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Tracing the leading role of emotions in the evolution of the mind, aphilosopher and a psychologist pair up to reveal how thought and culture owe less to our faculty for reason than to our capacity to feel. Many accounts of the human mind concentrate on the brain's computational power. Yet, in evolutionary terms, rational cognition emerged only the day before yesterday. For nearly 200 million years before humans developed a capacity to reason, the emotional centers of the brain were hard at work. If we want to properly understand the evolution of the mind, we must explore this more primal capability that we share with other animals: the power to feel. Emotions saturate every thought and perception with the weight of feelings.The Emotional Mindreveals that many of the distinctive behaviors and social structures of our species are best discerned through the lens of emotions. Even the roots of so much that makes us uniquely human--art, mythology, religion--can be traced to feelings of caring, longing, fear, loneliness, awe, rage, lust, playfulness, and more. From prehistoric cave art to the songs of Hank Williams, Stephen T. Asma and Rami Gabriel explore how the evolution of the emotional mind stimulated our species' cultural expression in all its rich variety. Bringing together insights and data from philosophy, biology, anthropology, neuroscience, and psychology,The Emotional Mindoffers a new paradigm for research into the complex origins of human uniqueness.
E-Book Content
The Emotional Mind
The Emotional Mind THE AFFECTIVE ROOTS OF CULTURE AND COGNITION
Stephen T. Asma Rami Gabriel
Cambridge, Massachusetts • London, England 2019
Copyright © 2019 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer ica First printing Cover design: Tim Jones Cover art: Phrenology head lying sideways © David Muir / Getty Images 9780674238923 (EPUB) 9780674238930 (MOBI) 9780674238916 (PDF) The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Names: Asma, Stephen T., author. | Gabriel, Rami, author. Title: The emotional mind : the affective roots of culture and cognition / Stephen T. Asma, Rami Gabriel. Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018046433 | ISBN 9780674980556 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Emotions. | Human evolution. | Emotions and cognition. | Social evolution. | Evolutionary psychology. Classification: LCC QP401 .A76 2019 | DDC 612.8/232— dc23 LC record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/2018046433
For Tom Greif and Jaak Panksepp
Contents
Introduction: The Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition 1 Why a New Paradigm?
21
2 Biological Aboutness: Reassessing Teleology 3 Social Intelligence from the Ground Up
43 74
4 Emotional Flexibility and the Evolution of Bioculture 5 The Ontogeny of Social Intelligence 6 Representation and Imagination 7 Language and Concepts
1
91
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8 Affect in Cultural Evolution: The Social Structure of Civilization 9 Religion, Mythology, and Art Notes
317
References
365
Acknowledgments Index
417
413
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The Emotional Mind
Introduction THE AFFECTIVE ROOTS OF CULTURE AND COGNITION
the Origin of Species, he famously closed the book with the provocative promise that “light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.”1 In his Descent of Man and his Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin began, as promised, to throw some of that light— especially regarding the emotional and cognitive similarities (homologies) of mamma