Idiosophy

The difference between the concept of “truth” in the sciences and the humanities is endlessly fascinating. I’ve bloviated about it before, in the context of research progress. But another instance came to me recently as I was reading a book called Affective Ecologies⁵.

We use neurons when we reflect, so, maybe?

The book is about how the reader’s psychological affect is the channel by which literature affects our attitudes about the events related in a story. Prof. WvM takes the idea of “mirror neurons” and runs with it, treating mirror neurons as the physiological mechanism underlying readers’ empathy. All well and good, except, well, the mirror-neuron hypothesis seems not to be true. When it was conceived a few decades ago, it was greeted with excitement, but as people have looked at it more closely, it seems to flunk a couple of tests. That’s a shame — had the hypothesis panned out, it might have led to therapies that could have helped almost everyone on the autism spectrum.

Prof. WvM introduces the idea of mirror neurons on page 23. On page 25, she acknowledges that there are problems.

“Needless to say, the use of mirror neuron research in literary studies does have its caveats. As Kuzmičová points out, “in each attempt at fusing literary theoretical speculation with experimental cognitive science, one could identify a host of methodological problems, starting from the fact that the stimuli used in cognitive experiments usually do not bear the slightest resemblance to literary narrative”. Like Kuzmičová, I have chosen to accept most of these problems as a natural part of any interdisciplinary inquiry.”

That last line is what got me intrigued. With my scientist’s hat on, if I find one of the premises of my research is wrong, I go get a new premise. But maybe this book has a different purpose. Could it be that there’s a value to carrying out the train of logic to a conclusion, even if the starting place isn’t true? I suppose it’s reasonable to presume that something must be the physiological basis for empathy. Almost nothing of the argument depends on specifics of biology, so once the correct mechanism is discovered, the argument here can be carried over directly.

This is an interesting role for the humanities: the repository of all ideas, whether they work or not. It certainly explains why it’s necessary to keep incorrect concepts around and make grad students learn them and cite them, as I was complaining about in the older post.

A thing from Poetic Diction⁷ has stuck with me since my last reading. Owen Barfield doesn’t challenge the idea that verse began as rhythm. I, like most timid thinkers, think rhythm was there to aid the poet’s recall, but Barfield extends it further. He says rhythm is intrinsic to Nature, indeed to our own bodies: “We can only understand the origin of metre by going back to the ages when men were conscious, not merely in their heads, but in the beating of their hearts!”⁸

But he also notes a problem, as history goes on and languages change: those ancient languages used inflection instead of word order to convey meaning, which is very handy for a poet. If you need to adhere to a meter you can just rearrange the words however you need them. But as languages mature, word order becomes more important, so that putting  a word in an unusual place is still intelligible, but it sounds affected and archaic. Poetry gets harder to make.

Barfield suggests this is how rhyme came to be. It’s a much more flattering idea to a rhymer than the usual. He says there’s a general trend: Poets tend to lose ground to writers of prose, as word order becomes more strict. For an extreme example, nobody’s writing physics papers in verse any more, as Lucretius did with De rerum naturae. So poets need something else to add to their verses. Barfield suggests it’s music. “Music (if one can use a fraction here) may comprise perhaps as much as half the meaning of a modern lyric.” Modern meaning post-medieval.

He’s thinking of rhyme, first: “in rhyme we are face to face with the development, at a comparatively late date, of an entirely new system of versification.” To which he adds changing uses of sound in general, explicitly mentioning alliteration and assonance, claiming that they were “unknown to the ancients”.  I don’t agree that alliteration and assonance are quite what he’s saying they are. As I’m sure he knew from drinking beer with Tolkien,⁹ alliteration was there first as far as English poetry is concerned. But I’m more interested in the modernist experiments in sound that were under way in the 20th Century, such as the Sitwells were doing. Barfield saw the trend away from classical poetry to music happening around him, and didn’t see it stopping. That definitely turned out to be correct.

Which leads us to a path I’ve trodden before. Those modernist experiments in the UK fused with the afro-celtic musical innovations happening in America¹⁰ to create rap music in the last quarter of the century. By now, “as much as half of the meaning” is now “basically all”. Chapter IX of Poetic Diction closes with this: “It would be pure fantasy to attempt to prescribe in advance what  uses man himself shall henceforth make of the material element in language.” Barfield lived until 1997, so he overlapped hip-hop by two decades. I wonder if he ever heard a rapper. And if he did, did he recognize his prediction coming true?

ETA: this is a re-posting of an essay from May that has mysteriously vanished from the database.

Notes