The heading of this installment declares it to be the conclusion of the paper, but this isn’t the last installment of “Practices and Practicing in Human Moral Development.”
A postscript – or maybe a coda? – is yet to come, with some initial thoughts on what a “mimetic pedagogy” for ethics might look like.
V. Conclusion
The key contention, to this point, has been that the roots of distinctively moral cognition may have arisen quite early in the evolution of hominins. On Merlin Donald’s account, hominins moved beyond the episodic cognition of other primates in three stages, from mimesis, to myth, to theory. Based upon Donald’s characterization of each stage, it is plausible that conventional moral cognition, and perhaps some precursors to postconventional moral cognition, become possible within mimetic culture.
One might reasonably ask: So what? We humans today have all the benefits of spoken and written language, which make available much wider possibilities for postconventional moral cognition. We are no longer grunting and pointing, no longer demonstrating the knapping of stone tools to one another. Instead, we are telling cautionary tales, deliberating together over this or that matter of shared interest, and even conducting seminars on the works of Immanuel Kant. What is mimesis to us?
And yet, Donald emphasizes that each prior form of cognition persists as a “fully functional vestige” within later stages, with the clear implication that each stage is a necessary condition for the stage that follows: it is due to mimetic cognition and memory that we have a meaningful world about which to tell stories, and it is because we can tell stories that we can devise abstract models to account for what is happening behind the scenes. Our encounters with other people, who are to be the subjects of moral consideration, are mimetic through and through: posture, expression, gesture and tone convey meaning and intention every bit as much as speech or text and, in some contexts, even more so. Making music together, per Alfred Shutz, stands as an example of the kind of mimetic “tuning-in relationship” which serves as the ground from which human sociality springs.
To bring this back around to the initial question, what does Donald’s three-part account of human cognitive development imply for the teaching and learning of ethics? Again, the supposition is that the goal of teaching ethics, in a college classroom as in any other context, is to foster a capacity consistently to respond well to situations in which values and relationships with others are at stake.
Theoretic cognition clearly has pride of place in college courses on ethics, with a heavy emphasis on moral judgment. Students may be expected to understand the principle of utility and the categorical imperative in their respective theoretical contexts, for example, and to bring those principles to bear on the particularities of complex problem situations. They may be confronted with formal dilemmas, which are carefully contrived narratives often designed to bring those two principles and their theoretical underpinnings into stark conflict.
Mythic cognition plays an important role in an ethics course, as well, if only insofar as case studies, open-ended problem situations and even dilemmas take the form of stories meant to engage the imagination. There are also accounts of the roots of ethics according to which narrative is more central to moral development than are universal principles, as already seen with MacIntyre’s (2007) elaboration on Aristotle’s virtue ethics and its implications for the establishment of practices. In teaching ethics, narrative may be uniquely valuable in revealing the ethical texture of situations and the particularity of human relationships within them. In a riveting analysis of an example drawn from a work by Henry James, for example, Martha Nussbaum (1990) demonstrates that a novel can be “a paradigm of moral activity.”
Nothing considered so far suggests pushing aside narrative or theory in teaching ethics. The provisional conclusion to be drawn here is simply that moral pedagogy would be incomplete without also giving mimetic cognition its due. Three aspects of a “mimetic pedagogy” have come to light through Donald’s account: a focus on attunement with others and their intentions which is not dependent on language; a focus on practices as shared ways of doing things that may be passed from one to another through imitation-with-intention; and a focus on the rehearsal loop – on practicing – as essential for establishing good habits of character.
References
MacIntyre, A. (2007). After Virtue (Third ed.). University of Notre Dame Press.
Nussbaum, M. C. (1990). Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford University Press.
Leave a Reply