Humans woke from being organisms to being something quite different.
Raymond Tallis
1 | Once they were standing upright, humans became free to use their hands to point. A pointing finger1 brings humans together in joint visual attention. Gesture, art and language indicate what it is to be another person.
2 | By putting their heads together humans ‘have transcended biology’.2
3 | Between 35,000 and 40,000 years ago there was a creative outburst among humans. Tool use, military strategy, gamesmanship, morality, personality, religion, representational art, cooking, conversation, storytelling, jewellery, tattoos, ceremonial burials, jokes and laughter – some or all of these.
Brains together create a space that cannot be stuffed back into the brain.
Raymond Tallis
We exist only to the extent that there are others.
Johann Fichte (1762–1814), philosopher
But can anyone doubt today, that all the millions of individuals and all the innumerable types and characters constitute an entity, a unit? Though free to think and act, we are held together, like the stars in the firmament, with ties inseparable. These ties we cannot see, but we can feel them.
Nikola Tesla
Every man has within himself the entire human condition.
Michel de Montaigne (1533–92), essayist
Our human world of pooled transcendence creates a theatre for our actions.
Raymond Tallis
4 | We live in the collective history made out of all of our individual and joint actions. We add to what has gone before, in art, conversation, jokes, cooking. Every human being is in debt in unknowable ways to everyone who has come before. Without shared context we would feel utterly alone. Not to feel alone is why we do the things that humans do: talk, laugh, dance, make things. Culture – whether it is art or conversation – maps our internal landscape onto something in the world outside ourselves that we can then share. We make connections to other human beings to the extent that we can agree on our shared cultural experiences. We make sense of ourselves only in relation to the narrative of our lives. And that narrative is as much written by others as it is by our own selves. We are shaped by the investment we make in others.
5 | Human beings alive today are anatomically and genetically almost identical to those living 200,000 years ago.3 But because the soft tissue of the brain leaves behind no trace in the fossil record,4 we do not know how our brains compare. Art appears to be our best evidence that we became truly modern about 40,000 years ago.
The so-called Lion Man is one of the oldest artworks yet found. Carbon dating tells us that it is around 40,000 years old. Carved out of a mammoth tusk, it was discovered in 1939, in fragments, in a cave in Germany. It seems it had been deliberately broken up – a difficult task to accomplish – but for what reason (perhaps ceremonial) can only be guessed at. The fragments – around two hundred of them – were archived and then forgotten about. About thirty years later they were rediscovered, and it was realised that they appeared to fit together. A first attempt at a reconstruction resulted in a body without a head. In 1997 additional pieces were located, and the sculpture we see today was revealed. It stands almost a foot high, a figure with the body of a man and the head of a lion.
Using fMRI, researchers have shown that when we are asked to think separately about a cat and then a man, the pre-frontal cortex is not involved. But when we are asked to imagine a cat-man the pre-frontal cortex hums into activity. It has been known for some time that the pre-frontal cortex is associated with abstract thinking. The appearance of abstract art around 40,000 years ago may be evidence that the pre-frontal cortex evolved around the same time.
Apart from tiny genetic differences that reveal themselves in variations in skin colour, height, hair texture, the ability to digest milk and so on – whatever differences there are between human beings born in the last 40,000 years appear to be differences of cultural heritage.
6 | On 18 December 1994 three cavers discovered by chance what is now known as the Chauvet cave. They found the remains of fires and animal bones. A bear skull seemed to have been deliberately placed on a rock, where it had remained for thousands of years. There were footprints still visible in the dust on the cave’s floor, left by the last human visitors, before a landslide had sealed off the entrance. The cave is most famous for the coloured shapes of animals painted on its walls, exquisite drawings of aurochs,5 horses and rhinos that appear three-dimensional and kinetic when seen by the light of flaming torches.
It has been said that creativity is a sign of a stable civilisation. If this is true, what are we to make of the fact that only time separates the paintings in the Chauvet cave – according to carbon dating around 32,000 years old – from those at Lascaux,6 a ‘mere’ 18,000 years old? Visually and viscerally there is little to distinguish between the work of artists separated by a period (commonly referred to as the ice ages) six times as long as that which separates us from the days of Plato.
Yet among the cave paintings and artefacts that date from this long era there are works that are recognisably masterpieces, and others that are clearly amateur efforts. That we feel confident that we know which are which collapses the time between then and now. Aesthetics connects us with our ice-age ancestors.
Or so we think. Certain abstractly-shaped stones found at ice-age sites have only recently been recognised as representations of the female form. They suggest females only obliquely, sometimes in the extreme abstraction of no more than three or four triangles. Biometric evidence has been called on to confirm that these stones do indeed represent women. Many of them had been lying around in boxes in museum store rooms for decades, as if waiting for the (re)discovery of abstraction by twentieth-century artists like Picasso and Brancusi. Only now can we see the stones for what they are. Perhaps art has not developed at all in 40,000 years, only come full circle – not even full circle: what else might we not be seeing?
Across the ice-age world, semicircles, zigzags and other symbols crop up in cave paintings and scored onto artefacts, as if meant to represent something: perhaps flowing blood or water, social status, wounds, arrows; perhaps they are maps of terrain or of settlements; or symbols of something else altogether that we have not yet guessed at.
Why are the ice-age models of human beings nearly all of women? Why are they mostly exaggerated: large breasts, prominently outlined vulvas, large buttocks? Some archaeologists claim them as adolescent male fantasies, others associate them with childbirth. Some find them grotesque, some beautiful. Choose a story you like best.
Why are there so few representations of humans painted on the cave walls? Why, when the paintings of animals are so naturalistic, are there almost no naturalistic images of humans?
There seems to be a hierarchy among the animals, but we do not know why.
There is no human conflict depicted in cave art,7 there are no depictions of landscapes, clouds, plants, the sun, moon or stars. Why not? We do not know.
Many of the images of animals are thickly outlined, the silhouette deeply and carefully etched. Nothing in nature has a line around it. As children, when we first learn to draw, we abstract the world by putting a line around what we take to be separate things. We transform the world into things represented by symbols.
Footprints surviving in the dust of the Chauvet cave are suggestive of dancing, as are the shapes of some surviving figurines. Remains of flutes have been found across the ice-age world.8 What kind of music was played we will presumably never know.9
In recent times cave art has been linked to shamanism. The notion that the spirit world pervades the physical world has survived in aboriginal cultures on all continents. Was cave art produced as a result of chemical enhancement? It is known that the air in underground caves is often high in carbon dioxide. Scientific experiments have been carried out which show that elevated levels of carbon dioxide produce hallucinations specifically of animals and monsters. In shamanism this state is also created by music, pain, fasting, solitude and repetition.
Why do caves and cave-like passages haunt our dreams, and not memories of our tented life on the desert plains? On the threshold of the cave, squeezed into a narrow passageway, we find ourselves at the boundary between the body – a self carapaced in the stone-like armour of a skeleton – and our limitless spirit. We describe caves as being like cathedrals, but surely it is the other way round. We built cathedrals because they reminded us of caves. In the stations and hallways of underground railways, cathedral-like spaces knitted together and accessed by tunnels – a reminiscence of the Underworld – we go on shaping and building the subterranean dream-caves of our vestigial memories.
We ask certain questions of our alien ancestors, and other generations will undoubtedly ask different questions. Even if we never find definitive answers, the questions, and our partial answers, provide clues both to our nature as questioners and to the subject of our gaze.
We recognise the beauty of this prehistoric – what used to be called primitive – art, but we do not know what we are looking at. We do not know if we can see what they saw – what we once saw. We look back at ourselves as into a dimly silvered mirror and wonder who it is we see there.
Art makes things visible.
Paul Klee (1879–1940), artist
7 | In The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins posited a complement to the gene called the meme. It was meant to account for the cultural evolution of human beings, the speeded-up rate of evolution that happened when humans got together and took themselves indoors.
Memes are units of cultural behaviour that are passed from one person to another and spread like measles, but instead of a virus it might be a fairy story that catches from generation to generation and across cultures. And so because of memes the best stories spread across the world. Memes unite to form memeplexes, which are meant to account for complex structures that take root in the world, whether in financial and legal institutions, in sport, the arts, or science. Some of these memeplexes are parasitical: spam emails, cults, alternative medicine, and religion. Winning parasite memeplexes like religion survive because of threats like hellfire. The problem, critics have pointed out, with this cultural parody of genetics is that there is no mechanism to tell us which are the good memes and which the parasitical ones. Bad genes are removed by death, but what removes bad memes? And if they are not bad, then what are they? It seems to be impossible to make any predictions about which cults will spread fastest. The meme theory is said to lack rigour. Stephen Jay Gould said memes are a meaningless metaphor. Unlike genes, memes have no actual physical existence, a curious property in a materialist model.
8 | Humans are assemblages of genes in an environment. Our conversations, the games we play, the meals we share, all the small ceremonies of life are constantly influencing, changing and shaping our brains, and influencing, changing and shaping how our genes get expressed.
9 | Evolutionists tend to concentrate on the genetic debt we owe to our deep ancestors, but we surely owe at least as great a debt to our recent ancestors. Denis Dutton, the founding editor of the web portal Arts and Letters Daily, says that our aesthetic preferences were forged in the 80,000 generations of the Pleistocene era, but as Raymond Tallis has pointed out, why privilege the Pleistocene over the five hundred generations since the first societies?10
10 | When you come across a bear in the wild it is likely that your pupils will dilate, your heart beat faster, your intestines contract, your muscle tension change, and that you will sweat and produce extra adrenaline. The brain processes these changes into a feeling. In this case not a good one. Sometimes when you listen to the right kind of music your pupils dilate, your heart beats faster, your intestines contract, your muscle tension changes, you sweat and produce extra adrenaline. The brain processes these changes into a feeling. Our fear of bears can be explained from a survival point of view, as reflex reactions. When we listen to music we have coopted those reactions, but what is it in the airwaves that we are reacting to? We are reacting to a shared cultural heritage that has been encoded on the page and realised in a performance. We are responding to collective and singular human expressions of meaning that have meaning only for other humans. We are tempted to elevate the survival explanation because it comes first in an evolutionary story, just as we want to elevate the universe at the Big Bang over everything that came afterwards because it comes first in a cosmological story. A symphony, which comes at the end of this story, is physically insignificant compared to the Big Bang; all its significance is human-scale.
Musical behaviour such as chanting, singing, dancing and playing instruments is universal among humans and even societies that lack writing and complex organizations practise highly developed rituals based on forms of music.
Jill Cook, Ice Age Art
If science breaks us apart, art puts us back together.
Jonah Lehrer
Art is the nearest thing to life: it is a mode of amplifying experience.
George Eliot
Works of art have and need no justification but themselves. Art is a self-justifying activity in the same way (probably) that life is, asserting its own importance instinctually, and vindicating its importance not by where it is going but by the intensity with which it is.
Brigid Brophy (1929–95), novelist and critic
It is only our words bind us together and make us human.
Montaigne
11 | For the philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), language has meaning because it grants us the power to value ourselves as a community.
12 | Language is a reality between people. Like motion it is meaningless except as a relationship between bodies. Motion means nothing in a universe with only one thing in it. And so with language the existence of at least one other human being is necessary for it to become what it is, an agency of meaning. We know that there are other things in motion so long as we are willing to accept that there are things that are separate from each other. Language becomes a reality between people, and then, paradoxically, out of the assumption of separateness that gives language its force, we may find, once more, occasionally, in love and empathy, that the boundaries dissolve between the self and another.
13 | In later life Ludwig Wittgenstein11 acknowledged that words do more than express facts. There are many ways – perhaps an infinite number of ways – in which words can be exchanged between humans meaningfully, each exchange understood in its own context as, say, a command, a promise or an emotion. Of course what we mean by commands, promises, etc. also has to be defined within some context. In this way meaning is nested, rather as Gödel’s theorem nests mathematics within itself.
Ludwig Wittgenstein in full Biblical style, Tractatus Logico-philosophicus
The meaning of a word is its use in language.
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
14 | Words are discrete, reality flows. But we do not use words one at a time. There is conversation, and when conversation flows language becomes the integral of its parts and meaning emerges.
15 | Words that win a stay of execution or proclaim a sentence of death. Words that win love. Words that have the power to hurt. Words and their manifest manifesting powers.
16 | If talking really does cure, it does it not through direct physical means, molecule on molecule, but through the intermediary of meaning and understanding.
He never fully realised … what a deep channel they cut; it never occurred to him that these words, uttered loudly, squarely and without any tinge of false embarrassment but boldly and unabashedly, do not just disappear without trace … but sink deeply like pearls into the silt of social intercourse and always end up finding a home in an oyster shell.
Ivan Goncharov (1812–91), Oblomov
Many people hesitate to put in a good word for the good and redden with embarrassment at the thought, but think nothing of throwing in some casual, flippant remark, little suspecting that unfortunately, such remarks, too, do not just disappear into thin air but leave behind their own long-lived, sometimes indelible traces of evil.
Ibid.
Narrative is the basic modality in which human mind functions.
Thomas Berry, cultural historian
Our cortex makes up stories about the world and softly hums them to us to keep us from getting scared at night.
Leif Finkel, a bio-engineer at the University of Pennsylvania
17 | There is no escape, except by dying (and temporarily from drugs and suchlike), from our own existence. Life may be meaningless, but even the most unplanned or aimless life becomes a biography over time; a story that seems to have some quality of inevitability about it. Things have a way of seeming inevitable whichever way they turn out. The universe, too, is inescapable, and – like life – has a look of inevitability about it when seen in retrospect.
It is far from clear whether or not it is possible to construct an account of the universe free of our perspective as storytellers. It is our human nature to assume that everything means something, even when we have no idea what that something is. We live as if there is meaning.
That we are not the end point of creation is clear enough, yet we are the first, it seems, who can tell the story.12 Our telling of the story may be crucial to the tale itself, a philosophical conundrum out of which there appears to be no escape. We are in the universe. There is no outside from which to tell the story, only outsides that we create in imagination.
The compulsion to construct narrative is the default mode of being human. Hindsight as foresight makes no sense, said W.H. Auden, but we have no choice as scientists but to tell the story from here, and rerun it as if it ran forward all along. That is the price we must pay for having a cosmology at all.
18 | i We are not always in control of the stories our bodies and our brains are telling us. A person with Capgras Syndrome loses her emotional ability to identify those around her, even though she retains her capacity to recognise them intellectually. If a close family member enters the room, a large gap opens up between the knowledge that here, say, is her mother, and the emotional feeling that this is a stranger. In order to bridge the gap a story is constructed. Typically, the story is that this person must be an impostor, someone who looks exactly like her mother but is in fact an alien or a zombie. Capgras Syndrome appears to be proof that emotion trumps intellect. We feel our way through the world. Even our most intellectual thinking is a kind of processed emotional response to the world. In Cotard’s Syndrome all the emotional centres of the brain become disconnected from the senses, and the subject concludes that he must be dead. In Anton’s Syndrome the subject is blind but won’t admit it, fumbles around the world as if she can see. Those with blindsight claim that they cannot see, even though they can point to a named object when asked to. Patients with anosognosia believe that everything is well even when they have serious injuries. There are those who cannot make abstractions13 and are overwhelmed by every fact; everything elicits a connection to something else. For some the body is at war with itself, one hand doing up shirt buttons as the other hand undoes them.
ii In brain studies it is often the abnormalities that throw light on the complexities of what it is to be normal. Case studies of neurological disorders are important because they reduce the human experience to something against which ‘normal’ experience can be measured and more fully described, but we can become so mesmerised by abnormal functioning that we discount what is normal. We are inclined to elevate abnormal skills: those who have no power to forget, or who can manipulate long numbers together in their heads. We see that certain functions can be heightened when brains go wrong, but forget that it is at the expense of something missing or broken. We tend to downgrade the normal merely because it is usual, but we might wonder why nature goes to so much trouble to make us as similar as we are.
In this scherzarade of one’s thousand one nightinesses that sword of certainty which would identified the body never falls.
James Joyce (1882–1941), Finnegans Wake
Humans are the animals that believe the stories they tell about themselves.
Mark Rowlands, The Philosopher and the Wolf
19 | The American newscaster Dan Rather once said of the Chernobyl disaster: ‘If it weren’t for the wind, no one would know this story.’ This is partly true; what he omits to add is that without human beings to tell the story there never are stories.
All our inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
Gustave Flaubert (1821–80), novelist, in a letter
20 | In AD 350 Sappho first applies the epithet ‘silver’ to the moon.
Everywhere I go, I find a poet has gone before me.
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), founding father of psychoanalysis
It is quite possible – overwhelmingly probable, one might guess – that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology.
Noam Chomsky, linguist and philosopher
Shall we for ever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another?
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever lived.
James Baldwin (1924–87), writer
A novel isn’t a piece of ethics or sociology. It is a release of certain energies and a dramatisation of how these energies might be controlled and given shape.
Colm Toíbín, novelist
21 | Every book owes something, perhaps almost everything, to all books that have gone before, is part of one collective book that the human race has been writing since The Epic of Gilgamesh. The influence of this collective book stretches beyond its writers and readers.
22 | The evolutionary epic is probably the best myth we will ever have, wrote the biologist E.O. Wilson. But it is also the first account of creation to spurn both meaning and metaphor.
23 | The ancient Greeks had two ways of telling the story of creation: through logos and through mythos.14 They mixed the two ways of storytelling together. In trying to understand the universe and the human condition logos can take us only so far.