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AUTHOR: |
HAROLD FROMM |
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TITLE: |
Pinker and
Johnson on Human Nature |
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SOURCE: |
The Hudson
Review 61 no1 220-6 Spr 2008 |
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COPYRIGHT: |
The magazine
publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with
permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the
copyright is prohibited. |
STEVEN
PINKER'S LATEST BOOK, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human
Nature,(FN1) is both thick and thin. As another
five-hundred-paged-wonder of the sort we have come to expect from Pinker, it is
pretty thick. As a book about "human nature" it is lamentably thin.
Having just read a review that proclaimed it his best book yet, I'm in the
awkward position of having experienced it as his worst. His previous magna
opera -- The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and The Blank Slate -- were
remarkable achievements indeed and I have already praised the last of these to
the skies in "The New Darwinism in the Humanities."(FN2)
Each of these previous books presents the underlying
concepts of large areas of contemporary fields of thought: linguistics,
psychology, Darwinism, evolutionary biology and psychology, philosophy, and the
role of culture in shaping consciousness. These general ideas are instantiated
from Pinker's enormous mental data base, including
cultural artifacts, classic and popular literary works, and, most winningly,
films, TV, even cartoons and comics. His demotic, energized,
surprising prose and appealing personality power these books in a distinctive
way and give coherence to the multiplicity of facts and insights that might
otherwise appear disorganized. One comes away with a set of puissant
general ideas, deftly substantiated.
The Stuff of Thought, however, even with all of Pinker's familiar virtues, seems badly under-theorized. The
impressive richness of his mind comes off, this time around, as a multitudinous
collection of beads strung on a very thin and diaphanous thread that keeps
threatening to rupture, scattering the beads in various directions. The string
that purportedly holds this book together is its subtitle, Language as a Window
into Human Nature, and indeed all of the chapters deal in some way with
language. But the book reads more like a collection of very disparate essays,
forced together, than a developed argument Collections of essays are fine (I
produce them myself), but this one promises much more than it can deliver. The
density, pace, rhetorical quality, degree of theorization, presumed audience --
all these are quite variable, and there really is little to propel or motivate
the reader to plow ahead. Some stretches are deadening, and I can't imagine
most readers continuing on without skipping, assuming that they can actually
make it to the finish line. Pinker keeps telling us that what he is discussing
in each chapter gives us some insight into human nature, but it's more of a
wish than a deed, since the discontinuities of the narrative leave the reader
disoriented, wondering where he really is at any given moment Pinker's habit of indulging very wide excurses away from
his putative subject, as well as his multitudes of anecdotes and allusions --
often the best pages in the book -- while redeeming qualities in themselves,
make the rationale of the already under-theorized discourse even more opaque.
Pinker informs us in the first chapter that his book is
about "the ideas, feelings, and attachments that are visible through our
language and that make up our nature." In his second chapter he rehashes
some of his former books and then launches into a brutally specific account of
"locative verbs" and locutions. Basically, "Peter painted on the
door" and "Peter painted the door" (but not "Ellie covered
an afghan onto the bed") reveals the work that locatives can do. Pinker's claim is that the ability of infants to start
understanding these fine distinctions in usage gives us insight into
"human nature." Building on Chomskian
"nativism," the widely accepted thesis that
language acquisition is indigenous within the brain -- though Chomsky keeps his
distance from evolutionary biology and psychology -- Pinker remarks that
"a deeper look at which verbs participate in the locative alternation has
forced us to take a deeper look at what compels the mind to construe physical
events in certain ways." If you like this sort of thing, there are 30 or
40 pages of it, but you're bound to forget the data pretty fast and emerge with
a vague and fuzzy sense that it all has something to do with, "human
nature." The chapter's relentless density might be appropriate for a
linguistics journal, but presumably academic linguists know all this. Beyond
being struck by some of the points made in passing, the general intellectually
curious reader will be blinded by too much light.
The next chapter, on "innate concepts," is
equally relentless. Pinker gives us accounts of Jerry Fodor's Extreme Nativism (that the mind is imbued with thousands of
meanings from Day One), of Radical Pragmatics, contra Podor
("that the mind does not contain fixed representations of the meaning of
words"), and finally of Linguistic Determinism, that language IS thought.
(In The Language Instinct and elsewhere, Pinker makes it clear that thought
precedes language, and his case is pretty strong, bolstered by an extensive
literature of experiments with the ways in which the attention of infants to
the external world reveals their understanding right from the start, without
language.)
As this chapter nears its end, Pinker writes that he
wants to "reinforce a major theme of this book: that language is a window
into human nature, exposing deep and universal features of our thoughts and
feelings," even if the thoughts and feelings can't be equated with the
words. This reinforcement is badly needed, but Pinker's
reminders throughout the book seem to me (I'll take the blame here for being
obtuse) acts of desperation rather than convincing theorizing.
In another chapter -- too long, like most in this too
long book -- Pinker expresses a debt to Kant for concepts "about space,
time, causality, and substance as they are represented in language, in the
mind, and in reality." Space and time are "reckoned with reference to
objects as they are conceived by humans," including the uses, actions,
abilities, and intentions involved in such conceivings.
In a chapter on metaphor, Pinker agrees with much that George Lakoff has written, starting with Metaphors We Live By
(co-authored with Mark Johnson, to whom I will turn below). Summarizing Lakoff, Pinker writes, "Reason is not based on
abstract laws, because thinking is rooted in bodily experience. And the concept
of objective or absolute truth must be rejected. There are only competing
metaphor... Western philosophy, then, is not an extended debate about
knowledge, ethics, and reality, but a succession of conceptual metaphors."
But Pinker thinks Lakoff goes too far in this picture
of human experience as divorced from a freestanding reality. So he adds,
"Our best science and mathematics can predict how the world will behave in
ways that would be a staggering coincidence if the theories did not
characterize reality." As useful as the notion of language as metaphorical
translations of experience can be, knowledge and truth, Pinker demurs, are not
obsolete.
After an interesting chapter on naming and names that
nonetheless gets carried away into extreme tangentiality,
Pinker produces what strikes me as the best chapter in the book, "The
Seven Words You Can't Say on Television." Even this one, however, is
subject to extreme wandering, so that Pinker is impelled to remind the reader
that the train of discourse here is about "involuntary speech
perception," a neuronal tic that causes people to have strong reactions to
obscenity and swearing as a result of cultural pressures and upbringing.
Despite its excesses, the accounts of "bad" words display Pinker at
his most virtuosic, especially in the pages and pages about the word
"fuck." After a penultimate chapter on "Games People Play,"
the conclusion, "Escaping the Cave" (a tired reworking of Plato in a
last-ditch effort to unify the whole) expresses once again the optimistic hope
that "In this book I have given you the view from language -- what we can
learn about human nature from the meanings of words and constructions and how
they are used." What then follows is essentially a summary of the
preceding chapters.
It was a welcome turn from The Stuff of Thought (and
what was the stuff after all, when Pinker believes that thought doesn't require
language?) to Mark Johnson's new book, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of
Human Understanding.(FN3) Alone and with George Lakoff, Johnson has been writing for years on metaphor and
the body, two main foci consolidated here along with a focus on the bioscience
of human consciousness, which I take to be the book's generating theme. Unlike Pinker's, this book is thin in pages but thick with quite
accessible theorization. Although there are none of the multi-media fireworks
we experience in Pinker, the argument is nothing if not clear, even labored and
repetitious, but worth it in the end, given its passionate unity. Moreover,
whereas Pinker kept trying to convince us that his book shed light on
"human nature," Johnson rarely if ever mentions that term even as he
sheds his own kind of light on who and what we are. Neither thinker, however,
treats human nature in these new books from the point of view of Darwinian
adaptation except incidentally: Pinker deals with language usage and what it
implies about the evolved psychology underlying it. Johnson deals with the neuroscientific biology and what it implies about the
evolved psychology operating above it.
Johnson's main goal, as I see it, is to pound final
nails into the coffin of Cartesian dualism while weaning Anglo-American
academic philosophy away from its bloodless obsession with the linguistic
analysis of sentences and propositions. And blood is at the heart of it
Consider that before farming, before human speech, before language, before
reading and writing, there was only the body. Copulation,
birth, nurturing, hunting for food, death, and a vivid imagining of
paternal/maternal agency behind lightning bolts and everything else -- that was
primate, hominid, human life. The pre-Socratic philosophers, succeeded
by Plato, offered a startling revelation, a new paradigm: thought and thinking,
according to Socrates, was a purer form of being in the world than mere gross
temporal bodily existence. Ideas had a reality and permanence not possible in a
body, which could never achieve their unsullied purity. "Mind" was
their vehicle, not corruptible flesh. Christianity, greatly expanding upon the
notion of sexual shame in Genesis, institutionalized ideas of the body and its
carnal sins as merely a lamentable halfway house, a temporary dwelling en route
to immortal being. Descartes expanded further on this by actually claiming to
locate a soul, self, spirit, mind that somehow transcended the body while
dwelling inside it, lifting Homo sapiens uniquely above mere animality. But
after many centuries, no souls, selves, spirits, or minds have ever been found.
Today, we are experiencing a return to the body in most of the sciences and
much of philosophy, with more emphasis on the bodiliness
(not the bodilessness) of the brain than ever before.
Johnson's title, The Meaning of the Body, is a double-play on this: what it
means to be a body (I almost wrote "to have" a body -- old habits die
slowly. To "have" a body "you" need to be a resident spook
inhabiting one) and what sort of meanings derive from the body that is
"you."
Johnson takes so much of this book from his joint
effort with Lakoff in their 1999 massive opus, Philosophy
in the Flesh, that the opening declaration of that
book could well serve here: "The mind is inherently embodied. Thought is
mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical." This, in
a very tiny nutshell, is the germ of Johnson's solo endeavor, which leaves out
much of the earlier book to concentrate on the issues he finds most central.
Johnson has a lot of detritus to sweep out of the way,
truisms accumulated, especially during the last century, by philosophy and the
social sciences. Kant, he writes, developed the notion of a "pure
reason" that was not dependent on anything empirical and had little to do
with our embodied, phenomenal selves. Behind this tradition is the faux
distinction between what is "merely" aesthetic feeling and emotion
and what is solid (even "transcendent") rational
thought. Indeed, this invidious distinction was an assumption that
almost went without saying during my undergraduate and graduate school years,
except that it was said -- over and over again. Johnson comments, "Ghief among these harmful misconceptions are that (1) the
mind is disembodied, (2) thinking transcends feeling, (3) feelings are not part
of meaning and knowledge, (4) aesthetics concerns matters of mere subjective
taste, and (5) the arts are a luxury (rather than being conditions of full
human flourishing)." The heart of Johnson's anti-dualism is a monism that
sees all of our experience as derived from and underwritten by one same
substance: bodily materiality. An archetypal book of my student days that
Johnson refers to was A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic, which regarded
propositional statements (to quote Johnson) "as the only meaning that
mattered for our knowledge of the world." Starting in infancy, however,
meaning (as today's empirical investigative techniques reveal) becomes an
expression of bodily needs, honed to the very shape of our arms and legs,
beating heart, and hunger for food. "Such concepts as curved, twisted,
diagonal, vertical, zigzag, straight, and circular get their meaning primarily
from our bodily postures, our bodily movements, and the logic of those
movements."
Johnson's heroes turn out, unsurprisingly, to be
pragmatic and aesthetic, so there is a good deal of quoting and discussing of
William James, John Dewey, and Susanne TL Langer, all of whom stressed the role
of feeling in thought From the last twenty years, Antonio Damasio
is singled out for his appreciation of the driving, generating role of the
emotions in moment-to-moment behavior and thinking, emotions whose origins are
ultimately metabolic and neuronal and, most important, non-conscious, not in
any Freudian sense of a mythic psychodrama taking place unbeknownst to us but a
metabolic, visceral, digestive, heart-pumping, testosterone-tugging, brain-fed
neuronal process very much unbeknownst to us. If "my heart leaps up when I
behold a rainbow in the sky," do "I" know anything about its
provenance -- or the effects of alcohol, coffee, statins,
antidepressants, air pollution, or even Twinkies on my moment-to-moment
consciousness? Everything that alters my blood alters my brain and alters my
thoughts -- and determines for me What Makes Sense. There is never Nothing working on my consciousness -- and it all comes from
biochemistry as it processes digestion, bowel movements, personal relations,
and Culture.
Even Rationality with a capital R can be seen as
ultimately from the body. Its status derives from its sometimes seemingly
"correct" judgments, but it is always measuring and reporting on our
world; the one experienced by our brains, not by "God." As Lakoff and Johnson emphasize in their joint book, all sorts
of "logical" ideas, like "in front of," "behind,"
"after," and "before," come from our bodies' relationships
to what we experience and then become abstracted into logical and mathematical
science, on investigation looking a lot less "pure," less from above
than below. (Speak of metaphors!) Although Pinker covers some of this
territory, there is very little "below" in his accounts. Summarizing
James and Dewey, Johnson writes, "To say that reason is embodied means
that you can never fully understand its capacities and workings without
reference to facts about human bodies, brains, and environments."
So-called Pure Reason is highly motivated by "conceptual metaphors"
that evolve from basic infantile experiences and characterize even the language
of the sciences. "Concepts are neural activation patterns that can either
be 'turned on' by some actual perceptual or motoric
event in our bodies, or else activated when we merely think about
something." What scientists don't know -- as yet -- because of the infancy
of neuroscience itself, is how and where the brain generates these
abstractions. Just watching active brain areas light up in fMPIs(FN4) tells us something
but not enough, as they freely admit.
What Johnson (and Lakoff) want to get rid of are antiquated notions from the
"faculty psychology" of the eighteenth century -- that there are
"faculties" such as reason, imagination, sensation, feeling, understanding.
These faculties, even when treated as "modules" in the brain by some
current thinkers in evolutionary psychology, have always had the character of
spooks. What actual physical thing is a module or a faculty? Are they a handful
of magical homunculi directing traffic on billions of neural highways? Johnson
wants them eliminated from philosophical conversation since they posit
immaterial entities, of which Reason is the most spooky
of all. Where is Reason to be found and what is its
status of being? Can we really suppose it's like "God" breathing
"spirit" into our "animal" bodies? Plunk! The Reason module
is inserted, and we're human beings, not apes? Speaking of "concepts that
we think of as utterly divorced from physical things," Johnson reminds us
that man is "a creature with a body-mind who has neither a disembodied ego
nor an eternal soul, for there is no nonbodily entity
or process to perform the abstraction" required by such a divorce.
Given Johnson's position that "aesthetics"
(in its most global senses, with the biochemical feelings entailed), far from
being merely vacuous "emotion," provides the raw materials of
thinking, it's no surprise that he concludes his book with several chapters on
the arts. Though his treatment of literature and visual art is fairly
conventional art criticism, his handling of music (clearly one of his major
interests) is deeper and richer, more informed by his book's theses. Quoting
from an illuminating essay by the twentieth-century composer Roger Sessions, he
makes it clear that music is not a representational art. Music says nothing
about anything but simply presents a pattern of human sensorimotor-derived
experience not to be translated into something beyond powerful feelings, not
even the tablespoon (or was it a teaspoon?) that Richard Strauss claimed
(somewhat jokingly, I assume) he could "represent" in his tone poems.
"Thinking about how music moves us," Johnson writes, "is not
going to explain everything we need to know about language, but it is an
excellent place to begin to understand how all meaning emerges in the flesh,
blood, and bone of our embodied experience." Schopenhauer, I think, is the
one who got it most right: in Kantian terms, music is a "thing in
itself," a nut we'll never crack.
Johnson's powerful book does not purport to say that we
should dispense with other philosophical approaches altogether. Analytic
philosophy's examinations of the logic of sentences and propositions will
continue to serve a useful purpose. What a society regards as sanity and
rationality is subject to cultural variations: yesterday's madman is today's
genius culture-hero and vice versa. Nevertheless, there are termini at the
edges of the spectrum, beyond which we question whether someone has lost his
marbles. All sorts of utterances may be from the body -- where else could they
be coming from? -- but some are unacceptable
nonetheless if you are interested in maintaining civilization and/or biological
survival. What can we think today of the populations of ancient
ADDED MATERIAL
FOOTNOTES
1 THE STUFF OF THOUGHT: Language as a Window into Human Nature, by Steven
Pinker. Viking. $29.95.
2 See The
3 THE MEANING OF THE BODY: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, by Mark Johnson.
4 functional magnetic resonance imagining