THE BODY AS AN ORGANISM: POSSIBILITIES TO RETHINK THE DUALISTIC METAPHORS OF DEMARCATION BODY-MIND AND INSIDE-OUTSIDE

Abstract

At first, this piece ponders about how the body has been identified through dualistic metaphors that delimit it. This paper explains that, in the 1970s the linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson created a new definition for ‘metaphor’ related to the way we think and we act in the world. Particularly, it discusses the metaphors body-mind and insideoutside, the first suggests a segregation that divides the body from the mind and the second delimits it as a closed container. Next, this piece presents new studies in the areas of the Cognitive Science and Neuroscience that rethink the operation of the body. These studies don’t bring out a perspective with the dual pairs, but the idea of integration between them. That is, as opposed to the metaphor body-mind, it evokes the idea of an organism in which both are integrated. Opposed to the metaphor outside-inside arises the thought that the body is not completely sealed because it performs exchanges with the environment through the skin, this one understood as a permeable membrane.