Page 81 - Contribution To Phenomenology

74 OSBORNE WIGGINS

It is also true that "force" and **weight" are perceived in the mask. But
as Johnson remarks, **we no longer have *weight' and 'force' in the
gravitational and physical sense. Instead, we have complex metaphorical
(but very real) experience of ynsual weight and force" (p. 80).
Johnson even views our conceptions of justice as involving a metaphor-
ical projection of a schema of balance into the moral domain. As he
writes,

Justice itself is conceived as the regaining of a proper balance that has
been upset by an unlawful action. According to some assumed calculus,
the judge must assess the wei^t of the damages and require a penalty
somehow equal to the damages as compensation. We have linguistically
encoded manifestations of this juridical metaphor, such as "an
eye-for-an-eye" and "let the punishment fit the crime" (p. 90).

This exemplifies Johnson's claim that highly abstract or even normative
domains can derive their "rationality" from more basic experiences of
bodily activity.
In searching for a term to refer to this founding level of preconceptual
experience, Johnson appropriates the word "understanding." For him, this
term signifies our most fundamental way of comporting ourselves toward
the world. He provides a good summary of his position when he writes,

. . . understanding is not only a matter of reflection, using finitary
propositions, on some preexistent, already determinate experience.
Rather, understanding is the way we "have a world," the way we experience
our world as a comprehensible reality. Such understanding, therefore,
involves our whole being—our bodily capacities and skills, our values, our
moods and attitudes, our entire cultural tradition, the way in which we
are bound up with a linguistic community, our aesthetic sensibilities,
and so forth. In short, our understanding is our mode of "being in the
world." It is the way in which we are meaningfully situated in our world
through our bodily interactions, our cultural institutions, our linguistic
tradition, and our historical context. Our more abstract reflective acts of
understanding (which may involve grasping of finitary propositions) are
simply an extension of our understanding in this more basic sense of
"having a world" (p. 102).

In Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, Lakoff appropriates and
summarizes Johnson's views. As Lakoff writes, "One of Mark Johnson's
basic insights is that experience is structured in a significant way prior to,