The Language of Imagination--论文代写范文精选

故事需要由生与死的问题，唐纳德显示神话是最古老的人类发明，甚至在最原始的人类社会,总会有创造的神话和死亡故事,用来封装原汁原味的思想起源和世界结构。下面的paper代写范文进行详述。

Symbolic language ability would undoubtedly be a necessary part of in this new kind of “hunting”. Utilitarian communication, complex calls and gestures for use in hunting, most likely long predated this stage of evolution (DONALD 1991; MITHEN 1996). With awareness of mortality, the task for newly developing thought and language would be to make death livable, to formulate mitigating conceptions around death that would become the precursors to magic and religion and also to imaginative stories. These would be impossible tasks for communication systems based on calls and gestures (DEACON 1997). Via imagination, perception of the external world could be altered. Via stored images and symbolic expression of thought, apprehension of death could be ameliorated (HOCART 1954). What better way to spend countless generations of long cold nights, countless winters of discontent, than around the warmth of the communal fire, struggling to discover ways to make the newly experienced fears bearable? Perhaps there was something within the body that did not die. 

Per- haps there were spirits (or demons even) who controlled such life. We can sense the struggle with such questions in the early expressions of art, the search that would lead to a variety of “answers”, some of which might also be terrifying. Spirits, even demons, no matter how terrifying, would be less terrifying than death itself (HOCART 1954). As fire was used to ward off the leopard, spirits might be used to ward off death, or to provide another life. Those individuals or tribes armed with such protection against death might be more willing to take the risks necessary for a successful hunt. The spirits might indeed inspire individuals to hunt more courageously than before. Who in the five thousand years of recorded history has been more courageous in situations requiring courage than those inspired by spirits or gods? To look at a world beyond that which is sensed, in “mythic modes”, requires that aspect of imagination which in literary theory is known as “suspension of disbelief”: a willingness to suppress doubt (DONALD 1991). Suspension of disbelief, I suggest, is similar to an older use of imagination necessary in order to reconfigure the world to accommodate spirits associated with the dead. 

The mere telling of stories would make long winter nights less monotonous, but that would hardly drive natural selection towards the adaptation of human imagination. Homo erectus, quite likely, lived a million years in such monotony, bored, perhaps, but genetically successful. The storytelling would need to be driven by matters of life and death. DONALD shows life and death mythic constructs to be among the oldest of human inventions: “Even in the most primitive human societies, where technology has remained essentially unchanged for tens of thousands of years, there are always myths of creation and death and stories that serve to encapsulate tribally held ideas of origin and world structure…

 These uses were not late developments, after language had proven itself in concrete practical applications; they were among the first” (DONALD 1991, p213). In discussing the prime uses of language, DONALD adds: “Initially, it was used to construct conceptual models of the human universe. Its function was evidently tied to the development of integrative thought—to the grand unifying synthesis of formerly disconnected, time-bound snippets of information” (p215). To integrate and express life and death thoughts requires that language we now associate with imagination and mind activity. Such thought and such use of language would, I suggest,

from its beginning, intertwine with utilitarian communication, and with the older form of calls and gestures. Once in place, imaginative mind processes would function alongside those of utilitarian brain in human communication, along a continuum from purely sensory expressions to those that are inner directed and conceptual. We see such in current communication, in a continuum from work-related statements, questions and commands, where accuracy is required, to those in religion and poetry, where ambiguity is acceptable and even encouraged. 

Also intertwined with such expressions of thought in human communication are certain “pseudo-symbolic structures… emotions, feelings, desires. They are not symbols for thought, but symptoms of the inner life, like tears and laughter, crooning, or profanity”, (LANGER 1957, p83). These structures too, I suggest, would evolve alongside the emerging human mind, to express the fear, the apprehension, and later, the joy and other good feelings involved in the new search and discovery process. 

Consider that era in prehistoric time when awareness of self and of death-of-self first emerged and found expression. Before this time, the essential role of language would be to communicate as accurately as possible: danger and opportunity, sighting of a predator, sounds of an antelope herd, where food was to be found, when and how to secure it, who should perform the various tasks involved. Plain, concrete, unambiguous communication was needed for success. The payoff was meat or plants that safely could be eaten. With hunting–gathering of information relating to the dead, with tasks related to spiritual well-being, the role of language and pseudosymbolic structures would be to communicate these thoughts and emotions: death-mitigating ideas and fears, in such a way that belief systems could be built. The payoff was an effective spirit or a god that could be believed in. 

Natural selection would favor individuals who “successfully” came to terms with death: who used their emerging minds to find ways of making death bearable. Imagine that stage in evolution when Homo sapiens first became aware of the frightening mystery of non-accidental death, of fatal illness, of an aging process toward certain death. Lacking knowledge of disease, they might have feared that death itself might be contagious (LANGER 1957). From their own terrible dreams they might have looked at a dead comrade and wondered as Hamlet wondered; “in that sleep of death what dreams may come?”

“To the dreamer dreams can be just as real, just as rich in experience. Is the world perhaps only a dream? Thoughts such as these must have struck with overwhelming force the man who had just emerged from the twilight of an unreflective, ‘animal’ realism, and it is understandable that, beset by such doubts, he should turn his back on the external world and concentrate his whole attention on the newly discovered inner world” (LORENZ 1977, p15). The origin of spiritual belief in connection with death is to detach the survivors’ memories and hopes from the dead (FREUD 1950). What “tools” might be found or made to “reshape” death? Those who had the ability to think such questions were on their way to answers. 

Early humans who developed rituals to mourn the dead, and then developed magic or religion to make the apprehension of death “bearable”, would function better: would tend to be less debilitated by fear of death, as individuals and in community. The foundation of all ritual is that one cannot do it alone. 

The individual cannot impart life to himself; others: human or superhuman, are needed (HOCART 1954, BECKER 1975). Natural selection might have favored altruism: such behavior might have had an evolutionary component—favoring those tribes, as well as those individuals within the tribe, who demonstrate altruistic behavior. “There is ample evidence that humans cooperate with people to whom they are not closely related—more so than for any other species… Humans, however, have evolved dispositions to cooperate or compete that take their cues from the actions of other individuals” (SULLOWAY 1998 p38). In a similar way, natural selection might then favor tribes as well as individual members who, having come to the realization that everyone, including themselves, dies, developed the ability to make death bearable— for the tribe as well as for themselves as individuals. 

Natural selection would then favor those with the ability to imagine and explain, to create and socially share ways of making death bearable. Ultimately, they would search for and find spirits and gods. Memory: stored imagination, would now get to be a communal process, a unique social process for preserving “the meat” hunted down by individual imaginations. Our ancestors, hunting for game with their appetites set on finding antelope meat, might have to settle for lesser game, or even for vegetation that merely took the edge off their hunger. These ancestors, hunting for spirits with their minds set on finding one that could awaken the dead, might have to settle for a lesser god, or even for vaguely sensed spirits that merely offered hope.

Conclusion 
All societies, in their rituals and beliefs, have transcended the reality of what their senses and experiences reveal about human death (BECKER 1973; BROWN 1959; HOCART 1954). This is true even of societies where the people deny that such death has occurred (LANGER 1957; 1982). It is also true of Buddhists, who have no God or belief in afterlife. Buddha left these matters sufficiently equivocal to allow beliefs that transcend the sensed reality and even those that “abolish” death (HOCART 1954; SMITH 1958). The essential difference between human brains and those of other animals, the difference which I believe led to other differences, lies in imagination: an adaptation which enabled humans to wrestle with the one set of problems which no other animal has had: a problem originating with human awareness of self, and then, some shrouded awareness of impending death-of-self, and finally, the problem of how to make that awesome awareness bearable. 

Early Homo sapiens, to the extent they lacked imagination and culture built on imagination, would also lack the individual and collective support systems we now have in place to make such awareness bearable. Modern minds, drawing from past cultures, have developed abilities to keep conscious thoughts of mortality separate from day-to-day business thoughts. Thus we have learned to live and function in pockets of immortality (MONTELL 1999, 2001). We go to work each morning, wrapping ourselves in a mantle of immortality, the fabric of which is sewn in a series of plans and activities we “know” will be executed; we will not die today; we have no thought of it. Intellectually, yes: we are aware of possible mishap. Practically, no: we have developed mechanisms and processes that allow us to function day to day, week to week, and beyond, as if we were immortal. Early Homo sapiens, newly aware of their mortality and fearful, lacking such mechanisms and processes, would expend precious energy in a state of unproductive alertness and anxiety, and would function less well in an already precariously balanced existence.

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