One of my favorite contemporary thinkers is a philosopher and linguist named George Lakoff. I first encountered him when I read his work, with Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind & its Challenge to Western Thought (1999) in college.
At the time I was a young white male Montanan who had barely stepped outside of the state (here and there on a few vacations, including a short trip to France and Italy).
My conceptual world felt limited to the mountains ringing the wide valley of Helena, where I grew up.
When I finally started studying liberal arts classes, including philosophy, those limitations exploded. I felt like I could literally think alongside Socrates and Aristotle. It seemed like their concerns were my own and that the very idea of contemplating their big ideas could make me happier. I spent a good two years living largely in my own mind, floating around town like a disembodied brain in a vat doing philosophy. Or so I believed.
Our Bodies Shape Our Thoughts
That book upended many of my ideals about what philosophy could do for me. For instance, it showed that our thoughts and ideas are intimately connected with our bodies and surroundings. We could not abstract ourselves to any kind of pure thinking being as Descartes had proposed. Nor could we ever truly live by Kantian moral dictates.
The best we could do would be to understand how our minds and bodies have been formed. With understanding would come at least some control, especially in how we help shape our future. As the title suggests, we must start with looking at our physical bodies. On the one hand, this may seem obvious. But on the other hand, it goes against thousands of years of thought.
Wait. Did you see what I did there?
I used a bodily metaphor to shape my conceptual thinking. We have two hands. We know they are roughly equal in strength and capacity to hold things. And we know they can hold two radically different things. Thus we can think of holding concepts and ideas in just this same way, especially two that seem very different from one another.
I hope that helps to flesh out the idea.
See, I did it again.
We have come to think of rough or basic ideas as a sort of skeleton. Then we add meat or flesh to those ideas to form something more recognizable as an idea in just the same way that a bunch of bones need some flesh to look like a person.
Our Conceptual Frameworks Control our Politics
Before writing Philosophy in the Flesh, George Lakoff wrote a book describing how our bodies are shaped by our upbringings and the politics of our parents and how we then see the world. It was called Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. That book, written in the 1990s, was re-released in late 2016, after Hillary Clinton had clinched the Democratic party’s nomination and her opponent would be Donald Trump.
When he wrote it, Lakoff did so as a progressive who was trying to understand the mindsets of liberals and conservatives in order to help everyone understand each other. He also saw that conservatives were (and are) more self-aware than progressives, which has allowed them to shape political discourse significantly in the last 40 years.
Put simply, he argued that liberals are raised with a nurturing mindset. For liberals, empathy is an important character trait. Liberals are taught to be a helper, to be friendly, and to show care whenever possible. Conservatives, on the other hand, are raised with a strict mindset. Conservatives see the world as dangerous and people must be shaped and controlled to behave properly.
While liberals think about social safety nets and layers of protection, conservatives tend to think of relationships of reward and punishment. In fact, terms like “social safety net” are a victory of liberal thinking and politics. Conservatives spent decades trying to paint anyone who was being helped by social programs (i.e. welfare) as a “welfare queen,” depicted with an image of a large, often African American woman, poorly dressed and sitting outside a modular home.
Such characterizations failed because liberals succeeded in showing that everyone could end up on some form of welfare and that it was neither dangerous to them nor something to be ashamed of.
Conservatives, however, have been successful in framing many debates around their language of choice. Tax breaks, for instance. For the conservative mind, taxes are a punishment and getting a break is a welcome change. And they have won this particular battle of language, as liberals in government have started talking about the importance of certain tax breaks as well.
According to Lakoff, liberals instead should have spoken about taxes as the contributions we make to ensure we have a safe, clean, livable country and planet. Our taxes help build roads and we should be proud of that. They help ensure our clean air and go to helping people in need. Instead of accepting the reward/punishment framework, liberals could have fought to reframe the discussion to make taxes something positive.
Questioning Our Own Frameworks
Understanding this simple version of Lakoff’s theory, we can think about how we were raised and what our frameworks are like. Knowing our linguistic programming can give us insight into why we get triggered by certain things we see on TV or in social media. Once we see that, we can ask how those institutions or people on them might be using language to manipulate us in various ways.
Justin Whitaker, Ph.D., holds a doctorate in Buddhist ethics from the University of London. He has given lectures, and taught Buddhist studies and Philosophy at Oxford University, the University of Hong Kong, the University of Montana, and at Antioch University’s intensive study-abroad program in India. A certified meditation teacher, he is a regular contributor to Patheos.com, and Senior Correspondent for Buddhistdoor Global. Justin is the official blog writer for Sunflower Counseling in Missoula, Butte, Kalispell, Billings, and surrounding areas. He lives in Missoula with his family.