Meaning and the body

This is another great excerpt from a NS article by Mark Johnson 12th January.
FROM birth to death, discovering, creating and communicating meaning is our full-time job as humans. Meaning helps us make sense of both our private world and our public intellectual world. But what do we mean by "meaning"? Can we hope to understand it?
For nearly three decades, George Lakoff, a linguist from the University of California, Berkeley, and I have surveyed mountains of evidence showing that most of our cognition and meaning-making goes on well below the level of conscious awareness. This is why we argue that to discover the nature and sources of human meaning we must explore our non-conscious bodily encounters with our world.
This is no easy task. Four centuries after Descartes, we are still having trouble with the concept of mind-body dualism. Growing up in western culture, we inherit dualisms such as the separation of mind from body, reason from emotion, and thought from feeling. These are predicated on some version of the Cartesian view of mind and body as radically different entities with distinctive functions. Body (material) and mind (immaterial, or at least transcendent) act on each other, and are somehow yoked together to form a human.
This division has influenced theories in virtually every discipline. For example, mind-body dualism has been used to explain how universal concepts and universal reason were possible - on the assumption that mind transcends any kind of human embodiment. As late as the 20th century, first-generation cognitive science was still splitting mind and body. This science, which combines artificial intelligence, information-processing psychology, analytic philosophy of mind and language, and Noam Chomsky's idea of an innate grammar, assumed that nothing about the body as a body shaped our concepts or reason.
However, over the past 25 years, a second-generation cognitive science has recognised mind and cognitive processes as inherently "embodied". This approach has been enticing even hard-core philosophers of mind and language to pay attention to the non-conscious thought and feeling lying at the heart of our ability to make sense of things.