Human sacrifice and the evolution of thinking: A critical assessment of christoph türcke’s philosophy of dreams

Abstract

In his award-winning book Philosophy of Dreams German philosopher Christoph Türcke argues that rituals of human sacrifice played an important role in the evolution of human cognition. Starting with some of Freud’s basic insights from his seminal book Die Traumdeutung (The interpretation of dreams), Türcke argues that the traumatic repetition compulsion described by Freud was already “at work†in our human ancestors. Confronted with natural horrors and experiences of traumatic shock, early hominids re-enacted these experiences in rituals of human sacrifice in order to find relief. Via repetition, this opened up the possibility of internalizing the observed horror and finally of dealing with it in the form of mental representations. This chapter critically discusses some of Türcke’s starting assumptions and suggests an alternative pathway to human cognition, in which joint hunting of potentially life-threatening animals might have been crucial for the evolution of human cognition.