The framework for the paper derives from the work of Merlin Donald, who identified three broad stages in the development of human cognition, characterized mimetic, mythic, and theoretic modes of memory and representation, respectively.
Philosophers tend to preoccupy themselves with the theoretic mode, sometimes with a dash of the mythic or narrative mode, but how much of our cognition and our interaction with others still bound up in mimesis?
II. A Mimetic Turn
The heuristic framework for the present inquiry comes from the work of Merlin Donald, who brought together lines of evidence from evolutionary biology, archaeology, neurophysiology and cognitive science to inform a model of human cognitive evolution. The story he tells has to do with forms of representation and memory that were in the cognitive repertoire of hominins at various stages of our evolution.[1] Each of these stages is expressed in a distinctive culture, evidence for which may be seen in the archaeological and paleontological record, as well as in direct comparisons between modern humans and modern apes.
Donald delineates three distinct stages in human cognitive evolution, departing from the episodic memory and culture of great apes: mimetic culture arose with toolmaking, mythic culture arose with spoken language, and theoretic culture arose with writing and other forms of graphic representation. He emphasizes that these are “broad, unifying concepts that express the dominant cognitive quality of the individual mind in relation to society” at each stage. This is only to say that it is a model, which necessarily includes some simplifying assumptions.
One of these assumptions is, as Donald states it, “that each cognitive adaptation in human evolutionary history has been retained as a fully functional vestige.” The term ‘vestige’ might on its own imply that earlier adaptations simply persist even though their moment has long passed, like the human appendix. But Donald describes each of the earlier adaptations as a fully functional vestige, adding that “when we acquired the apparatus required for mime and speech, in that order, we retained the knowledge structures, and the cultural consequences, of previous adaptations”(Donald, 1991).
In fact, in writing of the transition from mimetic to mythic culture, he describes language as “grafted onto an existing culture and an existing cognitive architecture.” He elaborates this point slightly earlier, writing that
speech provided humans with a rapid, efficient means of constructing and transmitting verbal signals, but what good would such an ability have done if there was not even the most rudimentary form of representation in place? There had to be some sort of semantic foundation for a speech adaptation to have proven useful, and mimetic culture would have provided it (Donald, 1991).
In short, it is due to the “vestiges” of episodic and mimetic cognition that we have a world about which to tell stories or to formulate theoretical explanations. Donald’s point converges neatly with Merleau-Ponty’s (2012) characterization of human language as arising against a backdrop of primordial silence that is nonetheless a source of meaning: “speech is a gesture, it’s signification a world.”
On Donald’s account, mimesis is not mere mimicry or imitation, but something more like imitation-with-intention: “it usually incorporates both mimicry and imitation to a higher end, that of re-enacting and re-presenting an event or relationship”; thus it involves “the invention of intentional representations.” This is the suite of cognitive skills exhibited in the archaeological records of Homo erectus, who made tools, adapted to varied climates, and lived together “in a society where cooperation and social coordination of action were central to the species’ survival strategy” (Donald, 1991).
The great strength and the great weakness of mimetic culture is that it is stable, tending to change only very slowly. The Acheulian industry of stone toolmaking and its associated social organization endured for around one million years, with examples found at sites across three continents (Tomlinson, 2015). So, mimetic culture may have real staying power, and it did enable early hominins to adapt to a wide range of climates and to pass down knowledge and know-how from generation to generation. It is not very agile, however, and would not support adaptation to – or even full recognition of – especially rapid changes in climate or in other conditions of life.
However, as a “fully functional vestige” still active in the minds of modern humans, mimetic representation and culture remain vital – perhaps essential – to understanding and navigating social situations. Mimesis, Donald notes, serves a different purpose from language: it “is still far more efficient than language in diffusing certain kinds of knowledge, for instance, it is still supreme in the realm of modeling social roles, communicating emotions, and transmitting rudimentary skills” (Donald, 1991). Hence the continuing relevance of mimesis in practical ethics.
All of this suggests the possibility of a “mimetic turn” in ethics. Note well that this is not to be cast as the mimetic turn. It is not a program or a movement, but simply an indication of a useful line of inquiry that builds on earlier critiques of the overly theoretical focus of modern ethics, and a turn toward the role of narrative and the finer texture of moral experience (see, for example, Anscombe, 1958; MacIntyre, 2007). A mimetic turn would go one step further, to uncover the structures of moral cognition that arose long before the emergence of language, and so are prior even to narrative.
Again, to be clear, the aim is not to displace theory or narrative, nor to claim that neither plays an important role in mature moral practice, but simply to reveal some of the conditions for the very possibility of a meaningful social world in which to engage in moral practice. A secondary aim is to consider, at least in outline, how far human moral development could have gone before the emergence of language. How early in hominin evolution did distinctly moral practices become possible?
References
Anscombe, G. E. M. (1958). Modern Moral Philosophy. Philosophy, 33(124), 1–19.
Donald, M. (1991). Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. Harvard University Press.
MacIntyre, A. (2007). After Virtue (Third ed.). University of Notre Dame Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of Perception (D. A. Landes, Trans.). Routledge.
Tomlinson, G. (2015). A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity. Zone Books.
[1] Current practice in the study of human origins is to use the term ‘hominin’ to encompass Homo sapiens and our extinct predecessors since our lineage diverged from that of great apes, which would mainly include species of the genera Homo and Australopithecus.
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