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4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not a patch on the original: for fans only, 6 Jul 2009
In the seventies a largely unknown Princeton academic by the name of Julian Jaynes published a book with the most leaden title imaginable: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It was, and is, an extraordinary book, which playfully announces an utterly preposterous premise: that human beings acquired consciousness less than 3000 years ago, that it was a cultural rather than a physiological development, and this cultural acquisition either led to, or was prompted by, a deterioration in the previously prevailing human mental configuration which, in a nutshell, involved hallucinating gods out of the effigies of fallen leaders and was, more or less, schizophrenic in nature. You read that right: human civilisation got past the point of the Iliad courtesy of imaginary voices.
Having announced that absurd premise, Jaynes' book then impishly, wittily, elegantly but always compellingly, set out to justify it and, while it did not revolutionise the fields on which it expressed opinions (and there were many, including anthropology, psychiatry, linguistics, epistemology, biology and philosophy) - which is what it would have needed to do to gain widespread acceptance - Julian Jaynes' outrageous theory has proved surprising elusive of its critics. Only philosopher Ned Block has had a really good go at it, and the consensus is that his efforts have largely been in vain.
Thus, and against all odds, Jaynes' theory hangs on, long after its progenitor's passing, and still attracts the odd furtive glance from the establishment: Dan Dennett gave admiring if qualified support, and Richard Dawkins was at least sufficiently moved to mention it in his The God Delusion, even if by all appearances he hadn't really read or thought about it in any great detail.
Jaynes' book is interesting not only in its own right, but also because it is such a fantastic example of the operation of scientific paradigms in the sense identified by Thomas Kuhn. Jaynes isn't properly credentialised at all - he was never tenured and only received his Ph.D. late in life and apparently only then almost by accident - and his theory flies in the face of the accumulated wisdom of so many unrelated research programmes that it is no wonder it has never been taken entirely seriously. Note that, pace Karl Popper, nor has it been humiliatingly dismantled or falsified - it has, for the most part, been quietly ignored, the traditions that it challenges not being particularly "in crisis"; the questions which Jaynes answers so much more convincingly (why did the ancients bury their dead with food and possessions? Why did they have such a visceral, apparently delusional, affection to gods? What made the ancients believe they were engaging in conversations with beings who weren't there?) are ones which the prevailing paradigms simply don't feel the need to ask, or are happy to cast off with a shrug of the shoulders. (Dawkins: religious people are simply deluded: Jaynes: as a matter of fact, back in the day this may have literally been the case).
Again, Jaynes' failure to attract attention - to not even get an audience - is what Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions suggests tends to happen when an internally robust theory is challenged from outright left field in such a way.
So, especially now he's dead, we can expect Jaynes' book and the small fame he acquired to wither on the vine - but not if Marcel Kuijsten has any say in the matter. Kuijsten's an enthusiastic adherent of Jaynes' and is doing what he can in this present volume to keep the flame alive. He's retrieved a few odds and sods from Jaynes' unpublished papers and has invited a few like-minded souls to contribute further thoughts on the implications of Jaynes' work, particularly in light of subsequently published neurological research which Kuijsten tells us (without a lot of detail) supports and confirms Jaynes' theories.
Kuijsten has a delicate balance to trike: on one hand he needs to bolster the delicate superstructure of the theory by setting a solid platform of academically robust support for it; on the other, to avoid seeing sycophantic and credulous he needs to subject the theory to constructive criticism, but without making it look like an obvious lemon.
The trouble is he manages neither. Jaynes' own pieces are short and largely restate material already put more elegantly in the original book. The new third-party material he's got doesn't really develop Jaynes' work,and the more thoughtful pieces tend to be the most equivocal about Jaynes' theory, and are yet riven with qualifications and distracted by irrelevant reservations about the theory itself. Missing are new contributions from the very two world renowned academics who have previously expressed views: Dennett and Block.
In a nutshell, if you haven't read the Jaynes' original, you definitely should; until you do this book won't be much use to you; if you have, I'm not sure this collection will get you a whole lot further down the track.
For completists only.
Olly Buxton
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