Jeffery Donaldson
MY SUBJECT here, simply put, is the relationship between spirit and the neurological brain. I hope to translate what would normally (and dismissively) be called an “analogous” relationship between a brain’s synapses and an individual’s spirit—in Frye, so closely linked to if not synonymous with powers of the imagination—into a contiguous narrative that shows how one may be related to the other (that is, spirit to brain cell) as a blossom is to its seed, and not as a painting of a flower is to the real flower. In Words With Power, Frye himself comes near to reflecting on these matters when he briefly considers the relationship one might discern between imaginative “emblems of eternity” (like the ouroboros) and the “designs” of modern science: “I am aware that Kekulé’s discovery of the circular structure of the benzene molecule was inspired by a dream of the ouroboros, just as I am aware that the dna molecule has affinities with a double spiral. But I am not sure what to do with these analogies” (WP 164). If you trace this passage back to Frye’s ruminations in the corresponding notebook, you find him completing the thought thus: “Nothing is discovered out there that isn’t in some sense already here” (LN 1:286. This sentence actually stands in place of the one that begins “But I am not sure what to do”). This gives us one side of the puzzle— that is, that the myths and metaphors of science can only show us what is already a part of the mind’s mental machinery.
At other times in the late notebooks, Frye appears to reflect on the other side of the puzzle—that is, the degree to which those powers of the mind are themselves evolved in terms that we might come better to understand. He writes,
[M]an is born using his consciousness in the service of the selfish gene…. The purgatorial process transfers power to the instrument of consciousness: the word. The relevance of machinery is that our behaviour is mechanical now: purgatory reverses this to the control of mechanism. (WP 247)
His point here is that a mechanical process is set in motion that has its roots in our evolving genes (our “selfish” ones, Frye allows, in deference to Richard Dawkins’ theory).1 Elsewhere, he makes this implication more or less explicit: “There is … a human and moral order that has developed out of the process of natural evolution” (WP 142). This is a mechanical process, one that might entrap us (and condemn us to the potential horrors of a misconceived social Darwinism)2 if it were not also true that we can and must rise above our own roots via what Nietzsche called a Will to Power (WP 174), a transcending power of mind that gives us control of our own natural machinery. The evolutionary process itself is a purgatorial one, this being the principle myth that governed Darwin’s own work: the long arduous process by which human being climbs clear of its own roots in nature on its way to some fuller promise.
I hope to fill in the picture of how, in evolutionary terms, we might think of spirit as arising from physical nature. Understanding spirit as a condition of evolved brain habits, while understanding those brain habits as themselves a function of spirit, or metaphoric mind, can produce the kind of interpenetrative vision that Frye himself might have countenanced. I offer a small example of how this contiguity between brain chemistry and spirit might manifest itself in our imaginative and scientific thinking. Even more specifically, I want to draw a line between Daniel Dennett’s theory of how intelligent consciousness has evolved to the advantage of homo sapiens and Frye’s theory of how the Bible’s Job gains an “access of power” when he first and at long last gains an apperception of the conscious orders of experience granted to him by God. Both writers have their sights fixed on the particular features of human experience that relate words with potency and that reveal, as Wallace Stevens says, the precious portents of our own powers.
In his long processional of rhetorical questions near the end of the story of Job, one of the things God does not ask his wounded patriarch is: “Where were you when I created symbolic thinking,” or even, and more to the point, “who told you you could think?” In his account in Words With Power of this apocalyptic exchange between God and Job, Frye shows that the question is implicit in God’s entire speech, where the advantages of being able to think consciously are obvious to any reader. The question of when a person becomes conscious seems to be the actual focus of this particular discussion of Job among Frye’s published many.3 Job, we might say, evolves toward an understanding of the world in symbolic terms after enduring a series of trials, both at the hands of Satan, who takes much away from him, and from his accusing friends, who tempt him with what we come to see as more primitive ways of responding to his situation. We might say that he lurches or leaps to this understanding in a manner very unreminiscent of evolutionary crawl— that is, as soon as God speaks and lays all clear. But surely the earlier parts of the experience—the loss, the desperate and failing attempts to come to terms—were equally necessary to Job’s being able finally to ‘see’ the cosmic orders in their proper context. The process by which Job comes to be redeemed can be seen on the one hand as an evolution in the understanding of his place and purpose—that is, a change in how he thinks about things (I return to this point shortly). Something evolves in the story. At the same time, the story of Job’s growth of mind may offer us a unique perspective on the story of human evolution itself, our species’ own growth of mind, if you like, or consciousness. This is something the Bible and other literary works are seen to do: offer insights, metaphoric or otherwise, into what we have come to understand as secular or scientific processes (as for instance where Frye himself argues that the story of creation in Genesis provides us with an allegory of how in psychological terms we think of ourselves as waking up from dream states; see GC 108). Critics, then, have found ways of relating literature’s handling of experience in myth and metaphor to science’s descriptive modellings of experience. I’m hoping it will be clear that the method I am working with here, while somewhat similar, leans in the direction of something beyond mere analogy.
We need, then, a brief account of how intelligent consciousness has evolved to the advantage of its host, and so we turn to Daniel C. Dennett’s always exciting and controversial work in evolutionary biology, the neurosciences, and cognitive philosophy. Director of the Centre for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University in Boston, Dennett is one of America’s leading philosophers of mind and cognition. In his books Darwin’s Dangerous Idea and Kinds of Minds, Dennett investigates, among a variety of issues relating to biological and human evolution, the question of when human being became human. He attempts to isolate and investigate the blurry line that separates those like us who are part of the consciously mindful orders and those of the animal kingdom who for one reason or another do not, on a behavioural level, manifest the same mental states or powers.
We begin by noting that evolution, for Dennett, is an entirely unconscious, unintentionally directed phenomenon. There is no divine agent handling the puppet strings from above, in Dennett’s picture, no greybeard in any guise drawing species upward toward a desired or ideal state. There is only the arduous and millenniums-slow labour of trial and error (a purgatorial process, as Frye conceived of it), survival of the fittest, where the “errors,” the mutations that are less well adapted to their conditions, get knocked off and the fitter forms live to mutate another day. In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Dennett characterizes these two conceptions of agency in evolution by way of what he calls the “Sky Hook” and the “Crane” model, respectively. A sky-hook scenario, as you may guess, is one in which some external influence (mythopoeically from “above”) participates in the evolutionary process either to initiate it or purposefully direct it in such a way that it concludes with us at the top of the evolutionary pile, resplendent in our biological complexity. Alternatively, the crane model is one in which the evolutionary process pulls itself up, as it were, by its own bootstraps, grounded in a process that requires nothing more than good old-fashioned cell-by-cell mutation and regular reproductive variation.
This principle of crane-style evolution—as opposed to sky-hook— is the calling card of strictly materialist scientists and evolutionary thinkers and is a central axiom in Dennett’s work. The main objective of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea is to put to rest any notion that a vestige of sky-hook evolution may be preserved in our understanding of how we got here. It seems no accident to me that Dennett’s two conceptions of evolution align with Frye’s mythopoeic axis mundi and his theory of the Four Variations.4 Elements of the mountain variation align rather well with the notion of a top-down power descending from above to change or influence creation below. Just so, elements of the furnace variation align with the crane model, where the world that “evolves” must be built from the ground up by purgatorial hard labours, bootstrap refining processes, and sheer grunting “unconscious” ingenuity. In a while, I will be venturing another example of how Frye’s model of the axis mundi may be mapped onto the models of Dennett’s science as a way of revealing their initiatives and orientation; to be sure, it is a rich and suggestive activity. Suffice it to observe here, as Frye himself did, that Darwin’s model of evolution, as one might expect of a 19th-century thinker, with its fromthe-ground-up orientation, betrays a manifestly post-Romantic bias, in terms of where the creative “power” we find all about us is seen to originate.5
We move now from the concept of crane-style evolution to the issue of how consciousness itself has evolved in this bootstrapping fashion, without divine intervention. I say again that Job is made to be conscious in more ways than one, though the lines between those ways blur. God bestows consciousness on Job, as he does on any human soul, by simply giving it to him in a sky-hook fashion (“Who has put wisdom in the inward parts, or given understanding to the mind?” Job 38:36). Job also passes through a series of experiences that in the end make him, alone, “conscious” of his place in the created cosmos, in a way that he had never been before; his having the “right” thoughts at last, now that he can “see” ( Job 42:5), has much to do with what he has survived. As Frye writes, “[W]hat is restored to Job at the end of the poem is in a considerable measure the world of what Job has recreated by his own endurance” (NLBR 577). Job evolves. Dennett’s evolving genotype (this term for the genetic constitution of the individual can be used as a metonymic shorthand for the individual itself ) is also conscious in these ways. Homo sapiens’ experience of being conscious has everything to do with the evolution of conscious thinking and the gradually evolved ability to have certain kinds of thoughts in certain contexts. That is what, for Dennett, is the assurance of this particular genotype’s election, if you like, among the earth’s creatures.
Somewhere along the line of human evolution, something must have happened to the brain to incarnate whatever neurological processes we associate with a having of consciousness. Dennett has stood in opposition to a host of cognitive philosophers, among them John Searle, David Chalmers, Joseph Levine (see Sweet Dreams 8–13), who with individual nuances argue that there must be a seat of consciousness in the mind, a place where the “youness” of you is housed, a central meaner, a homunculus or observing agent that in your brain acts as a kind of audience for all the thoughts and sensations you are having, where the experience of “what it is like to be you” is existentially grounded. Without such a property of mind, we would all be zombies, they argue.6 I think it is worth noting here that the idea of a central meaner in the brain is not that different from the notion of a Jobian, cosmological central meaner, the holder of creation’s puppet strings, who sets things in motion but seems for the most part to stand back and watch how it all unfolds. That is, what cognitive philosophers describe as the seat of consciousness may in metaphoric terms be a version of the watchmaker god, certainly as far as the notion of being an audience is concerned. And there is an interesting corollary here. We feel driven to describe the workings of a cosmos whose mythic maker, as such, variously controls or observes what goes on inside the space it has created. But what ends up getting embodied in those descriptions, Frye always showed, are the workings of our own minds, whose conditions and limits are in essence what we are trying to grasp.
While Dennett’s own descriptions of the nature of consciousness have themselves evolved over thirty years, he has never swayed from his conviction that there is no central meaner in the brain, no homunculus or “little you” manipulating all the strings inside you. There are only the infinitely complex activities of neurons, whose synapses make up what we think of as our consciousness. We could even say that those synapses make up the “illusion” of consciousness, so long as we remember not to lose sight of Frye’s belief in the potential reality of illusion (WP 129, 131). What Dennett has modified over the years are the metaphors he uses to try to describe the phenomenon of consciousness.
For most of the time between the publication of Consciousness Explained and his most recent volume on the subject, Sweet Dreams, he has worked with what he calls “the multiple drafts theory” of consciousness:
Mental contents become conscious not by entering some special chamber in the brain, not by being transduced into some privileged and mysterious medium, but by winning the competitions against other mental contents for domination in the control of behaviour…. One of the most effective ways for a mental content to become influential is for it to get into position to drive the language-using parts of the controls. (Kinds of Minds 155)
In Sweet Dreams, Dennett refines his theory of consciousness in response to his critics of the past twenty years. He describes the experience of consciousness as “fame in the brain.” In comparing his multiple-drafts theory to his “fame in the brain” idea, one difference that occurs to me is that Dennett has steered slightly away from the idea that language is related, in a precisely determinative way, to what is most conscious in us. Doing so opens up consciousness to states beyond those in which you are primarily just “talking to yourself,” or preparing to. One reason he might have steered away from such a notion is that it may appear to favour the idea of a goal in consciousness—that consciousness, in order to be consciousness, is trying to get somewhere, that is, into the language controlling areas of the brain. This would be but a hair’s breadth from the notion that consciousness is not consciousness until it enters a “special chamber.” What Dennett wants is a metaphor that doesn’t suggest our mental contents are trying to get into any position whatsoever. The theory he now calls “fame in the brain,” alternatively, speaks to what is in essence an echoing property, a self-reflexive looping mechanism in the brain that “beefs up” the conscious-seemingness, or “clout,” of certain neurons as they fire with greater and greater frequency “above” those neurons of other thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations that are firing less frequently or intensely.
If you think of neurons firing with increased frequency as generating a kind of heat, then consciousness, Dennett argues, is the heat so generated. The experience, or experiencer, of the heat, Dennett believes, does not stand over and against or opposite to the generation of the heat itself. Trying another trope, if all firing neurons in your brain made a noise, consciousness would be those sounds that are heard above the crowd, as it were. But if you go with this metaphor, you would need to take care not to think that there is a distinct sound maker and a distinct sound hearer. Dennett writes, “[W]e need to explain away this seductive metaphor … the searchlight of attention, by explaining the functional powers of attention-grabbing without presupposing a single attention-giving source” (Sweet Dreams 161–162). There is a kind of metaphoric unity between a network of neurons firing and that network’s experience of itself as firing. The paradox may come clear when you try to think of what it feels like when you touch the skin on your index finger to the skin on your thumb. Which is feeling which? Impossible to say. There is only the “feeling” of skin. One neuron can connect to or “rub against” another neuron, and each will feel, or “realize,” the other’s friction. (Look up M.C. Escher’s drawing of “Drawing Hands” [1948] and you’ll get the picture.) Visualize the still larger context. If whole populations of neuron networks chugged away in relation to one another, each in a sense experiencing or registering the impacts of others, it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to say how precisely the totality of their experiences were gathered together or where precisely it was centred. Frye can help us here: it is everywhere and nowhere at once, a vast array of centres whose circumference is infinite.
Let us stay with this idea for a moment. The human brain is made up of neurons that fire connections to other neurons across gaps called synapses. These synapses and their behaviours vis-à-vis the stimulation of brain cells are of three general kinds, serving three different purposes. There are what we would call unconscious neurological inputs and outputs that drive and regulate the heart, the lungs, and many other, though not all, of our physical processes. There are also those inputs and outputs that have to do with emotional responses and physical states, such as pain, hunger, the appetites, our sexual drives, signals that still do not appear to think about themselves as such, that may fall short of our being aware of them, but which “struggle” or “compete” with other inputs to rise into consciousness—that is, to the point at which you will find yourself consciously thinking “I am in pain,” or “I need to eat something.” (Freud’s theory of the subconscious obviously becomes relevant here.) And finally there are those inputs and outputs that we call our conscious thinking states, and they include the thoughts and feelings we have and that we know we are having (i.e., whose having we experience), our rational thinking, our active impressions and feelings, our imaginative powers of mind, and the further, though not necessary, association of all of these with their potential or actual representation in language. These latter neurological events, Dennett argues—and this is one of his most controversial claims—are not different in kind from the other brain functions, only in degree. The degree of our awareness of them has to do with how much “clout” the synapses associated with them have in the brain at any one particular moment. “Clout” is a function of the degree to which synapses, or networks of them, repeat. The more they fire repeatedly—that is, the more they are stimulated—the more they come to “dominate” the other synapses that are, as we might describe it, competing for the same right to determine action and response. This is precisely how they are conscious to us, or rather how there is consciousness.
I would like to venture another aside here, as promised earlier, to note how effectively this theory of levels of consciousness can be mapped, once more, onto Frye’s axis mundi. With a bottom-up, post-Romantic orientation, the unconscious neurological inputs/outputs that drive the body’s organs align with the furnace variation. Remember especially that, in Frye’s thinking, buried mythopoeic worlds, such as Atlantis (symbolized as under the sea), are conceptualized as a source of creative power, not a manifestation of it. It inaugurates that subconscious that we do in fact “visit” when we can (as in the cave variation), but is not itself a place that we are conscious of (we know our brains are telling our hearts something, we will just never hear what it is). Next are those neurological inputs, which, as they grow stronger and stronger, approach a being-conscious, like pain and hunger. These align with the cave variation, the “something subordinated, neglected, or underestimated in power which is excluded from the thought … yet is dangerous to ignore” (WP 248). When such inputs become strong enough—that is, resisting our powers to ignore them—they rise up into our conscious thoughts: “I’m getting hungry, I need to eat something.” Next come our actual conscious thoughts, the networks of neurons that fire with sufficient frequency or intensity that they dominate the landscape, have more “clout” in relation to the inputs that are not quite so loud. These align with the garden variation (where in the post-Romantic orientation we do most of our living), our conscious rational and metaphoric thinking, where thoughts mingle and identify, circulate about one another as in a dance. As for the final mountain variation, this is the “area” that Dennett comes to terms with when he works to describe “consciousness itself,” the consciousness of consciousness, the experience of being sentient, the “what it is like to be you.”7 Dennett sees this level of consciousness as the haunted part—at least as it would have to be, he would say, in the minds of his adversaries—where the elusive bugaboo of that homunculus wanders about in your brain thinking about you, or rather thinking for you (a pretty fair definition of paranoia, when you think about it). It is no surprise that Dennett would portray this “highest” state as essentially alien or remote when thought of as a homunculus, quite specifically the illusion of what is in reality a solely mechanical operation (note that Frye portrays such alienation imagery as mechanical in WP 248). For Dennett, such higher states are not different in kind from the “lower” states of everyday conscious thinking, and therefore in a sense don’t exist, at least not as a separate level or medium of mind. There is, then, no obvious distinction between garden and mountain variations in Dennett, between your conscious thoughts and your sentient experience of those conscious thoughts as such. The higher thoughts are merely those lower thoughts thinking about each other (see the trick of index finger and thumb above). Though he may not distinguish these higher thoughts of consciousness from the mechanisms that constitute them, Dennett nonetheless finds himself trying to account for the “hallucination” of consciousness—that is, why it is that we should experience consciousness at all as a “special medium” inside us (Sweet Dreams 162). The attempt to account for it at all suggests that there is an experiential distinction to make. There is ink to be spilled in accounting for even just the illusion of a real experience that won’t go away. This puts us in the territory of distinctions we put there, as opposed to distinctions we objectively find.
We should remember, with Frye, that an “all-seeing” cognitive power—the kind Job hears from in the end—appears to come from both within and without in the same way that “consciousness” appears to come from a youness that is both yourself and not yourself, at once both a here and a nowhere in particular. Thus, a phrase like “consciousness of consciousness” very nearly collapses into a phrase like “consciousness of God” in both the suggestive valences of this phrase. There is the scientific sense, in the partitive construction “consciousness of god,” where god is the object of conscious thought, suitably undressed and dissected as such, and shown to be an illusion. The other is the onto-phenomenological sense, “the consciousness of god” in the subjective genitive, the consciousness that god is. While the phrase points in the first instance to our need to limit objective analysis to observable facts, it also reminds us, in the second instance, that the spirit we seek may not be in the observable facts but in the act of conscious thinking and observation itself. It is nice to imagine that such a simple phrase might hold a clue to how science and spirit are fundamentally related.
Consciousness, as both Dennett and Frye would agree, is a handy thing to have. The brain is that part of a creature that controls its actions and responses to the environment. Job’s brain, given his physical destitution, is just about all he has left to help him cope with his new tragic reality. When our environment is relatively stable, responses can be simplified, and the living creature’s equipment for response may also be kept relatively simple, for efficiency’s sake. The daisy responds to its mostly unchanging environment of alternating light and dark with photosynthesis. As the environment becomes more complicated, however, the responses must themselves become more complex and versatile in order for that species to do well. No squirrel is going to survive long on the evolutionary tree if it uses only a daisy’s ability to respond to light when it senses a fox nearby. It must have more options at its disposal, and to have more options it must have some computing equipment on board that will allow it to construe the variables and respond accordingly.
Dennett breaks down into four types of creature the degrees of conscious responsive power that living things have. They are the “Darwinian” creature, the “Skinnerian” creature, the “Popperian” creature, and the “Gregorian” creature.8 The Darwinian creature is the unthinking species, like the daisy. The daisy’s progeny survives not because each particular daisy can respond effectively to changes in the environment but because some daisies evolve in such a way that favours them. No thinking is done here, but as the environment changes those daisies that are lucky enough to change in step with its conditions will persist. (Note that if we were to look in prospect at a whole field of daisies over a thousand years (using stop-frame animation), it would appear to us that the field was thinking, trying out this and that response to the environment with its many potential daisy options, until it found the “right” option and “went” with it, so to speak.)
The Skinnerian model—named after B.F. Skinner’s theories of behaviourism— is similar to the Darwinian model in that its phenotype is essentially unthinking. Like a computer that runs through a series of potential algorithms until it finds one that fits the data that has been input and then responds according to a set of programmed instructions, a Skinnerian creature will randomly try out a variety of potential responses in succession until it receives a reinforcing or negating signal from the environment. No mind is required. Different options are tested, but the creature is not thinking about those options, it merely runs through them. Dennett goes on to the next stage:
Skinnerian conditioning is a good thing as long as you are not killed by one of your early errors. A better system involved preselection among all the possible behaviours or actions, so that the truly stupid moves are weeded out before they’re hazarded in “real life.” We human beings are creatures capable of this particular refinement, but we are not alone. We may call the beneficiaries of this [adaptation] “Popperian Creatures,” since as the philosopher Sir Karl Popper once elegantly put it, this design enhancement “permits our hypotheses to die in our stead.” (Kinds of Minds 88)
For this preselection function to work, Dennett argues, there must be “a filter” in the brain, a sort of “inner environment,” not especially sophisticated at this stage, in which potential responses may be tested against the likelihood that they would be favoured if they were actually performed. One such example of this more primitive inner environment is the nausea that an animal might experience when it smells rotten food. Something in its inner makeup is telling it that it might not be a good idea to proceed further with the “contemplated” action. At a higher level of this adaptation, memory becomes important: a creature may record the undesirable consequences of an action and use them as warning representations to itself when similar circumstances arise again.
What happens, then, when we make the final step to human consciousness? We are “Gregorian creatures,” Dennett argues (naming our condition after the pre-eminent British information theorist Richard Gregory), because an inner environment evolves that can be informed not just by sensory data and memory, for instance, but by other elements in the world that are themselves products of design. Those designed elements may range from what the creature sees other creatures doing (succeeding or failing: “there but for the grace of God go I”), to the use of tools that are themselves designed or that have otherwise fallen into our hands as useable. “Tool use is a two-way sign of intelligence,” Dennett writes. “Not only does it require intelligence to recognize or maintain a tool … but a tool confers intelligence on those lucky enough to be given one…. Among the pre-eminent tools, Gregory reminds us, are what he calls mind tools: words.”
Dennett comes at last to Frye’s territory: the introduction to the human individual of words and symbolic thinking, and the advantages that such tools confer on human being in its struggle for survival. Dennett continues:
Words and other mind tools give a Gregorian creature an inner environment that permits it to construct ever more subtle move generators and move testers…. Gregorian creatures take a big step towards a human level of mental adroitness, benefiting from the experience of others by exploiting the wisdom embodied in the mind tools that those others have invented, improved, and transmitted; thereby they learn to think better about what they should think about next—and so forth, creating a tower of further internal reflections with no fixed or discernable limit. (Kinds of Minds 100–101)
Notice how similar Dennett’s world has become to Frye’s concept of the critical reader when he writes of “the wisdom embodied in the mind tools that those others have invented, improved, and transmitted” and “a tower of further internal reflections with no fixed or discernable limit.” Such a world in which there is no discernable limit to our internal reflections seems well on its way to Frye’s vision of a manmade cultural cosmos (the mind tools “out there”) available to any reader doing any reading, where everything is potentially related to everything else, and where the god in the midst of it would be the perceiving agent that puts it there and holds it all together as a unity.
Frye’s account of Job has to do double duty for him at the end of Words With Power. He must on the one hand conclude his discussion of the furnace variation (the last of the four), represent its elements of purgatorial journey and descent to nothingness as creative and potentially revolutionary experiences. On the other hand, he needs a story whose structure and context may illustrate something of his theory of the reading experience itself, particularly of the Bible and the aspect of the kerygmatic he discerns there and seeks to illuminate.
Frye speaks of Job’s “purgatorial trial” as “a testing and refining operation … directed toward what one can still be” (WP 310–311). As we noted earlier, the evolution of a genotype over millennia may also be seen as a form of purgatorial trial, a testing and certainly a refining operation, where the genotype is transformed over time by its environmental encounters, its failures and successes in relation to them, and is ultimately (however unconsciously) directed toward “what it can still be.” Like a genotype struggling for survival, Job faces the hardships and challenges of his environment and is looking for the best way to move forward. As Frye writes in The Great Code (196), the important thing now is not how he got into his situation but how he plans to get out of it. Picture our four brain types facing the obstacles of their environment and responding in whatever ways their powers of mind make possible. In his cloud of unknowing, for most of the story Job would probably fall somewhere between a Skinnerian and a Popperian creature. He doesn’t understand what sort of situation he is in, and he certainly doesn’t have much of a sense of how to move forward from where he is. He might, like a Skinnerian creature, simply try on as many possible responses he can think of, hoping like a gambler that one of them will work. And indeed, this is certainly what his accusers tempt him to do, each crying out to be heard over the others, “Think of it this way, Job, and respond as I tell you.” Job passes up on each haphazard offer, knows enough that he shouldn’t be scrambling about looking for anything that only “might possibly” work. He wants the bigger picture, the power of mind that will help him respond to his situation with better than a mere gambler’s chance of getting beyond his nightmare.
What then does God offer Job that gives him more power? God, Frye writes, “answers Job by recapitulating his original creation in the form of a vision which is held in front of Job in the present…. He has reached the end of his narrative in his present situation, and must now look up and down” (WP 311). In effect, Job is given a book of the created cosmos, one that is “held out in front of him” for him to read. Readers familiar with Frye’s other writings will recognize this account of Job’s experience as characteristic of our reading experience in general. We start at the beginning of a book with no, or next to no, knowledge of the world we are passing through, and read on without a definite sense of where we are headed; when we are finished, though, we can look back at the work finally as a fixed structure, in which any point may be related to any other point, from start to finish. We no longer experience the narrative in time, but from above, as it were. We become metaphorical gods at that point, because all of the created experience is encompassed in our minds. We possess it, and that possession gives us more power to determine the relations among all its parts and between the parts and the whole. We gain control, thanks to the vision supplied by a power that can see in all directions at once. We become increasingly able to perceive the world we inhabit from a metaphorically omniscient perspective.
Paul Ricoeur writes in The Rule of Metaphor that “language possesses the reflective capacity to place itself at a distance and to consider itself … as related to the totality of what is” (304). Frye states,
When the infinitely remote creation is re-presented to [ Job], he becomes a participant in it: that is, he becomes creative himself, as heaven and earth are made new for him. He is given no new discovery, but gains a deeper apprehension of what is already there. This deeper apprehension is not simply more wisdom, but an access of power. (WP 312)
So Dennett might say as well, with the advent of our Popperian and then Gregorian creature: he does not discover anything new about what is in front of him in the environment, but he does gain a deeper apprehension and understanding of what is already there, because he “sees” and encounters it now in the form of a symbolic tool that he has created and/or discovered—that is, he possesses a symbolic picture of it in his mind. This deeper apprehension is not simply more wisdom but an access of power. He is now more likely to make decisions that are not merely mechanical. Remember that in Frye it is the merely mechanical agent, the unthinking machine in the brain, that is most feared in the post-Romantic axis mundi.
What God gives to Job, Frye says, are the tools he needs to move forward: “The answer of God [puts] Job’s primary concerns into a larger context of what Paul Tillich calls ultimate concern” (WP 312). By placing Job’s primary concerns into the context of ultimate concern, God is effectively ordering and structuring them, giving them a place in a larger context, showing how they are related to one another and to the kinds of creative power that are available to Job. What God puts into Job’s head, then, is the vision of the axis mundi, a picture of the imaginative cosmos that human beings themselves have put there simply by being the creators they are. That is, what God offers Job is a vision of the world we ourselves have designed, a picture of our creative apprehension of the cosmos, and his most important act is to make that designed world intelligible to us by spinning it into patterns and orders.
And this is the crucial point. For Dennett and Frye, it is not just any knowledge that will do to advance the potential of its user. For both, it is knowledge of the already designed element, the world we have already put out there or discovered and recorded as otherwise meaningful to us, that gives us particular evolutionary lift. “We learn,” Dennett writes, “to spread our minds out in the world, where we can put our beautifully designed innate tracking and pattern-recognizing talents to optimal use” (Kinds of Minds 139). We offload the contents of our minds into the world by thinking symbolically and acting upon our symbolic thoughts. The external world thus comes clear, at least to the extent that we recognize it as a projection of our internal operations of mind, one that we can then perceive from our detached perspective and so manage and choreograph as best suits us. The more we see that this there is where we are, the more the subject/object divide in the world falls away and we become possessors and inhabiters of a universe that is both very real and very symbolic at the same time.
For Dennett the designed world that dwells in the Gregorian’s mind is made up of “elaborate systems of mnemonic association—pointers, labels, chutes and ladders, hooks and chains. We refine our resources by incessant rehearsal and tinkering, turning our brains (and all the associated peripheral gear we acquire) into a huge structured network of competences” (Kinds of Minds 152). For Dennett’s “pointers, chutes and ladders, hooks and chains,” think of Frye’s mountains, ladders, caves, and all the descent and ascent motifs of his Four Variations. These are part of a system of mnemonic association that assembles the contents of our brains into a structured network of competences that becomes, along with the world, increasingly intelligible to us the more we go over it. Dennett’s Gregorian creature and Frye’s Job are both advantaged because, unlike those who came before them, they can finally “see,” as such, those offloaded, symbolic pointers, chutes and ladders, hooks and chains of the designed world.
So Dennett writes,
As we improve, our labels become more refined, more perspicuous, ever better articulated, and the point is finally reached when we approximate the near-magical prowess we began with: the mere contemplation of a representation is sufficient to call to mind all the appropriate lessons. We have become understanders of the objects we have created. (Kinds of Minds 151)
The same might be said of Job, that he enjoys in the end a near-magical prowess, and that the mere contemplation of the vision God has put before him is sufficient to call to mind all the appropriate lessons; he becomes an understander of the world he has endured. Dennett’s findings in the biological and evolutionary sciences corroborate Frye’s theory that it is our meditations on the designed world, as it enters and re-enters our minds, that bestow on us increased mental power. And just as the advent of consciousness represents the beginning of community in Dennett’s evolutionary theory, so Job’s newly conscious experience represents, as Frye argues, the restoration of a lost world, one that is reborn in rather the same manner that enabled human society to evolve in the first place.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time in this essay talking about what, in current cognitive philosophy, consciousness is seen to be, washing away all the illusions and bugaboos of the homunculus that used to live there. Job too is purged in the end of whatever illusions he had harboured: “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee. / Wherefore I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes” ( Job 42:5–6). Frye argues that what Job is letting go of here is the idea of himself as a stable identity, and that what he is plausibly saying is, “I no longer consider what I call myself, an ego, as any reality at all, and I am withdrawing from it” (NLBR 573). We may believe in the self, in identities that belong to us as our own, in a spirit of consciousness that we feel dwells inside us as ourselves. But for both Dennett and Frye, an apperception of the reality that lies behind that conscious disposition, illusory or otherwise, would be highly conscious indeed.
ENDNOTES
1 See Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, 30th Anniversary Edition, 2006).
2 See WP 174.
3 Two other of Frye’s important discussions of Job are “Blake’s Reading of the Book of Job” in Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 228–244, and several lectures included in a series that Frye gave in 1981–1982 called “The Mythological Framework of Western Culture,” now published in Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts, The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, Vol. 13 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 553–577.
4 For the purposes of saving space, and given the fact that this is a volume of essays that assumes at least some familiarity with Frye’s thinking, I will elide any lengthy paraphrase of this aspect of Frye’s late theoria. Readers can of course go to the source, the entire last half of Words With Power. In addition, Glen Gill offers a very fine synopsis of the Four Variations and their corresponding primary concerns in his essay “Beyond Anagogy: Northrop Frye’s Existential (Re)visions” in Northrop Frye: Eastern and Western Perspectives, eds. Jean O’Grady and Wang Ning (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 42–53.
5 I also make the association between the axis mundi and Dennett’s notions of “Sky-hook” and “Crane” evolutionary models by way of drawing attention to what some might see as a revealing irony in this approach to Frye’s thought. Frye himself sees imaginative creation as coming from both metaphoric “directions,” above and below. The voice calling us to our promise is both not our own and also our own, he coined memorably in Words With Power (118). Readers who are less familiar with Frye’s nuanced characterization of creative power in both its secular and spiritual dimension might be surprised to learn that his study of the Bible should be so commensurate with a strictly materialist conception of evolution—in all its “godless” momentum—and indeed that it may offer that conception a clarifying account of its enabling mythopoeic power.
6 See the fuller argument in Sweet Dreams 1–23.
7 “The interests of modern poets in ladders and spirals is not nostalgia for outmoded images of creation, but a realization that because such images stand for the intensifying of consciousness through words, they represent the concern of concerns, so to speak, the consciousness of consciousness” (WP 165).
8 Dennett offers a series of very helpful illustrations of these levels of consciousness in Kinds of Minds (see 84, 86, 89, 100).
WORKS CITED
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