In Philosophy in the Flesh George Lakoff and Mark Johnson presented an embodied theory of mind which brings together cognitive science and neuroscience, linguistics and embodied philosophies of mind (building also on Maurice Merleau-Ponty and John Dewey). The book is nothing less than an attempt to redefine the mind and by doing this it offers an interesting and controversial criticism of some of the basic presuppositions about the mind, language, reference and meaning, found in the most of the analytic or Anglo-Saxon philosophy.
Basic idea of the book is this: The fact that human mind is inherently and necessarily bodied has great and not-yet-fully-recognized consequences for any philosophy. Think about it: Reason is inherently embodied. The very structure of reason and its categories (logic) are what they are because of our everyday functioning in the world as bodily beings. Structures of reason piggyback on the neurological and sensomotoric ways of our being, and the only "universality" reason actually has stems from aspects of our shared bodily in-the-world experience.
If this is true (and Lakoff and Johnson insist that empirical evidence for such a view is extremely strong), much of our conceptual inference actually is 'sensorimotor inference', even though it may be this "in disguise" - it doesn't seem this way for us when we think in abstract terms. Our concepts arise from our bodily engagement with our surroundings, other humans, etc. Think of the fact that we really can't describe almost anything without bodily concepts. For ex. rational understanding itself is, as a rule, described metaphorically: as "seeing" (as in "Oh, I see!"), or as "following" arguments, or "going through" reasons, or "arriving" at the conclusion, or similar. These are not only "colourful additions" to our descriptions of reasoning; metaphors are constitutive, inherent in our conceptualization of what rational understanding is.
Implications of such a view of the mind and of reason are indeed far-reaching. One of them is that any spirituality or theology that posits disembodied souls which can exist and think "without the body" is simply not credible. Of course, this is not at all obvious. One has to do a lot of examination and honestly see the implications of what we today know about the mind, about our concept formation and language use, etc. in order to see these implications clearly. Only think about the concepts which we use regularly in theology, like "beyond", "super-natural", God as "Highest Being" or as "King", as "Light shinning in the darkness", "Heaven", "spiritual growth", "deliverance from sins", "rising above temptations", "leaving the sinful man behind", "dying to self and sin" etc. All these concepts are of course metaphorical and most come from our very immediate bodily engagement with our environment.
Lakoff and Johnson, although themselves not theologians, do suggest some ideas as to what, in their view, an honest look at neuroscience of our brains, and a careful look at our actual language use etc. means for theology and spirituality:
"Embodied spirituality requires an understanding that nature is not inanimate and less than human, but animated and more than human. It requires pleasure, joy in the bodily connection with earth and air, sea and sky, plants and animals - and the recognition that they are all more than human, more than any human beings could ever achieve. Embodied Spirituality is more than spiritual experience. It is an ethical relationship to the physical world." (Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 1999. p. 566)
Although I have issues with some positions argued for in the Lakoff and Johnson's book, I couldn't agree more about what they say here about embodied spirituality. People who think in terms of religious traditions that see human soul (or spirit, for that matter) as a disembodied, thinking person which is only attached to the body for the period of our earthly life and then "freed" from the body at the time of death, can not appreciate the embodied view of the mind nor the vast evidence for it. However, by and large, the Bible does not have a problem with embodied spirituality - it should be a common knowledge that a predominant view of "soul" in the Bible ("nephesh" in OT and "psyche" in NT) seems to be NOT of a disembodied entity, but of the very much bodily human being (see a paper reviewing possible shades of meaning of both terms in the Bible, which range from "life" to "corpse").
