Mark Johnson (born 1949, Kansas City, Missouri) is an American philosopher, Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon. He is the philosopher half of the partnership behind [[George Lakoff|Lakoff]] and Johnson's conceptual metaphor theory — but it is his independent work that gives the embodied-mind programme its philosophical depth. Where Lakoff arrived at embodiment through cognitive linguistics, Johnson arrived through aesthetics and the philosophy of mind. He took his PhD at the University of Chicago (1977), taught at Southern Illinois until 1994, and has been at the University of Oregon since. ### The Partnership with Lakoff Johnson co-wrote the two books that frame the embodied-mind project: _Metaphors We Live By_ (1980), which established that [[Metaphor|metaphor]] is the basic machinery of abstract thought rather than a decoration of language, and _[[Philosophy in the Flesh]]_ (1999), the philosophical capstone. The "Subject / Self" division that runs through [[Artists Method|An Artist's Practice]] — the disciplined maker and the expressive being — is one of the metaphor systems anatomised in _Philosophy in the Flesh_. ### Image Schemas — Johnson's Distinctive Contribution The pivotal solo book is _The Body in the Mind_ (1987). It introduces the **image schema**: a recurring, pre-conceptual structure of bodily experience that becomes the skeleton for abstract thought — CONTAINER, PATH, BALANCE, FORCE, SOURCE–PATH–GOAL, CYCLE, NEAR–FAR, UP–DOWN. These are not images in the pictorial sense, and not yet concepts. They are the rhythms of being a body — going in and out of rooms, balancing as a toddler, pushing against resistance — repeatedly enacted until they become templates onto which abstract meaning is hung. To say "I am _in_ a relationship" or "her argument _contains_ a flaw" is to run the CONTAINER schema over a situation that has no literal inside. Image schemas are what make Lakoff's _primary metaphors_ possible: Johnson supplied the philosophical machinery for why a body could generate [[Meaning|meaning]] at all. ### Moral Imagination _Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics_ (1993) turns the embodied view on ethics. Johnson argues that moral reasoning is not the application of universal rules — the [[Immanuel Kant|Kantian]] picture — but the imaginative projection of bodily, emotional and narrative understanding from familiar situations into new ones. Empathy, metaphor and story do the real cognitive work; rules describe only a thin slice of how anyone actually deliberates. ### The Meaning of the Body — the Aesthetics of Meaning _The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding_ (2007) is, for an artist, the most consequential of his books. Johnson argues that meaning is **felt before it is propositional** — that it originates in the qualitative, bodily, emotional engagements that the arts make most vivid. [[Aesthetics]], on this account, is not a specialist branch of philosophy concerned with beautiful objects; it is the key to understanding _all_ meaning, because all meaning begins in the body's qualitative encounter with its world. _Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason_ (2017) and _The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought_ (2018) are the late synthesis of this position. ### Influences Johnson is more explicit than Lakoff about his lineage. He draws openly on [[Maurice Merleau-Ponty]]'s phenomenology of the lived body, and on [[John Dewey]]'s pragmatist aesthetics — Dewey's _Art as Experience_ and its claim that experience is a transaction between organism and environment. Merleau-Ponty gives Johnson the lived body; Dewey gives him the idea that meaning and value emerge in the doing, not before it. [[Antonio Damasio]]'s neuroscience of emotion and reason is a close cousin from another discipline. ### Connection to *An Artist's Practice* Johnson's work intertwines with [[Artists Method|An Artist's Practice]] at several points, and not loosely: - **Image schemas underlie the postures.** The note's organising moves — _wander, arrive, return_; _depth and surface_; _chance and discipline_ — are less chosen metaphors than image schemas enacted. "Wander, arrive, return" is a SOURCE–PATH–GOAL schema closed into a CYCLE. "Depth and surface" is verticality and containment. "Excess discipline suffocates vitality; excess authenticity dissolves form" is the BALANCE and FORCE schemas doing ethical work. Johnson would say the postures are felt before they are formulated — which is the note's own claim that practice precedes theory. - **_The Meaning of the Body_ underwrites "practice precedes theory."** The note warns that "when the description of a practice becomes more vivid than the practice itself, the description has begun to do damage." Johnson supplies the philosophical basis: meaning lives in the qualitative bodily doing, and the propositional description is always a later, thinner derivative. - **Johnson is the Western ally the "Two-Eyed Seeing" passage is looking for.** _An Artist's Practice_ is restless about borrowing from traditions it has "not earned" — Potawatomi animacy, Anangu grammar, a Japanese cosmology. Johnson dismantles Cartesian dualism _from inside_ the Western analytic tradition. He offers a route to the note's "meeting" rather than "possession" account of the eye, and to the agency of materials in "listening to the work", without the borrowing the note is so honest about. He corrects the first eye rather than asking for a second one. - **_Moral Imagination_ is the philosophical cousin of "Against method."** Johnson's claim that imagination — not rule-following — does the real cognitive work runs parallel to [[Paul Feyerabend]]'s "anything goes". A taxonomy like the four axes is, in Johnson's terms, a prompt for imaginative exploration, never a decision procedure. --- `Concepts:` [[Embodiment]] · [[Metaphor]] · [[Imagination]] · [[Aesthetics]] · [[Meaning]] `Knowledge Base:` [[Philosophy]]