Johnson, instead, believes that "imagination" is essential for human cognition, and imagination, in turn, arises from the human body. Imagination is taken to be both the creative quality (in the "Platonic" tradition) and the faculty that connects perception with reason (in the "Aristotelian" tradition). The human body is not just a machine that passively receives perceptions. It is an entity involved in a complex interaction with the world and with other bodies.

Human rationality is embodied because our reality is shaped by bodily movements Johnson points out that, like all animals, we are bodies connected to the world. Whatever else we are, it comes from this basic fact, therefore from our bodily essence, from our "embodiment". Our mental life is a creation of this embodiment. It is only in the embodiment that one can find the meaning of our mental life.

His building blocks are Kant's "schemata" (nonpropositional structures of imagination), which are then amplified into concepts by metaphorical projection, and these concepts then structure and constrain our understanding and reasoning. Johnson claims that, ultimately, the body "is" the mind.

TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi