ABSTRACT
Continuing the inquiry into evolutionary origins of significance discernment, this chapter notes that neocortical mediation of heterogeneous mesolimbic impulses and measures of significance reshape affective-cognitive experience in ways conducive to deep sociality. In turn, deep sociality prompts the emergence of consciousness of consciousness, and with it an interior sense of self alongside attributions of intentional subjectivity to other people and to nonhuman actors. Thinking through the bearing of diverse intentional agents on one another becomes a central task of symbolic culture, and thus foundational to understanding the signifying, significance-discerning activity of imaginative discourse. The emotional communion elicited by poetry and the ease with which one slips into a mimetically figured, intentional, imagined world have at their core—as ordinary language attests—a sensation of being moved, of partaking in an impetus whose elaborations bespeak some promise of good. For non- and pre-axial societies, poetic inspiration and captivation by poetry’s images, sounds, and movement (often accompanied by visual art, music, and dance) link poetry’s cultural agency to the affective, ethical sense animating maternal–infant interactive solicitude, and the projection of that solicitude upon relations with gods and other spiritual agents.
