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The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding

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A few years ago I read Mark Johnson's book 'The Body in the Mind' and enjoyed it, so I bought and read this new book. The author's main thesis is that meaning is not just a matter of words, concepts and propositions, but also draws upon images, sensorimotor schema, feeling, qualities, and emotions. He further holds that any adequate account of meaning must include aesthetic dimensions that give our life experiences their distinctive character and significance.

He claims to get some of his ideas from the pragmatist philosophers William James and John Dewey. I am minimally familiar with their writing, especially Dewey, so I can't say the author is accurate about them or to what extent he deviates from them. Regardless, I like and agree with much of his main thesis.

He writes much about mind/body dualism and is very critical of it. According to this view the mind and body are two separate substances with the first pertaining foremost to linguistic meaning. This view underlies much of mainstream philosophy of mind and language. In contrast the author says there is no radical mind/body separation. A lot of evidence from the cognitive sciences supports the idea that meaning is shaped by the nature of our bodies, especially our sensorimotor capacities, feelings and emotions.

Part of our experience we call "mental" and another part "physical", but we do this only reflectively. These concepts are abstracted from the organized flow of our experience. Even the mental, or reason, is grounded in our bodily experience. Reason and emotion are entwined, and he favorably cites the work of Antonio Damasio. As anyone familiar with the author's writing would know, he holds that metaphor is a powerful part of meaning and our ideas.

The role of sensorimotor experience is especially true, of course, for young children. We don't lose this as we grow up. We are all to some extent "big babies", his title for chapter 2. He cites experiments that show cross-modal (vision and touch) mapping in infants as young as three weeks old. Oddly to me he does not mention that Aristotle and John Locke centuries ago wrote about cross-modal perception, which was for Aristotle part of the "common sense." (I have a review for a book about Aristotle's "common sense" on Amazon.)

Chapter 3 is about the emotional dimensions of meaning. One example is doubt, which he says is a bodily experience of holding back assent and feeling a "blockage" of the free flow of thoughts or emotions. Emotions play a central role in an organism's assessment of its internal state and its environment. In other words, emotions and feelings contribute to cognition. Many philosophers are reluctant to grant such a role to the emotions. To support his thesis, he appeals to brain structure.

Chapter 4 in part is about the relations between percepts and concepts. Percepts are, of course, bodily based. He again appeals to brain structure. Chapter 5 has more on feelings and their relation to concepts.

Chapter 6 is about the representational theory of mind. He is critical of it also and sketches his alternative view. Are "neural maps" internal representations? Chapter 7 is more about the bodily roots of symbols. Chapter 8 continues on the topic of the brain and meaning. Therein he writes: "Remember that the traditional (disembodied) view requires the conceptualization occur in brain regions different from sensorimotor processing." He doesn't cite anyone, so I don't know who he means.

Chapter 9 connects embodied meaning to abstract thought. In both Chapters 8 and 9 he appeals extensively to metaphor to give his position. He sketches some views of a few other philosophers on metaphors. He says other philosophers err in giving little or no cognitive significance to metaphor, and he is partly correct. His targets are John Searle, Donald Davidson and Richard Rorty. However, I believe the author errs in the opposite direction, giving metaphor too much significance, nearly as if any literal meaning always depends on metaphor. He easily slides from saying that meaning is based on sensorimotor experience to it being based on metaphor. A metaphor's structure is a map from a source domain to a target domain. He seems to forget that the meaning is metaphoric in the target domain but usually literal in the source domain. The former does not imply metaphoric use in the source domain.

Chapter 10 is about art and meaning and Chapter 11 about music and meaning. Chapter 12 is a recap of the whole book.

If you truly want to see and understand how ALL meaning emerges out of the flesh, blood, and bone of embodied experience, philosopher Mark Johnson suggests that you start with music.

In Chapter 11, of his book The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, Johnson addresses what he describes as the "long, troubled, and inconclusive" history of the question of meaning in music. According to Johnson, the problem arises from the widely held misconception that words and only words can carry meaning--that language is the sole mode by which humans create meaning. If you accept this premise, then it follows that, in order for music to have meaning, music must be some kind of language.

Based on this mistaken MUSIC AS LANGUAGE metaphor, philosophers and music theorists have sought to discover the `universal grammar' of the musical language, trying to identify the musical counterparts to `words' and `sentences'. Inevitably any theory of music based on the MUSIC AS LANGUAGE metaphor ends up making music look like an impoverished or inferior language--not because music isn't meaningful, but because the initial metaphor is faulty.

Music does not make true/false assertions about the relations of objects in the world, nor does it develop these assertions using propositional calculus. So the MUSIC AS LANGUAGE metaphor is inadequate for explaining just how music carries meaning or what it means.

That leaves us with two choices: We can either abandon the MUSIC AS LANGUAGE metaphor, or we can expand our overly restrictive definition of `language' to include more than just its capacity to convey literal concepts and objective references.

Johnson would prefer that we redefine what we mean by `language' to include more than just literal references to objects and relations in the world. However, realistically speaking, he concedes that this narrow notion of language is far too entrenched for us to be able to change it easily. So instead he suggests that we abandon the MUSIC AS LANGUAGE metaphor and focus instead on enriching our awareness and understanding of the full spectrum of ways we have for creating meaning (of which language is just one among many).

Meaning without Representation
In an earlier chapter entitled The Origin of Meaning In Organism-Environment Coupling: A Nonrepresentational View of Mind, Johnson warns against the pitfalls of using words like "representation" to describe the way the mind works.

In the embodied view of mind, thought emerges as a result of physical phenomena. Thought does not take place in a separate, immaterial world; instead it is a two-way organism-environment interaction that lies along a continuum of organism-environment interactions. Your mind/body is part of the world, and your thoughts are part of the complex system of the entire environment, continually being shaped by the environment while at the same time shaping and influencing and interacting with it.

The representational theory of mind suggests the metaphor of a digital computer with a BRAIN as HARDWARE / MIND as SOFTWARE; if we accept this metaphor, it follows that we can build models of the world inside our heads using symbolic tokens or representations. It's the representational theory of mind that led artificial intelligence researchers in the 1980s to use LISP for building databases of assertions (e.g. John loves Mary) and propositional calculus for reasoning about those assertions. But real minds turn out to be less like digital computers and more like adaptive analog circuits, running continuously, as long as you are alive, with the inputs giving more weight to some connections and less to others, continuously re-shaping the behavior of the circuit which in turn results in physical, chemical outputs that change the environment.

Real minds are emergent properties of a complex system (consisting of you and your environment), exhibiting complex behavior and interaction without having been programmed with tokens or representations of the world; they are a result of and a part of that world. Chemicals gradients, vibrations, electromagnetic waves impinge on transducers like noses, ears, and eyes as part of chains of events that continue to generate neurotransmitter chemicals, impulses, oscillations, the results of which may be pheromone secretions, vibrating vocal folds, or electro-mechanical force imparted by muscle contractions that alter the environment. In other words, you don't build a model of reality in your head; reality is in your head!

What is music?
Music, then, is not a representation of something else. So what is it? On page 238, Johnson makes a simple but profound statement about the way music works:

Music does not re-present anything...Music's function is, instead, presentation and enactment of felt experience.

In other words, Johnson asserts that music, rather than being a re-enactment of an experience, is the experience itself! He is saying that music is meaningful in that it presents a flow of human experience.

Johnson has an affinity for the work of neurologist/philosopher Antonio Damasio whose books are cited throughout The Meaning of the Body. In Damasio's book, The Feeling of What Happens, he describes `thought' as a continuous flow of dynamic, multi-modal `images' (his term for what Johnson calls `image schemata', what Albert Einstein calls `muscular images', and what Daniel Stern calls `vitality-affect contours'). Damasio is careful to explain that what he means by `image' is not a static visual image, but a structured, dynamic, somatosensory pattern including all sensory modalities--visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatotory, tactile--along with a sense of internal state, including muscle tone, temperature, pain, and feedback from the visceral organs and the vestibular system. In other words, the `images' are not symbols, but more like "indexes" linked to every aspect of the mind/body's spatio-temporal interaction with the world. These patterns are not `representations'; they are not referring to something else, they are our experience.

Using his enriched definition for the word `image', Damasio defines `thought' as:

...a continuous flow of images many of which turn out to be logically interrelated. The flow moves forward in time, speedily or slowly, orderly or jumpily, and on occasion it moves along not just one sequence but several. Sometimes the sequences are concurrent, sometimes convergent and divergent, sometimes they are superposed.

Substitute the word "sound" for the word "image", and you have a perfect description of music.

Combine Damasio's definition of thought with Johnson's definition for music, and we are left with a startling conclusion: The way we experience music is very closely related to the way we experience thought. We experience it directly, without translation into and out of symbols.

Not only is Johnson dismissing the idea that music doesn't mean anything, he goes much further, elevating music to one of the most profoundly meaningful of all the arts: as the direct presentation of the human flow of experience, of thought, of what it feels like to be a living mind-body interacting with the physical, chemical and social environment. Furthermore, Johnson asserts that, like other aspects of our experience, music has the power "to enact changes in our body-mind," thus satisfying John Dewey's requirement that art be transformative.

So we have two very profound assertions about music: first, that it is perhaps the closest experience to the way we experience thought, and second, that the experience of music has the power to transform your mind/body. Are those statements sufficient to deem it `meaningful'? (My online dictionary tells me that meaningful is: significant, relevant, important, consequential, telling, material, valid, worthwhile.)

Is music the only art form to directly present the flow of experience? What about films and immersive computer game-play? It's interesting to note that both of those art forms usually make use of music as part of the experience. Often it is the musical sound track that is (typically pre-consciously) supplying the felt experience of the film or game. Visuals and dialog advance the narrative, but music is often used to intensify the meaning and flag the importance of key aspects of the experience. Why is that? How is it that a completely abstract art form is able to tag the visual and linguistic elements of a film or a game, letting you know when things are getting dangerous, when you've reached some kind of fulfillment, when there's reason to move quickly and nervously along, when you can safely relax for little while, etc. Perhaps because the way we experience music is so similar to the way we experience the flow of life, music supplies something that's missing from the images and dialog; it supplies what it feels like to be experiencing the images and to be involved in the narrative.

Metaphors of musical motion
In the next section, Johnson goes into more detail using a specific musical example. This section is largely a restatement of the beautiful (almost musical in its form) paper that Johnson wrote with his colleague from the University of Oregon School of Music and Dance, Steve Larson: "Something in the Way She Moves: Metaphors of Musical Motion", first published in Metaphor and Symbol in 2003.

Using the title of the familiar George Harrison song as a bit of a pun, Johnson and Larson focus on the metaphors of `musical motion', the TIME is SPACE metaphor, and the various ways we humans experience the flow of time and conflate it with movement through space.

To quote an example from Lera Boroditsky's work, imagine that you and I are co-workers and I send you an email saying, "Wednesday's meeting has been moved forward a couple of days." When is the meeting?

If you said Monday, you were imagining yourself as stationary as the days move forward toward you. Moving the meeting forward two days would put it closer to you or earlier in time.

But if you said Friday, then you were imagining yourself moving forward on a grid labeled with the days of the week. Moving the meeting forward, pushes it forward in the same direction you are moving so it ends up on Friday.

Perhaps because our brains evolved to help us navigate through space toward food and away from danger, we often use movement through space as a metaphor for reasoning about time.

Music, being a time-based art form, is also experienced as movement in space: sometimes we experience the music flowing past us; at other times, we may feel that we are the ones moving through a musical `landscape', moving past `landmarks' or events. (In relative terms, of course, Einstein used his `muscular images' to show us that it doesn't really make a difference which metaphors of motion we use).

A third way to experience musical motion involves a force metaphor. Instead of sitting peacefully as objects glide past you, you may instead experience temporal events as massive objects slamming into you with great force and knocking you backward. Music can do that too.

Reasoning with metaphors
When we utilize a conceptual metaphor or mapping from one domain, such as movement in space, to another, such as the way music unfolds in time, we can also reason about the target domain by reasoning in the original domain. For example, in physical space we have developed a logic of experience when it comes to the use of force to initiate movement of an object toward a destination. And we have experienced forces that assist or obstruct the progress of an object moving along its path toward a destination and forces that attract an object into a stable or unstable orbit, etc.

And we experience music (or ourselves) as moving quickly or slowly, of being blocked, of being forcefully propelled, of going in circles, of meandering, struggling against the force of gravity, or of reaching a resting place.

Descriptive or the experience?
Here Johnson pauses to ask a legitimate question: Are these metaphors of movement and force the way we actually experience music, or just the way we describe our experience? Johnson decides (and I agree) that it is indeed the way we directly experience music, not just a post-experience way of understanding or describing our experience of music:
"...such image schemas actually constitute the structure and define the quality of our musical experience. They are in and of the music as experienced: they are the structure of the music."

But does it mean anything?
Some philosophers are unwilling to call these structures--images, image schemas, affect contours, metaphors--meaningful if they cannot be stated in propositional form. Instead of concluding that music is not meaningful, we should instead conclude that our theory of meaning is lacking--that meaning goes beyond propositions and references.

John Dewey says that art is not an escape from meaning but the pursuit of intensified and complete meaning. According to Dewey art is not an option; it is a condition of life. And the best art reminds us how experience can become significant and meaningful.

Conclusions
Johnson's conclusions on the meaning of music are nothing short of revolutionary. He has identified the root cause for years of misunderstanding on the question of meaning in music (namely that only words can carry meaning) and goes on to show that, not only is music meaningful, music is an exemplar for all human meaning-making (including language, if you are ready to expand your definition of language to include all of the rich, non-symbolic, non-referential aspects of language).

My one and only disappointment in the chapter is that Johnson, like nearly every modern philosopher or theorist dealing with the issue of meaning in music, focuses almost exclusively on the experience of listening to music, ignoring for the most part the experience of actively generating music in real time or composing music (out of real time, as an iterative, reflexive process, outside of the flow of the music).

It's easy to see why modern observers would focus on listening to music when, in the late twentieth century, fewer and fewer Americans were participating in singing and dancing and creating new music. There are orders of magnitude more iPods in the world than violins or even guitars (and more violins and guitars than manuscript paper or its electronic equivalent).

It shouldn't really surprise us, when every parent (well, at least the conscientious ones), relentlessly coaches their child on letters and words, and the majority of every school day is dedicated to the mastery of written language. Whereas music? It is optional, left to the parent willing and able to invest extra money and time in private instruction, assuming the child has any time left after training for team sports after school. It might explain how a highly educated professor like Steven Pinker could write, in his book How the Mind Works:

All neurologically normal children spontaneously speak and understand complex language... In contrast, while everyone enjoys listening to music, many people cannot carry a tune, fewer can play an instrument, and those who can play need explicit training and extensive practice.

Has he never seen a toddler spontaneously singing and dancing? Has he never noticed how tirelessly a parent coaches his or her child, pointing to things and asking their names, reading bedtime stories every night, constantly correcting mistakes in grammar and pronunciation? Has he ever visited an elementary school classroom and listened to the children reading and practicing and drilling for years upon years, continuing their study of language and rhetoric and honing their critical reading and writing skills throughout college and even graduate school? All of this sounds a lot like years of "explicit training and extensive practice" to me. Music and language both arise spontaneously and they both require explicit training and practice in order to perfect. But we, as a culture, have decided that language is essential to pass on to the next generation, whereas music and other art forms are optional.

It's amusing to imagine a world in which the majority of your experience with language were spent passively listening to the performances of expert, celebrity orators on your iPod and where you never learned how to read and write unless your parents had enough money for private language lessons. Of course you would still talk to your family and friends, but actually speaking in public would elicit the same embarrassed snickers that singing in public does now, and the idea of actually composing an essay would be unthinkable to most people.

But the end of last century was an historical anomaly in that respect. In the past, music and dancing were universal communal activities, often associated with important events or rituals. Dewey blames our ART as COMMODITY or ART as SOCIAL STATUS metaphors; instead of viewing art on a continuum from fascination with fire, to designing a home garden, to painting the Sistine Chapel, we have been taught that artists are special ethereal beings who must be revered and that art is an object, a badge of social status, rather than an activity that is necessary for a satisfying human life. But thanks to technology, we may once again be on a trajectory toward full participation in music-making. The popularity of dancing together and the ubiquity of music software is once again creating a culture of educated and talented amateurs who crave and appreciate virtuosity, even more so than do non-participants. It's been said that we are entering a new age of "the oral tradition", with more knowledge being transmitted via online videos and less by the written word. This in itself may put the question of meaning in music to rest. When you are participating in making music with other people, the experience is even more intense and immersive and meaningful than it is when you merely listen to it.

Soon we will develop art forms of full multi-modal immersive environments, direct brain stimulation, and amplification of the electric field generated by our brains. In preparation for that, perhaps we should heed Johnson's advice: if we really want to understand human meaning-making, we should first try to understand how and why music continues to have so much power to move us (both literally and metaphorically),