Conrad Montell
Rather, the focus is on imagination as a possible
adaptive response for early Homo sapiens to that car-
dinal human fear: mortality (Leyhausen 1973), and
on the associated memory devices essential for stor-
ing the products of imagination (Langer 1982,
1972). Apprehension of death developed as a free
fear: the sensing of a danger that cannot be avoided
or fled from (Leyhausen 1973; Langs 1996). Having
such apprehension, “we die a thousand deaths, that
is the price we pay for living a thousand lives”
(Bronowski 1977, p25). When and to what extent
this apprehension became conscious (in the ordinary
murky sense of the word) are questions beyond the
scope of this paper. This apprehension might have
developed as a consequence of that prereflective
consciousness Sartre and others consider as aware-
ness of an object and awareness that it is not that
object (Malhotra 1997). I avoid modern issues of
authenticity of self and self awareness: issues of
whether and to what extent such self and awareness
exist and are known by the individual, apart from
social content (Weigert 1988). It seems that at least
some amount of self-awareness is required to enter
the state of being a self (Martin 1985, p3). I intend
awareness: of self and other, and of mortality, to
mean some “knowing” of these things that leads to
behavior, whether or not the knowing can be
squeezed into thought and expressed. Thus, this
sense of awareness encompasses various forms of
knowing, some of which were (and still are) ineffable:
anxiety, feelings of foreboding, dread, and individ-
ual moods that find expression in some form of hu-
man behavior, including inaction (out of fear) in a
situation calling for action. There is Freud’s contro-
versial conception of a death instinct to consider, as
well as other instinctual knowing that exists at the
borderline of animal and human awareness (Brown
1959). Considering these levels of the knowing of
fear, I focus on that cardinal fear and on the potential
loss of vitality that I suggest paralleled its develop-
ment: “a number of factors, psychological as well as
physiological in nature, at work in causing actual,
concrete fears; the cardinal source (not the experi-
enced but the essential one) of the phenomenon of
fear as a whole, however, is man’s mortality” (Ley-
hausen 1973, p248).
I argue that human imagination evolved as a way
of coping with that cardinal fear and its potentially
debilitating consequences. This fear could not be al-
leviated by further evolution of the external senses.
An inner sense offered an escape from a “predator”
that did not appear within the physical environ-
ment. This escape mechanism quite likely developed
as a distortion of sensory experience (Lorenz 1977;
Leyhausen 1973). This disorder had survival value for
our species. Lorenz offers a clue in understanding
such a development: “Far from hindering the inves-
tigation of the organism affected by it, a pathological
disorder very often gives us the key to the under-
standing of how the organism works” (1977, p5).
This “key”, I suggest, is useful in understanding the
evolution of imagination as an adaptation. Human
self-awareness leading to an awareness of mortality
can be considered a disorder, and just that kind of
disorder that “gives us the key to understanding”
how that anomalous part of the human animal came
into being. “We have developed ‘organs’ only for
those aspects of reality of which, in the interest of
survival, it was imperative for our species to take ac-
count, so that selection pressure produced this par-
ticular cognitive apparatus” (Lorenz 1977, p7). Since
human imagination appears to be unique, it seems
reasonable to inquire as to what unique survival
problems might have developed for proto-humans.
I suggest that an evolving awareness of self and of
death of self led to a new kind of survival problem
that, in turn, led to the evolution of a new kind of
“solution”. As it evolved, imagination would lead to
the development of “belief”, a pro-attitude superim-
posed on information and experience, and to a new
kind of behavior: religious behavior. “Its original
function may have been to keep men’s minds in bal-
ance with the rest of nature, but what has led to its
own elaboration is a purpose it soon acquired: the
denial or masking of death” (Langer 1982, p137).
“Religious behavior” is used here in a broad sense,
to include the nascent mental activity hominids,
newly aware of self and mortality, might have en-
gaged in individually and, as emerging language
made possible, in small groups. With regard to inves-
tigating the sources of religious behavior, there is, of
course, a great rift in human views of “mind”, “soul”,
and individual afterlife: a largely unspoken-of di-
chotomy between scientists and secular academi-
cians on the one hand, and the rest of the world on
the other, between the staunch materialists (mo-
nists) and the mass of people (dualists) who feel that
mind and soul exist as non-material stuff. “I suppose
most people in our civilization accept some kind of
dualism. They think they have both a mind and a
body. But that is emphatically not the current view
among the professionals in philosophy, artificial in-
telligence, neurobiology, and cognitive science”
(Searle 1997, p43). Few professionals address this
rift. There is some risk in doing so, especially when
the different views are taken beyond academia. Our
Evolution and Cognition ∣ 3 ∣ 2002, Vol. 8, No. 1