The nature of being human: From environmentalism to consciousness

The Nature of Being Human: From Environmentalism to Consciousness

Volumn , Issue , 2009, Pages 1-299

  Fromm, Harold ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84895691850     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
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References (129)

1. See www.lehigh.edu/~inbios/news/evolution.htm.
2. "Reading with Selection in Mind", review of The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, by Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson, eds. Science 311(February 3, 2006):612-13.
3. Autonomy, Singularity, Creativity, a project of the National Humanities Center. http://asc.nhc.rtp. nc.us/news/?page-id=4.
4. Iowa Review 9. 1(Winter 1978):71-86.
5. More easily accessed in Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, eds., The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 105-23.
6. Michael P. Branch and Scott Slovic, eds., The ISLE Reader (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), xvi.
7. Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 1. Buell's first chapter provides a general overview of the development of ecocriticism. The bibliography is wide-ranging.
8. Dave Foreman, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior (New York: Harmony Books, 1999);
9. Murray Bookchin, Remaking Society: Pathways to a Green Future (Boston: South End Press, 1990);
10. Steve Chase, ed., Defending the Earth: A Dialogue between Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman (Boston: South End Press, 1991).
11. Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 3rd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 129.
12. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), vii.
13. Roderick Frazier Nash, The Rights of Nature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 205.
14. Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered (Salt Lake City, UT: Gibbs Smith, 1985).
15. Daniel B. Botkin, Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 62.
16. Eugene C. Hargrove and J. Baird Callicott, "Leopold's 'Means and Ends in Wild Life Management, '" Environmental Ethics 12(Winter 1990):336.
17. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
18. Steve Kroll-Smith and H. Hugh Floyd, Bodies in Protest: Environmental Illness and the Struggle over Medical Knowledge (New York: New York University Press, 1997).
19. Marian R. Chertow and Daniel C. Esty, eds., Thinking Ecologically: The Next Generation of Environmental Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997).
20. Peter C. van Wyck, Primitives in the Wilderness: Deep Ecology and the Missing Human Subject (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).
21. William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 69-90.
22. J. M. Coetzee, "What Is Realism?" Salmagundi 114-15(Summer 1997):70-71.
23. J. M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Atwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 52-53.
24. J. M. Coetzee, "What Is Realism?" 83, 101.
25. Doubling the Point, 63, 205.
26. J. M. Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K (New York: Viking Press, 1983), 163, 164, 166.
27. J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 21.
28. Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, 2nd ed. (New York: New York Review Books, 1990), 165.
29. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (New York: Viking, 1999).
30. Harold Fromm, "Establishing a Way in a World of Conflicts", in Teaching the Conflicts: Gerald Graff, Curricular Reform, and the Culture Wars, Chapter Thirteen: My Science Wars Chapter Thirteen: My Science Wars ed. William E. Cain (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994), 74, 76.
31. Social Text 46-47 (This is also identified as vol. 14, nos. 1 and 2, Spring/Summer 1996). The issue was entitled Science Wars. Most of the essays, along with some new ones, were subsequently published as a book in the fall of 1996 by Duke University Press. According to the editors, Alan Sokal's essay was never intended to be included in the book version because of its marginality to the theme of science wars.
32. Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
33. See my account of Ross in "Democritus Junior and the Curse of Postmodernism", Hudson Review 49(Summer 1996):323-30.
34. Camille Paglia, "The MIT Lecture", in Sex, Art, and American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 265.
35. Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 28.
36. Paglia, Sex, Art, and American Culture, 99.
37. Paglia, Vamps and Tramps (New York: Vintage Books, 1994).
38. See Paglia's interview in a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly: Catholic Lives/Contemporary America 93(Summer 1994):727-46. "People said to me early on, 'Oh, what can you do? One person can't do anything.' And I said, 'Excuse me, one person can move mountains.' That's the example of the saints."
39. I am indebted to John V. Walker for an interesting twist that I derived from his essay, "Seizing Power: Decadence and Transgression in Foucault and Paglia", in Postmodern Culture 5, no. 1 (September 1994): http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern-culture/. I am also extremely grateful for repeated help from Donald Marshall (formerly at University of Illinois at Chicago, now at Pepperdine University) and the late Bill Shuter (Eastern Michigan University).
40. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 8.
41. John Milton in Paradise Lost asks Urania, a goddess of heavenly wisdom, to bring him some inspiration.
42. Wendell Berry, Life Is a Miracle: An Essay against Modern Superstition (Washington, D. C.: Counterpoint, 2000), 19.
43. Quoted passim from The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing. (New York: Doubleday, 1956).
44. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002).
45. Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby, eds., The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
46. Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
47. Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 528.
48. Joseph Carroll, "Steven Pinker's Cheesecake for the Mind", Philosophy and Literature 22, no. 2 (1998).
49. "Adaptationist Literary Study: An Emerging Research Program", Style 36(2003):596-617.
50. A version of this article also appears as the introduction to Carroll's collection, Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (New York: Routledge, 2004).
51. Evolution and Literary Theory (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995).
52. "Wilson's Consilience and Literary Study", Philosophy and Literature 23, no. 2 (1999). This is an especially brilliant and densely substantiated review of E. O. Wilson's book. More accessible is the reprint of this essay in Literary Darwinism (see p. 82).
53. "Human Universals and Literary Meaning", Interdisciplinary Studies 2 (2001). Collected in Literary Darwinism.
54. "Pluralism, Poststructuralism, and Evolutionary Theory", Academic Questions 9, no. 3 (Summer 1996).
55. Nancy Easterlin and Barbara Riebling, eds., After Poststructuralism: Interdisciplinarity and Literary Theory (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993).
56. Robert Storey, Mimesis and the Human Animal: On the Biogenetic Foundations of Literary Representation (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996).
57. Brett Cooke and Frederick Turner, eds., Biopoetics: Evolutionary Explorations in the Arts (Lexington, KY: Paragon House [An ICUS Book], 1999).
58. Cooke has recently published a book-length application of adaptationist biopoetics, Human Nature in Utopia: Zamyatin's We (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002).
59. Kathryn Coe, "Art: The Replicable Unit", in Cooke and Turner, Biopoetics.
60. Philosophy and Literature 25, no. 2 (October 2001).
61. For an account of cultural biology see Steven R. Quartz and Terrence J. Sejnowski, Liars, Lovers, and Heroes: What the New Brain Science Reveals about How We Become Who We Are (New York: William Morrow, 2002).
62. "The Artistic Animal", Lingua Franca (October 2001): 28-37. Dissanayake's books are: What Is Art For? (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988);
63. Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why (New York: Free Press, 1992);
64. Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000).
65. Dissanayake, "Aesthetic Incunabula", Philosophy and Literature 25, no. 2(October 2001):335.
66. Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus, 35.
67. Dissanayake, "'Making Special'-An Undescribed Human Universal and the Core of a Behavior of Art", in Cooke and Turner, Biopoetics, 30.
68. See "Donald E. Brown's List of Human Universals", in the appendix to Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002).
69. Also see Donald E. Brown, Human Universals (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991).
70. See Pinker's The Blank Slate;
71. Daniel C. Dennett, Freedom Evolves (New York: Viking, 2003);
72. Stephen R. Quartz and Terrence J. Sejnowski, Liars, Lovers, and Heroes: What the New Brain Science Reveals about How We Become Who We Are (New York: William Morrow, 2002);
73. William H. Calvin, A Brain for All Seasons: Human Evolution and Abrupt Climate Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002);
74. Matt Ridley, Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).
75. Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby, eds. The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
76. Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003).
77. See chapter 13, "My Science Wars."
78. These have been collected in Joseph Carroll, Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (New York: Routledge, 2004).
79. Joseph Meeker, The Comedy of Survival: Literary Ecology and a Play Ethic (3rd ed. of The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology, 1974; Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997).
80. A. Lawrence Buell, Emerson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003).
81. David Mikics, The Romance of Individualism in Emerson and Nietzsche (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), 1.
82. Barbara Packer, "Origin and Authority: Emerson and the Higher Criticism", in Reconstructing American Literary History, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 71.
83. Emerson, "Fate", in The Conduct of Life (1860).
84. Passages from Kierkegaard are taken passim from Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Preparation for a Christian Life, and Fear and Trembling.
85. For a more sympathetic account of Kierkegaard, written during the years when Joyce Carol Oates and I were arguing about Emerson, see Harold Fromm, "Emerson and Kierkegaard: The Problem of Historical Christianity", Massachusetts Review 9, no. 4 (Autumn 1968), 741-52.
86. Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 166.
87. See also Harold Fromm, "Wrestling with Heidegger", Hudson Review 51(Winter 1999):681-90.
88. John A. T. Robinson, Honest to God (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1963), 55, 74, 76.
89. Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 40, 47.
90. Virginia Quarterly Review 76, no. 2(Spring 2000):299-312.
91. Robert Denoon Cumming, Starting Point (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).
92. Kenneth S. Sacks, Understanding Emerson: "The American Scholar" and His Struggle for Self-Reliance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
93. Laura Dassow Walls, Emerson's Life In Science: The Culture of Truth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 63, 62.
94. Moncure Daniel Conway, Autobiography, Memories and Experience (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1904), 1:281.
95. Moncure Daniel Conway, Emerson at Home and Abroad (Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1882), 154, 157.
96. The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph L. Rusk (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939-45), 5:195.
97. Joseph Warren Beach, "Emerson and Evolution", University of Toronto Quarterly 3(1934):474-97.
98. The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 2:97-98.
99. Laura Dassow Walls, "'If Body Can Sing': Emerson and Victorian Science", Emerson Bicentennial Essays, ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society/Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 361, 359, 360.
100. For the background to this, see the first part of chapter 16, "The New Darwinism in the Humanities."
101. Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004).
102. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (1986; repr. with a new introduction, New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 112.
103. See Daniel C. Dennett's Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991)
104. for an extensive treatment of this subject. Dennett's more recent Freedom Evolves (New York: Viking, 2003) is an unsuccessful rehash of his earlier writings, described by critics as "bait and switch" because of his quirky redefinition of free will to enable him to fudge the whole issue, on which we are in substantial agreement, minus the fudge.
105. Daniel M. Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
106. David M. Eagleman, "The Where and When of Intention", Science 303(February 20, 2004):1144-46.
107. The account that follows is heavily indebted to Gerald M. Edelman, Wider Than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).
108. But the enduring influence of several other books has unwittingly commandeered my neurons: Dennett, Consciousness Explained;
109. Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997);
110. and Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998).
111. Wider Than the Sky, 44.
112. Consciousness Explained, 134-35.
113. Thomas Henry Huxley, "On the Hypothesis That Animals are Automata, and Its History", in Collected Essays (London: Macmillan, 1893-94; New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 1:245.
114. "The Psychological Foundations of Culture", in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, ed. Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
115. Hudson Review 43(Summer 1990):245-56.
116. Hudson Review 51(Spring 1998):65-78.
117. John Searle, Mind: A Brief Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
118. Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (New York: Anchor Books, 2001).
119. David Sloan Wilson, Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
120. Daniel C. Dennett, Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). (Henceforth, SD).
121. Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2001), 454. (Henceforth, CE.)
122. SD, 12.
123. Gerald M. Edelman and Giulio Tononi, A Universe of Consciousness (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 158, 208.
124. Much more helpful than Chalmers's The Conscious Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) is his brief and pointed article, "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, "
125. published in 1995 in the Journal of Consciousness Studies 2, no. 3:200-219. It can also be viewed online at http://consc.net/papers/facing.html. Most of the passages quoted from Chalmers are from the article as it appears in the journal, identified as JCS with page number.
126. See chapter 20 of this book, "Muses, Spooks, Neurons, and the Rhetoric of 'Freedom.'" See also the conclusion, "My Life as a Robot."
127. PMLA, January 2006:297-98.
128. See chapter 4, "Air and Being: The Psychedelics of Pollution. "
129. After this chapter was written, Mark Johnson published The Meaning of the Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). This book, a more concentrated development of themes in earlier books by Johnson alone and with his coauthor George Lakoff, offers a deeper look at the radically physical basis of neuroscience and psychology.