At any rate, it is significant that Carroll does not seem to believe that I have misrepresented the views of anyone I quote. Nor, of course, does he engage with any of the arguments I put forward against neural and evolutionary approaches to literature. Hand waving in the direction of books and articles by people who agree with him is not good enough. Hic Rhodus, hic salta.

The refusal to engage with critics is reminiscent of the previous suicide attempt of the humanities when Theory reigned unopposed. Many years after that fad had passed (though it is still taught to some students) people came up to me and said that they had agreed with my critique (set out in full-length books) but had not wished to admit to doing so as it would have been fatal to their advancement. And of course the leading figures had too much at stake to want to reflect on the possibility that they might have taken a disastrously wrong turn. At any rate, there was scarcely a peep from within the opaque geodesic dome of Theory. Neuro-evolutionary-prefixed humanities do not having anything like the stranglehold of Theory but the refusal to engage with critics is just as strange. As I said in my piece, plus ca change…

Those who would like to look further at the problems (to put it politely) with ‘neuro-evolutionary’ humanities could do worse than consult the many pages I devote to them in Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Mankind.

In response to David Livingstone Smith:
I can understand why Professor Smith may agree with my position while at the same wishing that I had been a little more polite. I believe, however, that biologism, supported by the two pillars of unwisdom that I have named ‘Neuromania’ and ‘Darwinitis’, is a very serious aberration and its exponents seem to be impervious or deaf to arguments conducted in the usual tone of voice.

Like Professor Smith, I think there is an important task to be carried out in trying to bridge the gap between science and the humanities. As a clinical neuroscientist who has also published over a score of books in the broad field of the humanities, as well as verse and fiction, I am deeply aware of this. Indeed my Newton’s Sleep: Two Kingdoms and Two Cultures (1995) deals with this issue.

Attempts to bridge that regrettable gap will, however, be thwarted by the capitulation of certain humanities academics to scientism, and contracting interdisciplinary marriages in which the natural sciences are seen as the senior partner. It is surely telling that neuro-evolutionary literature criticism embraced by humanist intellectuals is not balanced by a new approach to neuroscience that is shaped by the methods traditionally used by literary critics. (The results would be dismal but at least its existence would testify to the equality of the partners in the marriage of biological science and humanities.)

My own endeavours to bring the discourse of science (or the area of science with which I am most familiar) closer to literature (as in my collections of verse, particularly Between the Zones – about light and water – and my prose work The Kingdom of Infinite Space) may or may not be successful but they at least demonstrate my willingness to work positively on this, the most important intellectual task that faces us. And I have endeavoured in the 1,000 pages of my trilogy on human consciousness (published by Palgrave and beginning with The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being) to make visible the gap between ourselves and all other living creatures and to develop an account of ‘how we came to be so different’: how the organisms H sapiens came to be the kinds of persons that walk the earth today. This included examining the biological roots of how we escaped from biology. I ended this particular enterprise with a sense of how much work there was to be done.

This work will be hampered by a naïve scientism that takes it for granted that a combination of neuroscience and Darwinism (two magnificent monuments of the human intellect) will account for what it is to be a human being, such that we can understand even the nature of art, of its creation and its appreciation, by reference to the human being as an evolved brain. Of course, the brain is a necessary condition of all aspects of our consciousness, behaviour etc (How can a clinician specialising in stroke and epilepsy not have noticed that?); but it not a sufficient condition. We humans have long since gone beyond the point at which our daily lives, never mind our aesthetic activities, could be usefully illuminated by peering into our brains or referring to life in the Pleistocene era.

So while my article has criticised one particularly absurd way of closing the gap between science and the humanities, I do not oppose this as an overall aim. It is because I value it that I take exception to the kind of ‘neuro-evolutionary’ nonsense that is spreading across academe. If John Locke found it ‘ambition enough to be employ’d as an under-labourer… removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge’ it should be good enough for me. And in dealing with those who dump such rubbish, politeness should not always be the first consideration.

However, I do not sympathize with his dismissive manner, and his failure to acknowledge that those whom he (offensively) diagnoses as suffering from neuromania and Darwinitis are wrestling with a real, and profound, philosophical conundrum.

Human beings ARE organisms and organisms ARE configurations of matter. It follows from this that physics and biology (and also neuroscience) must enter into a complete explanation of any state or activity of human beings. Does physics, or biology, or neuroscience provide a SUFFICIENT explanation for, say, the effects of Shakespeare’s prose? Of course not – but I very much doubt that anyone seriously believes that they do.

Rather than sneering at efforts to bridge the gap between traditionally humanistic modes of explanation and scientific modes of explanation, it is more productive to step up to the plate and take on the more challenging task of grappling with the question how these modes of explanation can be brought into some principled relation with one another (or, if this is deemed impossible, producing a coherent and empirically plausible account of why this might be).

David Livingstone Smith
Department of Philosophy
University of New England

Boyd, Brian. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.

Boyd, Brian, Joseph Carroll, and Jonathan Gottschall, eds. Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

Carroll, Joseph. Reading Human Nature: Literary Darwinism in Theory and Practice. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011.

Carroll, Joseph, and Alice Andrews, eds. The Evolutionary Review: Art, Science, Culture. Vol. 1. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010.

Carroll, Joseph, and Alice Andrews, eds. The Evolutionary Review: Art, Science, Culture. Vol. 2. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2011.

Clasen, Mathias. “Primal Fear: A Darwinian Perspective on Dan Simmons’ Song of Kali.” Horror Studies 2, no. 1 (2011): 89-104.

Clasen, Mathias F. “Vampire Apocalypse: A Biocultural Critique of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend.” Philosophy and Literature 34, no. 2 (2010): 313-28.

Dissanayake, Ellen. Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2000.

Dutton, Denis. The Art Instinct. New York: Bloomsbury, 2009.

Gottschall, Jonathan. Literature, Science, and a New Humanities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Gottschall, Jonathan. The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Headlam Wells, Robin. Shakespeare’s Humanism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005.

Johnson, John A., Joseph Carroll, Jonathan Gottschall, and Daniel Kruger. “Hierarchy in the Library: Egalitarian Dynamics in Victorian Novels.” Evolutionary Psychology 6, no. 4 (2008): 715-38.

Nordlund, Marcus. Shakespeare and the Nature of Love: Literature, Culture, Evolution. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2007.

Saunders, Judith. Reading Edith Wharton through a Darwinian Lens: Evolutionary Biological Issues in Her Fiction. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009.

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Readers who are interested in such subjects might also be interested in a conference on consilience taking place in late April: http://consilienceconference.com/