Embodiment and Body Metaphors

Der Artikel stellt den Zusammenhang zwischen Körpermetaphorik und der EmbodimentThese in Frage. Als erstes werde ich einige Gründe für die Unklarheiten im Gebrauch des Begriffs „embodiment“ (wie auch „embodied mind“ und „embodied cognition“) darlegen und zeigen, wie weit oder wie eng eine für die Kognitive Linguistik fruchtbare Definition sein sollte. Als zweites werde ich nach dem Status einer bestimmten Form von empirischer Evidenz fragen, die häufig als Argument für die Wichtigkeit von „embodiment“ angeführt wird: Körpermetaphorik. Ich benutze empirische Studien, die sowohl Alltagssprache, Medienund wissenschaftlichen Diskurs einschließen, um zu zeigen, dass Körpermetaphorik mehr als eine einfache Übertragung von einer konkreten zu einer abstrakteren Domäne sein kann. Daher kann das Auftreten von Metaphern, bei denen Körperteile auf einen anderen Bereich übertragen werden, nicht ohne weiteres als Beweis der Embodiment-These gewertet werden. Ich plädiere für einen sorgsamen Gebrauch des Begriffs „Körper“ und für die Suche nach mehr empirischer Evidenz für die Grundlage von Metaphern und „grundlegenden Erfahrungen“. This article calls into question the connection between metaphors using the body or body parts as domains in metaphoric mappings, and the notion of embodiment. First, I will outline some reasons for the confusion with the term “embodiment” (as well as “embodied mind”, and “embodied cognition”), and explain how wide or narrow a useful definition for Cognitive Linguistics should be. Second, I ask for the status of a piece of empirical evidence which is frequently used as an argument for the importance of embodiment: body metaphors. I use empirical studies including research on everyday language, media and scientific discourse to show that there is more to those body metaphors than a simple mapping from one concrete domain onto another more abstract one. Thus, occurrences of metaphors where body parts are mapped onto other domains cannot be directly used as a proof of the embodiment hypothesis. I argue for a careful use of the term “body” and for the search of more empirical evidence for the grounding of metaphors and “basic experiences”. 1. What is embodiment? During the last two decades, the notion of embodiment is of growing importance in Cognitive Linguistics. Perhaps the most comprehensive definition and explanation of “embodiment” and “embodied mind” in Cognitive Linguistics is found in Lakoff and Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh (1999). Lakoff & Johnson (L&J) claim that a major finding of Cognitive Science is the fact that the mind is inherently embodied. They explain this “embodied mind” as follows: 1 For a more general definition including the meanings of “embodied cognition” in developmental psychology and robotics/artificial intelligence, see Cowart (2004). metaphorik.de 09/2005 – Goschler, Embodiment and Body Metaphors 34 “Reason is not disembodied, as the tradition has largely held, but arises from the nature of our brains, bodies, and bodily experience. This is not just the innocuous and obvious claim that we need a body to reason; rather, it is the striking claim that the very structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment. The same neural and cognitive mechanisms that allow us to perceive and move around also create our conceptual systems and modes of reason. Thus, to understand reason we must understand the details of our visual system, our motor system, and the general mechanisms of neural binding. In summary, reason is not, in any way, a transcendent feature of the universe or of disembodied mind. Instead, it is shaped crucially by the peculiarities of our human bodies, by the remarkable details of the neural structure of our brains, and the specifics of our everyday functioning in the world.” (Lakoff & Johnson 1999:4) In this sketch of the “embodied mind” are hidden at least two different definitions of embodiment. The first sense is the one that has become the common sense definition in Cognitive Linguistics: that the functioning of our bodies is crucial for the structure of our conceptual system. Our conceptual system is, as L&J (1980, 1999) and many other Cognitive Linguists claim, mirrored in language patterns, for example systematic use of metaphor. It is another question how one wants to understand “body”. It is of course possible to treat every kind of behaviour as the interaction of a body in an environment. Thus, every experience we make could be called “embodied”. But this would make the notion of the body trivial and we were better off with just calling it “experience” and nothing else. If one doesn’t want the notion of embodiment to be a trivial one, which would lead to a non-falsifiable theory, “body” needs a narrower definition. But there’s also another aspect of “embodiment” in the passage from L&J above: Cognition is embodied in the sense that it is inseparably linked to brain processes. This second sense can cause confusion because in that sense also every aspect of cognition must be “embodied”. Thus, although this is very important for the Cognitive Sciences, this claim is trivial except for the explicit exclusion of an idealistic view of the mind, as Jordan Zlatev (2003) pointed out. Another source of confusion in using the term “embodiment” is a lack of differentiation from conceptual metaphor theory. One of the most important books in that field – Lakoff & Johnson’s Metaphors we live by (1980) – mentions experiential gestalts which are based on the nature or our bodies, our interactions with our physical environment and our interactions with other people within our culture. These experiential gestalts serve as the grounding of conceptual metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 117). This theoretical claim has been fleshed out by Johnson (1987) who developed the idea of these experiential gestalts as “image schemata” or “embodied schemata” – these terms are used interchangeably (Johnson 1987: metaphorik.de 09/2005 – Goschler, Embodiment and Body Metaphors 35 23). An image schema is “a recurrent pattern, shape, and regularity in, or of, these ongoing ordering activities. These patterns emerge as meaningful structures for us chiefly at the level of our bodily movements through space, our manipulation of objects, and our perceptual interactions” (Johnson 1987: 29). Johnson claims that image/embodied schemata structure our perceptions, images and events. Johnson sees evidence for this in art and culture, but mainly in language – especially metaphoric patterns in language. Thus, the notion of embodiment, as it was developed in Johnson’s The Body in the Mind and in other studies, and the ideas of conceptual metaphor theory are closely connected. But they don’t have to be necessarily the same. On the one hand, embodiment is clearly more than conceptual metaphor theory because it offers much more: A framework to study the mind and how cognition evolves in general (Varela/Thompson/Rosch 1991), and a theory that overcomes the paradoxes of materialism and idealism by giving way to a philosophy of embodied realism (Lakoff & Johnson 1999). On the other hand, it is less than conceptual metaphor theory because for that theory it is not necessary to claim that every conceptual metaphor is embodied. Nevertheless, empirical evidence for conceptual metaphor theory is often treated as empirical evidence for embodiment as well. Thus, in consequence embodiment is often taken as the ultimate explanation for all kinds of mapping, metaphor, analogy or blending. Now there seems to be a new twist in the embodiment discussion. Sometimes the phenomenon of body metaphors is taken as another argument for the ubiquity of embodied experience. (Kövecses 2002: 16, Yu 2004: 677-678, 682), or body metaphors themselves are even classified as embodiment (Musolff 2004: 60). To avoid a loss of meaning of “embodiment” by making it totally polysemous I argue for a use of the term in Cognitive Linguistics in only the first sense: Embodiment means that parts of our conceptual system and therefore some aspects of our language are structured by the features of our bodies and the functioning of our bodies in everyday life. This definition is still fuzzy and can include different sorts of embodiment (Ziemke 2003). Conceptual metaphors don’t have to be necessarily grounded in bodily experience, although that might be true in many cases. But there is no need for this theoretical claim. Instead, it should be an empirical question how certain metaphors are grounded. Therefore we need a 2 I am aware of the fact that from a materialist point of view every kind of experience emerges somehow from the functioning of our brains – therefore a certain aspect of “body” is by definition included in every experience. This might be an important philosophical point for the Cognitive Sciences. But as I have argued above, for Cognitive Linguistics this understanding of “body” and “embodiment” is trivial because it includes everything and excludes nothing. Therefore it is not useful to make any differences in the field of language and concepts. metaphorik.de 09/2005 – Goschler, Embodiment and Body Metaphors 36 restricted use of theoretical terms like “embodiment”. If “embodiment” is used in that restricted meaning, the question is if the existence of body metaphors is indeed closely connected to embodiment. If yes, the question whether it supports or contradicts the embodiment thesis is no longer a trivial one – and it calls for empirical investigation. To investigate the use of body metaphors in different contexts I use the empirical studies of Hänke (2004, 2005), Musolff (2004), Pauwels & Simon-Vandenbergen (1995), Stibbe (1999, 2001), Nerlich/Hamilton/Rowe (2002), Wallis & Nerlich (forthcoming), and Goschler (2005) which use German and/or English corpora. This eclectic collection of data which are collected from different studies is absolutely not complete. I just want to point out some aspects of how body me