“If You Depict a Bird, Give it Space to Fly”: Eastern Psychologies, the Arts, and Self-Knowledge

Evolutionary psychological theory is seeking to colonize the arts. Art is to be seen as useful–specifically useful to human beings as they are conceived within the present standard cognitive science framework. This paper is intended as a dissenting voice. In it I will seek to show how the imaginative arts may be universal and treasured precisely because they can offer humans a glimpse of a different mode of knowing (and being), a different kind of psychology altogether, than does our standard psychological theory or cognitive science. The implication is that the cognitive sciences could learn more by asking–rather than telling–the arts about what kind of creatures humans actually are.