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Spirituality and the Embodied Mind

Whitehead and Mark Johnson
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​ Embodied Cognition and Process Theology in Dialogue​​

The purpose of this page is to facilitate a dialogue between embodied mind theory as developed by Mark Johnson in The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, and open and relational theology as influenced by the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, often called process theology. Embodied mind theory and process theology lend themselves to an appreciation of metaphorical thinking, which takes concepts from one domain and links them with another, forming what Whitehead calls blended contrasts.  The metaphors then become means by which subjects can be understood that could not be understood in more literal thinking.  

But process theology also proposes, along with Johnson, that much if not most "meaning" is found in perception and emotion, quite apart from linguistic renditions. Meaning occurs wherever a sense a felt connection is made between past and future, or between diverse objects of experience that are held together in felt contrasts.  Meaning in its various intensities and shadings is felt connection.  Human infants make meaning in this way as they explore their environments and establish connections between faces and places; and so do other animals.  The point, then, is that meaning does not have to be linguistic; the embodied mind finds and makes meaning in the affective spaces of lived experience, originating in their bodily reception of the world.

The final chapters of Johnson's book are on art and music and how they are conduits of meaning-making in human life.  For adult humans, music is a particularly important way in which affective spaces are entered.  As a Whiteheadian would put it, and Johnson seems to agree, music is what felt connections sound like.  Music is meaning in auditory form.

But this page is not on aesthetics; it is on the embodied mind as understood by Johnson and Whitehead. My proposal is that Whitehead offers a creative lens for appreciating Johnson's insights; that Johnson deepens Whitehead's perspective with a tremendous range of empirical research, adding the important voices of John Dewey and William James to the mix; and that Whitehead opens the door for people to envision the universe as a whole as an embodied mind: otherwise named "God" whose very body is the unfolding universe.  The concept of God does not play a constructive role in Johnson's perspective. But my suggestion is that God, understood in a Whiteheadian way as the embodied mind of the universe, beckons people toward the very kind of spirituality Johnson appreciates: horizontal transcendence in a spirit of faith, hope, love, and gratitude.

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See also "Music and Being Alive: Affect Theology"

Embodied Cognition

Embodied cognition is the idea that our cognitive activities -- our acts of knowing and meaning-making -- are bodily activities involving our brains, our interactions with the world, and our emotions.  We are not "minds" separate from our brains, interactions, and emotions; rather we are body-minds.

In The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, Mark Johnson draws from recent work in neurobiology, cognitive linguistics, and cognitive psychology to develop insights concerning embodied cognition and meaning-making, interpreting his data with help from the philosophies of John Dewey and William James.

If you read his book with eyes informed by process philosophy, you realize he could have also drawn from the work of Alfred North Whitehead, who is often associated with Dewey and James.  All three philosophers take experience, not language, as their starting points for understanding "understanding."

Embodied Cognition in Whiteheadian Perspective

A Whiteheadian approach to embodied cognition proposes the following eight ideas, all of which overlap considerably with Johnson's approach.  The italicized words and phrases are technical terms in Whitehead's philosophy.
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1. All knowing begins viscerally: All knowing emerges out of, not apart from, bodily experience, or experience in the mode of causal efficacy, which constitutes the physical pole of each and every experience, and which can be influenced (causally affected) by cultural and social factors as well as physical factors.
2. All knowing is a form of feeling: All human knowing is a form of feeling or, in Whitehead’s words, prehending, which can be conscious or unconscious.  Most is unconscious.  Abstract thinking and imaginative exploration are forms of feeling: intellectual feelings and imaginative feelings.  
3. We make meaning through metaphor-making: A primary form of knowing -- the making of meaning -- consists of imaginative feelings which combine different domains of experience (source and target) into simple and complex metaphors.  The domains may or may not have had similarities prior to their combination; the combination itself creates aesthetically pleasing contrasts in which similarities are felt.  The feelings of these metaphors, and the living by them, is part of the mental pole of experience, which emerges out of the physical pole.
4. Emotions are the subjective forms of thinking: All knowing—including highly abstract forms and knowing through metaphors -- carries with it emotional tones, or subjective forms, which means that emotion and cognition cannot be separated.
5. The subjective aim of cognitive experience is aesthetic. We seek satisfying forms of harmony and intensity: All knowing carries with it a subjective aim which is aesthetic in nature: the enjoyment of harmonious intensity or intense harmony. Understanding is an emotional and aesthetic experience: a gathering of many influences from different domains into felt contrasts that seem to resonate with the way the world is.  
6. Our physical bodies include the surrounding world.  The body-mind is continuous with, not sharply separate from, the surrounding environment, because the environment itself is part of the body.  “The world is my body,” says Whitehead.
7. The self is not a single, self enclosed reality.  It is a series of experiences, always in process: Whitehead would add, along with Johnson, that knowing, understood in this way, is itself a process and not an inert fact.  The knowing self is not a fixed and settled fact but rather an ongoing process of becoming, never quite the same at any two instances.  The process of living is the reality of our lives.
8. Meaning is more than metaphor making.  It is also a sense of connection and, in human life, empathy: feelings the feelings of others.  Human beings find meaning in life (1) by enjoying felt connections between different aspects of experience: temporal, spatial, emotive, and visceral, and but also (2) by living in a spirit of what Mark Johnson calls "respect and care for others."  This respect and care is not simply an act of creating metaphors to live by, it is an act of receiving into one's own experience the palpable presence of other people and other living beings in a bodily and visceral way.  In the reception itself there is an appreciation and recognition of their value or importance for themselves, which Whitehead calls their intrinsic value.  This appreciation is empathy, which is itself a form of knowing.

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Why Whitehead?

Mark Johnson would most likely agree with most if not all that was said above, albeit understood with help from Dewey and James rather than Whitehead.  So the question emerges: Why Whitehead?  

One value of Whitehead’s philosophy is that it situates embodied cognition in a larger biological and cosmological context. Thus, along with Johnson, It helps us appreciate ever more deeply the continuity between human cognition and forms of knowing found in the more-than-human world:in other animals, for example, as  understood in the emerging field of cognitive ethology (animal intelligence).  

Whitehead goes further by proposing that “embodied cognition” in human beings and other animals is an expression of, not an exception to, a kind of interaction that all experiencing subjects such as living cells have with their environments and still further down.  In Whitehead’s philosophy the idea of “dead matter” is a remnant of western dualism, not responsible science, which likewise points to the interactive nature of energy-events within the depths of matter.

Indeed Whitehead goes still further by proposing that the universe as a whole is an embodied mind, namely God. Thus he offers a naturalist understanding of God which can support the naturalist orientation of Johnson and lend itself to the kind of "horizontal" spirituality Johnson affirms (see below).  I turn, then, to spirituality.

Spirituality

In The Meaning of the Body Johnson explores the implications of embodied cognition for an understanding of spirituality.  Given that we are body-minds, he says,, spirituality is best understood in terms of horizontal transcendence rather than vertical transcendence.  Vertical transcendence is an escape from the body into something disembodied: a higher plane of existence transcending the world, an Infinite.  Horizontal transcendence is the activity of transcending our present situation in a spirit of faith, hope, love, and receptivity to the grace of life itself.  In this more horizontal perspective, writes Johnson:

Faith thus becomes faith in the possibility of genuine, positive transformation that increases richness of meanings, harmony among species, and flourishing, not just at the human level, but in the world as an ongoing creative development.  

Hope is commitment to the possibility of realizing some of this growth— not in some final eschatological transformation of the world, but rather locally, in our day-to-day struggles and joys. 

Grace is the undeserved experience of transformative growth even in spite of your individual or communal failures to do what would make things better.

Love is a commitment to the well-being of others in a way that takes you at least partly beyond your ego-centered needs and desires and opens up your potential to respect and care for others and for your world. None of this is grounded in the infinite, but rather in the creative possibilities of finite human experience. It gives each of us more good work to do than we can possibly realize within our lifetime. [1]
 
We should note that Johnson's approach to spirituality is cast mostly in terms of Abrahamic and perhaps even New Testament ideals.  His primary religious frame of reference in The Meaning of the Body is Christianity. Those of us in the Whiteheadian tradition would  want to expand this frame of reference considerably, including within our horizons forms of spirituality prized in Asian traditions (Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Daoism, Jainism, Sikhism), in Judaism (including Kabalistic traditions) and Islam (including Sufism), and in indigenous traditions (African, Asian, American, Australian).  Our list of "spiritual virtues" and "spiritual moods" would include mindfulness, ecstatic states, questioning and doubt, and a wide range of others. At the bottom of this page I offer a visual diagram with various spiritual moods found in the world's wisdom traditions.

Still, Johnson's list of four spiritual virtues is helpful, and for purposes of this essay I will stick to them. If we understand faith, hope, grace, and love in these embodied ways, we might also ask: "What is the meaning of the word body?"  Here Johnson invites us to understand the body in five ways: biological, phenomenological, ecological, social, and cultural.  

Five Dimensions of the Body

Our biological bodies are our bodies as understood in the natural sciences: that is, as physical objects understood from a third-person perspective.  Our phenomenological bodies are our bodies as lived from the inside, from the perspective of first-person experience.  Our ecological bodies are the environments in which we find ourselves -- the hills and rivers, trees and start -- as ingredient in our own experience.  Our social bodies are our inter-subjective relations with others, whereby they feel our feelings and we feel theirs, linguistically but also in ways deeper than language.  And our cultural bodies include the ideas and practices in which we find ourselves as shaped by our culture.

Causation and Modest Freedom

In being shaped by these bodily dimensions, we are always undergoing what Whitehead calls experience in the mode of causal efficacy.   Our body (in its physical, social, ecological, cultural dimensions) influences us all the time, and we could not be ourselves without them. Nevertheless, causal efficacy is not completely determinative.  Moment by moment, our body/minds carry what Johnson calls a “modest freedom” to respond to the situations in which we find ourselves and thereby alter our situations and ourselves.  In Johnson’s words:

The concept of freedom that is supported by the naturalistic idea of the body-mind is a modest freedom to contribute to transformations of our situation, and thereby to self-transformations. [2]

This modest freedom is not absolute.  Always and at every moment we are partly determined and partly free.  And in our modest freedom, both nourished and limited by our bodily contexts, we try to know ourselves and our worlds. This knowledge, however partial, is our embodied cognition.

The Ecological Body as the Universe as a Whole

Ultimately, the ecological body is the entire universe as it has existed and exists in the present.  This ecological environment includes the earth and its biosphere and also the stars and galaxies. It consists of any entities and processes of any sort in any dimension. This body is our deep history of our body/minds.  If we trace the lineage of any given causal influence upon our own lives, it will take us back in time to the evolution of life on earth, the evolution of the solar system, and the evolving universe itself, which may or may not have a temporal beginning of its own.

The Universe as a Whole as God’s Body
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It is possible and arguably probable that this ecological body – the universe as a whole – is also a body/mind.  This would be God, understood naturalistically rather than supernaturally. The universe would be God’s body.  The argument for this probability is made most consistently by David Ray Griffin in Panentheism and Scientific Naturalism. See also my Panentheism: the Universe is God’s Body.

It is also possible and perhaps probable that this embodied mind would have a causal influence on every other entity in the universe, as expressive of its own “modest freedom” to transform its situation.  In process theology this causal influence would take the form of what Whitehead calls initial aims: that is, fresh possibilities for creative transformation relative to the situation at hand. 

Experiencing God in a Bodily Way

Thus understood, experiencing God would itself be a bodily or visceral experience. God would be the gentle influence within each person to embody what Johnson calls faith, hope, and love – and to be receptive to moments of grace.  Process theologians speak of this gentle influence as the lure of God within each person.  Others might also call it God’s Breathing or God’s Spirit. The human experience of this lure would itself be bodily in the sense that it comes from the ecological body either independently (a still small voice in the heart) or as mediated by physical, social, and cultural influences.  It would be a lure toward faith, hope, love and receptivity to grace of the very kind Johnson emphasizes in The Meaning of the Body.


[1] Johnson, Mark (2012-06-29). The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (p. 279). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition. 

[2] Johnson, (pp. 281-282). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.

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