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Biopoetics
From: Columbia University
| By:
Karl Kroeber |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
 During the past quarter century, the growing influence of sociobiology and the associated concept of "evolutionary psychology" have forced us to recognize that cultures are the products of reciprocal interactions between cultural history and genetic evolution (known as co-evolution). Yet modern literary criticism, according to Columbia University English professor Karl Kroeber (right), shuns the recognition of the social impact of biological science. In this exclusive Fathom essay, Kroeber traces the influence of biology on literature back to the Romantic poets, whose work pre-dated Darwin by a generation, and makes a passionate argument for recognizing literary works as one of the most direct ways to understand co-evolution. |
 ontemporary literary critics ignore the revolutionizing social impact of the biological sciences in the twentieth century. From the development of antibiotics to genetic engineering, advances in biological knowledge have, more profoundly than political ideologies, changed the way people now live, and are already determining the character of twenty-first-century life. But, for postmodern critics biological discoveries are irrelevant to "discourse analysis," the study of hermetic language "play" without practical reference to nonlinguistic realities. Nature to these critics is "nature," a verbal construct significant only as representing some ideological bias revealed by "cultural critique." These critics share with fundamentalist creationists a distaste for the idea that has made biology the most exciting science of our times--evolution. Two hundred years ago, however, poets, novelists and literary critics were leaders in stimulating recognition that human culture and natural processes were inextricably intertwined. William Wordsworth defined the purpose of his most ambitiously conceived poem: |
[I] would proclaim
Speaking of nothing more than what we are--
How exquisitely the individual Mind
(And the progressive powers perhaps no less
Of the whole species) to the external world
Is fitted; and how exquisitely too--
Theme this but little heard of among men--
The external world is fitted to the mind;
And the creation (by no lower name
Can it be called) which they with blended might
Accomplish ; this is my great argument.
("The Recluse," ll. 1004-14) |
The pervasive impact of the biological sciences upon modern life began with publication of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin 140 years ago. Darwin's theory of evolution systematically articulated with intellectual efficacy a new way of thinking about nature which had first emerged at the end of the eighteenth century--a way that British literary artists a generation before Darwin had helped to shape. Romantic poets like Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Byron first dramatized the deepest implications in the view that human cultures were natural phenomena. Romantic "nature poetry" displays human culture as existing historically through participation in an environing natural world that is intrinsically unstable, never static. Terms such as "God and ghosts and Heaven," Shelley wrote in his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" (1816), record futile attempts to deny that the essence of nature, of "all we hear and all we see," is "Doubt, chance, and mutability." Transformation is the fundamental condition of all being, including human cultures and the minds that create them: "Nought may endure but Mutability." |
Shelley emphasizes "doubt" because processes of natural change in which human beings participate as individuals and as members of social communities offer no evidence of purpose beyond the mere continuance of mutability. Darwinian evolution frightens some people, because, following in this Romantic tradition, it fulfills no transcendent purpose, moves toward no meta-natural goal. This "meaningless" historicity of all natural being shadows Romantic poets' enthusiasm for the freedom from repressive social traditions made possible by their new perception of humankind's intrinsic naturalness. Its dark ethical implications are explored in Lord Byron's drama "Cain" (which includes a vision of dinosauric pre-human creatures based on the paleontologist Cuvier's reconstructions). The biblical protagonist recognizes that if "circumstances make sin / Or virtue," any moral system is threatened: its systematicness denies the truth that all natural life is always subject to "chance and mutability." Keats in his uncompleted epic "Hyperion" (telling how the Greek Olympian gods overthrew their predecessors, the Titan gods) likewise challenges absoluteness of all religious truth, since it can be said to any God |
as thou wast not the first of powers,
So art thou not the last; it cannot be:
Thou art not the beginning nor the end. (Book 2, ll. 188-90) |
Keats in another poem sees at the heart of nature "fierce destruction," what came to be called survival of the fittest: "the shark at savage prey, --the hawk at pounce," even "The gentle robin ... Ravening a worm." |
The imaginative visions of Romantic artists that underlie evolutionary science are today of interest because of the spreading influence of sociobiology and the associated concept of "evolutionary psychology" during the past quarter century. These are founded on the claim that cultures are products of processes of co-evolution. Co-evolution in this context means continuous reciprocal interactions between cultural history and genetic evolution. Culture comes into being through biological processes, but cultural forces then affect the functioning of physical evolution. This idea of reciprocal feedback implies that it is impossible to fully understand culture without recognizing it as a biological phenomenon, but, simultaneously, that one does not fully comprehend biological evolution without recognizing how it may be transformed by cultural feedback. Humanists have something to teach scientists as well as much to learn from them. |
The intuition of mutually transformative reciprocity between the natural and the cultural is a distinguishing focus of British Romantic poetry, which displays the mind-set that led to Darwinian evolution. But, simultaneously, Romantic writers envisioned the possibility that our minds could reshape the physical processes determining the constitution of the natural world (including humankind) through the activity of our unique reflexive consciousness, which they celebrated as imagination. Romantic poems repeatedly give expression to intellectual, emotional and ethical crises evoked by imagining human psychic uniqueness as a natural, not supernatural, quality. For them, productive feedback between the dynamics of consciousness and the dynamics of physical nature is made possible by imagination, which they conceive in essence as the power of the human mind to enhance and orient natural energies. |
It is not accidental that contemporary literary theorizing almost never employs the term "imagination," because present-day criticism is committed to ignoring the possibility of any significant interaction between activities of the conscious mind and primary physical processes of the natural world. For contemporary literary critics, culture is important only so far as it is different from nature, just as language is important because its referential functions are dubious. Art can directly tell us nothing valuable about human conduct or encourage us to improve the way we live--exactly the functions that Romantic poets asserted as the primary justifications for their art. Recent advances in evolutionary biology call for a reappraisal of Romantic claims for the social efficacy of poetry. The growing influence of sociobiology and related ideas (accompanied by increasing awareness of the environmental problems produced by technological cultures) encourages this reassessment, as does the threatening promise of various kinds of genetic engineering, which are--for good or ill--manifest realities of the world before us. Any fully responsible literary criticism today ought to take account of these equally exciting and frightening actualities of our social and intellectual life. |
The idea of co-evolution especially demands rethinking of current anti-imaginative aesthetic presuppositions--for instance, that art serves no significant practical function. Art of one kind or another is a major feature in every human culture of which we have a record--beginning with the cultures that produced magnificent cave paintings 30,000 years ago. If so distinguishing a characteristic of culture as art is indeed of no practical significance, any claim for culture's influence on processes of physical evolution is enfeebled. Yet, while contemporary critics have withdrawn literary discourse from any productive role in the ongoing conduct of daily life, a number of anthropologists and psychologists have recently joined with biological scientists to bring forward compelling evidence of diverse aesthetic activities' deep-reaching mental and social effects. These derive principally from aesthetic activities' capability to shape and direct the development of reflective consciousness in individuals. Especially because of growing interest among biological scientists in the study of consciousness as a product of the physical workings of the brain, the main focus of research to date into co-evolution has been "human universals"--features of an assumed common "human nature." My own interest has been drawn to a problematic but promising branch line of such inquiries, a line that begins with concentration on the singularity that characterizes fine works of art: Is there a connection between that phenomenon and the cornerstone of the theory of evolution, the recognition of the uniqueness of every organism? The work of sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists suggests the possibility that the uniqueness of art works may strengthen human societies through intensifying and making more complex forces of communal interdependency by increasingly empowering individual consciousness. An oversimplified analogy may illuminate the apparent paradox. Whereas the sociality of most social creatures--bees, for instance--is founded on reduction of the inescapable individuality of each bee, human societies have succeeded spectacularly by fostering the individuality of each member. This tension-laden success depends upon the reflective consciousness of individual humans. Works of art seem primarily addressed to sustaining and intensifying this dialectical reciprocity between interdependency and enhanced individuality. Through this reciprocity we can understand and so manipulate (for the better, we hope) the cultural/biological processes by which human societies come into being as social manifestations of our special consciousness, our imaginative powers. Paradoxically (from the perspective of contemporary criticism), literary art may be one of the most direct ways to understand this reciprocal feedback that makes co-evolution possible. An attractive historical subject for testing this possibility is the writing of those poets who first proposed the significance of the intersection of natural and cultural history, as when Shelley in "Mont Blanc" (1816) describes how |
My human mind ...
Now renders and receives fast influencings,
Holding an unremitting interchange
With the clear universe of things around. (ll. 37-40)
By examining such imaginings of how and with what consequences we realize our most potent natural endowments--pre-eminently in the finest works of literature--we will reorient humanistic study toward operating in a fashion analogous to that by which biological scientists have advanced their discipline--through reassessments of Darwin's ideas in the light of new discoveries and innovative reconceptions of enduring problems. |
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