J ÜRGEN S CHLAEGER Preface The title of this volume takes us right away to Mark Turner’s seminal book The Literary Mind, which has opened up a new field of investigation for many literary scholars. It is, therefore, more than appropriate that we borrow the formula to move the debate forward. I will begin this introduction with a quotation from the 17th century, then move on to tell you how I became interested in cognition and the neurosciences as a new perspective for understanding literature, and finish off with a story about aliens who have great problems with music. On the way, I’ll raise a couple of general questions and points which had always been with us during the conference on which this volume is based. In 1643 Sir Thomas Browne famously reminded his readers that to explore and to know the internal worlds, the minds of human beings was more urgent and more important than to explore and know the external world. And he insisted on this preference although he was very much a child and part of an era, in which exploration, experiment, in short the advancement of a scientific view of nature and the human body as part of it made huge progress and caused tremendous excitement. Here is the quotation: I could never content my contemplation with those general pieces of wonders, the flux and reflux of the sea, the increase of Nile, the conversion of the Needle to the North, and have studied to match and parallel those in the more obvious and neglected pieces of Nature, which without further travell I can doe in the Cosmography of my self; we carry with us the wonders, we seek without us: There is all Africa, and her prodigies in us; we are that bold and adventurous piece of Nature, which he that studies wisely learnes in a compendium, what others labour at in a divided piece and endless volume. (78) As I have shown elsewhere (Schlaeger), for a short period of time internal and external exploration were pursued side by side. Both activities, their various aspects, dangers and promises were documented by the same metaphorical domains. But the grand division of labour between the two cultures was already in the making and eventually each mind-set went its very different way of understanding the world. Progress in the knowledge of the inner self and the operations of the mind was mainly and often solely seen as moral progress and stayed as such firmly in the hands of theology and philosophy. The price to be paid for what Bacon had stated in his Advancement of Learning and his Novum Organon (122), i.e. that the Fall did not originate from man’s desire to know, that is to understand the world scientifically, but from his presumptuous wish to gain God- J ÜRGEN S CHLAEGER 2 like knowledge of good and evil, that price had to be paid by separating the two kinds of knowledge radically and it was not before the rise of psychology as a university discipline that there were some indications that things were changing. But it was going to be a long, drawn-out campaign. The fact that psychology for a long time has had and even today still has equally strong footholds in both camps, shows that the fundamental conflict is still with us. Freud tried to bridge the chasm by a curious mixture of scientific posturing and hermeneutics, but that we are still in the middle of an undecided struggle for precedence can be seen from the resistance of the humanities to claims by the sciences, and in particular by neurobiology and the neurosciences that everything that is considered the territory of the arts and the humanities will eventually be explained by scientific methods, i.e. as emanating from and in fact consisting of processes in the material world. The neurochemistry of love as an acceptable answer to an age-old problem in human life is still anathema for many academics who work in the humanities. But, on the other hand, advances in the neurosciences, in emotions theory and in understanding the complex connections between brain structures and some salient features of human cognition have made so much progress that they do not only constitute a serious challenge to, but also a huge opportunity for the humanities to understand the relationship between brain and mind, nature and culture better than ever before. This is why we organized a conference on “The Literary Mind” and why we publish the papers given. They show that there is no need for intellectualtual warfare. I hope we are not in a state of war. There is no battle to be decided once and for all. I rather think the papers show that we are - whatever our deepest convictions in this matter - in a win/ win situation, a scenario in which everybody can profit if only we keep our minds open enough to really listen to what the other side has to offer. I now come to the second part of my introductory remarks - to the story of how I came to be interested in the neurosciences and in cognition theory - not because I think everybody will be dying to know more about me, but because over decades of a professional life as a professor of English and Comparative Literature, the questions and problems for which I did not find satisfactory answers in my own discipline accumulated and in the end it felt as if the growing surplus and excess of such questions cried out for a paradigm shift, at least for radically new avenues of thought and theorizing. Although I did my fair share of close reading and new critical interpretations of texts in my early days as an Oxford undergraduate, I had the great opportunity to do my further qualifications as Wolfgang Iser’s research assistant i.e. in an intellectual environment in which interpretation was not seen as an established and successful practice but was cultivated as a theoretical problem. Yet even there and then it was obvious and taken for granted that the answers to these problems had to be found in theories of the mind such as phenomenology and aesthetics and not in the physics of the brain, in its Preface 3 architecture or the specific character of brain processes such as blending, compression etc. But, in spite of some disappointment with the long term productivity of such theorizing, the tendency to look at the theoretical side of all aspects of understanding literature remained with me when I turned to research about writing the self, i.e. diaries, memoirs and autobiographies from the late 16 th to the 20 th century. One of the most fascinating aspects of this research was to see how the act of writing changed the people who did the writing and how these changes registered in the language. Maybe they thought it would be easy to sit down and produce a record of the kind of person they believed they were or they would love to present for future generations, but whatever their intentions there is plenty of evidence that the act of turning inward by exploring the past and present self in writing led to a recreation of the self and of the language needed to grasp something so complex. (The rise of the novel, from this perspective cannot only be seen as an offshoot of autobiographical writing, but it also changed radically the parameters for writing the self). There is obviously something very exciting going on in a mind that tries to “represent” itself in the act of writing. So against this background Norman Doidge’s claim that “thought changes the physical make-up of the brain”, that there are direct and highly fluid relationships between what is at the centre of cultural activities and the physiological make-up of the human brain, is not only welcome support from the other side of the fence, but it also shows that one can learn a lot more from the speculations of neuroscientists and cognition theoreticians than from literary theory. I have also gained something very valuable from Alan Palmer’s and Lisa Zunshine’s work on the constitution of the self in fictional texts: i.e. that it is culture-specific and that it has biased any Theory of Mind in favour of books and reading them. A broader approach based on the neurosciences could put that in an enlightening historical perspective. At least there should be some caution with the claim that writing as the medium for self-constitution is a cultural universal. Later on I came to be interested in emotions and the different uses literature makes of them. It is obvious that literary studies did not have to offer much in this field beyond highly sophisticated interpretations of emotions. And this is a point one has to make here as well as in many other aspects of the problems and questions we are discussing: so far, the neuroscientific threat is no reason to give up completely the old ways and change sides, for one thing is even more obvious today than ever before: literature may tell us more about what goes on in the brain than the neurosciences can tell us what goes on in literature. In other words we can bring more evidence for the workings of the human mind into the laboratories than any of the breathtaking imaging machinery that are designed to explore the Africa within us. You remember I promised a little story about aliens and music as the third part of my introduction. Here it is: J ÜRGEN S CHLAEGER 4 The scanning devices of scientifically and technologically far advanced aliens pick up signals of a violin concert from earth during their journey through the universe and some of these signals strike them as showing highly unusual patterns. Since they have no arts and music in their civilization they are curious to know what the source of these somehow intriguing patterns is. So they send a robot to earth to find out. After some time the robot comes back and reports that the noise consists of complex wave patterns (which the aliens had already realised when they first measured them) and that these wave structures were produced by contraptions made of wood and metal and strings and valves and some unknown life-form mainly consisting of water. “Ah! ”, said the aliens “Is that all? ” and travelled on. Now, I don’t have to spell out the implications of this story at great length. One could simply dismiss it as a bad story based on bad science, but may be there are a couple of lessons to be drawn from it after all. If you leave culture out of the account you will end up with blind atoms doing something that has no meaning, only structure. If you investigate the physics of a cultural phenomenon you may get information about the how, but not about the what - let alone the pleasure it can bring. If we all agree that the brain would be nothing, probably would not have evolved at all the way it did, without culture, but also, and equally obvious, that there would be no culture without the potential that billions of nerve cells working in unison holds in store, then it is their cooperation which makes the music. The quarrel for precedence is, in view of that, futile. If the arts and the humanities help the brain to turn itself into mind, i.e. to use its potential in ever new ways, then activities like these have legitimacy in their own right. It is only when the humanities masquerade as science, that is speak with an authority underpinned by a truth claim that they are out of their own depth and run the risk of losing out on the sciences. And equally, it is only when the sciences masquerade as doing the work of culture better they will be out of their depth. Obviously science as we know it has in some sense been so successful because it decided to make the reckoning without the host: the humaneness of the human brain. Equally obvious, scientific thought is not the ultima ratio of brain work. The literary mind is the best evidence we have for that. Maybe we need another science to understand what is really going on, a science that recognises “fuzziness, excess, indeterminacy, compression and blending, plasticity and its most expert agents - the Artists” who, as Per Aage Brandt has it, “are cognitive researchers in the wild” as central to brain work (Brandt 183f). I at least expect, we need a much softer science before we can use it to make literary studies harder. And as long as this is not the case, literature will rightly remain a provocative sore in the soft underbelly of science, which, unfortunately most scientists think they don’t have. Preface 5 Listen to what Friedrich Cramer, director of the Max-Planck-Institute for experimental Medicine in Göttingen from 1962-1991, has to say about complex structures in living things: The complexity of living things marks the limit of what we can scientifically know: It is not that we cannot describe all the many details of nucleid acids or proteins. But their interaction in subsystems and higher forms of biological organisms confronts us with unpredictable network-systems for they show what I would like to call “fundamental complexity. Most scientists still believe that the only method to do science properly is to adopt the venerable Cartesian procedure: “If a problem is too big or too complex, then divide it into a set of sub problems which you can solve step by step. This approach is predicated on the assumption, that after having solved all the sub-problems you can put the solutions together like the pieces of a mosaic in order to solve the big, complex problem. In complex multi-parameter systems which operate with high density feedback processes such an assumption and its implicit promises are fundamentally flawed. Such systems are not reversible. I call such systems which are characterized by the fact that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, fundamentally complex systems. In such systems there is no reversibility. They cannot be understood by the laws of classical, reversible but only by non-reversible thermodynamics. It would, therefore, be simply intellectual sloppiness to assume that in biochemistry or neurophysiology the total picture of a living organism can be put together like a mosaic from bits and pieces.” (Cramer 223f.) Self-organization (auto-steering) is a characteristic of the system as a whole. In specific circumstances a system which shows a high degree of complexity organizes itself. (228; quotations my translations) So much for now. Let me return again at the end, before Gesa Stedman gets down to business in hand, to the 17 th century, in fact to a contemporary of Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), Andrew Marvell (1621-1678): Meanwhile the Mind, from pleasures less, Withdraws into its happiness: The Mind, that Ocean where each kind Does streight its own resemblance find; Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other Worlds, and other Seas; Annihilating all that’s made To a green Thought in a green Shade (“The Garden” ll 41-48, 49f.) Works Cited Bacon, Francis. A Critical Edition of the Major Works. Ed. Brian Viekers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. J ÜRGEN S CHLAEGER 6 Brandt, Per Aage. “Form and Meaning in Art.” The Artful Mind. Ed. Mark Turner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 171-188. Browne, Sir Thomas. The Major Works. Ed. C.A. Patrides. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984. Cramer, Friedrich. Chaos und Ordnung - Die komplexe Struktur des Lebendigen. Frankfurt a. M.: Insel Verlag, 1993. Doidge, Norman. The Brain that Changes Itself. New York: Penguin Books, 2007. Marvell, Andrew. The Complete Works. Ed. George deF. Lord. London: Everyman’s Library, 1984. Palmer, Alan. Fictional Minds. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Schlaeger, Jürgen. “Parallel Explorations.” Studies in Travel Writing 3 (1999): 27-46. Turner, Mark. The Literary Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2006.