| Title | : | The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought: The Bodily Roots of Philosophy, Science, Morality, and Art |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 022653880X |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780226538808 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 304 |
| Publication | : | Published April 23, 2018 |
This book gathers the best of philosopher Mark Johnson’s essays addressing questions of our embodiment as they deal with aesthetics—which, he argues, we need to rethink so that it takes into account the central role of body-based meaning. Viewed that way, the arts can give us profound insights into the processes of meaning making that underlie our conceptual systems and cultural practices. Johnson shows how our embodiment shapes our philosophy, science, morality, and art; what emerges is a view of humans as aesthetic, meaning-making creatures who draw on their deepest physical processes to make sense of the world around them.
The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought: The Bodily Roots of Philosophy, Science, Morality, and Art Reviews
-
This book was a labour of love for me. I’m a fan of Johnsons style of thinking, but because this is a collection of essays, the winding path from aesthetics of philosophy, science, art and life was a difficult route to traverse.
The last section was the strongest and most applicable to the central thesis of the book: That aesthetics has been relegated to the diminished status of subjective “taste”, and that it should instead be rightly restored to the centre of philosophical discussion, dealing as it does with our capacity to have meaningful experiences and reason intelligently about them.
This is not necessarily a new line of thinking, both because Johnson elaborated on it in detail in The Meaning of the Body and (as he goes to great lengths to point out) so did John Dewey almost a century ago. If you’re looking for a more in-depth look at the aesthetics of embodied meaning, I would recommend reading Johnson’s earlier work as I think it serves as a better introduction to the subject.
However, as much as The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought seemed to cover familiar territory, the sections which departed from the central thesis did serve as a renewed call for consideration of the applicability of pragmatism as a basis for contemporary neuroscientific research among other areas of study.
Although I am not as well read when it comes to the pragmatists, the last section of the book Art and the Aesthetics of Life was what earned the book five stars from me. Dewey’s big idea alone was enough to inspire me to delve deeper into “The gospel according to John (Dewey, that is)” as Johnson provides a modern context for the central position in which Dewey has placed his aesthetics. “The stone of aesthetics that was cast out shall become the foundation of our new kingdom—our new philosophy of experience”
I would highly recommend the final essay The Embodied Meaning of Architecture to anyone interested in human centric design or more generally for anyone who curates space to create experiences for humans with bodies. In some ways this short essay is similar to Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, if it had been based on modern concepts inherited from cognitive neuroscience and pragmatism instead of Jungian Psychoanalysis and phenomenology. While Bachelard created a book about space that IS art, Johnson here hints at a method for how to construct meaningful aesthetic experiences that are founded in our embodied engagement with the world.
