Many of the ways that people use metaphor make reference to human bodies and bodily experience. For example, people frequently talk about nations in terms of human bodies, also known as the “body politic.” Consider a 2016 letter published in an online newspaper in which the writer offered his thoughts on the upcoming United States presidential election contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The letter was printed with the headline “The human body as a metaphor for the country’s people”:

This letter provides an excellent example of the NATIONS ARE BODIES metaphor, in this case detailing the ways that various types of people in the United States (e.g., scientists, artists, philosophers) may be understood in terms of different bodily organs and their functions (e.g., liver, heart, backbone). But, as the author argues, the United States “body” is “neglected” and has “difficulty staying healthy.” Donald Trump has offered “an ointment” to help the nation “feel better temporarily,” yet his cure may be “toxic and poisonous to the entire body.” Individual readers surely have their own responses to this letter and the “metaphorical scenario” outlined in light of Donald Trump’s ultimate victory in 2016 (i.e., he was not “evacuated and flushed” as hoped for by the letter writer).²

Consider a different bodily metaphor for United States politics. In the fall of 2020, just before that year’s presidential contest in the midst of a pandemic, New York governor Andrew Cuomo claimed:

Another writer expanded on this idea in light of many political protests that unfolded throughout the United States before the election in 2020:

Once again, people may debate the relevance and aptness of this specific extension of the NATIONS ARE BODIES metaphor. There is no doubt, though, that these examples are concrete illustrations of what the social Darwinist Herbert Spencer observed over a century ago when he argued:

It is unsurprising that the human body is so prevalent in discussions of abstract topics (e.g., body of knowledge, body of evidence, bodies of literature, the student body) given that people may be most familiar with their own bodies. However, references to the human body allude to both different abstract and concrete concepts. Bodily metaphors are a critical part of people’s understanding of their thoughts and actions, and the world in which they live. As psychologist Daniel Benveniste observed:

Many contemporary cognitive scientists now embrace the idea that minds are embodied in the sense that our thinking, reasoning, and imagination are closely tied to recurring patterns of bodily action and experience.⁶ Human bodies often serve as the grounding for many higher-order forms of abstract thought, especially in terms of metaphorical concepts that have a fundamental role in human conceptual systems.

Our scholarly understanding of the body in human cognition, on the other hand, is assumed to be mostly direct and not at all metaphorical. After all, human bodies are not abstract entities, because our bodies feel physically real with substance, weight, length, and volume. We have bones, blood, guts, skin, hair, all of which are constituted by cells and DNA that self-organize to enable us to move about the world in complex, adaptive ways.

This book explores how the human body itself is interpreted in diverse metaphorical ways. Human bodies, and human bodily experience, do not simply serve as the nonmetaphorical basis for thinking more concretely about abstract events and ideas (e.g., NATIONS ARE BODIES). Instead, the human body is remarkably metaphorical. I advance this claim via the “Metaphorical Embodiment Hypothesis”:

My aim here is to consider, through the analysis of metaphor in talk of the body, the possibility that people routinely experience their bodies in metaphorical ways. Metaphorical talk of the body, both our own and those of other people, is not just poetic discourse about some underlying reality that is primarily conceptualized in nonmetaphorical ways. People speak metaphorically of their bodies and bodily experiences because metaphor is a constitutive force in the ways we make sense of our bodies in action within specific social, cultural contexts. The challenge for readers of this book will be to assess whether the vast metaphorical forms used for talk about the body actually reflect something significant about how we experience our bodies.

One major result of this examination of the metaphorical body is that metaphor may be discovered to be far more extensive in human experience than previously understood, even by those who have claimed that metaphors are essential parts of how we live.⁷ To state this new possibility most boldly, metaphor may be everywhere!

Everyday talk, and more specialized discourses (e.g., political, religious, scientific) offer compelling evidence of several broad metaphorical characterizations of the body, as seen in the following list of conceptual metaphors:

• BODY IS A GARDEN

• BODY IS A MACHINE

• BODY IS A CONTAINER

• BODY IS A MIRROR

• BODY IS A BATTLEGROUND

• BODY IS A JIGSAW PUZZLE

• BODY IS A FORTRESS

• BODY IS A PRISON

• BODY IS HOME

• BODY IS A BOOK

Each of these conceptual metaphors conceives of the body (the target domain) given some more concrete understanding of different source domains (e.g., flowers, engines, houses, mirrors). For example, the idea BODY IS A GARDEN underlies many possible ways of thinking about our births, lives, and deaths, such as the suggestion that we are like plants or fruits, which are born, grow, blossom, and, eventually, wither away and die.

The BODY IS A CONTAINER metaphor has a more specific manifestation in BODY IS A TEMPLE, as seen in the following lines from the Bible (I Corinthians, 6:19–20):

The human body is compared here to a special container, a temple, a place where God lives, which implies that the human body is the home of God.

The conceptual metaphor BODY IS A MIRROR is evident in a famous quote by the sculptor August Rodin, who once stated, “The human body is, above all, the mirror of the soul, and from the soul comes its greatest beauty.”⁸ In this case, the visible beauty of the body is a reflection of the invisible beauty of the soul. The twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed, in this spirit, that the “human body is the best picture of the human soul.”⁹

The conceptual metaphor BODY IS A BATTLEGROUND underlies one man’s description of his treatments for cancer, “My body is the battleground between cancer and chemo.”¹⁰ This statement conveys the man’s impression that his body has become the location for the battle between cancer and chemo (e.g., a “battleground”), a struggle, which according to this metaphor, places the patient as a mere spectator of the ongoing conflict.

Finally, the BODY IS A BOOK metaphor underlies contemporary efforts to map the human genome, which is conceived as a “program” that can be read, like a book, to reveal its inner contents. One BBC news story in 2000 announced the first sequence of the human genome with the title “Reading the book of life”: “The blueprint of humanity, the book of life, the software for existence – whatever you call it, decoding the entire three billion letters of human DNA is a monumental achievement.”¹¹ The defining essence of human bodies, the genome, is defined in metaphorical terms.

Besides our understanding of the body as an integrated system (e.g., a garden, a machine), individual body parts also have specific metaphorical functions. For example, the head is thought of as the “seat” of the intellect, or a “director,” a “leader,” and a “container” of thoughts, ideas, and memories. Different cultures privilege certain body parts that lead them to refer to these in varying metaphorical ways. To take one example, although the embodied metaphor THE BODY IS A CONTAINER FOR THE EMOTIONS (e.g., “Rage was building up inside me”) may be universal, cultures differ in where they locate emotions within the bodily container. The emotion of anger is located in the head in Hungarian, but it arises from the stomach via the chest to the head in Japanese.¹² Many higher emotions (e.g., joy, love, grief) are typically located in the heart within Western cultures (e.g., “He has a heavy heart,” “She’s broken my heart”), but are associated in the liver in Malay.¹³ As cognitive linguist Ning Yu once argued, “culture functions as a filter that selects aspects of sensorimotor experience and connects them with subjective experiences and judgments for metaphorical mappings.”¹⁴

Scientists and health practitioners have long described the human body and different bodily systems through metaphor. Consider a famous text titled De Humani Corporis Fabrica,¹⁵ by the sixteenth-century Belgian anatomist Andreas Vesalius. Vesalius employed a variety of metaphorical images, some of which were presented as pictures and diagrams, to both label and explain different bodily functions and dynamics. For example, Vesalius characterized the veins and arteries as being like a pipe, synovial fluid like oil, and the skeleton like the walls and supportive beams of a house. The digestive system was a complex of city streets, the sinuses were a wine press, the stomach a storeroom, and ligaments were seen as reins and pulleys. Muscles were described through several metaphorical images, including a spinning top, a ray fish, a pyramid, the letter C, a butcher’s cleaver, and Benedictine cowls. Other bodily parts and systems were characterized as horns, nets, rivers, pumpkin vines, pigeon coops, wickerwork baskets full of curdled milk, grape root, and tree trunks. Some of these metaphors reflect imagistic mappings from one domain to another (e.g., the digestive system has some perceptual resemblance to a map of a city street), while others in Vesalius’s text convey more abstract relations, such as that between ligaments and reins and pulleys.

These different metaphorical descriptions did not simply provide concrete ideas to teach anatomists, many centuries ago, about bodily systems that were already well understood in more literal ways. Vesalius employed metaphor and analogy to more aptly conceptualize body parts and bodily systems. His metaphors helped create new understandings of the human body and its actions, and not just explain in different ways ideas that were already well understood.

Scientists have continued to think about human bodies in a diverse range of metaphorical ways (e.g., the brain is a switchboard) that often change given new technological developments (e.g., the brain is a computer). To take another example, Buckminster Fuller was a twentieth-century self-educated engineer and architect, who in 1938 offered his own definition of a human being:

This description of a human being seems awfully technological, but concretely captures how people can easily be seen as complex machines.

Different metaphorical concepts about the human body may be debated as to their veracity and relevance to different target domains. Some people resist the idea that the HUMAN BODY IS A MACHINE, despite the prominence of this metaphorical concept over many centuries.¹⁷ One recent proposal claims that human life and bodies should be distinguished from classic machines along a variety of dimensions.¹⁸ Machines are characterized by the following features:

• Structure is a single level.

• Described as a predetermined list of parts.

• Machines arise from a design “blueprint.”

• Tightly constrained operation toward predetermined functions.

• Highly efficient operation.

• Function can be interpreted and restarted.

• Behavior is linear and predictable.

On the other hand, human bodies, as biological entities, have the following significant features:

• Built as multiscale systems of active, goal-seeking components.

• Protean machines that add or subtract components as needed.

• Self-organizing systems that modify their own structure on the fly.

• Noise is exploited, and fallibility of components is expected.

• Perverse creativity increasingly results in less predictable behaviors.

The debate over whether human bodies are machines, or not, reflects a fundamental principle about conceptual metaphorical thinking. Many topics do not have one, and only one, metaphor that helps us better understand these target domains. Metaphorical thinking can be quite flexible with multiple, sometimes contradictory, metaphors appearing that offer different understandings of the topic. The idea that BODIES ARE MACHINES, for example, is quite useful in a variety of contexts (e.g., personal and some medical contexts), while BODIES ARE BIOLOGICAL SYSTEMS may be more apt in many other situations.

Metaphorical talk of the human body and our subjective bodily experiences are not restricted to academic discourse, such as anatomy texts or scholarly debates about bodies possibly being machines. People routinely create metaphorical understandings of their body and bodily sensations in everyday life and express these ideas through different forms of metaphorical language.

Consider, for example, your bodily experience of feeling very tired or fatigued. When I am tired from a long day of mental and physical exertion, I feel this deeply within my muscles and bones, sometimes to the point of no longer being able to stand and walk about. Feeling tired is an all-over bodily ache that only extended rest can cure.

There are some people, unfortunately, who feel tired all the time, no matter how much rest they have had. Many of these individuals have been diagnosed as having “chronic fatigue syndrome” (CFS), which is defined as “a complicated disorder characterized by extreme fatigue that can’t be explained by any underlying medical condition. The fatigue may worsen with physical or mental activity, but doesn’t improve with rest.”¹⁹ Chronic fatigue syndrome is a controversial disorder given that it likely arises from a complex set of psychological, physiological, and environmental factors. People suffering from CFS do not simply describe their symptoms in purely literal terms, such as saying “I am always tired” or “I am continually fatigued,” but, instead, talk about their fatigue using metaphors. Consider three people with CFS who responded to the question “What does it feel like to have CFS?”²⁰

• “Chronic fatigue feels like I was run over by a cement roller right after I wake up. I get plenty of sleep, but I wake up feeling sore and even more tired than I was when I went to sleep.”

• “To me chronic fatigue feels like when you’re in the water at the beach and you try walking out of the water against the waves as they pull back into the ocean and you feel as if you’re not actually moving, you’re just walking in the one spot, and it’s heavy and your legs ache but you’re not getting anywhere. All. The. Time.”

• “Swimming in a fur coat after running a marathon. Exhausted earning it. Most people know what it feels like to work yourself to exhaustion, but can’t imagine feeling like that and not accomplishing anything more than moving from your bed to the sofa for a change of scenery.”

These metaphorical descriptions of CFS are representative of the ubiquity of metaphor in people’s experiences of their bodies.²¹ As philosopher Drew Leder argued, “When normal physiology reaches certain functional limits it seizes our attention. We remember the body at times of hunger, thirst, strong excretory needs, and the like.”²² Metaphor is often highlighted as a rhetorical tool that allows people to express themselves about ideas and experiences which are otherwise impossible to convey using literal language alone.²³

A major question to consider is whether the various linguistic metaphors seen above (e.g., “I was run over by a cement mixer” and [it is like] “Swimming in a fur coat after running a marathon”) are just examples of ordinary, casual talk or they emerge as critical indications of people’s unconscious metaphorical thoughts about their bodily fatigue. My claim is that metaphorical talk about the body and bodily experience is an important marker of how people really think about their bodies (i.e., the “metaphorical embodiment hypothesis”). Linguistic evidence offers a valuable clue on the metaphorical body. But there are also important findings from Psychology, Neuroscience, Anthropology, Medicine, and Philosophy that point to the unconscious ways that metaphor shapes thinking processes in a wide variety of domains, including those related to human bodies and bodily experience. I do not claim that people necessarily always view their bodies in metaphorical ways. Exactly when, and to what degree, people find themselves immersed in metaphor when thinking about their own, or other people’s bodily experiences is a topic that will be explored at points throughout the book.

Scholars typically seek out metaphorical thinking through the identification and analysis of diverse forms of metaphorical language. However, somewhat surprisingly, when we describe bodily experiences in even the most physical, literal terms, metaphorical meanings may automatically emerge. For instance, I am very tall (just under 2 meters) and often do not “fit in” or “fit into” many physical spaces (e.g., when putting on clothes, getting into cars, sitting in airplane seats, walking through doorways). Yet when I am unable to, literally, physically “fit into” some object or space, I frequently experience the conscious thought that I also do not “fit” into the metaphorical world of most ordinary people. I feel as if I am a social outcast simply from my being so tall, and being unable to fit within so many spaces that most others easily negotiate. In fact, the phrases “fit in” and “fit into” are mostly employed in metaphorical ways (e.g., “Not quite sure how sirens fit in to this mundane story?”), and often convey metaphorical meanings when referring to physical size (e.g., “He was too large to fit into that role in the play”).²⁴ Even when people talk about their physically not “fitting in” some space, they often follow up with comments that convey their metaphorical impressions of socially not “fitting in” (e.g., “I can’t fit into the driver’s seat, which shows that I am not the right type of person for such a classy sports car”).

These observations highlight a critical, but often neglected, aspect of bodily experience. We rarely experience our bodies in purely physical or literal terms. As with other facets of our daily lives, we frequently interpret our bodily sensations and actions in symbolic ways that are very much shaped by metaphor. The human body is very much a metaphorical body.

I specifically titled this book “Our Metaphorical Bodies” to emphasize the crucial fact that human bodies are different, despite many physical similarities, given our subjective histories. The poet Adrienne Rich cautioned us not to fall into the linguistic trap of only referring to “the body”:

I fully support Rich’s point of view on the importance of not thinking about “the body” as an object that may best be studied from a distance. Our bodies, and bodily experiences, must always be understood subjectively, with the acknowledgment that there are significant variations in our bodies and bodily experiences, even if there are also major regularities between people and their bodies. The scientific challenge is to properly balance our appreciation of both these regularities and variations in our attempt to understand the metaphorical nature of our bodily understandings.

Each of us uniquely possesses a body which makes us distinct from other people and the world around us. But many philosophers and cognitive scientists now reject person–world dualism and advocate that persons be understood, and scientifically studied, in terms of organism–environment mutuality and reciprocity. As the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty once claimed, “My body is the fabric into which all objects are woven, and it is, at least in relation to the perceived world, the general instrument of my ‘comprehension.’”²⁶ The enactive view of personhood emphasizes person–environment mutuality in which cognition is understood as enaction, or a history of structural couplings that “brings forth a world” either by taking part in an existing world, as happens during development and maturation, or by shaping a new one, as happens over the history of a species.²⁷ When a person enacts or brings forth a world, the body and the world are coupled. Our bodies are closely defined, and experienced, in terms of the specific actions we engage in as we move about the world.

In cognitive science, the term “embodiment” refers to “understanding the role of an agent’s own body in its everyday, situated cognition.”²⁸ Human thought and action arise from self-organizing processes that are constrained by a range of interacting forces, from evolution, history, culture, and discourse situations to unconscious cognitive and neural processes. Each of these forces operates along different timescales, and they collectively function to shape each moment of thinking and behavior. Concrete bodily actions, such as walking down the street, are therefore created from a complex configuration of forces that include both higher-level processes (e.g., evolution, culture, personal history, broader life goals) and lower-level forces (e.g., social context, immediate bodily needs). Human body actions are never purely physiological.

My emphasis in this book on our metaphorical bodies highlights how the body’s continuous interactions with the world provide for coordinated patterns of adaptive behavior. The philosopher Mark Johnson’s writings have been a major influence in my thinking about minds and bodies. In his book The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, Johnson described the embodied theory of meaning in the following manner:

The idea of our “metaphorical bodies” follows the spirit of Johnson’s view of embodied meaning, but places even greater emphasis on our understanding of the human body as being infused with metaphorical content. We immediately experience metaphoricity in the embodied flow of everyday living. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has fleshed out this observation in his argument that we have an ongoing awareness of our somatosensory systems.³⁰ Noting that the brain continually receives feedback signals from the body’s autonomic processes, Damasio suggests that this feedback provides us with a constant background awareness of our own bodies’ somatosensory systems. “The background body sense is continuous, although one may hardly notice it, since it represents not a specific part of anything in the body but an overall state of most everything in it.”³¹ We understand something about our bodies, and bodily experiences, through sensorimotor sensations, or whole “body-loops” which give imagistic experience its rich phenomenal quality.

Our phenomenological experience of our bodies is not raw and pristine, as it is often interpreted via metaphors, many of which emerge from different cultural traditions. Following the emergent trend in cognitive science, my view of metaphorical experience is that it must be characterized as a facet of mind from a 4E perspective. Under this view, human minds are always embodied (involve more than the brain, such as general involvement of bodily structures and processes), embedded (only function in relation to an external environment), enacted (involving not only neural processes but also what an organism does), and extended (where minds are part of the organism’s environment).³²

The driving force in our metaphorical understandings of our bodies and bodily experiences from a 4E perspective is our ability to create imaginative, but still embodied, simulations of what is happening to us in the present, past, and future moments of our lives. Embodied simulation processes emerge automatically, at various unconscious and conscious levels, in everyday experience. For example, our understanding of language, such as the expression “grasp the concept,” is accomplished, not simply through linguistic analyses, but by imagining ourselves engaging in the actions referred to in the discourse. We imagine ourselves reaching out to grasp onto the metaphorical object (e.g., “the concept”) that we can bring closer to the body for examination and understanding. A large body of research in experimental psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience offers empirical support for the role that embodied simulations play in various aspects of language understanding, including metaphorical and figurative discourse.³³

Embodied simulation processes are also a critical part of everyday perception and cognition. We imagine what it may be like to grasp onto an object in front of us as part of the actual process of seeing, reaching out, and holding onto that object. We think about the future by running various simulations of ourselves engaging in different possible actions in varying situations. When people with CFS speak of their illnesses in terms of trying to walk out of the ocean, or being run over by a cement roller, they are spinning imaginative embodied understandings of what their bodies feel like because of their disorders.

The automatic nature of embodied simulation processes implies a close connection between the human body and our imaginative, sometimes metaphorical, thought processes. When our bodies are in action, even at rest, there are tight, even causal, associations between our movements and sensations and the pragmatic meanings that guide us in the world. I advance this idea by proposing the “Body–Metaphor Contiguity Hypothesis”:

This proposal may seem controversial, because it denies the well-accepted idea that metaphors arise primarily from cross-domain mappings between nonmetaphorical source domains and varying, often abstract, target domains. My advocacy of the “Body–Metaphor Contiguity Hypothesis” highlights the fundamental nature of metaphor in bodily experience, not via cross-domain mappings, because bodies and metaphor are copresent and contiguous. Bodies and metaphors coexist and do not occupy disparate places in conceptual space, or more importantly, ongoing human experience. Metaphor, for this reason, may be far closer to contiguity, related to metonymy, than has generally been understood or acknowledged.

The following chapters extend the arguments outlined in this introduction.

Chapter 2 provides greater detail on the pervasive ways in which metaphor shapes our understanding of basic body parts (e.g., head, heart, liver) and a diverse range of bodily experiences (e.g., smelling, eating, urinating, having sex). Many conventional expressions in language reveal the critical role that metaphor plays in the ways people think about basic bodily functions and expressive actions. The range of metaphors for individual bodily parts and actions is impressive. People conceive of their bodies in multiple metaphorical ways, which may differ from one situation to the next. Many of these different metaphorical ideas for the body arise, once again, from cultural traditions which people uniquely adapt to various, often quite subtle, bodily experiences in context.

Chapter 3 explores the diverse ways that metaphor underlies people’s experiences of their ill or disordered bodies. Susan Sontag once warned against metaphorical interpretations of illness out of fear that these sorts of symbolism distract people and health practitioners from directly dealing with the real, physiological etiologies of the disordered body. But scientific explanations of illness and disease are often structured through enduring embodied conceptual metaphors (e.g., BODY IS A MACHINE), which greatly influence clinical therapies for healing the body. Paying attention to how individuals speak of their disordered and ill bodies reveals multiple, sometimes overlapping, other times conflicting, metaphors, which may offer clues to the diagnoses of specific health issues. Many medical treatments have also been proposed to alleviate the severity of bodily disorders by getting individuals to think of their physical complaints using alternative metaphors – a case of altering one’s physical and emotional response to illness by changing how one thinks about one’s situation. Paying attention to metaphor in people’s illnesses helps illustrate the particularities of their complex bodily experiences.

Chapter 4 considers extended metaphorical performances in which people both enact more elaborate displays of metaphor via the body and discover metaphorical meanings through various forms of simple and complex bodily actions. The emphasis here is on metaphor as a kind of bodily action that unfolds in complex ways to express metaphorical and other symbolic messages. For example, people gesture metaphorically, they enact metaphorical facial displays and body postures, they dance metaphorically, and they perform various metaphorical pantomimes in different social contexts. These metaphorical performances are not merely outward expressions of inner metaphorical concepts, but emerge dynamically in specific moments given a host of personal and real-world constraints. People also sometimes seek different bodily experiences, such as climbing high mountains and swimming across large seas, precisely to discover specific metaphorical meanings through their bodies that may offer new guidance on how to best live their lives.

Chapter 5 further explores whether metaphor may really be everywhere. My advocacy of this claim will surely meet some resistance from scholars who are skeptical of different proposals on embodied cognition, conceptual metaphor, and, more particularly, the use of linguistic analyses in inferring the content of human conceptualizations and affective experiences. For example, it is not always clear that how we talk about our bodily experiences via metaphor is necessarily an unbiased account of how we physically feel. Another possibility is that conventional metaphorical language may guide people to talk in certain ways about their feeling of pain or their thoughts about sex without having much influence of their specific pain or sex experiences.

The metaphorical embodiment hypothesis highlights a different possibility for characterizing how metaphor arises in human experience. Rather than suggesting that metaphors are primarily a matter of cross-domain mappings, many metaphorical ideas may emerge via part–whole, or metonymic, meaning construction processes (see the “Body–Metaphor Contiguity Hypothesis” defined earlier in this chapter). Particular instances of bodily experiences (e.g., taking journeys) may be representative of larger metaphorical categories (e.g., living one’s life). People’s dispositions to draw connections from their here-and-now bodily actions (e.g., going out on a limb) to larger symbolic life themes (e.g., putting oneself in a dangerous situation) create bidirectional correspondences that enable individuals to discern metaphoricity in bodily experience. Our bodies are often most paramount in daily living, and it should be unsurprising that we experience our bodies in symbolic, metaphorical ways.

If human bodies and bodily experiences are deeply metaphorical, then the scope of metaphor in human life may be far greater than ever imagined before. Metaphor may be everywhere in human life. I will, nonetheless, offer an important qualifying idea in Chapter 5. Even if metaphor may be everywhere, it is not necessarily always there. Metaphors, like emotions, may most often arise at moments of juncture, such as interruptions, in our daily lives. It is at that these moments when things may have gone wrong, or have unexpectedly led to positive outcomes, that metaphor comes in to inform us about the meaning of our lives at that moment and what may be best for us to do next.

Finally, Chapter 6 summarizes some of the important methodological and theoretical implications of the metaphorical embodiment hypothesis. One conclusion here is that the traditional view within conceptual metaphor theory of a divide between disembodied source domains and metaphorical target domains no longer holds. The traditional view embraces an implicit dualism between the metaphorical mind and the nonmetaphorical body. My alternative argument is that the body itself is also metaphorical. A methodological guide that falls out from the “Metaphorical Embodiment Hypothesis” is the “Metaphorical Body Imperative”:

My hope is that readers will consider what is presented here not only from a scholarly, academic perspective, but also imagine from a personal point of view the relevance of the many bodily metaphors outlined in these chapters. Are some of these metaphors appropriate ways for how you have thought about your own body and bodily experiences? Are some of these metaphors unfamiliar, but still sensible and possibly relevant to your personal, subjective bodily actions and feelings? When do you find yourself thinking about your bodies in different metaphorical ways? What would it really mean if our bodies, the so-called nonmetaphorical sources in many abstract concepts, were actually understood via metaphor?

Please accept my invitation for this journey toward discovering our metaphorical bodies. I have written this book to raise an important, but neglected, suggestion on the ways metaphors arise in experience through the body as its functions in embodied, extended, enacted, and embedded contexts. My key proposal is that metaphor and our bodies still have a far closer, even contiguous, relation with one another than ever suggested before. Let’s explore this idea and see what new insights it offers about the nature of the metaphor in our meaningful life experiences.