The Secret Life of Literature by Lisa Zunshine

Author:Lisa Zunshine [Zunshine, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Cognitive Science, Language Arts & Disciplines, Linguistics, General, Literary Criticism, cognition; theory of mind; novel; cognition and literature; fiction: social aspects; mindreading and social status; Bakhtin; opacity model; children’s literature; creative writing., Science
ISBN: 9780262046336
Google: crZNEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2022-03-15T20:37:17+00:00

4.7   From the “Monastic Theory of Mind” to the Academic One

If communities indeed elaborate some mindreading practices and suppress others, we can view a variety of cultural institutions as implicated in this project. For instance, a recent study, Paul Dilley’s Monasteries and the Care of Souls in the Late Antique Christianity: Cognition and Discipline (2017), builds on Luhrmann’s view of culture-specific models of mindreading to suggest that “the training of thoughts practiced by early Christian monks led to the gradual acquisition of a new and particularly monastic theory of mind.” Some of the key precepts of this monastic theory of mind were that the mind was both permeable and accessible. This is to say that monks had to learn that their cogitations arose “not only from the interior self, but also through divine guidance or demonic temptation” and that “God was aware of their private thoughts, which were also known to certain inspired saints.”48

Learning these precepts demanded introspection, physical exercise, and communal activities. Also, interestingly, monks were encouraged to read hagiographies, which, Dilley argues, constituted a particularly instructive and pleasurable training in mindreading.49 Hagiographies facilitated the acquisition of “the monastic theory of mind, by offering a privileged perspective on the saints’ internal deliberations, including the use of clairvoyance and other revelations in their disciplinary decisions.”50

Where would the “monastic theory of mind” fall on the continuum of opacity? It seems that, on the whole, it gravitated toward the transparency end of the spectrum. Other people’s minds were considered inherently knowable, and a particular virtue was attached to being able to figure out the source of one’s own and other people’s thoughts (i.e., divine or demonic). Moreover, one’s “secret thoughts” were not really secret, for God was aware of them and so were the saints.51 This means that “thinking about others’ internal states and/or talking about them” (Bambi Schieffelin) was both a useful and an ethical thing to do.

If we remember that monasteries were “the centers of learning before the rise of the universities”52 and that Sorbonne, Oxford, and Cambridge continued to be theological schools “until the middle of the fourteenth century,”53 it makes sense to think about the “academic theory of mind” as influenced by the monastic one. We can consider, for instance, the role of the dual belief that other people’s thoughts are knowable and that there is a particular virtue associated with tracing the provenance of those thoughts in the development of some academic disciplines; and we can also talk about the gradual suppression of explicit mindreading as a prerequisite for the emergence of others. I can’t hope to do full justice to this topic here (it would require a separate book), but let us take a quick preliminary look at some forms of mindreading associated with academic learning, in a culture that edges toward the transparency end of the opacity spectrum.

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