Descartes, Emerson, and Lakoff

DRock presented me some Emerson thoughts that reminded me of the writings of the cognitive linguist George Lakoff.  In talking with him, I made a realization about how much my thinking about thinking has changed through the years. Then I ran across a casual reference to Descartes when it fell into place:  I started my intellectual journey as Descarte, then I was Emerson, and now am I Lakoff?

 We think therefore we are

to

Things are what we think

to

We think with things

"Next I examined attentively what I was. I saw that while I could pretend that I had no body and that there was no world and no place for me to be in, I could not for all that pretend that I did not exist. I saw on the contrary that from the mere fact that I thought of doubting the truth of other things, it followed quite evidently and certainly that I existed; whereas if I had merely ceased thinking, even if everything else I had ever imagined had been true, I should have had no reason to believe that I existed. From this I knew I was a substance whose whole essence or nature is simply to think, and which does not require any place, or depend on any material thing, in order to exist." - Descartes' Discourse

"It is not words only that are emblematic; it is things which are emblematic...that state of mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.  An enraged man is a lion...Visible distance behind and before us, is respectively our image of memory and hope...Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind"
-Emerson's Nature

"Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature." "We are neural beings, our brains take their input from the rest of our bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think just anything — only what our embodied brains permit."- George Lakoff