Monthly Archive for December, 2011

From R. Salvador Reyes at Tottenville Review…

First confession. I didn’t start out this way: believing that art is a Godless domain, a tactically-consumed, evolutionarily-wrought siren to the mind—just another victim hunted by our massive, pulverizing desire to devour and catalog every pattern in the universe that presents itself to our perpetually-ravished brains. I didn’t believe any of those things. Not in the beginning.

In the beginning, I just wanted to write. Why should I care how humans had come to love literature and art? I didn’t care. Until I asked the question. How had humans come to love literature and art? People have been asking this for centuries, and they’ve put forth a plethora of fascinating answers. But during the last couple of decades, theorists have started examining the question through the lens of evolution—and it’s beginning to look like a new future for literary studies is taking shape. Two of the most eloquent and compelling arguments for art’s evolutionary roots are the recently published On the Origin of Stories (Harvard University Press), by Brian Boyd and The Art Instinct (Bloomsbury Press), by Denis Dutton. Both seem destined to become part of the foundation of the emerging field of Literary Darwinism—where literature is being examined from new viewpoints, like neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. More…

From Samuel McNerney at Scientific American…

Embodied cognition, the idea that the mind is not only connected to the body but that the body influences the mind, is one of the more counter-intuitive ideas in cognitive science. In sharp contrast is dualism, a theory of mind famously put forth by Rene Descartes in the 17^th century when he claimed that “there is a great difference between mind and body, inasmuch as body is by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible… the mind or soul of man is entirely different from the body.” In the proceeding centuries, the notion of the disembodied mind flourished. From it, western thought developed two basic ideas: reason is disembodied because the mind is disembodied and reason is transcendent and universal. However, as George Lakoff and Rafeal Núñez explain:

Cognitive science calls this entire philosophical worldview into serious question on empirical grounds… [the mind] arises from the nature of our brains, bodies, and bodily experiences. This is not just the innocuous and obvious claim that we need a body to reason; rather, it is the striking claim that the very structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment… Thus, to understand reason we must understand the details of our visual system, our motor system, and the general mechanism of neural binding. More…

Essay from Elisabeth Camp at nonsite.org, photo by R Carruthers and credits to Apic/©APIC…

Humans are inveterate storytellers. We make incessant and insistent narrative sense of the world around us and of our place in it—so much so that some scholars have suggested “homo narrans” as a more appropriate identifying description for our species than “homo sapiens”.1  Indeed, a long-standing tradition holds that our very self-identities have an essentially narrative shape: that who each of us is is determined by the stories of our lives, and that in some sense we create our selves by crafting those stories.  In this essay, I focus on an especially compelling case of narrative self-construction: Wordsworth’s Prelude.  I argue that we do need rich, substantive selves of the sort delivered by narratives like The Prelude, both in order to evaluate our past actions and to guide future ones.  However, the very feature which makes Wordsworth’s poem so rhetorically powerful as an autobiography—his invocation of a robust teleological structure, which is imposed on him from infancy by Nature—also prevents us from embracing it as a model for our own self-understanding, because it conflicts sharply with modern views about ontology.  Contemporary advocates of a narrative conception of the self, such as Jerome Bruner, Alasdair MacIntyre and Marya Schectman, drop The Prelude’s objectionable ontological assumptions.  But rather than placing the narrative conception of self on a firm metaphysical foundation, this actually intensifies the threat of fictionalism: the risk that the selves we fashion through stories are mere self-deluding illusions. I conclude by gesturing toward the characters within stories as an alternative literary model which avoids many of these problems. More…

Marilynne Robinson in The Nation…

Recently a friend sent me a composite photograph of the planet Mercury. Even as a composite, grossly disfigured to accommodate our strategies of perception, it had about it the great calm and sufficiency the ancients attributed to the spheres. The innumerable scars of eons of local cataclysm were only proof of its indomitability. Someone has named the more visible of these scars. The largest, a gigantic bloom of relative brightness, is Debussy. Machaut, Vivaldi and Rachmaninoff have their craters, as do Rembrandt, Matisse and Derain. And there is a fosse, a trench, called Pantheon, which I take to be a shrine to the unknown, or in any case the unnamed, cultural gods. I like the eccentricity of the choices, which suggests that personal preferences are reflected in them. There is an astronomer somewhere who loves Machaut and Derain. So a record of his or her quietest human pleasures is inscribed, not on the planet, of course, but on its image. More detail has been added to our universe, to the map of what we know in the very human ways we can know it.

The thought occurred to me that if the name of everyone on earth who is remembered for any kind of distinction were assigned to a crater or a mountain or a seeming rivulet somewhere in the visible universe, the astronomers would soon be out of names. The universe expands, in terms of the horizons of our awareness, in terms of its own phenomenal life, and again and most dramatically in terms of the horizons of plausible speculation. More…