For my project the text for the reading group tomorrow is worth it's weight in gold: Chapter 6, The Uses of Fiction, of The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution by Denis Dutton (2009).
I feel it helped me to get back on track with a story idea for an animation that I have been carrying around with me since late 2008. More about this at a later stage.
In brief the book looks at art (both the creation and appreciation of art) from an evolutionary point of view. Naturally such a Darwinian perspective in itself is quite provocative. Do we appreciate art because we are culturally conditioned or is the appreciation a result of evolutionary adaption? Dutton supports the latter and argues for example that Pleistocene hunter-gatherers would have
imagined what food was likely available in the next valley and weighted heading in that direction against envisioned risks and opportunity costs of doing so. This capacity for strategic, prudential, conditional thinking gave to such bands a vast adaptive advantage over groups that could not plan with imaginative detail. (Dutton, p. 106)
This very Darwinistic viewpoint tries to explain the importance of the human imaginative faculties to outsmart others; a 'tradition' that is continued among today's military strategists. The strong winning over the weak. Reaction to external conditions. To me this behaviour is still located in the animal kingdom, be it in a Pleistocene tribe or a meeting in the Pentagon.
According to Dutton, through this process humans "evolved specialised cognitive machinery that allows us to enter and participate in imagined worlds" (Dutton, p. 106) which by itself definitely is a prerequisite to appreciate some forms of art, in particular narrative fiction.
Dutton explains that fictional stories, in whatever form or shape, can provide three adaptive advantages:
- A low-cost, low risk surrogate experience.
- An instructive source.
- An encouragement to explore someone else's points of view, beliefs, motivations, and values.
It's hard to argue with that. Looking at today's media landscape it is difficult to find any fictional film, novel, short story, etc. that does not at least apply one of the points mentioned above. The strongest I feel is the surrogate experience. Point two and three appear to be optional. Point two seems (next to the experience) close to acient mythology, supporting the individual with practical or existential guide. Point three is closest to humanity and assumes a certain level of openness or tolerance which, no offence, our hunter-gatherer ancestors and their contemporary equivalents may have (had) a hard time to understand.
Dutton briefly touches on Greek mythology from Plato's point of view who largely regarded these epics of old as the "worst possible moral examples" (Dutton, p. 115), a soap opera of gods showcasing all human weaknesses – and outside of the original context and society they may well appear like that. As Joseph Campbell remarks:
In the later stages of many mythologies, the key images hide like needles in a great haystack of secondary anecdote and rationalization; for when a civilization has passed from a mythological to a secular point of view, the older images are no longer felt or quite approved. In Hellenistic Greece and in Imperial Rome, the ancient gods were reduced to mere civic patrons, household pets, and literary favourites. (Campbell, 1956, p. 248)
And:
Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives is dissolved. (Campbell, 1956, p. 249)
Which brings me back to a more Campbellian train of thought: What are our contemporary mythologies? Is the entertainment industry, the counterpart of the ancient Greek epic theatre, able to provide substitutes? Do they function as Dutton's instructive source that can inform, enrich and expand our life?
To me the most interesting thought of The Uses of Fiction is the speculation of what would happen to an individual if it was completely deprived of any kind of fiction, art and literature. Would not eventually this most human urge and integral part of self make itself visible in one form or another? Would someone who is living in a fantasy vacuum without any fictional or illusional stimuli not ultimately create illusions, an uncontrolled outpouring of the unconscious into consciousness? Comparing this to my latest abstract I'm now clearly back at my project Borderland and the blurred frontier between reality and illusion. The thought is also very close to my original story idea which, as was mentioned earlier, will be discussed at a later stage.
Overall Dutton's text is a provoking and thought-provoking text even if there are parts that at first consideration I can't easily agree with. It's a good read but at times it feels very uncomfortable to be reduced to a being that acts merely out of animalic instinct in a Darwinian sense, even if Dutton stresses that exactly our ability to imagine and appreciate imagined worlds distinguishes us from our animalic fellows in the process of natural selection. To that effect:
Many people today do not see anything wrong about the strong winning over the weak. This is the Law of the Jungle, but I think such an attitude is foolish because it is mindless. It involves no wisdom, no reasoning, no will. Those who can do no more than follow their instincts have no control over their fate. Along with instinctive desire, we have intelligence, conscience, the ability to love, and a sense of compassion. It is the ability to use these powers to satisfy our instinctive desires, while yet keeping them under control, that distinguishes us as human beings. (Ikeda, p. 102)
A more entertaining discussion of the subject can be found in an interview with Denis Dutton in The Colbert Report.
References
Campbell, J. (1973). The hero with a thousand faces (Second.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Dutton, D. (2009). The art instinct. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Ikeda, D. (1982). Life, an enigma, a precious jewel. (C. S. Terry, Tran.). Tokyo, Japan: Kodansha International.
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