but our access to that structure is filtered and organized through evolved perceptual, motor, affective, and cognitive systems. Thus, consciousness is not an inner Cartesian theater, but the embodied organism’s mode of world-presentation (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Kuhn, 2009).

Conceptual Metaphor and the Cognitive Unconscious

Much of thought is metaphorical, and metaphor for Lakoff and Johnson is neural wiring, not verbal flourish. Primary metaphors—"more is up," "affection is warmth"—arise when two experiences are repeatedly co-activated (pouring water and a rising level; being held as a child and bodily warmth) until, through spreading activation, "you form a connection that is a metaphor… the synapses change and you form circuits… that circuit is the metaphor. It's a physical connection" between brain regions (Kuhn, 2009). These mechanisms run beneath awareness, and Lakoff stresses that the unconscious extends far past metaphor: "most concepts are unconscious. You don't know your conceptual system," with "98%… the estimate that certain neuroscientists have suggested" of "what your brain is doing when you're busy doing other conscious things." Frame structures supply the same silent scaffolding—"a small part of the frame evokes the entire frame"—so that understanding a story, a painting, or another person depends on inferences never explicitly given. The cognitive unconscious, on this view, is the constitutive ground of conscious thought (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999).

Consciousness, Binding, and the Residue of Qualia

Consciousness, Lakoff argues, "is not simply one thing"; its properties include attention, memory, and "unity of consciousness." The unity he attributes to neural binding—"a phenomenon… that links different parts of the brain together via neural circuitry of a certain kind, creating a unity of consciousness"—and he notes the striking fact that "if you imagine seeing something, you're using the same part of the brain as when you actually see," as also in dreaming and remembering (Kuhn, 2009). Several such dimensions he regards as scientifically approachable, and he treats the assumption that thought is conscious as itself an "illusion… when most of it is not, and we can show that it isn't." But he is candid about the limit. Pressed on first-person experience, he concedes that science "cannot answer what it means to be aware"—"there isn't even a method of modeling it"—and that "the same thing with qualia. You know, the fact that red looks red and not green, that a cello sounds like a cello not a piano… We have no scientific way to do that." He declines, however, to call this mystical: "it could be, in principle, scientifically studied… or maybe it never will advance far enough. Maybe our mental capacities don't allow us to understand those aspects of consciousness."

The Mind–Body Problem and its Limits

It is Lakoff and Johnson’s claim that the resulting position resolves the mind–body problem, and it does so empirically rather than by fiat. Studying the categories of mind—inference, metaphor, frames, prototypes, the emotional binding of personal narratives—reveals that their properties "follow from the properties of the brain," so mind is "not just floating in air independent of the brain" (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Kuhn, 2009). "The old mind–body problem," Lakoff concludes, "is solved in the following way: the mind is the body—but there are certain aspects of mind that we do not yet understand and may never understand, which is qualia and awareness… but that doesn't mean it's not caused by the body." The residue is bounded rather than total: while the felt character of experience resists modeling, "certain things about the relationships among qualities are explainable in terms of the body"—the structure of color relations, for instance, following from "the neural physiology of color vision." The view is thus a materialism candid about an explanatory gap that it does not claim to close, placing embodied realism alongside enactive and phenomenological accounts that reject a disembodied, representationalist mind (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991).

References

Kuhn, R. L. (2009). George Lakoff [Interview transcript]. Closer to Truth. https://closertotruth.com/contributor/george-lakoff/.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. Basic Books.

Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. MIT Press.