The image here is a stone circle on Dartmoor called the Nine Maidens. There are actually rather more than nine stones, so the name is a mystery. What is a home or a site like Stonehenge, with the blocks aligned for some annual festival? No one seems to know.
We are ancient in a sense, and yet so young in the history of life on our planet.
If we knew more about what this circle represented, could we feel our way into the minds that built it?
One of my friends, a man immensely clever but with – and I’m sure he’d admit it – limited practical sense, believes that the imagination is the human quality that confers free will, to a degree compatible with biological determinism. He’s written a paper on it. Unpublished, but very good. Convincing, too.
Indeed, on a similar theme, Felipe Fernández-Armesto has a theory that ideas, as representations of what-is-not-in-the-world, grant humans a unique capacity to change the world according to their imagination. Creativity and complex thought leading to new conceptualisations – a trait extended exponentially in our species. He sees a plausible back-story for the evolution of imagination arising out of our relatively fallible memories and enhanced abilities to anticipate.
I’m starting a book in which the author, Christopher Boehm, credits ‘shame’. A human universal, apparently – first conceived of by Darwin as the evolutionary root of morality, arising out of a tribe’s need to instill positive behaviour between extrafamilial individuals. And John Cottingham cites ‘soul’ – but not the supernatural concept of an immaterial thing that floats up to heaven, but as a suite of human characteristics that allow us to respond to transcendent ideas and experiences. These may depend on biological processes, but they allow us to enter a world of meaning and value beyond our biological natures.
I find myself persuaded by all these concepts. Oh, yes, and another that I have come across – the ability to develop a rich narrative sense of self, in terms of biological history and the ability to plan for an imagined possible future. To see the self as a constant through life, mutable, yes, but with an essence of ‘me-ness’. Interestingly, the philosopher Galen Strawson denies that he has such a sense of self, insisting that he feels distinct, moment by moment, from the person he was in the past. He claims, and I believe him as I too have something of this experience, that this in no way inhibits him from learning from prior experience nor from making commitments to the future. It’s just that it’s more like, how shall I put this? More like a company making commitments for CEOs who change over time. Maybe that explains it. Maybe not. Whatever the case, though Strawson refutes a universalised narrative self, he maintains something of the core of this argument for universal human exceptionalism: an ability to time travel, taking lessons from the past and making commitments for the future.
Of course, none of us know what other animals experience. Perhaps my dog, who was trembling in his dreams this afternoon, fears for the coming weeks, unsure whether his life will return to its previous familiar pattern. Perhaps he recalls, with affectionate longing, afternoons at creche with a pack of other canines and wishes to be with them now.
Mind you, though it’s my assumption that other human minds have similar mechanics to mine, I am often astounded by the views that others have, which they believe to be self-evident, but which to me are utterly bizarre. I can argue for the reasons for my own views, yet, if pushed, when it comes to ground zero, could I really say why I think this or that? My own mind, too, is a black box to me. It is pure confabulation, post hoc story-telling, to make claims for why I hold a particular belief. I could cite recent reading or past education, parental influence or genetic factors and none offers an answer that fully satisfies.
I would like to be in conversation. Taken seriously by someone other than myself. Is that so absurd a desire? I could pay a therapist, but, frankly, they’re there to sort out my emotional fragility not my philosophical quandaries. That lens is too narrow, that focus too limited. Philosophy classes could put my thoughts in a historical context – but, considering specialisation and the teacher-philosopher’s desire to impart her conclusions, I doubt that my rather wide-ranging concerns would get much clarification. Besides which, philosophy can become more academic than practical, more dogmatic than discursive, more abstract than human.
They spoke to themselves, so often, the thinkers of the past. In exile, in prison, in seclusion. Locked down with their own minds. And then they settled to reside in the rock-carved gully of their own predispositions. Is that what I want for myself? No, I don't want to be inhibited by my individual proclivities and biases. I want to learn and to be in conversation. With an ideal correspondent who has time and generosity, wisdom and the history of thought to call upon.
That’s not going to happen.
I have to become my own fallible, ignorant and severely limited conversation partner. Considering this, reading that, thinking the other. Open to opposition. Willing to change course. And yet seeking a path to something that I can feel is meaningful.
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