When I was a child, I believed that the truest philosophy would be the one which gave me superpowers. While this idea was naïve, there is a kernel of truth behind it: some life philosophies present a path which are achievable and lead to concrete benefits, while others are so ambitious that their achievement is unimaginable. Žižek’s ideally ethical person is a “monster without empathy, doing what is to be done in a weird coincidence of blind spontaneity and reflexive distance, helping others while avoiding their disgusting proximity” (Milbank & Žižek, 2009, sect. 4.4). While this notion is interesting and audaciously humorous, I often find myself liking people and thinking before I make ethical decisions and am not expecting that to change soon. Other theories of the good or meaningful life are boringly achievable, such as the various self-help books which offer pre-made activities which promise a positive change in outlook on life.
The works of Oscar Wilde present a middle way: a methodology which is ambitious and engaging enough to be worthwhile, while practical enough that one can follow the path. Wilde tells us our minds exist in a nexus point between nature and art, with nature hostilely attempting to infect mind with its violence and mundanity (Wilde, 1989, p. 1040). He proposed that art could be used to oppose nature’s cruel impositions upon us, and that if the ideology of realism can be overcome by turning one’s own life into art, then the arts can be used as a tool to overcome and even shape nature (Wilde, 1989, pp. 991-992). That the theory is compelling is not enough to make it practical; because a life must be lived, any theory of meaning must be expressible in the lives of individual humans. An examination of three theories in cognitive science will show that the popular notice that Wilde had great insight into the human experience is correct. Down to the details of his essays, plays, and poems, Wilde’s project for meaning anticipated some of the most cutting-edge ideas in the science of the brain, and his accuracy is an additional reason to consider taking on the project of an artistic life because it means an attempt has the potential of success.
Prototype theory is a cognitive-linguistic theory which states that individuals do not use necessary and sufficient conditions to categorize phenomena (Coseriu, Willems, & Leuschner, 2000). Instead, they have a mental model of a prototype, a mental construction consisting of a set of features associated with the category. Some of these features are strongly associated with the category, while some are only mildly associated with the category. When individuals classify objects, they classify them not in a black and white dichotomy, but rather as a spectrum. Research subjects were shown to classify animals as a spectrum even though animal taxonomy would imply a binary categorization; to the average person a swallow is more of a bird than an ostrich because swallows better match up with the typical bird prototype (Geeraerts, 2016).
We can look to The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde, 1989) to see that Wilde masterfully used prototypes in his fiction. The play is a smorgasbord of romantic comedy tropes, such as: miscommunications which lead to drama, a simple moral at the end, several couples who find love together, and much more (Millgram & Class, 2022). Each trope is a feature which is highly associated with the prototype of romantic comedies, and because of the preponderance of these features in the play, The Importance of Being Earnest is a token that almost entirely embodies said prototype. Wilde’s theory of art is that to create good art one must fill an artistic form with content (Wilde, 1989, p. 1027). These tropes are important formal features of the romantic comedy genre, and prototypes are the cognitive aspect of form which Wilde fills with the events of the plot.
The conceptual mapping theory of analogy (Holyoak & Stamenkovic, 2018; Gentner, 1983) explains how the brain can use comparisons, metaphors, similes, and so on to transfer understanding of one topic to another. According to the theory, the domains involved in an analogy can be classified as either being the source or the target. The source domain is the conceptual schema the analogy is pulling from. The target domain is the phenomenon which is meant to be understood through the lens of this new conceptual schema. For example, if one claims that “love is a battlefield” the source is battlefields, and love is the target. The conceptual structure of battlefields can then be used to better understand how love works: a breakup is like being shot through the heart, passion is like an explosion, and so on. However, it is important to note that conceptual mappings do not exclusively reveal traits of the target. Some aspects of conceptual mapping discover similarities between two domains, while other aspects create apparent similarities between domains (Black, 1979, p. 456); these created similarities can generate an illusion of understanding even when the conceptual structure of the source is dissonant with the reality of the target.
Conceptual mapping change how humans process information. When Thibodeau and Boroditsky (2011) gathered research subjects to ask them to solve a fictional problem involving rising crime rates, some subjects were told about the scenario with the metaphor of crime being a virus while others were presented with crime as a beast. Subjects who were taught about the scenario with the analogy of a virus were more likely to suggest making systematic changes to how the city government addressed issues like poverty. Members of the beast group were more likely to suggest that crime be prevented with increasing uses of force by police. The differences between how the two analogy groups decided to handle the problem were greater than the differences between how individuals with opposing political views answered the scientists’ questions; because the conceptual structure of virus prevention involves the slow process of a community working together, while beasts invoke an immediate physical threat, each subject’s experience of the target domain was altered, and their problem-solving mechanisms reflected this shift.
Wilde’s poem, “The Burden of Itys,” shows conceptual mapping being utilized to improve one’s writing. The poem’s main character is a student, sitting on the banks of the Thames. As the main character examines the river and its surroundings, he begins to compare the nature around him to things he had learned about Greek myth and Catholicism. When Wilde is attempting to show that the beauty of the river is far greater than anything of the church, he uses the source domain (Catholicism) and its out of tune hymns to the beautiful “songs” of the birds in the target domain (Thames) (Wilde, 1989, p. 737). Similarly, The Portrait of Mr. W. H. tells the story of a man who has become obsessed with a theory involving the identity of the subject of some of Shakespeare’s poetry. The implied romantic hold the subject had over Shakespeare is used to conceptually map the obsession the story’s main character has over this theory, to the point where the theory holds so much power over its researchers that the notion of dying for the sake of the theory is within the possibility space (Wilde, 1989, p. 1200); like one would die for a true love, one would die for a true theory.
The free energy principle is a neurological framework which attempts to ground neuroscience in physics and information theory, while also acting as a unified theory for life and behavior (Friston, 2010; Schwartenbeck, FitzGerald, Dolan, & Friston, 2013); it characterizes living beings through mathematical descriptions of learning and action. A full explanation of the theory is beyond the scope of this paper, but central to its modeling is the division of organisms to sensory, inner, and active states. When sensory information is transduced by a living being, the data is compared to the models in the inner states. Typically, some form of surprise will occur due to the imperfection in the models; this surprise is measured by an increase of free energy (Friston, 2010, p. 127).
According to the free energy principle, the reduction and manipulation of surprise through the reduction of free energy is the best way for complex systems to survive in an entropic universe. When an organism processes surprising sensory data they have two options: they can alter their models, learning from the surprise and therefore reducing the surprise, or they can take some form of action to make their sensory environment match up with their models so the surprise is no longer relevant. Both solutions lead to a decrease in free energy. According to this principle, the behavior of all life and all dynamic systems on Earth can be modeled by this framework, and this relationship between surprise and learning is the explanation for all action.
In Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (1989) we see Lady Chiltern as a perfect case study. Lady Chiltern believes that her husband, Sir Robert Chiltern, is an ethically ideal man. When she receives surprising information which implies, and later reveals, that he has a shady past, she decides to act by willfully pushing him to behave as if he were still her ideal. The play ends with her realizing how much pressure she has put on him by putting him on a pedestal; she decides to develop a more accurate model of Sir Robert, allowing him to better express his own model by taking action and pursuing his ambitions.
When these theories are synthesized the achievability of Wilde’s call for our lives to reflect art becomes clearer. Prototypes are a kind of model which exist in the inner states of human organisms. These prototypes can act as source domains for conceptual mapping or can be understood when made into an analogy’s target. When an analogy is made, some of the mappings will be discovered, while others will be created. Upon closer examination of the situation, the created aspects of the mapping will become apparent. This will lead to surprise in the inner states and a spike of free energy because the analogous reasoner expects the source and target to have the same structural map. When a prototype-analogy leads to such a surprise, the surprised human can learn the differences between the two domains or they can act so the domains align. This shows an important subtlety in Black’s philosophy of analogy (1979). It is not just that created similarities in conceptual mapping are illusory similarities between domains, but that the created similarities change the world, both based in how individuals perceive the world and in how individuals act in response to the world.
Wilde offers the example of children who read stories about glamorous scoundrels, who then reenact the exploits from the fiction. This is “usually attributed to the influence of literature on the imagination. But this is not so. The imagination is essentially creative, and always seeks for a new form. The boy-burglar is simply the inevitable result of life’s imitative instinct” (Wilde, 1989, p. 983). When the youths read the stories, a prototype for the glamorous scoundrel is developed. They then compare their lives to this prototype, and in some ways, they learn how their lives cannot match up with the scoundrels; their crimes end up being small-scale theft of sweets instead of grandiose highwaymen exploits. In the ways they can act, they shape their lives (target domain) based on the structure of the stories (source domain) by staging play acted robberies in their own neighborhoods. This expression of reduction of free energy for a prototype-analogy aligns with Wilde’s description of the basis of life: “the energy of life, as Aristotle would call it—is simply the desire for expression, and Art is always presenting various forms through which this expression can be attained” (1989, p. 985). Prototypes are the cognitive aspects of these forms, and the analogous reasoning and the informational surprise dynamics of the free energy principle leads to their expression.
The task of making life into art becomes the task of selecting and internalizing an artistic prototype one would like to manifest. The mission is to reduce learning in the form of accepting domain differences, and to maximize actions which change the world so that the differences are erased. Without infinite will, resources, and skill this cannot be perfectly achieved, but more work to match up created conceptual structures can always be done. If I decide I would like my life to embody a cyberpunk thriller, I will probably have to accept that I will never get a robotic limb which can turn into a sword, but I might develop my skills as a computer programmer and learn Japanese. Wilde shows us how this is best done in De Profundis, in which he turns a bad breakup and encounter with the law into the tragic tale of a Christ-figure (1989, p. 929-930), living out the rest of his short life in the mold of the form of tragedy.
The power of art to generate prototypical domains, which can then be easily applied to an individual’s life, contributes serious credibility to Wilde’s ideas on meaning. Each of the cognitive science theories I have covered are based in the real potential for human decision-making and action. Presuming the truth of the above theories, because humans are artistically oriented beings and because we are amongst the most powerful forces within our environment, the art humanity creates changes reality by inspiring us to shape the world around us in the image of painting, song, and literature. Wilde’s call is for people to overcome realism, and all this takes is the projection of artistic prototypes onto the world, triggering human action. Once the domains of art and nature begin to clash, the only limit is human creativity and ingenuity; while humanity’s capabilities have restrictions, the dynamics of the free energy principle have kept life going on Earth for three billion years, shaping the face of a planet and giving us the subject for which we seek meaning.
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