Hypochondriac disease – in the mind, the guts, or the soul?

Posted on December 6, 2012 by

Domenico di Bartolo’s Care of the Sick

By Yasmin Haskell (Chief Investigator, ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions: Europe 1100-1800 at University of Western Australia)

This post was first published on The Conversation in their Medical Histories series, recounting curious stories from the history of medicine. This instalment looks at the apparent epidemic of “hypochondriac disease” in the early modern period.

Lots of common and country folk, of both sexes, come to me very frequently seeking advice and cures for murmurings and motions, continual and extraordinary, persuading themselves most stubbornly that they have accidentally swallowed the spawn of frogs or other beasts in drinking water, from which, in their bodies, those beasts have thereafter hatched and been nourished … Since I have to agree with them, whether I like it or not, in deference to their most fixed melancholic impressions, I prescribe either vomitives or cathartic medicines, and I expel these imaginary beasts with their melancholy feces, not without ample incantations, to the great relief of the sick.

This passage comes from a seventeenth-century medical treatise, The Hypochondriac Microcosm, by Munich physician, Malachias Geiger. Like so many medics during the early modern period, Geiger was preoccupied by an apparent epidemic of “hypochondriac disease” that had been sweeping Europe since the late Renaissance.

But hypochondriac disease in this period was not exhausted by the sort of imaginary illness described above by Geiger. For early modern writers, afflictions of the “hypochondria” were just that – real sickness caused by disorders of the organs “below” (hypo-) the “cartilage of the ribs” (chondria).

Disorders of digestion could give rise, via the transmission of noxious vapours through the body, to respiratory and cardiac problems, and in the case of “hypochondriac melancholy”, to severe psychological anguish and delusions.

Sufferers harboured unreal beliefs – one was made of glass; another had turned into a bird; one was a king, the pope, or the most brilliant or irresistible man alive. It’s difficult to credit such sensational “symptoms”, especially when they are attributed so widely and to anonymous individuals.

 

Caspar Barlaeus, the Dutch physician and poet who believed he was made of butter. Museum Catharijneconvent/Wikimedia Commons

 

But we can point to at least one historical, self-convinced victim of the malady, the Dutchman Caspar Barlaeus (1584-1688). A famous poet, theologian and physician, Barlaeus seems to have come to believe that he was made of butter, and drowned himself in a well.

Interestingly, such extreme derangements of the imagination (the image-processing faculty in the brain) were not usually thought to affect the reason. The healthy reason, if you like, was merely working with faulty perceptions. But there was also a recognition that such delusions, which would be classified by modern psychiatrists variously as “psychotic” or “somatoform”, were closely connected with the emotions, or “passions of the soul”.

Reviewing Barlaeus’s case, an eighteenth-century Dutch physician, Gerard Nicolaas Heerkens, concluded that the poor man had come unstuck because of a well-founded anxiety about religious persecution; not, as one of Heerkens’s fellow physicians claimed, because of the long-term ill-effects of the sedentary academic life!

The connection between mental health and lifestyle, including diet, exercise, social and sexual intercourse, was certainly no invention of modern medicine. But what, if any, are the lessons for modern psychiatric theory and practice of the experience and diagnosis of early modern hypochondriac disease?

Modern “hypochondriasis” according to both the current diagnostic “bibles” for mental disorders – the DSM-IV-TR and ICD-10 – requires patients to show chronic anxiety that they have one or more specific diseases, such as cancer or multiple sclerosis; be hyper-vigilant about bodily symptoms; and have been doctor shopping.

Early modern hypochondria sufferers were also anxious about their health and notoriously dissatisfied with their doctors. The difference between now and then is that they and their doctors “knew” and named the malady from which they suffered – it was hypochondriac disease, and it was serious.

Bodily suffering is not necessary in modern day “hypochondriasis”, but the gastrointestinal problems mandated by the DSM-IV for modern “somatisation disorder” (patients seem to experience real physiological problems and distress) were hypochondriac problems par excellence in the early modern period. Indeed, most early modern patients would be classified by modern psychiatrists as “somatizers”, sufferers from a different kind of “somatoform” disorder.

 

Bodleian Library, University of Oxford/Wikimedia Commons

 

Needless to say, dark religious scruples leading to self-castration, motor and neurological problems, the sense that one’s bed is crawling with snakes and other such symptoms would not appear anywhere near the modern DSM and ICD definitions of “hypochondriasis”. My research collaborator, a neurologist and psychiatrist, informs me that he often sees in his practice patients with delusions of being infested with parasites who are, nonetheless, not especially anxious about their health. They are thus not hypochondriacs as defined by the DSM.

Histories of illnesses like hypochondriac disease leave one wondering whether modern psychiatry has really de-cluttered the diagnostic house or merely rearranged the furniture. There is certainly nothing in modern definitions of illness in the ICD or DSM that speaks to the aetiology of the sufferings (let’s not call them symptoms) associated with these “disorders”, let alone guarantees better treatment of patients.

In the seventeenth century the typical hypochondriac (usually a man) would have grizzled about his guts, been fearful, sad and perhaps even delusional. He would have turned to his physician for both physical and psychological care, not just a quick prescription.

A label of “melancholy hypochondriac” would be just the beginning of a course of multi-pronged, no doubt often misguided, attempts to alleviate his suffering ­– bodily, emotional and even spiritual. For his doctors, the baffling hypochondriac illness was never “all in the mind”, let alone reducible to a neat checklist.

The messy work of tracing the long conceptual history of “mental” disorders is probably not to the taste of busy modern psychiatrists. But scientists should, after all, be in the business of evidence, not bibles.

This is part one of Medical Histories – click on the links below to read the other articles:

Part Two: Spermatorrhoea, the lesser known version of male hysteria

Part Three: Culture and psychiatry: an outline for a neglected history

Yasmin Haskell receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

The Conversation

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.

Mezzogiorno: Life. Death. Southern Italy.

Posted on December 5, 2012 by

Last month, author David Kerekes spoke at one of our QM history of emotions lunchtime seminars about his new short novel: Mezzogiorno. In this blog post David writes about some of the background on how Mezzogiorno came to be. 

A free extract from Mezzogiorno: Life. Death. Southern Italy. by David Kerekes (pub Headpress 2012) can be found here.

 

I had not stepped foot in the mountain village of Montefalcione for more than twenty years when the imminent death of my mother precipitated my return in 2006. The village is in southern Italy, located in the province of Avellino in Campania, some 523 metres above sea level. In the last week of August, Montefalcione is host to a festa (party) devoted to its patron saint, Sant’Antonio di Padova, during which the unassuming streets are decked out with lights and musicians and inundated with visitors, no less a Diaspora returning to the place of their birth (among their number my mother).

I was quite prepared for the bitter fruit of such mitigating circumstances, of returning to the village after twenty years at the behest of a dying parent, but what I found in 2006 was something wholly unexpected.

Image from author’s collection.

Southern Italy is depicted in the history books as a cruel and amoral land overrun with brigands and devils. The territories of the south begin with Rome, perhaps Naples, and they stretch down to the islands of Sicily and Sardinia, becoming collectively the Mezzogiorno, which means midday sun, or, that blistering and rotten country. The geography of the south is harsher than that of the north, its economy poorer, and its culture occult and mysterious.

Nothing much had changed since I last visited Montefalcione. The pace of life had not picked up so that I could notice: Old people still observed the street from their chair at the door; Tony’s bar remained a fixture in the playing of Scopa and Briscola, the traditional card games; and men of the comune, the local council, still had a lot of things to shout about. The place quickly assumed the disquieting dream like quality I held for it in my thoughts, in no small part attributable to the folkloric stories of my mother and her childhood, in which family and Church are sacrosanct. In these stories the living often walk with the dead, and almost no division exists between real and unreal.

The Church of S. Maria Assunta, Montefalcione (image from author’s collection)

The soundtrack for the festa is the hymn of S. Antonio. This sober musical phrase plays on a loop from a speaker and serenades the statue of the saint as it travels through the village on the back of a truck. It ebbs and flows on the mountain and can be heard for miles, rallying funds for the procession of  S. Antonio that takes place on the Sunday, when the statue will be carried through the streets (bedecked in a coat fashioned from the silver and gold trinkets and jewellery donated over the years). Fireworks are another key aspect of the festa. The breathtaking display of pyrotechnics that conclude the festa on Monday is anticipated each morning by thunderous practice charges, which rattle the wind and S. Antonio’s melancholic theme.

Image from author’s collection.

From what I could determine, the influx of tourists in 2006 was greater than the preceding years (and has increased exponentially since). The architects of these old streets, said one member of the comune, could never have expected it. Indeed not. They had more in mind peasants, the occasional latifondista, chickens and goats. With dusk, people begin to saunter down Via Pieschi and Via Roma, where gaudy bancarella have been erected selling tat, arriving at the piazza where the entertainments begin. This part of the village retains much of its antiquated flavour, and the entertainment in 2006 comments something of the fact with a medieval theme, including revellers in armour, a re-enactment of a scene from Romeo and Juliet, and lots of food and wine. On one small street are the antichi mestieri, examples of traditional work craft as demonstrated by old folk. The street is nameless but comes out beneath an archway that carries a fitting crest: Porte del Tempo (Gates of Time). A TV crew has arrived and interviews one barrel maker behind a cigarette, documenting for posterity a former generation and its trade.

And of course there is the music.

There is no shortage of musicians during the festa, and in the old part of town they are found. Small bands, or gruppi itineranti (travelling groups), comprising mandolin, squeezebox and sometimes tambourine or castanets, play a traditional music known as tarantella, which is a swift, loose and hypnotic type of music without any discernable beginning or end. The tarantella dates back to the Middle Ages, perhaps earlier. One legend claims an infestation of tarantula spiders in Taranto, a city in Apulia on the coast of southern Italy, gave rise to it. When bitten by a tarantula, the inhabitants of Taranto would flail and dance to frenetic rhythms to try and rid themselves of its poison. An expansion of this legend suggests the venom had hallucinogenic qualities, hence the vigorous dancing. Others regard stories about invading tarantulas as fudge for the constraints placed upon dancing by the church at that time.

There are three churches in the village of Montefalcione. Of these, S. Maria Assunta is the chiesa madre, the mother church, situated at the highest tip of the mountain. This is where bidding will take place for those men who wish to be the statue bearers for S. Antonio, a great and expensive privilege. The statue on its tour will be accompanied by a brass band wearing black shirts and grey neckties, colours representing death and mourning, or in the Christian faith the mortality of the body and the immortality of the spirit. Next to the church of S. Maria Assunta is a vantage point that overlooks the village and where, for the festa, a stage has been erected for groups to perform.

The head of the dance leads his troupe up Via S. Angelino da Padova. We pass a circle of people observing other musicians playing an equally engaging music, and a young couple dancing in a slow, precise and yet almost disengaged manner. It’s an inversion of the usually frenetic dance associated with the tarantella. (I would see an old-timer dance this exact same way during another festa, in Galatina in Apulia, which is the spiritual home of the tarantati, those people exhibiting symptoms of the tarantula bite.) The steep cobblestoned climb finds us at the brooding doors of S. Maria Assunta. To the left of these doors, in the corner of the village, is the vantage point whose glorious view spans the whole of the mountainside, and where, on the specially erected platform, another group of musicians are already playing.

At the fore of the stage, clutching a glass of wine, soon replaced by the bottle, a grizzled fellow in a t-shirt and an aged tattoo down one arm makes a rasping introduction. He looks not unlike a sailor on shore leave.

The crowd stands and watches as a beat provided by the tamburelli augments with an accordionist who carefully picks out a melody.

The group is called Zimbaria, named after the man at the front with the wine, Pino Zimba. Zimbaria hail from Salento, southern Apulia, the so-called ‘heel’ of Italy, and their repertoire is almost exclusively traditional songs. Pino Zimba’s introductions to these songs, like the lyrics themselves, are set in the dense colloquial brogue of his homeland, close to impenetrable to the Montefalcionesi audience. Zimba notwithstanding, the group are a relatively young bunch, among them a gifted accordionist, two guitarists, a violinist and a large lute. A vocal contingency within the audience is young, too, having made the trip especially to see Zimbaria play. This is evidence of a resurgent interest in traditional music in the Italian south. Zimbaria are a far cry from some other groups playing the festa and the type of groups I recall from my own childhood, playing at functions organised for the Italian Diasporas across the UK, notably Bury and Bedford. Music in this instance was attuned to family entertainment, performed by uniformly dressed musicians on harsh electrical instruments. It served its purpose but was very uncool.

Pino Zimba was to die of cancer soon after the performance in Montefalcione. This cemented his status as Italian folk hero, with tribute concerts taking place (and continuing to take place) throughout the south. I would attend some of these concerts in what was to become an infatuation with the music of the tarantella. I spent some months travelling to places that were key in its legend and, moreover, the legend of tarantism itself, where the roots of the tarantella lie. My departure point was of course Montefalcione, in a search for the forces evoked that night of the Zimbaria gig. Therein lay enlightenment and purpose, and its road — a secret road manifest only in the steps taken upon it — I found and followed, returning some years later with a novel I called Mezzogiorno.

 

[The above text is an extract from Gathering of the Tribe: Music and Heavy Conscious Creation, Mark Goodall, pub Headpress 2012]

© David Kerekes 2012

New AHRC report on grassroots philosophy

Posted on December 5, 2012 by

Here is a new report I wrote on the rise of grassroots philosophy clubs.

A very brief executive summary:

– There are more and more grassroots philosophy clubs all over the world, including 850 philosophy clubs just on meetup.com, which have a combined membership of 125,000. There are also Socrates Cafes, Skeptics in the Pub, Cafe Philos, and a myriad of debating clubs, discussion groups and ideas salons. And there are a growing number of commercial organisers of ideas events, such as the School of Life and the Idler Academy in London, Brandstof in Amsterdam, TED and Big Ideas on the net, as well as philosophy festivals like Amsterdam’s Month of Philosophy and the UK’s How The Light Gets In.

– People go to clubs for lots of reasons, including learning, sociability, the desire for community and belonging, and to find new ways to think about how to live.

– I suggest the growth of philosophy clubs is usefully situated in the rise of the ‘mass intelligentsia’ – a growing demographic of intelligent people who, while not necessarily working in academia, have the desire and capacity for complex culture, and happily give up their leisure both to consume it and to discuss it. This demographic appeared from the 1960s on, as a result of the expansion of higher education. Some of the theorists for this concept include Daniel Bell, Richard Flacks, Charles Taylor and Jonathan Rose. I discuss this concept in the report, and have also written more journalistically about it here. There was also an excellent Intelligent Life article on the concept back in 2008, which you can read here.

– Grassroots philosophy clubs can be ‘anti-academic’, in so far as they’re a form of philosophy outside of traditional academic confines, in the wider community. They’re often more informal, participatory, personal, and irreverent. However, the dichotomy of street philosophy versus academic philosophy is limiting and ultimately unhelpful – many grassroots clubs are run by academic philosophers, or invite them to speak, and some have strong links with universities. I suggest that grassroots philosophy and academic philosophy need each other – academic philosophy without the grassroots risks becoming irrelevant, while grassroots philosophy without academia risks becoming incoherent.

– We set up a website for the report, The Philosophy Hub, which has a map where people can register their local group and advertise events. There’s also lots of useful resources on the site about grassroots clubs. If you’re involved with a club, it would be great if you added it to the map, and spread the word.

– We held a seminar on grassroots philosophy at Queen Mary last month, with participants including people from SAPERE, Philosophy For All, Skeptics in the Pub and Pub Psychology and other groups. You can watch their talks on this YouTube playlist.  There are also some articles on grassroots philosophy in the upcoming issue of The Philosopher’s Magazine.

– This is an ongoing research interest of mine, so please get in touch if you’re involved with grassroots philosophy projects which I could write about for The Philosophy Hub’s blog. And a big thank you to Thomas Dixon, my supervisor at the Centre, for helping me with this project.

History of suicide is worthwhile, whatever the Australian government says

Posted on December 4, 2012 by


By Rebecca McNamara, University of Sydney

How do we feel about death, suffering, and struggle, and how do we react to those around us as they deal with these issues?

These questions shape and are shaped by society. They guide individual choices, communities, and national and international policies. Emotions are so integral to these questions that we rarely pause to tease them out and find out how and why they work. But emotions are key.

I am a postdoctoral researcher for the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100-1800), or CHE. My project, carried out with CHE Chief Investigator Dr Juanita Ruys, considers emotions related to suicide in medieval Europe.

It is one of dozens of research projects funded through the CHE that asks how emotions were formulated, how they operated in the past, and how they have shaped the present.

ARC-funded research from our centre was deemed by the Coalition to be of “limited value” this week – the kind of research that in a tight fiscal environment should have its funding pulled.

But this view is shortsighted and superficial, and here’s why.

Though I research people who killed themselves hundreds of years ago, there are continuities in the ways that humans deal with struggle and change.

A person who drowns him or herself after suffering from disease, isolated at home and delirious with pain, a widow who hangs herself in her bakery after working to support herself and her children, a suspected criminal who kills himself in fear that he will be shackled with torture, imprisonment, and shame: these scenarios are lifted directly from medieval coroners’ rolls, but they could equally be used to explain suicide today.

How were people’s emotions in the past understood to lead to these self-destructive situations, and how did family, community, and the state respond to their
suicides? Though the cultural settings, geography, and time period are different, we are asking the same questions now in Australia.

One in three Australians participated in R U OK? Day on September 13th this year according to R U OK’s scientific advisory group.

This event and other organisations such as Lifeline, Beyond Blue, Headspace, and ReachOut.com are working to ensure that Australians check in on each other and themselves. They provide services that help people to cope with and overcome depression, bullying, the oppression of chronic sickness or ill mental health, and other factors that can trigger suicide.

My research project on emotions related to suicide in medieval Europe is historical, but it has impact on Australia today. If hearing about this project causes one person to reassess their suicidal thoughts, or prompts someone to ask a loved one or colleague how they are doing, if it piques the interest of policy makers and furthers the work of those in organisations who help suicidal people, then it has done something incredible.

The advancement of the humanities is my academic goal. I also talk about suicide in the public sphere, liaise with medical practitioners and counsellors, and reach out to those who need us to recognise and help them before it’s too late. These things transcend the traditional view of what humanities scholarship does, yet they are part of my project.

Research in the history of emotions necessarily involves the big issues, and the CHE is committed to publicising this groundbreaking historical research and showing how it is relevant to Australia today.

Through this project and others, the CHE is helping to articulate how Australian universities are relevant beyond the walls of their sandstone quadrangles. This is the cutting edge of the academy.

Devoting Australian Research Council funding to create jobs in the intellectual culture of this country and further high quality research — while addressing the significant issues of modern society — is something that the government and the people of Australia should not only support, but of which they should be exceptionally proud.

Rebecca McNamara works for the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100-1800). She receives funding from the Australian Research Council. She works at the University of Sydney.

The Conversation

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.

The Politics of Empathy

Posted on December 3, 2012 by

When Mitt Romney was caught on camera writing-off 47 per cent of Americans as tax avoiders, Democrats were quick to jump on his remarks as another example of the Republican Party’s ‘empathy deficit’. Since Barack Obama identified a lack of empathy as the cause of America’s bitter partisan divides, a series of studies have claimed to show that conservatives score lower on empathy than liberals. As one would expect, Republicans contest these findings, arguing that such studies tend to favour Democratic principles of compassion and care over Republican philosophies of autonomy and self-help. It’s not that they have less empathy, they argue, it is just that there are times when other moral values such as justice and self-determination take precedence and compassion should take a back seat.

Anders Behring Breivik


This notion of empathy as an affective capacity that can be switched on and off at will was also invoked by the Norwegian neo-Nazi Anders Behring Breivik during his recent trial for the mass murder of 69 young Labour activists on Utoya island. In a bid to avoid being found criminally insane by a Norwegian court, Breivik had to convince the panel of judges that he was capable of normal emotional responses but had somehow managed to set his feelings to one side. In short, Breivik had to demonstrate how it was possible to be empathic and cruel at the same time.

Breivik’s solution was novel: it wasn’t that he lacked empathy, he explained – on the contrary, he had deliberately spared the youngest and most vulnerable children on Utoya. Killing the others hadn’t been easy either, but using a ‘meditation’ technique he had been able to bypass his feelings. ‘If you are going to be capable of executing such a bloody and horrendous operation you need to work on your mind, your psyche, for years,’ he explained.

In quoting Breivik in his own words, I do not wish to suggest that we should accept his account at face value – on the contrary, it may well have been a ploy to manipulate the court into returning a criminal verdict, thereby validating Breivik’s desire to be regarded as a political martyr. Nor do I wish to suggest that Breivik is sane or that Republicans are somehow like mass murderers. Rather I wish to examine how Breivik’s novel defence destabilizes the view of empathy as an intrinsically pro-social affective state. This notion, which pervades social psychology and social neuroscience, holds that when we empathise we both mirror the distress of the ‘other’ and are also moved to respond in a way that is culturally appropriate. In other words, unless our brains are damaged or we are developmentally abnormal, we are saddened by the suffering of others and that sadness becomes the seed of our compassion.

The problem with this definition is that it elides the important distinction between the cognitive and affective aspects of empathy and also between empathy and sympathy, the far older term with which it is often confused. It also glosses over the fact that, historically speaking, empathy has been a shifting and multi-faceted concept, denoting variously an aesthetic response to a work of art, a term in interpersonal psychology, and a means of furthering historical and psychological understanding more broadly. When Obama chided Romney for his lack of empathy, he can be seen as privileging what the medical anthropologist Allan Young calls a ‘human nature 2.0’ model of empathy. Implicit in this model is the notion of empathy as a pro-social affective capacity that has been selected by evolution. But what if this notion reflects nothing more than the current vogue for connectedness that permeates the post-Darwinian sciences and our internet-obsessed times? What if instead of empathy 2.0 being the basis of modern social life it is merely a product of current scientific fashions and a morally wishful reading of evolutionary psychology?

Derived from the German word Einfühlung, meaning ‘feeling into’, empathy originally designated an aesthetic response to a work of art. For the German art historian Robert Vischer, Einfühlung was an enlivening process whereby an art object evoked actual or incipient bodily movements and accompanying emotions in the viewer. This process was not merely kinaesthetic but also involved the projection of one’s personality into the object, resulting in what Vischer called the creation of a ‘second self’.

Edward B. Tichener


As the historian of science Susan Lanzoni has shown, in English empathy first appeared misspelled as ‘enpathy’ in a 1909 lecture by the Cornell psychologist Edward B. Tichener, and in a translation credited to the Cambridge philosopher and psychologist James Ward the same year. Turning to the Greek ‘empatheia’, Ward saw empathy as a kind of personification, while Tichener cleaved more closely to Vischer’s kinaesthetic meaning, envisaging empathy as reflex response of the ‘mind’s muscles’.

At this stage, empathy was about projection rather than perspective-taking. This made it very different from Victorian notions of the ‘sympathetic imagination’, which novelists like George Eliot had conceived as a cognitive act in which readers learned to extend themselves into the experiences, motives and emotions of fictional characters. For empathy to become more like sympathy, Einfühlung first to transit from aesthetics to interpersonal psychology and the new brain sciences. This process can be traced to the German philosopher and psychologist Theodor Lipps.

Vernon Lee (Violet Paget)


Writing in 1903, Lipps had stressed the projection of inner activity – the feelings and strivings of the ego or self – into the perceived object, thereby making Einfühlung as much a psychological as an aesthetic process. In Britain, Lipps’s ideas were taken up by the Victorian critic and novelist Vernon Lee (Violet Paget). Somewhat idiosyncratically Lee translated Einfühlung as ‘sympathy’, comparing the process to the sort of perspective-taking that occurs when ‘we “put ourselves in the place” or more vulgarly “in the skin” of a fellow creature’. At first Lee’s definition seems to recall the famous passage in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments about how even ‘the greatest ruffian’ is capable of sympathising with the sorrow of others. However, as Lanzoni has shown, Lee’s main contribution was to psychological aesthetics and it took early personality theorists like Gordon Allport and Carl Rogers to assign empathy a central role in personality development and for empathy to be embraced by psychoanalysis.

At this point, empathy was still very much a cognitive process, but in 1992 a group of Italian researchers launched a new empathy craze when they observed mirror neurons in macaque monkeys that fired both when they picked up a raisin and when they saw a person pick up a raisin. Soon mirror neurons were being hailed not only as the basis of animal mimicry but as the source of what Jeremy Rifkin, the high priest of ‘empathy neurons’, calls humanity’s desire for ‘intimate participation and companionship’. The result is that today empathy is increasingly seen as the modern-day equivalent of Smith’s moral sentiments.

But as Romney’s politically inept remark demonstrates, if empathy is reduced to a reflex then logic dictates that under certain circumstances it can also be switched off. And if Breivik is to be believed, it can also be inverted into its opposite: namely, counter-empathy, or feeling good when someone else feels bad. Indeed, writing in the Guardian shortly after Breivik’s arrest, the psychologist and autism expert Simon Baron-Cohen endorsed something close to this viewpoint when he argued that Breivik’s actions were best explained by a combination of low affective empathy and his extreme ideological beliefs.

The problem with this type of empathy, of course, is that it is no basis for morality, which is why we frequently invoke other values and principles to balance such tendencies. This is precisely the argument made by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his latest book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. According to Haidt empathy, or what he labels the ‘harm/care’ module, is just one of several emotional dispositions that undergird our moral outlook, the others being ‘fairness’, ‘liberty’, ‘loyalty’, ‘authority’ and ‘purity/sanctity’. The difference between Democrats and Republicans is that while liberals focus almost entirely on care and fairness, conservatives tend to give equal weight to all six dispositions.

Barack Obama embraces Hurricane Sandy storm victim Donna Varant in New Jersey


In theory, this should have been good news for Romney, especially as something like 42 percent of the American electorate self-identify as conservative. That it wasn’t is a measure of the extent to which empathy has become a political buzzword and a measure of electability in America. Indeed, it is noticeable that rather than defending his comments about the 47 percent on traditional conservative grounds, Romney spent the closing weeks of the campaign desperately trying to persuade voters that he was just as compassionate as Obama, even going so far as to cite his passage of health care reform when he was governor of Massachussetts – somewhat ironic given his promise to repeal Obamacare if he was elected.

Even before Hurricane Sandy upset the candidates’ campaign plans, however, that was not an argument that carried much weight with the undecideds, much less the 47 percent, and following the pictures of Obama embracing the victims of the storm damage it was pretty much game, set and match to the incumbent. Indeed, if there is a lesson to be drawn from the 2012 presidential election it is that compassion is here to stay and that where candidates once talked about ‘the economy, stupid’, they would now be well-advised to invoke a different ‘e’-word.

Mark Honigsbaum is a Research Associate at the Institute and Musueum of the History of Medicine in Zurich.

Evangelical Emotions and Constance Maynard

Posted on November 30, 2012 by

Angharad Eyre is  currently working on a PhD thesis on the impact of the female missionary on religious women and their writing through the nineteenth century. She was one of the speakers at the one-day conference on Constance Maynard hosted by the Centre for the History of the Emotion in November 2012. Here she writes about Maynard and the emotions involved in the Evangelical conversion process.

Constance Maynard’s life was one of love and passion, as has been noted in a previous post on this blog. And it was the interpretation of that passion as part of a religious experience that enabled Maynard to understand her relationships with young women as part of her religious mission and identity.

In my research into female missionaries in the nineteenth century, and how they experienced love for God, their missionary husbands and their native converts, I have encountered Evangelical religion as something that made great demands of women. The height of emotion required to demonstrate true conversion and piety was difficult for many young women to achieve. For example, Harriet Newell’s biography (published 1816 and reprinted through the century) quotes her journal in which she cursed her ‘cold, stupid heart’ for failing to feel enough in prayer and causing her to hesitate in her decision to go out to India as a missionary.

Constance Maynard seemed to have no such trouble feeling passionate about her religious mission. In the same way that Wesleyan female missionaries (in published letters) expressed military fervour for their mission – it was a ‘campaign’ to ‘attack’ the strongholds of idolatry – so Maynard in 1881 (in one of the diaries recently made available online) expressed her mission to convert the daughters of the upper-middle class with passionate zeal:

I would like to fly high, to attack the very top, storm the very citadel within, to shew my brothers that nothing is too strong if we have the Lord with us, and that after very patient, skilful obedient working, we may shout for the Lord hath given us the city!

A page from Maynard’s diary (‘Green book’) from 1881

Another aspect of Evangelical culture that encouraged strong emotion was its encouragement to of the use of love and friendship to convert other women. Religious literature for children, especially that written by Martha Sherwood (1775-1851), paints vivid pictures of the expression of religious love within conversion narratives. For example, in Caroline Mordaunt (1835), the eponymous governess becomes converted by her young charge, Emily, a preternaturally holy child. However, the relationship is depicted in such a way that suggests a passionate affair or infatuation. Caroline and Emily are often in each others’ arms and there is secret hand-holding at the dinner table. Emily’s tears are often described as ‘violent’, and Caroline becomes ‘possessed’ by the idea of Emily, as well as by her beliefs. She notes that the child’s claiming of her ‘to love me’ left her disordered, unable even to read, the child had so ‘thrown [her] mind’.

 

An 1894 Punch cartoon

This relationship is shown to be the result of religious conversion. Emily expresses an idea that there is a link between loving a woman and growing in faith when she says ‘I shall have you to love me and read the Bible to me’, linking these two activities. Emily’s status as a child-saint, makes more apparent the idea that the converting female missionary is a vessel for God to work through; the passion instilled by the child in Caroline is given greater solemnity and status as it is love for God, elicited by and bestowed through his vessel. Ultimately, the relationship, combined with the conversion, leads her to take up a missionary role with all her subsequent students.

It is this sort of relationship, I think, that Maynard aspired to with her students when she was principal of Westfield. In one of her relationships – with Margaret Brooke in the first few terms of Westfield – she appears to have succeeded. Even in her oftentimes remorseful diary of the Westfield years, Maynard remembers this relationship with pleasure as ‘restrained and lovely’.

When reading Maynard’s diaries of this first relationship and those first few months of Westfield, I was struck by the heady mixture of religion and love described. It is no coincidence that Maynard falls in love with Brooke around the same time of the first successful prayer meeting at Westfield. She describes this event as transforming her relationship with her students:

My students are more good, more interesting, more loveable than I could have thought […] the Spirit of God seemed near. For the first time I kissed their dear faces in succession […] Katie stayed a minute […] she seemed hardly to know how to speak of it.

The kisses she distributes here are the direct result of a shared religious experience – an experience so intense that there are no words to describe it as it approaches a sort of godly excess.

Most of Maynard’s intimate encounters with Brooke take place after similar experiences of religious enthusiasm. Brooke visits Maynard’s room after this very prayer meeting. A few months later, a similar result is achieved through Maynard taking her students to a Salvation Army meeting:

The stirring singing and the few searching words from Mr Booth, touched my beautiful little Margaret as I stood with my arm around her, and on parting with her she whispered, ‘Oh come, just for Goodnight to my room!’

When Maynard describes what happens between the two of them she clearly recognises the ‘human feeling’, the strong ‘physical power’ that Brooke has over her. However, she continually defends her actions and feelings through the language of her religion. If ever she doubts the moral rectitude of the relationship, she reminds herself that this love is working to convert Brooke. She writes in her diary: ‘It is leading her to closer to the Lord, it really is, and surely this should be the test.’

Constance Maynard with a group of fellow students at Girton College, Cambridge

Overall, I hope this attention to Maynard’s experiences, through her autobiographical writings, can add to our understanding of female friendships and relationships as they could have been understood by religious women in the nineteenth century. While Maynard experienced strong female friendships at Girton, it was when these sorts of relationships were combined with the strong emotions of Evangelical missionary religion at Westfield that she could really understand and enjoy her experiences with other women.

 

The Religious Emotions

Posted on November 28, 2012 by

Dr Jenny Hillman is Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow in History at the European University Institute, Florence. Here she reviews Susan Karant-Nunn’s book The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany (Oxford University Press, 2010), recently released in paperback, for the QMUL History of Emotions Blog.

Good Friday continues to elicit powerful emotions among the faithful. In April 2012, the Telegraph reported that 12 Catholics in the Pampanga province of the Philippines had voluntarily been nailed to the cross in a graphic re-enactment of the Passion of Christ, which was later condemned by the Church. Less extreme was my own first-hand encounter with ‘religious emotions’ during a Good Friday mass at a Lancastrian Catholic Church during the early 1990s, when (as a small child) I was surprised to witness a number of female parishioners weep as they each genuflected and kissed the foot of the cross.

In her recent book, The Reformation of Feeling, Susan Karant-Nunn allows us to glimpse similarly unfamiliar sentiments in the context of early modern Germany, largely through an interrogation of Passion sermons. Karant-Nunn explains her decision to focus on ‘two core subgenres’ of printed sermons: those treating death and those expounding Christ’s Passion. Holy Week and the Death Bed were both settings which she correctly judges to be particularly emotionally-charged.

Judiciously selected quotations from this material colour the eight main chapters. Careful analyses of several passages are provided and the discussion remains faithful to the language of emotion employed by the preachers throughout. Karant-Nunn detects the recurrence of Trost (or reassurance) in the Lutheran sermons, for example, and shows that whilst Lutheran preachers sought to inspire sorrow for sin and a love of God, their overwhelming message was to instil comfort through this vocabulary (pp. 97, 251). Elsewhere these rich sources are, quite appropriately, left to speak for themselves.

Sermons delivered by Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed (Calvinist) preachers to mass audiences were, according to this comparative study, designed to stimulate certain kinds of religious emotions which supported competing confessional claims during the Reformation. In other words, rhetorical appeals to the emotions reinforced the broader processes of religious renewal in each of these traditions.

The correspondence between the emotionality of sermons and the Reformation agendas of the three respective confessional groups is presented in the first three chapters. Chapter One ‘The Emotions in Early Modern Catholicism,’ shows that preachers urged their audiences to feel an emotional identification with Christ, through regular contemplation of his suffering. These exhortations often took the form of quite graphic descriptions of Christ’s corporeality and his agonized flesh. In Mainz, for example, the Franciscan Johannes Wild described the horror of Christ ‘sweating blood’ and tried to impress Christ’s wounds upon the memories of his congregation (p. 28). Chapter Two ’The Lutheran Churches’ details the Lutheran ‘curtailment’ (p. 64) of this emotionality, through a toned-down treatment of the Passion. This relative restraint also manifested itself in the purging of sacred spaces, particularly those adornments which were most emblematic of femininity. As Karan-Nunn notes, ‘this signalled to the pious that the best religiosity was calm, interior and unrelated to material objects’ (p. 68). Chapter Three ‘The Reformed Churches’ reveals that Calvin and his reformers departed ‘drastically’ from both Catholics and Lutherans, in a psychological rendering of Christ’s Passion (p. 101), since for them, bodies (including Christ’s) ‘could not serve as a nexus between the telluric and the heavenly’ (p. 103). Instead, preachers in the Reformed tradition condemned and shamed the sinfulness of their congregations and inculcated feelings of worthlessness and sorrow. Evidently, ‘these were not sermons of good cheer’ (p. 114).

The book thus highlights both continuities and change across the period. It argues for a ‘new-old’ Catholic tradition (p. 60), in which sixteenth and seventeenth-century preachers appropriated strands of medieval piety, making expressive and emotive demonstrations of faith characteristic, or ‘affective earmarks’ of post-Tridentine Catholicism (p. 62). It also posits that neither Lutheranism nor Calvinism ‘…invented ideals of religious feeling that had not existed earlier’ (p. 11), but it does show that the Reformed programme consisted of attempts to ‘dampen the outer demonstrations of religious fervour’ encouraged by the Catholics (p. 63).

Interestingly, Chapter Four is devoted to ‘The Condemnation of the Jews.’ The ways in which this theme cut across the sermons of all three traditions, with the shared aim of stimulating feelings of ‘revulsion and hostility’ is successfully illustrated (p. 157). However, I was unconvinced by the categorisation of anti-Semitic feelings as a ‘religious emotion’ – something which Karant-Nunn is herself hesitant about (p. 133) – and thus it seemed to sit less comfortably with the other chapters.

The connection between femininity and emotionality is a recurring theme throughout the text, but one which is probed most deeply in Chapter Five ‘The Mother Stood at the Foot of the Cross.’ The chapter finds (quite predictably) that both Lutheran and Reformed preachers attributed a less significant role to the Mother of Jesus in their Passion sermons than their Catholic counterparts (p. 159), and Lutheranism and Calvinism are, consequently, deemed to be ‘more masculine’ (p. 186). In this regard, the chapter does not really contribute anything new. But, importantly, it does offer some more broadly useful reflections on female emotionality as a historical and cultural stereotype, by challenging the assumption that it was necessarily a weakness. As Karant-Nunn reminds us, for the Catholics, Mary was ‘an incentive and a model to feel strongly’ (p. 169) and her emotionality a virtue.

There is some attention to the textual clues about the oral techniques used by those ministering, which underlines the rhythms, accents and tones of the homiletics. Reformed preacher Caspar Olevianus used verbal repetition and the ‘resounding enunciation’ of ‘hellish’ seven times in four sentences as a ‘rhetorical technique (anaphora)’ to harrow his sixteenth-century audience with the psychological horror of Christ’s Passion (pp. 120 – 21). It strikes me that the use of these cues to gauge the emotional investment of early modern preachers might be an important area of future research in the field.

Karant-Nunn acknowledges her debts to Barbara Rosenwein’s concept of the ‘emotional community’ (p. 4), in her exploration of collective emotional experiences and emotional cultures. It is observed in Chapter Seven ‘The Formation of Religious Sensibilities’ that sermons were vehicles for communicating reformation messages to large audiences and that their reception was a communal, and often social, experience (p. 218). Karant-Nunn also shows that certain religious emotions such as sympathy with Christ’s bodily sufferings were intended to be aspired to collectively, where preachers and people bonded through ‘feeling together’ (p. 61). Unity through grief was also the theme of Chapter Six ‘Proper Feelings in and around the Death Bed’ (p. 192). Perhaps this could have been more fully explored in the sections on material culture in Churches, where the ‘collective performance of emotion’ (as John Corrigan put it) would have surely been most pronounced.

The Reformation of Feeling is among the first historical studies of the emotional dimension to the Reformation written in English and should help to set the bar for future research in the history of the ‘religious emotions.’ Susan Karant-Nunn illuminates very effectively the way the polemical recourse to emotional ‘scripts’ (p. 255) was intended to inspire faith in the early modern age of religious renewal. On 17 October 2012, speaking in Saint Peter’s Square, Pope Benedict XVI implored Catholics around the world to renew their faith not only through catechism, but through ‘feelings’, ‘heart’ and emotions.’ The Annus Fidei will, no doubt, bring many more attempts to engage emotions from the pulpit.

An interview with Martha Nussbaum on Neo-Stoicism

Posted on November 22, 2012 by

This is an interview I did with Professor Martha Nussbaum back in 2009, for The Stoic Registry (a web magazine for Stoics. No, really!) Professor Nussbaum, who is the Ernst Freund distinguished professor of ethics and law at the University of Chicago, is one of the most important philosophers of emotion today. She’s done a great deal to revive academic and general interest in Hellenistic philosophy and virtue ethics, and to show their relevance to the contemporary politics of well-being, through books like Upheavals of Thought; Cultivating Humanity; and The Therapy of Desire, and through her work with Amartya Sen on the ‘capabilities approach’ in development economics. 

So you began your academic career in Harvard in 1975…


Well, I started my graduate career at Harvard, but I don’t regard my academic career as having started there, I regard it as starting in high school. I was already working on the same problems when I was 16 that I am now.

For example?

I was already thinking about the nature of emotions, their role in ethical life. I did quite a lot of writing on the tension between the aspiration to justice and the aspiration to love in individuals. I wrote a long play on that, it was actually about Robespierre and the French Revolution, but the main theme was love versus justice.

When did your relationship start with ancient philosophy?

It was probably when I was around 14. We were studying ancient Greece, and I was given a special assignment – the teacher thought several of the more ambitious students could write essays on tragic and comic poets, so I got going on Greek drama. I was also doing a lot of acting in those days.

How much would you say has changed in terms of the level of interest in Hellenistic philosophy, in academia and among the general public, since the beginning of your career?

You need to look at the longer trajectory. Hellenistic philosophy was absolutely central to the education of any cultivated person in Europe and North America from around the 17th to the late 19th century, so you did probably read some Plato and Aristotle, but you were much more focused on Roman authors. Lucretius, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Cicero above all, were authors that really shaped the thinking of a lot of public life in not only continental Europe but Britain and the US. Stoicism had an enormous influence on the Founding Fathers, for example.

So the question is really: why did it go out of fashion? And it’s really because of the influence of Hegel and Nietzsche. They were taken as guides, and they made Plato a much more central figure. People were also focusing more on Greece than Rome, and of course the Hellenistic Greek texts are just lost, they’re fragments, so people forgot about Hellenistic thinkers.

There was a huge gap in the world I grew up in graduate school. Everyone was reading Plato and Aristotle, they thought that was absolutely central, and there was no study at all of Hellenistic philosophy. People didn’t even think you had to learn Latin to do ancient philosophy, because it was clear to them that Roman philosophy was not worth studying. I was actually very lucky that I got my PhD in classical philology and not classical philosophy, because it meant I had the equipment to study a lot of the classic works of Roman philosophy — including the poetic works of Lucretius and Seneca.

The revival of Hellenistic philosophy was very self-conscious. It was started above all by a group of philosophers in the generation before mine, led by Richard Sorabji, Miles Burnyeat and Jonathan Barnes, who decided ‘well Plato and Aristotle have now been exhausted, they’ve been mined for their philosophical significance, we should move on and do something where we can make a creative contribution’.

So they got people together to have these meetings called Symposium Hellenisticum, and I was lucky enough to be invited to the first one, in Oxford. It was around 1980 or just before. They published a collection of essays shortly after, called Doubt and Dogmatism, which is quite a famous book. Then every three years they held a similar meeting. I didn’t give paper at the first one because it was on epistemology, which is not my thing. But the third symposium was on ethics, and I did give a paper, and was on my way, because I decided to write book about it.

Would you say there has been a revival in the general public’s interest in Stoicism?

The humanities curriculum has still not internalized it. Look at the typical Great Books curriculum, which is two years of liberal arts study. That’s where a member of the general public would make contact with Stoicism, but the curriculum still doesn’t reflect the revival of interest in Hellenistic philosophy, it’s still focused very strongly on Plato and Aristotle, and then it might go quickly over Augustine and Aquinas, but sometimes it still leaps straight over to Descartes. So there’s not very much Hellenistic philosophy in the average Great Books curriculum. They don’t focus on Rome in general, and that’s what you have to do if Hellenistic thinkers are to be read. Of course, Lucretius is always loved, so he’s an exception, but that’s because people think of him as a poet rather than a philosophical thinker.

As for Seneca, part of the reason there’s a lack of interest in Seneca is the translations are of a very uneven quality. Right now at the University of Chicago Press, there’s a project to make a complete set of new translations of all the works of Seneca. There’s a terrific team of experts lining up to translate all the philosophical works, the literary works, the tragedies and so forth. My own translation is of the Apocolocyntosis [Seneca’s satire on the death of Claudius], which is the only funny Stoic work… maybe it’s not Stoic, but it’s by a Stoic.

In your book, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions [2001], you describe your position as neo-Stoic…

I’ve got to correct this – there are two parts to the Stoic view on emotions, the descriptive part and the normative part. What I call neo-Stoic is the descriptive view of what emotions are like, but I certainly reject the normative view.

So what do you think Stoics got right and wrong?

Are we talking about the descriptive view?

Let’s start off there.

With that, I think they have a very powerful position about the role of judgments of value in emotions, which has now been amply supported by psychological research into the emotions, and i show that convergence between Stoic philosophical analysis and modern psychological analysis, which focuses on what psychologists call appraisals, that is, evaluations and their role in emotions. That part the Stoics got brilliantly right, and a lot more detail about particular emotions they also got right.

What you need to do, to make it a defensible philosophical view, is to correct their view that animals and small children don’t have emotions. That’s not correct, so you have to revise that view so that emotions still have a cognitive / evaluative character but it’s the sort of cognitive character that animals and children could have.

Secondly, the Stoics are also not very sensitive to cultural variation in emotion, so you have to learn from anthropology and put that into the neo-Stoic view.

And finally, because they didn’t think you had any emotion until you were sixteen, which is a very implausible position, they didn’t care about development and how that influences emotions, and we do have to care about how emotions develop from infancy through childhood into adulthood. So we have to draw on developmental psychology and psychoanalysis.

So can you combine the Stoic cognitive model with a more psychoanalytic model, or are they contradictory?

It depends which psychoanalytic view you use. If you use the view that the goal is always pleasure, then it’s much harder to make a connection. But if you use the view from objects relations theory, according to which children have complex cognitive attitudes to objects, such as anger, grief and envy, that sort of view that you get in Klein or Winnicott meshes very nicely with the basic way that Stoics view the world, and it also make sense of the fact that children do have emotions.

Upheavals draws some great parallels between Stoicism and modern psychology and neuroscience. How rare is that? How much of a dialogue is there between classical academia and modern psychology?

If you’re talking about classicists, it’s an individual matter. If you’re talking about philosophers working on emotions, it happens all the time. You wouldn’t think of publishing something on the emotions without becoming at least aware of what’s going on in neuroscience. Sometimes philosophers do it too often. They think neuroscience solves all our philosophical problems, whereas I think it gives us helpful hints, but doesn’t replace the need to do hard philosophical work, and also doesn’t replace the need to go back to developmental psychology and psychoanalysis, which some neuroscientists don’t like at all. So you need a judicious sense of what it can solve and what it can’t.

So what did the Stoics get particularly wrong?

I already told you three big things that are wrong in the descriptive view. Turning to the normative view, Stoics think the correct attitude is that nothing is worthy of serious concern except our rational nature, nothing outside of us, not our political culture, not our friends or our children, none of that is really worth serious concern, so we shouldn’t get upset when bad things happen to them. It’s hard to argue with that because it’s a very complete view and internally consistent in most ways.

So if we produce an argument that will shake a modern Stoic, it needs to show something of importance to the Stoics themselves that the Stoic view can’t explain. I try to show certain things Stoics want to say – for example that we should care about our country and should be committed to defending it – which contradict their view on externals, so in the end they can’t defend their theory. It’s not simple, you need to take a long time to show that, but I think you can show that, even on its own terms, it’s not entirely successful.

So the Stoic position that all externals are indifferent is untenable?

Cicero: bad Stoic, good human?

The Stoics think you should never mourn, for example. Cicero reports that a good Stoic father says, if their child dies, ‘I was always aware that I had begotten a mortal’. Now, Cicero is one of my favourite thinkers of all time, and I find it very interesting to look at his letters when his daughter died. Just before she died, he had been writing typical letter of Stoic consolation to a friend who had lost a child. But when his own daughter died, he was absolutely devastated. He says to his friend Atticus again and again, ‘I can’t do normal things’. Atticus says ‘this is not seemly, not fitting, you should not mind this so much’, and at one point Cicero says ‘it’s not only that I can’t go about my normal business, it’s also that I don’t think I ought to’.

So he made un-Stoic judgments about both his daughter and the Roman republic. He lost his life trying to save the Republic. If he hadn’t stayed in Rome so long trying to criticize Mark Antony, he wouldn’t have been assassinated. He lived his life for both these things – his daughter and the Republic – and both were lost. What I find admirable is that he really wrestled seriously with the norms of Stoicism, and saw that they could help us correct an inappropriate kind of worldliness – he saw a lot of people go wrong because they were too ambitious, too competitive, too attached to worldly goods. But about the things we really love, and rightly love, we shouldn’t be Stoic.

So even if we don’t accept the Stoic view of externals, we can still use Stoic methods of therapy?

The therapy they have in mind is that you can’t really improve your life without understanding what’s worth valuing and what isn’t. It would have been better if everyone learned all this in the first place, but since, according to them, people live in a highly corrupt culture, they don’t learn right values, so they have to be given therapy, which consists in weaning them away from money, status, competitive goods of all sorts, and this will undo the damage of anger, jealousy and so on. All of that seems reasonable; it’s only when they take it so far that they say we should lose love of children, family and so on. There I part company with them. Bu it doesn’t mean their methods of weaning people away from unwise values is useless.

In Upheavals, you argue that Stoics are part of what you call an anti-compassion tradition, as opposed to a pro-compassion tradition. Could you unpack those ideas a bit?

Sure. When people read figures like Nietzsche, who say you shouldn’t have pity, they read that it means you should be cold and hard-hearted. That’s not it at all. Nietzsche tells us he’s following a whole slew of people like Seneca, Epictetus, Kant. These people think that what you rightly value is your own good will and rational purpose, and that external things shouldn’t upset you so much. And then they say ‘OK, if you yourself are not deeply upset when you lose money or status, then you shouldn’t pity or have compassion for someone else who loses those things. If you think you shouldn’t be upset when you lose a child, then when someone else loses a child, you shouldn’t feel compassion’.

Marcus Aurelius says, if someone is upset, and you know they have wrong values, you can treat them the way an adult treats a child – you can console the child, while understanding that the child is upset over nothing. That’s the Stoic view. In other words, you have to be consistent. You can’t say ‘I’m going to get rid of anger, jealousy, hatred, but I’m going to keep compassion, because it’s so nice’. No, what they say is, the best thing to do is get rid of your unwise attachments to externals, so you won’t feel compassion, but you also won’t want to hurt people, or to retaliate against them. You will be detached. So Seneca writes to the young emperor Nero on mercy, saying you should be gentle and merciful, but in the middle of the letter is an attack on compassion. Compassion is this soft thing where you care too much about what’s out there. And they think in that is the seeds of anger, jealously and ultimately cruelty.

It seem to me that Stoics’ problem with emotion is it is either attachment or aversion, either a running towards or a running away from something. But could we argue that compassion could be something more Buddhist, that could not involve attachment or aversion, and rather bean attitude of disinterested concern, which we could integrate into a modern Stoic approach?

Sure, you could. It depends how you define it. Some people do define it like that. But then it’s not really an emotion at all, because it doesn’t involve the idea of a deep attachment to an external object and a mental upheaval about the fortune of that object.

And it doesn’t necessarily involve the judgment ‘this shouldn’t have happened’…

Exactly, or the idea that this person has suffered some important damage. No, you’re supposed to think these things really aren’t that important. But you can still have an attitude of concern, that’s right.

I loved your analysis of Sophocles’ Philoctetes in Upheavals. You made a dichotomy between Sophoclean tragedy and Stoicism, saying that Sophocles teaches us compassion for the wretched, like Philoctetes, while Stoicism teaches a more detached respect for our inner integrity. But could you argue there’s a link between Sophocles and Stoicism, in that Stoicism could be seen as the end-point of tragedy? It’s the point the tragic hero reaches at the end of their journey. For example, Oedipus reaches an end point at Colonus, a point of heroic passivity and endurance, so that whatever the gods of nature send him, he can endure. And by that point he has achieved a sort of divine oneness with nature. And that’s what Stoics are trying to achieve, a oneness with nature and a heroic endurance.

Sophocles’ Philoctetes: an optimistic tragedy

You’re on to something important. I’d say that’s only true of Sophocles among the tragedians, that you find this attitude that the hero may actually transcend the vicissitudes of human fate, and it’s particularly true of Oedipus at Colonus, so you picked the right play. I don’t think it’s really in Philoctetes at all – in that play, there’s a tremendous joy and celebration that he will be cured and the war won. So we’re not deflected from the real world, we’re returned to it, with the right outcome. And likewise in Antigone, there’s a sense of terrible loss and tragedy all around, and no sense that this is mitigated by anything else. So I think Oedipus at Colonus is the closest thing you get to Stoicism in ancient tragedy. And what that shows is that traditional Greek religion had in it elements that Stoics mined for their own view of Zeus and the nature of universe. Which is interesting, because it shows that their view didn’t come out of nowhere.

But could you say that there is a Stoic element even in Philoctetes: towards the end of the play, he can’t go to Troy because he can’t get over his feeling of alienation and resentment, then Heracles appears and says ‘there’s a cosmic plan, and you going to Troy is part of it’. That realisation of a divine providence is what enables Philoctetes to accept his lot. It’s like Hamlet realising there is a divine providence, and accepting his role in it. Isn’t that moving towards the Stoic idea of the Logos, and of accepting your lot in the Logos?

Well, I think it’s quite right that Philoctetes is supposed to go back and play his part, but notice he does it on the condition that he will be relieved from pain, and given great glory, so all the worldly goods are not undermined. It’s not a sacrifice. And you represent Heracles one way, but in fact, Philoctetes is won over because it’s his friend making the appeal, and he trusts his friend, not because there’s a grand cosmic scheme. The main thing is it validates rather than undermines the importance of worldly goods.

Turning to your 1997 book, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Do you think Stoic techniques of learning to control our emotions should be taught in schools?

The part of Stoic therapy I would like to focus on is the Socratic part , the commitment to self-examination, the relentless scrutiny of traditional values. That’s what I appropriate from the Stoics. The part that says ‘now we can use this to go into people’s emotional lives’…I’m not sure that’s appropriate in a university, it’s more appropriate for small children. The other thing I’d want to appropriate is the Stoic sense of the whole world as a series of concentric circles, and that we should become increasingly aware of the broader world to which we belong. That you really can teach in university curricula, you can talk about the world economy, about different world cultures, different world religions and so on. So that’s a very important thing we can borrow from Stoics.

The Stoic idea of cosmopolitanism?

Yes. We’re citizens of a whole world order. We’re not just members of one family, town or nation, but of the whole world. We’re increasingly interdependent on important issues such as the environment, so there are now even stronger reasons for seeing oneself as cosmopolitan than there were in the days of the Stoic. We can’t escape from the fact that what we do affects lives on the other side of the world.

You’ve written that the goal of political society is to enable citizens to search for the Good Life in their own way. Do you think the state has any role in terms of giving guidance as to what constitutes the Good Life?

I’m in strong agreement with John Rawls that the state has to show equal respect for all different reasonable comprehensive views of the good human life. The only way can do that is via the principle of non-establishment, which means no particular religious or comprehensive ethical view should be the basis of political principles or statements. But we can have a partial ethical view that’s the basis of our political judgments, so we can all overlap on that and speak together in terms of that, because after all our political principles themselves have a moral content.

So what would that involve? Ideas of equal respect, support for human needs, human rights and so on. So there’s a political part of the good human life that we can talk about and that the state certainly should persuade people about. So, for example, last Monday the university closed for the birthday of Martin Luther King. It does not close for the birthdays of racists. Having a national holiday for King, and not for racists, is a form of public persuasion, but it’s right, because racial equality is at very core of the political conception that we all share, whether Protestant, Catholic, atheist, Hindu or what have you.

What about the idea that you find in Stoics and in Martin Seligman [founder of Positive Psychology], that the state and state schools can provide some guidance as to how to find eudaimonia?

Martin Seligman, founder of Positive Psychology

Well, eudaimonia is a contested concept. What the state can do is provide some comparative studies of different traditions, and maybe show some things such as ‘if you want to achieve the following, this is how go about it’. But to advocate one particular comprehensive concept of eudaimonia, whether religious or secular, a public institution shouldn’t do that.

But certainly, in a philosophy course, you can try to show what considerations might make one conception more attractive than another. And when I teach criticism of utilitarianism, that’s what I try to do. But if I was president or a supreme court judge, I would never stand up and say ‘I think utilitarianism is an impoverished world view’. I would focus on the political conception we all share.

Is Positive Psychology going too far down one particular road, of advocating one definition of eudaimonia and then propagating it?

It’s not intended to be political, it’s for people’s personal lives. I’ve been talking about limits on political speech.

But it is taught in schools.

Is it?

Yes. In the UK, for example, the government is considering putting it into the national curriculum.

Huh…Well, it isn’t here, but I guess I would be troubled by that. Seligman is a lot more subtle than most of people who talk about happiness. He has philosophical training, and asks questions about what it really is, he’s pluralist about different religions, so it’s much more open to contestation than many simpler views. But i still think it’s too determinist. The state should not be telling you how to live your life beyond a certain core of political principles. The only thing about Seligman is he thinks we should be happier, that we’re too sad. But I actually think, certainly in the US, that people should be a lot sadder than they are. The reason they’re rather jolly is they don’t think about the suffering of others, they don’t think about the injustice suffered by others. I want to raise the level of sadness and anger in my students rather than diminish it.

You’re an expert in therapeutic techniques in Stoicism, Epicureanism, Scepticism, Platonism and other traditions. Are there ones you’ve found particularly effective or ones you’ve used in situations in your own life?

Well, when I observe my life, I think, ‘How is what I’m going through here related to these views?’ You can see that in Upheavals, where I talk about my mother’s death. Sometimes when I get upset about some temporary thing, I do think ‘you know how you characteristically over-estimate the seriousness of this’…But I’m not sure whether I needed to read the Stoics for that, or whether I always knew it. The parts of Stoicism that appeal to me are when they tell you to get rid of excessive attachment to money and reputation, but that doesn’t happen to be my problem. My upheavals come from attachment to particular people or politics, and that’s the part where I reject Stoicism. So that’s why I don’t find myself using Stoic therapy.

Some of the leading writers on Stoic thought at the moment are women – yourself, Julia Annas, Nancy Sherman. Does that dispel the view that Stoic values are somehow ‘masculine’ values? Is that a wrong view, or even a sexist one?

Probably. I don’t think any one view of values is masculine or feminine. The Stoics didn’t either: they wrote treatise on how the virtues of men and women are the same, and they defended complete equality of the sexes in their ideal city. It’s what Mary Wollstonencraft observed in her critique of Rousseau: people put up a stereotype of women as highly emotional or sentimental, but in fact just it’s just a stereotype. They can be just as rational. And of course, Mary herself was deeply influenced by Stoic thought.

Martha, thanks very much for your time, it’s been a very interesting talk.

Thanks to you, I’ve enjoyed it.

The Master: American self-help, and the Puritan longing to escape the past

Posted on November 16, 2012 by

Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film, The Master, tells the story of troubled drifter Joaquin Phoenix’s relationship with the head of a New Age sect, a sect which looks suspiciously like Scientology. The group, called The Cause, aims (like Scientology) to clear its members of the karmic traces of their past lives, and return them to their inherent perfection. They do this by hypnotising their members to retrace their past incarnations, or by subjecting them to a battery of psychometric tests with questions like ‘why do you loiter at bus stops?’

Scientology’s E-Meter

Like Scientology, the Cause records all these confessions through microphones, to create a huge database of personal indiscretions. I find the technology of spirituality fascinating – all the gadgetry that humans have invented over the millennia to help us escape the material prison, from shamanic regalia, to the confession box and rosary, to the orgone box and the dianetics machine of modern ‘scientific’ religion. We yearn to escape materiality and come closer to God, yet when we look behind the veil of religions, we often discover cheap stunts, pseudo-science and tawdry showmanship.

The head of the Cause, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, is part-Svengali, part-PT Barnum. One is never sure how much he believes his own hype. For almost all of the film, he is a flouncy performer, playing up to his adoring devotees. Only once do you see him alone, off-stage, looking out through the slats of a blind at the empty stage and the crowd awaiting him. Briefly, you see the lonely soul trapped within the public persona, the diminutive figure behind the Wizard of Oz, the child longing to stop the pretense. He declares, when he first meets Phoenix, “I am a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher…but above all I am a man” – you wonder if he wishes he was just the latter.

Phoenix, meanwhile, is unbearably compelling to watch. His very skin and veins seem to pulsate with tormented animal spirits, like a painting by Bacon. He is Caliban to Hoffman’s Prospero, longing to govern his demonic compulsions, while Hoffman’s faux-guru is drawn to him precisely for his wildness, his spontaneity, his authenticity and the promise he carries of escape from responsibility.

The Puritan longing to outrun the past takes some weird forms in modern American culture

The film, like the Great Gatsby, is an exploration on how the Puritan desire to escape the sinful past takes some very weird forms in modern American culture. You realise both the main protagonists are trapped in their past, in their roles, both dreaming of escape, both destined to fail. The past stretches out behind us, like the wake of a ship (in one of the film’s recurring images). We can try to outpace it, like Phoenix riding a motorbike at breakneck-speed across the desert and into the horizon. But when we arrive, our past is already there, with all its claims upon us. It reminds me of the old Looney Tunes cartoon, where an escaped convict is being hunted by Droopy, the lethargic basset-hound. No matter how far and fast the convict runs away, somehow Droopy is always there, waiting for him.

This is cinema that proves a close-up of an actor utterly inhabiting their character can be more breath-taking than any 3D spectacular. Anderson continues to explore the rocky terrain of modern loneliness and our yearning for community, forgiveness and transcendence. In contemporary American cinema, he is the Master.