Moving Pictures

Posted on October 8, 2012 by

Dr Stephanie Downes is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Melbourne, where she is part of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. Here she reviews Ben Lerner’s novel Leaving the Atocha Station for the History of Emotions Blog.

Things started coming together for me while I was reading Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station: it contains multitudes. I can’t remember where I first heard about the book, but it’s just come out in paperback in Australian bookshops, and with endorsements by Jonathan Franzen, Paul Auster, and having been awarded last year’s Believer Book Award, it seemed a reasonable enough airport purchase on my way to Perth from Melbourne for an ARC Centre collaboratory on Language and Emotion. J. K. Rowling spoke recently about various moving vehicles – trains, planes – as the genesis for her literary creativity. What about reading on public transport?

There’s a passage in Lerner’s novel on reading translations of Tolstoy on a train leaving the Atocha station, in which grammar and motion merge: travel, translation, poetry, and emotion all merge in this book. One of its most fundamental questions is how poetry can or can’t represent public, as opposed to private, emotion. Adam Gordon is an American poet who has taken up a fellowship in Madrid with the supposed intention, which he pursues meanderingly, of exploring literary responses to the Spanish Civil War. It’s 2004, and by the end of the novel it’s clear that it is the Madrid train bombings at Atocha that are really at stake. The Leaving of the novel’s title is as much about the leaves of a book or a poem as about displacement. I read ‘leaving’ as describing the act of literary creation: what can an individual poet convey on the page of public tragedy? In the gently comic pretentious spirit of the novel itself, I hope the pun I’m suggesting here makes more sense of the reference to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass at the beginning of this post.

Visual art and literary expression are often synonymous is Lerner’s novel. Looking back up at the image of the cover I’ve just pasted into the text, I suddenly notice how the fragments of Renaissance painting on the right have been smeared makes them look like they’re in motion, but also has the effect of a pile of pages or sacked books: more leaves.

Of all the emotional multitudes in the novel, what I want to isolate is a phrase that appears in italics right at the start, and which brings me back to reading or experiencing art or literature – on trains, planes, or anywhere else. The narrator moves through the rooms of the Prado, en route, as is his habit, to position himself in front of a particular painting, Roger Van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross. The fifteenth-century oak panel shows Christ’s lifeless body borne down amid a small crowd. Mary faints, her body in sympathy with her dead son’s, and two other figures are shown actively weeping: individual tears stand out on their cheeks. When the narrator reaches the painting, he finds an unknown man has beaten him there, and is standing in front of the work, himself weeping ‘convulsively.’ (It’s a year of literary tears for me; see an earlier review of Peter Carey’s Chemistry of Tears in this blog.) At this point the narrator asks: ‘Was he, I wondered, just facing the wall to hide his face as he dealt with whatever grief he’d brought into the museum? Or was he having a profound experience of art?’ (8)

The passage is accompanied by a black and white close-up of the face of the man on the right of Weyden’s painting. Suddenly, we’re reading faces, reading art, as well as text. The image, incidentally, is remarkably reminiscent of the close-up of Bouts’ Mater Dolorosa (c. 1460), which appears on the cover of James Elkins’ Pictures and Tears: A History of People who have Cried in Front of Paintings (Routledge, 2001). All this has made me think more about responses to, rather than representations, of emotion in literature. If we cry in front of a painting, or while reading a book, do those tears still convey ‘real’ emotion? Does emotion have to be lived to be experienced? Hamlet-like: ‘What is Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,/ That he should weep for her?’ (2.2.448)

While Lerner’s narrator looks at the weeping stranger, and we look at Van der Weyden’s weeping man, he wonders: ‘Maybe this man is an artist, I thought; what if he doesn’t feel the transports he performs’ (10).

‘Transports’ – not ‘performs’ – is the key word for me here. Emotional states are always in flux, or in motion; always changing, moving. It’s the reader or viewer that’s ‘transported,’ emotionally, or otherwise.

No wonder books and planes go together so well.

The history of the stiff upper lip. Part 1.

Posted on October 2, 2012 by

This evening sees the broadcast of the first episode of a new BBC Two television series:Ian Hislop’s Stiff Upper Lip – An Emotional History of Britain, produced by Deborah Lee for Wingspan Productions. All being well, I think I will pop up briefly a couple of times as one of the interviewees. I was also involved in the series in a minor way as an academic consultant.

To be honest, I think I learned more from the team of hard-working researchers, directors and producers than they did from me, but it was certainly interesting to be able to contribute to discussions about how to represent such complex and frankly nebulous historical entities as national identities, emotional styles, and metaphorical upper lips within a compelling and clear narrative for television. As readers of major works by Peter Mandler and Paul Langford will know, it is possible to write absorbing and illuminating historical monographs on these subjects. But how to translate such complex ideas into the language of television?

This is not the first time I have been interviewed about the history of British emotions for a television programme. Slightly oddly, on all these occasions, the presenter of the programme has been in the comedy business – Tony Robinson, Jo Brand, and now Ian Hislop – rather than the history business. In the case of Brand and Hislop the root cause of their interest in the subject is the same – namely their own squeamishness about public displays of emotion. These experts in the production of laughter seem to be troubled by other expressions of emotion. Jo Brand interviewed me for her documentary a couple of years ago about the recent outburst of televisual weeping, which she found a massive turn-off:

My involvement in the new Ian Hislop series began at a research symposium on the theme of ‘Wandering Feelings‘ organised by Tiffany Watt-Smith (QMUL) and Carolyn Burdett (Birkbeck) at the Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions in 2011. I gave a short presentation on that occasion about Victorian philosophies of weeping. That talk included some reference to my research into the weeping judge Sir James Shaw Willes, whom I have written about in the Journal of Victorian Culture, and also to a weeping policeman, reported in the press in the 1880s as ‘Robert Emotional’. The latter figure (about whom I’ll write a little more in a future post) particularly caught the imagination of Nick Tanner, the assistant producer who attended the symposium, and that provided the starting point for our conversation about how I could help.

The first episode, mapping out the forgotten emotional past of the British, as well as tracing the early origins of the stiff upper lip, faced a particular conceptual challenge: How can one portray the prehistory of an imaginary national trait in a period before it had even been first imagined? And if one had to put a date on the first emergence of the idea of a ‘stiff upper lip’, what should that date be? Did early-modern proponents of Stoic philosophy or of Puritanism offer anything like an endorsement of a stiff upper lip? Probably not. Do we have to wait until the Victorian period for the first real signs? As you will see, the first episode neatly spans eighteenth- and nineteenth-century materials in a way that manages to offer an answer while, wisely, not pinning itself down to any cut-and-dried dates or definitions.

In my own current research project, on the history of weeping in Britain, I have been particularly on the look-out for interesting sources indicative of changing attitudes to the shedding of tears, and this has led me to put particular emphasis on the role of the French Revolution. The earliest statements I have found linking aversion to tears with the English national character date to the 1790s. The most striking and clear-cut of these comes in the second volume of the  Letters from France about the Revolution written by Helen Maria Williams, published in 1792. Williams observed behaviour at the theatre:

You will see Frenchmen bathed in tears at a tragedy. An Englishman has quite as much sensibility to a generous or tender sentiment; but he thinks it would be unmanly to weep; and, though half choaked with emotion, he scorns to be overcome, contrives to gain the victory over his feelings, and throws into his countenance as much apathy as he can well wish.

Williams concluded in 1792 that, “We seem to have strange dread in England of indulging any kind of enthusiasm”. But it would be at least another eighty years before the “stiff upper lip” as we now know it (or think we do) would really come to prominence.

To be continued…

Wittgenstein, Jealousy and the Man in a Bowler Hat: SSHM 2012

Posted on September 25, 2012 by

Jane Mackelworth is a PhD student at the Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions. Her research examines the meaning of home, family, love and belonging for women living in romantic relationships together in the first half of the twentieth century. Here she reports for the History of Emotions Blog on the 2012 conference of the Society for the Social History of Medicine (with an original illustration by Darren Walsh).

The 2012 SSHM conference, recently hosted here at Queen Mary, took over 130 delegates on a giddy tour of some of the most cutting-edge research in the social history of medicine. Attendees were spoilt for choice with lectures and seminars touching upon topics as diverse as the implications of Wittgenstein’s theory in our understanding of pain; the chequered social history of Ritalin; men’s involvement in childbirth; and an imaginary bowler hat.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, September 1947, in Swansea Photograph by Ben Richards; © Wittgenstein Archive, Cambridge.

The conference opened with a dazzling plenary lecture from Joanna Bourke, who drew on the ideas of Wittgenstein and others to explore the nature of pain. Bourke encouraged us to think of pain as a ‘type of event’. Whilst beginning her definition of pain with the individual’s own subjective experience she quickly departed from this to emphasize the cultural and social norms that mediate our meaning and understanding of pain. She was keen to underline that this cultural mediation of pain takes place from birth. It is through language (both verbal and symbolic) that we are able to culturally make sense, not of pain itself, but of our own experience of pain. As always, Bourke was compelling and engaging and she served a strong reminder to us all to keep probing and digging at our everyday understandings of things, of feeling and of emotions.

Following the plenary delegates were offered  a wide range of themed panel sessions, excellently pulled together by Professor Colin Jones, Emma Sutton and Jen Wallis. There is simply not the space to touch on all of these and so I want to highlight just one or two key themes. One prevalent theme was gender. Papers explored  the ways in which definitions, diseases and ‘disorders’ became associated historically with masculinity or femininity. There were some excellent debates on the impact of feminism, and the role of post feminist theory on issues such as female sexual dysfunction. Katherine Angel in particular engaged with the thorny issue of feminism and post-feminism. She raised the challenge of how best to unpick feminist discourse without accusations of attacking or undermining the whole feminist cause. For example, is FSD purely a cultural patriarchal construct, created by doctors? Where does this leave women who may be experiencing symptoms, which cause them problems in their daily lives? Angel suggests that researchers must examine the fault-line between feminist theory and women’s own experiences, and indicated that this is what she had attempted herself in her recent Penguin book Unmastered: A Book on Desire Most Difficult to Tell.

The importance of gender in the social history of emotions and sexuality was also considered. Lesley Hall posed intriguing questions for historians of sexuality as a result of her work looking at literature in the interwar period. Most historians are familiar with the cultural images of  the lesbian in sexology and also in the much quoted Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness. In these, the lesbian woman is depicted as unfeminine, as mannish. She is seen as having an inverted gender. Yet Hall demonstrates that in interwar British literature close friendships with other women became seen as dangerous or troubling when marked by an excess of emotion, which was seen as a feminine trait. Relationships were marked with a jealous intensity. This hyper-femininity is particularly interesting, as it challenges the familiar cultural depiction of ‘female inverts’ as excessively masculine. I found this particularly interesting in terms of my own research (on love, desire and ideas of home between women in Britain from 1900-1960).

Other scholars explored ways in which men and  masculinity, have featured in medical discourse. One theme which emerged was the importance of interrogating historical statistics. For example, women have long been recognized as outnumbering men in being diagnosed with depression and many other mood based disorders. Yet Alison Haggett problematizes this in her compelling research. For example, her extensive oral history study of retired doctors reveals that men’s problems often only came to light when reported by female members of the family. Similarly men often show higher levels of alcohol abuse and this can be considered a way of ‘self-medicating’ for troubling emotions. Haggett’s work, in particular helps highlight the important role that historians can play in effecting change. Her research has a social purpose. She reminds us that, in fact, it is young men who feature highly in suicide statistics. To this end she is involved in policy- making panels to help promote understanding of the complicated relationship between men and what we think of as depression.

The role of men and emotions was also explored by Jade Shepherd in her work looking at the link between jealousy, insanity and crime at Broadmoor prison in the nineteenth century. She shows how, as the nineteenth century progressed, lawyers became less sympathetic to the notion of provocation in cases of murder or sexual assault. As this happened the defence of feelings of jealous passion leading to insanity became invoked much more frequently. This theme was also discussed by Adrian Howe who discussed how in the current day ‘diminished responsibility’ is still used as a defence by men who have murdered their partners. This lead to a discussion of the troubling split, still there in popular culture, which posits reason and emotion at opposite poles.

Yet, in addition to serious debate, there was also room for laughter. Laura King at Warwick is looking at the increasing role of men in childbirth across the twentieth century through oral histories of midwives. She shared an anecdote of the man who sat with his head behind a newspaper throughout his wife’s labour, popping his head up only once to tell his beloved wife ‘not to grunt now’ as she was about to deliver. The midwife said that this image has stayed with her throughout her career with the chap even gaining an imagined bowler hat (which sadly he was not actually wearing at the time).

Illustration (c) Darren Walsh, 2012.

Overall the conference encouraged delegates to reconsider elements of their own work. For example, the second plenary by William Reddy (for a taster, see his recent post on this blog) gave Liz Gray, postgraduate student at Queen Mary, food for thought. In his wonderful overview of the latest neurophysiological research on emotions he highlighted the way in which our own facial muscles physically respond to another person’s emotional expression and how without these movements we find understanding their emotions more difficult. This leads Liz to wonder how this would work in a comparative psychology setting, looking both at animal and human physiology.  Does the same apply when observing animals (such as Darwin’s disappointed and sulky chimpanzee, pictured below)?

The final plenary session at the conference was a debate on the various ways in which historians could intervene in current debate and also show their impact. We left the lecture hall with the words of Mark Jackson ringing in our ears. He told historians to ‘be bold, polemical and unsettling’ within debates in medicine and health.

Along with the lectures and seminars the conference offered museum visits, a programme excellently put together by Liz Gray. I took part in a tour of the Doniach Gallery. The Gallery is a tiny room in the Royal London Hospital and it holds the skeleton of Joseph Merrick, known in popular culture as the elephant man. The visit prompts inevitable reflections of the role of museums and objects and questions of how best to show such ‘objects’, which were once subjects, without objectifying. The staff are passionate in their quest to ensure that Merrick receives the dignity in death which appeared to elude him during his short life. They are selective in who they allow in to the gallery and turn away visitors who they think may have dubious motives. A poem is included from Merrick’s point of view, although no one knows the origin of the poem or when it was written. However, its authenticity is not important, rather it serves as a reminder to see Merrick as subject, not object, something which all of us working in the social history of medicine would want to do.

 

Imbecility, Stress, Panic: Another View of SSHM 2012

Posted on September 24, 2012 by

Hazel Croft is a PhD student at Birkbeck, University of London, where she is supervised by Professor Joanna Bourke. Here Hazel offers her reflections on the recent SSHM conference at Queen Mary, complementing the posts by William Reddy and Jane Mackelworth.

Attending conferences as a part-time PhD student over the last three years, I have discovered that you can often learn the most from the papers you were the least expecting to or which seemed far removed from your own topic. Yet as someone researching the history of psychiatry in the Second World War, when I pored over the programme ahead of the recent SSHM conference on ‘Emotions, Health and Wellbeing’, I felt here was conference that had been designed for me.

Although the topics at the conference were diverse and wide-ranging, and covered the early modern period to the present, I honed in on the papers on  twentieth-century psychiatry, an area of research which less than a decade ago historian of psychiatry Andrew Scull had bemoaned as ‘unexplored territory.’  That is certainly no longer the case – here we were presented with exciting new research on key developments through the century, ranging from patient narratives from the 1920s to the development of psychoactive drugs, and from medical treatments for obesity to the construction of new psychiatric categories, such as ‘panic disorder’.   Here I’ve picked just a few of my highlights.

A Patient’s Voice:  Historians of psychiatry have often attempted to follow Roy Porter’s famous exhortation to do medical history from the patient’s point of view, but have frustratingly found little trace of the psychiatric patient’s voice in the archives. Hazel Morrison, however, has found a wonderful resource in the surviving archives of the Gartnavel Hospital in Glasgow. Letters, and other snippets of patients’ writings, have been preserved in the case notes of some of the female patients diagnosed as ‘moral imbeciles’ in the 1920s. The writings were kept in the records as examples of the patients’ emotional instability and to confirm the diagnosis of moral imbecility.  For Morrison, however, the patients’ words provide a new, and seldom explored, account of the meanings patients attached to their experiences in the hospital.

A ward at Gartnavel Hospital. Photograph (c) Greater Glasgow NHS archives, Mitchell Library.

In a captivating talk, Morrison read from the writings of two young women patients, against a backdrop of an atmospheric photograph of one of the hospital’s wards from the period. Listening to one woman’s articulation of her desires to leave the locked ward and the ways in which she attempted to escape in her imagination,  not only added a new dimension to more traditional analyses of medical discourse, but also brought, as Morrison put it, ‘emotion, movement and light’ to the patient’s story.  Morrison’s talk was perfectly complemented by Vicky Long’s account of the more recent experiences of long-stay psychiatric patients at the same hospital. Histories of post-war psychiatry have tended to focus on services for those with more minor psychiatric disorders in the process of ‘de-institutionalisation’. Long argued passionately that this history needed to include the experience of those with severe and enduring mental disorders, and gave a fascinating account of attempts to develop psychiatric rehabilitation in the context of government cost-cutting and the low priority assigned to the needs and well-being of long-term patients.

Walter Cannon

A genealogy of stress: Today ‘stress’ seems ubiquitous. It permeates everyday language, and there can be few of us who have not at some point felt we were suffering from stress, whether at work or home. The development of the concept of stress as psychiatric category was the product of specific set of historical circumstances, argued Chris Millard in his absorbing presentation. Using the example of ‘cry for help’ suicide attempts, he argued that the psychiatric category of stress bridged the gap between psychopathological and social environmental understandings of mental states. Cutting across traditional diagnostic categories, the concept of ‘stress’ and perhaps more pertinently, ‘distress’, enabled those who attempted suicide to be understood as mentally suffering without necessarily being labelled as mentally ill.  Millard skilfully linked the construction of the concept of ‘stress’ to the post-war reorganisation of mental health care, the move from the asylum to the community and the consequent shifting boundaries between what was constituted as mental illness/abnormality and mental health/normality.

The genealogy of the concept of stress was also addressed by Mark Jackson, in his stimulating plenary lecture ‘Secret Places of the Heart: Stress and Emotion in 1922’.  Although not claiming the year 1922 was a watershed, Jackson highlighted that this year saw the publication of several important works on stress, emotion and disease, including by Walter Canon, George Crile, the report of the Committee of Enquiry into Shell-Shock, Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, as well as T. S. Eliot’s poem The Wasteland and H.G. Wells’ novel, Secret Places of the Heart.  Historians have often characterised the period from the late nineteenth century through to the mid-twentieth century as one which saw a shift from physiological understandings of ‘nerves’ to a focus on the psychology of the mind.  Jackson contended that although there were many differences of approach in the 1922 works he cited, they were linked by an understanding of stress that still relied on a physiological model.  Like Millard’s earlier paper, Jackson suggested that the reshaping of physiological understandings of stress did not take place until during and after the Second World War. These papers resonated with  questions raised in my research about understandings of the ways in which ‘psychological resilience’  was understood by psychiatrists in the Second World War, and have prompted me to probe a little deeper in my analysis of the ways in which wartime mental disorders were conceptualised and diagnosed.

Alive and Kicking: The papers I’ve highlighted were of course only a small part of an extremely wide-ranging conference covering all aspects and time periods of the history of medicine and emotions, including discussions of its relevance and applicability for social policy and public practice.  Yet the papers I’ve discussed here highlight what I found most inspiring about this conference – the depth of the analyses offered and the way that connections and dissonances between different contexts and time frames were discussed and debated. Perhaps most impressive of all was the engagement of the audience and the diverse, but always informed, debates following the talks, the buzz of which continued well into the coffee breaks.

Just before I started my PhD three years ago I remember coming across various articles debating the possible demise of the social history of medicine, following first the ‘cultural turn’ and more recently what some have called the ‘neuro-turn’. Whatever the merits of those arguments, on the evidence of this conference, the social history of medicine is alive and kicking and the organizers of the conference are to be congratulated for providing this forum to highlight the vibrancy of the field.

Sensibilité and information processing: Historical approaches to “Striving to Feel”

Posted on September 21, 2012 by

Professor William M. Reddy was one of the keynote speakers at the recent SSHM conference on “Emotions, Health and Wellbeing” at Queen Mary. He has very kindly agreed to post on the History of Emotions blog the following paragraphs, which were not included in the paper delivered on 11 September due to lack of time. Posted below the text is the full list of references for the lecture.  Professor Reddy’s most recent work is a study of the medieval roots of romantic love, which will be reviewed in a future post on this blog. 

Evidence appears to be accumulating in favor of theories that see a close connection between cognition and affect, as I indicated in my paper presented on 11 September. (See provided list of references.) As several observers have noted, we appear to be on the verge of setting aside a distinction between reason and emotion that has a long history in Western understandings, going back to the fourth century BCE. The reason / emotion distinction may itself represent not the cutting of nature at its joints, but a conception that plays a central role in certain local emotional vocabularies used in Western venues. Of course, if this is the case, the term emotion has to be used with scare quotes around it, and the history of emotions must address a wider range of issues than simply what has been thought about emotions and how they have been experienced—as if “emotion” itself were an unproblematic concept. The notion of reason has itself, in effect, been used in a variety of Western emotional styles over the centuries, in the service of a variety of norms.

But this is not the first time in Western history that the distinction between emotion and reason has been subjected to critical reevaluation and even rejection. The failure to find a modular system within the brain underlying specific emotions—as outlined in Lindquist et al. (2012), Pessoa and Adolphs (2010), and other studies—might be compared to the famous experiments of Charles Bonnet and Abraham Trembley in the 1740s. They cut arms, mouth, stomach away from freshwater polyps, and found that the polyps readily regenerated the missing parts. They cut polyps into pieces, and found that each separate fragment of the polyp was capable of regenerating the whole organism. (Here I am following discussions in Baertschi and Gaukroger.[1]) The possibility that nature could generate organisms in this way suggested that matter itself might possess an intrinsic principle of activity or life. Buffon, whose Histoire naturelle appeared in 1749, speculated that mechanists, from Galileo to Newton, had taken the external qualities of objects—extention, impenetrability, motion, external shape, divisibility, communication of motion in collision and through the action of springs—as fundamental principles of matter. But, Buffon asks, “ ‘Is it not the case that, if our senses were different from what they are, we would recognize qualities in matter different from these?’” (X, 328). Buffon does not want to exclude these mechanical principles, but suggests we could add to them.[2]

Having puzzled over the development of the foetus, Maupertuis also argued in 1751 that matter itself must contain some kind of life principle. “If all of [the parts of the embryo] have the same tendency [that is, a uniform attraction similar to gravity], the same force for coming together with each other, why do some go to form the eye, others the ear?; why do they form this wonderful arrangement? … If we want to come to terms with this, even if only by analogy, we need to have recourse to some principle of intelligence, to something similar to what we call desire, aversion, memory.’”[3]

These same years, 1739-52, saw the major publications of Albrecht von Haller, the Göttingen professor of medicine who argued that muscle activity arose from an irritability that “belonged to the glutinous component of muscle fibers … in the same way that gravity belongs to matter.” For Haller, this principle of irritability in muscular tissue combined with the principle of sensibility of tissue imbued with nerves to create the capabilities of movement of the animal organism. Robert Whytt of Edinburgh in 1751 rejected as “absurd” the idea that “matter can, of itself, by any modification of its parts, be rendered capable of sensation, or of generating motion.”[4] Haller responded with counterarguments, sparking a wide-ranging debate.

Denis Diderot took the views of Buffon, Maupertuis, Haller, and others and pushed them to a radical conclusion, that (1) the line between animals and plants was arbitrary, with many intermediate forms such as polyps that had characteristics of both, and the line between plant and mineral might also be a gray one; (2) that sensibility was a characteristic of all matter comparable to, and in addition to, matter’s responsiveness to gravity; and (3) that human sensory experience and human thought itself were no more than a realization of this sensibility. In making sensibility the origin of all human thought in this way, Diderot was downplaying the thought-emotion distinction and granting certain emotions an unprecedented primacy within experience.  Diderot hesitated between the view that sensibility could make itself manifest prior to the existence of organization and the view that a specific organization of matter (the animal body) brought out the latent sensibility of matter, rendering it active. Either way, Diderot insisted, sensibility was responsible for all human mental activity.[5]

By promoting this view Diderot was attempting to link the aesthetic and moral theories of Dubos, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and others; the speculations of naturalists such as Maupertuis and Buffon; the new medical understanding, especially vis-à-vis the nervous system, represented in the works of Cheyne, Haller, and others; as well as the vivid melodramatic narratives of novelists such as Samuel Richardson. Diderot brought them all together in a single vision of human nature. While Diderot’s views were not accepted by all, concern with knitting together the implications of developments in all these areas was widespread, and there were strong scientific and philosophical reasons for concluding, as Hume famously put it, that reason “is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”[6] This conclusion was rendered more palatable by the general rejection of the doctrine of original sin, which had seen the weakness of the will in relation to passion as a mark of divine punishment. There were certain passions that remained dangerous, in the view of many, but other “feelings” or  “sentiments”—the expressions of sensibility—came to be widely regarded as the foundation of human virtue.

For Diderot and many others, then, states of absorption tinged with feelings of pity, love, gratitude, or cheerful affection were “natural” in the physiological sense and also “natural” in the moral sense. Naturally social, human beings found pleasure in sentiments that bound them together.

The eighteenth-century experience can serve as a cautionary tale for the present. As with Bonnet and Trembley’s dissections of freshwater polyps, so in current brain imaging. No matter how finely one slices the brain, each piece seems to contain both cognitive and affective components, just as each piece of a polyp was able to regenerate the whole organism. The hypotheses offered by Buffon, Maupertuis, Diderot, that each part of the organism possessed a principle that Diderot and others called “sensibility,” could be compared to the background assumption of much cognitive and neuroscience research, i.e., that the brain is engaged in “information processing,” by analogy with a computer. Previously, “affective” processing was viewed as a separate system that interfered with or overrided cognitive “information processing.”[7] Now, affective processing has been elevated to equal status with cognitive processing; both, therefore, appear to involve “information.” Watson and Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA, as based on an amino-acid code, capable of containing and replicating vast amounts of information, offered the possibility of a striking (and purely “mechanistic”) answer to Maupertuis’s insistence that there must be some “principle of intelligence” underlying the unfolding of embryonic development. Likewise, the anatomy of the neuron has offered grounds for seeing the nervous system as a processor of information.

In the last twenty years, however, neuroscientists have dropped the idea that this processing is “linear” in character. (In linear processing, each stage of processing is completed before the results are passed on to the next stage. As I have noted elsewhere, a good example of a model of linear processing is Saussurian structural linguistics.) The elevation of affect to equal status with cognition is no more than a single dimension of this more general transformation. Processing in the brain is now seen as “massively parallel,” and generally characterized by “top-down” or “cascade” patterns (in which later stages of processing begin before earlier ones are completed, and feed early, sketchy results back down the chain to speed the completion of earlier-stage tasks). Although the precise wiring is far from agreed upon, it is generally agreed, for example, that, in vision, object-recognition at early processing stages is facilitated by a preliminary guess, based on low-resolution information. This guess (or set of related guesses) is rushed back down to early-stage visual cortex regions to check for possible matches. Evidence of similar top-down processing has been found for speech recognition, where semantic processing begins well before phonetic and syntactical processing are completed, as well as, spectactularly, for pain, where efferent (outgoing) pathways have been found reaching all the way out to the pain receptors distributed throughout the body. In general, efferent pathways are as numerous and as rich as afferent (in-going) ones in the nervous system, suggesting that all early-stage processing is “assisted” or shaped by late-stage top-down assistance—some of which is cross-modal (e.g., information from hearing may be used to interpret visual perception of a moving mouth, as in the so-called McGurk effect). The involvement of late-stage “cognitive” regions of the prefrontal cortex in “regulating” the responses of the amygdala, central to the “emotion regulation” paradigm, is just another case of top-down processing (Ochsner & Gross, 2007).

One must wonder, as the understanding of this extraordinary architecture deepens, whether it will be necessary to drop the “information processing” analogy entirely, just as the notion of sensibility was dropped in the nineteenth century. The brain seems designed to leap to conclusions about the environment on the basis of the barest hints of information. There would be plentiful grounds for thinking of this as a kind of “construction” of one’s environment, except that the patterns themselves derive from learning and habituation that are made possible by the existence of an environment that is, indeed, quite stable in many respects. In addition, these rapid-fire pattern recognition propensities are subject to reshaping by practice. Everything depends on how highly “activated” a given guess about a pattern has become. And activation, in turn, depends in large measure on repetition. Hence, again, the centrality of what might be called “striving.” “Striving to feel” might be useful as a catch phrase, to replace the notion of “self-fashioning,” characteristic of the linguistic turn.

(c) 2012 William M. Reddy.

[1] Bernard Baertschi, Les rapports de l’âme et du corps: Descartes, Diderot, et Maine de Biran (Paris: Vrin, 1992), 34-41, 101-133; Stephen Gaukroger, The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680-1760 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2010), 357-420.

[2] Gaukroger, Collapse of Mechanism, 365.

[3] Quoted in Baertschi, Les rapports, 37; and in Gaukroger, Collapse of Mechanism, 362.

[4] Quoted in ibid., 397.

[5] Two texts are central to understanding Diderot’s views: the article animal in the Encyclopédie and the Entretiens avec d’Alembert of 1761.

[6] Quoted from the Treatise in Daniel Gross, The Secret History of Emotions: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 98.

[7] See, for a good example of this kind of approach to affect, Keith Oatley, Best Laid Schemes: The Psychology of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

 

William M. Reddy

“Striving to Feel: The Centrality of Effort in the History of Emotions,” paper delivered to the conference of the Society for the Social History of Medicine, on the theme “Emotion, Health, and Well-Being,” at QMUL, Center for the History of Emotions, 11 September 2012

List of references

Davis, Elizabeth L., Linda J. Levine, and Heather C. Lench, “Metacognitive Emotion Regulation: Children’s Awareness That Changing Thoughts and Goals Can Alleviate Negative Emotions,” Emotion 10(2010):498-510

Eagleman, David M., Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (New York: Pantheon, 2011).

Gross, James J., “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades,” Emotion Review 2(2010):212-216

Gross, James J., and Lisa Feldman Barrett, “Emotion Generation and Emotion Regulation: One or Two Depends on Your Point of View,” Emotion Review 3(2011):8-16

Havas, David A., et al., “Cosmetic Use of Botulinum Toxin-A Affects Processing of Emotional Language,” Psychological Science 21(2010):895-900

Hollan, Douglas, “Emotion Work and the Value of Emotional Equanimity Among the Toraja,” Ethnology 31(1992):45-56

Jones, Matthew L., The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, and the Cultivation of Virtue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006)

Kellermann, Tanja S., et al., “Modulating the Processing of Emotional Stimuli by Cognitive Demand,” Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience, 7(2012):263-273

Kron, Assaf, et al., “Feelings Don’t Come Easy: Studies on the Effortful Nature of Feelings,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 139(2010):520-534

Lindquist, Kristen A., et al., “The Brain Basis of Emotion: A Meta-Analytic Review,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 35(2012):121-143—with 28 comments and a reply from the authors in this issue, on pp. 144-202

Niedenthal, Paula M., et al., “Embodiment of Emotion Concepts,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 96(2009):1120-1136

Ochsner, Kevin N. and James J. Gross, “The Neural Architecture of Emotion Regulation,” in Handbook of Emotion Regulation, edited by James J. Gross (New York: Guilford, 2007), 87-109

Pessoa, Luiz, “On the Relationship Between Emotion and Cognition,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 9(2008):148-158

Pessoa, Luiz, and Ralph Adolphs, “Emotion Processing and the Amygdala: From a ‘Low Road’ to ‘Many Roads’ of Evaluating Biological Significance,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11(2010):773-782

Rosaldo, Michelle Z., Knowledge and Passion: Ilongot Notions of Self and Social Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980)

 

Loyalty and a Dog Called Bobby

Posted on September 20, 2012 by

Liz Gray is a PhD student at the QMUL Centre for the History of the Emotions. Her doctoral research is into the work of the physician and comparative psychologist, William Lauder Lindsay. She has recently launched her own blog: Tales of Animals Past. In this blog post she tells the remarkable story of ‘Greyfriars Bobby’.

__________

In an Obituary published in the Scotsman in January 1872, and reprinted in papers across Scotland and as far south as London, one of Edinburgh’s most famous residents is described as ‘a poor but interesting dog’. For the last fourteen years of his life, and for over a hundred years since, Greyfriars Bobby, has been known as one of the most faithful dogs to have ever lived.

The most traditional version of his story is one of a small dog, a Skye Terrier, who, upon the death of his master, mourned him greatly. After the funeral he never returned home, choosing to live instead in the graveyard of Greyfriars church. He was seen sitting at, or near, the graveside every day following the funeral, to the day he died. This demonstration of such dedication to his master engendered him to the hearts of the city’s population. Local restaurateurs fed him, and the observation of his daily routine of sitting in the graveyard, visiting the castle and trotting to visit the local businesses that cared for him, became part of the tourist trail. Upon his death, he was buried in the graveyard that had become his home.

Since his first appearance in Greyfriars (c.1858), Bobby has been the subject of paintings, photographs, films, books, and most famously a statue. Yet, in the most recent biography Greyfriars Bobby: The Most Faithful Dog in the World, Jan Bondeson, posits a most interesting scenario – there were in fact two Bobbys. His examination of the images and descriptions of the dog, alongside the many variations in narrative that make up the legend of this dog, result in a tale of a stray dog, who through chance and luck was ‘adopted’ by members of the community (both Edinburgh’s and the animal advocates for Britain). And when he died (Bondeson suggests in 1867) he was replaced by another, similar, dog. But why? And what does this publicity stunt say about the emotionality of man towards animals.

Dogs featured heavily in nineteenth-century society: their lives were depicted in literature, in moral tales for children and adults, such as Ouida’s Puck; they were subjects of scientific research, especially in the form of vivisectional experiments; and, related to this, were the focus of philanthropic and charitable works. Greyfriar Bobby’s statue is not the only dog statue in Edinburgh –Bum, the San Diego dog is immortalised in Prince’s Gardens, but he was a stray adopted by a city, there is no tale of faithfulness attached to him. Nor was he the only ‘Cemetery Dog’ of the nineteenth century – Bondeson identifies forty-six such animals, and many of these have their own ‘folk tales’, and statues that attract visitors to these memorials. Yet it is argued that Bobby is probably the most famous of all. He was, and always has been a tourist attraction. Maybe one of the first animals used in advertising, the first of a long line of dogs used in this manner – the Dulux dog and the Andrex puppy being just two that are most recognisable today. These dogs are used to embody qualities such as loyalty and reliability, traits that can be traced back to the little dog from Edinburgh.

If you accept Bondeson’s theory and the interpretation that the tale of Greyfriars Bobby was nothing more than an elaborate advertising strategy, you have to question what aspects of nineteenth-century culture enabled the story to develop in this way.

The year of Bobby’s death also saw the publication of Charles Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. The previous year had seen the publication of The Descent of Man and interest in the sagacity of animals was reaching levels not seen before. Although in no way a new topic, since the publication of The Origin of Species(1859) it had experienced a flourishing amongst both the scientific and lay communities. Newspapers and magazines were regularly publishing articles of anthropomorphised tales of a range of animal behaviours. This anecdotal evidence was collected by the likes of Darwin, and other ‘men of science’ interested in the subject of animal mind.

A dog in a “humble and affectionate frame of mind” from Darwin’s book on The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals

The story of Greyfriars Bobby was not one of the anecdotes chosen by Darwin, or George John Romanes (his intellectual successor in terms of the animal mind). Bobby does feature, however, in the work of William Lauder Lindsay. For these three men, all dogs, if treated correctly, exhibited unredoubtable loyalty and love to their owners. All three were themselves dog owners and all professed to have experienced this from their own animals.

Lindsay, in his final book, Mind in the Lower Animals, goes so far as to construct an evolutionary scale based on mental qualities, and places dogs as second only to man. Within this, and his earlier texts on the animal mind, a dog’s ‘worship of man’ is correlated with that of man’s worship of God, and to some extent, woman’s worship of man. Lindsay traces this theory back to Francis Bacon and Robert Burns. That this devotion should continue after death and the animal should been seen to continue their worship is just a continuation human religious practice. Following Lindsay’s reasoning in this way it could be suggested that, even though Greyfriars Bobby’s devotion was greater than some animals (for he lived in the graveyard rather than just regularly visiting the spot), he was not the most devoted of animals. There are many anecdotes of animals being struck by such powerful grief on the loss of their masters that they too died – and surely this is the greater sign of devotion.

The scientific interest in the animal mind coincided with the increasing use of animals within scientific practices – the vivisectional experiments designed to increase the understanding of the physiology of the body, were expanded to include the physiology of the mind. And tales such as that of Bobby were valuable to anti-vivisectional and animal welfare campaigners. Having said that, he was never the figurehead for any of the charitable or legislative movements of his lifetime (Dog Duty Act, 1867; Vivisection Act, 1876), although records show he was made a special exemption to the Dog Duty Act by the Lord Provost. His, now famous, statue on Candlemaker Row was erected to include a drinking fountain for dogs, by Angela Burdett-Coutts, a leading philanthropist and animal welfare supporter.

So, what, if anything, does the story of Greyfriars Bobby tell us? Whether you believe the original tale of a devoted dog mourning his master for well over a decade, or the more cynical version of a publicity stunt that fooled the public for even longer, the answer is the same. Bobby’s story is a microcosm of the way in which the human-dog community was presented in the nineteenth century. The bond between dog and owner was a lasting one, based on a mutual respect. For the men of science mentioned above, dogs embodied characteristics that moral men in society should possess – loyalty, work-ethic, reliability, to name a few. For the animal welfare advocates these characteristics were the reasons that dogs, as well as other animals, deserved to be treated better.

Greyfriars Bobby’s statue stands today as a reminder both of this small dog, the place of dogs within our society, and the deep emotional bond formed between many a dog and their owner.

__________

Follow Liz Gray on Twitter: @lizanngray

Return to: Five Hundred Years of Friendship at the History of Emotions Blog

 

Are other animals artistic?

Posted on September 20, 2012 by

Last week, an online media outlet (that does not need to be named here) posted a link to an article and entitled it ‘Our favourite animal that thinks its human moment…’. This struck a cord with me – and not because I believe that animals, on occasion, may/could think of themselves as human. Now this may not strictly have an historical element to the story, and because of that I have been quite undecided as to whether to share this as my first post. But, upon reflection, if I can’t write about it here, where can I write about it.

The story was about an elephant that paints. This is only one of many stories that are out there about animal art. But what struck me about this interpretation is that art was presented as something that defines us as human. Art is placed in the same category as language, music, religion, education…

Animal art was the subject of an exhibition earlier this year at UCL’s Grant Museum, and they have a written an excellent blog on the subject, which saves me covering a lot of the same ground. The training of animals, elephants in particular, to produce art work clearly raises the question of the ‘real’ motives behind their actions. The paintings they produce cannot therefore be described as an expression of their inner ‘thoughts’ and ‘feelings’ – concepts that most of us think of art being expressions of.

However, if we put aside the notion of elephant art, and even that of the chimpanzee that is also discussed by the Grant Museum (which I think could be argued as being a more genuine expression than the former), there are other versions of art that perhaps have a more substance within this sort of debate.

Take this Bower bird nest. Can it be seen as a piece of sculpture in its own right? It is thought to serve a purpose in attracting a mate, but it is perhaps a more elaborate means than some other birds adopt. Robins are satisfied with their red breasts, blackbirds have their song, so why do bower birds feel the need to build such elaborate structures? And can they not be regarded as sculptures, and as such an art form? I do not admit to being able to provide an answer to these questions – at least not yet anyway.

What intrigues me more though, and has had me scratching my head, and arguing in circles, can these ‘sculptures’ be seen as expressions of emotion? Now this is a nineteenth-century concept that will be returned to on many occasions in this blog. My ‘instinct’ is to answer no – that their choice of shape, and the colours of the flowers and seeds that are used to adorn these spaces are purely based on instinct – on attracting the best mate possible. But, as a quick search on Google Images reveals, these nests come in a huge variety of shapes, sizes and colours. Can this all just be an graphic illustration of the ‘survival of the fittest’ concept? Or is there something else that accompanies this drive to impress?

Dennis Dutton, in his book, The Art Instinct, deconstructs the relationship between ‘possible’ animal and ‘actual’ human art. For Dutton there is something deeper and more cultural about art, a factor that defines it as a purely human endeavour. The evolutionary instinct for this form of expression is located post the genetic separation from the Chimpanzee, located somewhere in the 4% of genetic difference that lies between us as species. Although, he does concede that the Bower bird perhaps comes closest to what he defines as the artistic instinct of man.

To quote Dutton: ‘From beaver dams to African termite mounds to New Guinea Bowers, animals construct stunning objects and put on spectacular performances’ (The Art Instinct, p.9). Yet none of these are art. Is it perhaps because they all serve a purpose – be it accommodation or attracting a mate. And art, for all intents and purposes, in human culture has no such purpose. And if we extend notion of artistic expression into other forms of visual display by animals, as was argued by my husband during one late night discussion on this subject, does it still stand up? Can you count the display by the peacock or the bird of paradise, as similar artistic expressions?

Most people, including myself, would argue that these are no more artistic expressions than me getting dressed up for a night out. So have I just argued myself out of my own point? Perhaps I have. However, there still remains the fact that the whereas the peacock and birds of paradise do not have a choice on the colour or elaborateness of their physical displays, the bower bird still appears to make a choice about the ‘sculptures’ they create and decorate. Something still drives them to choose the pink flowers over the blue flowers or the mass of shiny black seeds over brown ones.

So to return to the headline that first started me thinking about the human-ness of art. The circularity of this blog is, I think, a clear indication that I am no closer to resolving my thoughts on whether there is such as a thing as animal art. The problem starts in the definition we each adopt in understanding what art is, and what it is an expression on. The training of animals to produce ‘artworks’ to sell to the public, is clearly a definition of art on shaky ground, and one which neatly fits into sentiment of art as a purely human endeavour. However, I still believe there is something to be said about the bower bird and the individuality that can be seen within the structures they build. Whether it can be said to be an expression of artistic sentiment – well, I will leave that for you all to ponder on.

Love in the time of ‘miracles’

Posted on September 18, 2012 by

The cover of an issue of 'Grand Hotel' magazine, 1959.

Niamh Cullen is working on a three-year post-doctoral project, at Università degli studi di Milano and University College Dublin, entitled ‘The post-war generation: Growing up and coming of age in 1950s Italy’. The project uses diaries, memoirs, magazines, and popular culture to investigate the changing nature of everyday life, including attempting to reconstruct the experience of everyday emotions. Here she writes about the complex meanings of love and marriage during the economic ‘miracle’ of post-war Italy.

The following advice was given to a reader of the popular Italian magazine Grand Hotel who wrote in 1955 with the pseudonym ‘Gone with the wind’, and it manages to capture in a few words, the complex meanings and expectations associated with love and marriage in 1950s Italy.

It wouldn’t have been very nice of you to marry (the first man) just to have a comfortable life. As for the other one, if he really loved you and had serious intentions, he would be able to persuade his parents to break his obligation. Be careful then dear, (…) neither a marriage of convenience nor a clandestine relationship with a man who is engaged to another. You’ll be left with empty hands and a bitter smile.

Don’t marry just for material comfort, marry for love. And with regard to the second suitor, surely a marriage arranged by his family was no real obstacle if he really loved her? What seems like fairly straightforward, common sense advice at first actually describes two different views of marriage and two different ‘emotional styles’; one that sees economic security, kinship and community bonds as central to marriage, and the agony aunt’s ‘modern’ ideal of true love as the basis of a lifelong union. ‘Gone with the wind’ was caught between these two conflicting positions, unsure which criteria to use in making her choices.

While the idea of romantic love was of course an age-old one, the idea that it might realistically be used as a sound criteria for choosing a partner, and indeed as the basis of a marriage, was a relatively recent one in 1955. Italy too was on the cusp of great social change. Up to the mid-1950s, it was still predominantly a rural society dominated by the Catholic Church and by traditional notions of family, kinship and gender roles. However the late 1950s and early 1960s saw society transformed by an economic boom so strong it simply became known as the miracle. Migration to the cities increased rapidly, as people were drawn away from the countryside by the promise of higher wages and modern city life. Women’s roles in society were changing, consumer culture was on the rise and mass culture was beginning to displace the voice of the priest.

All of these changes had massive implications for the ordinary lives of Italians. I’m particularly concerned with the way that these social transformations affected the day-to-day lives of ordinary Italians, and on how not just their material circumstances but their outlook, attitudes and decisions were shaped by wider social currents. While my research initially focused on the lives of those growing up and coming of age in the 1950s, I gradually came to see as I sifted through magazine articles, stories, advice columns, memoirs and diaries that one of the most fundamental ways in which social and cultural change impacted on day to day life was at the level of the emotions; in the shifting meanings and constant renegotiations of the meaning of love, courtship and marriage. Decisions about when, whom to marry, and whether to marry at all, were central to the lives of young Italians and were bound up with their experiences and expectations of family, work, migration, politics, religion and mass culture.

My research now mainly focuses on courtship in the 1950s, looking at both the popular discourses surrounding it – in magazines, and some fiction and film – and attempting to reconstruct as much as possible the variety of lived experiences and recollections about ‘ordinary’ love, through diaries and memoirs. Looking at the various descriptions and discourses about love and marriage in the 1950s, it can seem difficult to locate the actual ‘emotion’ since sometimes, as in the example quoted above, the reasons for marrying could be about everything but love. However it is in the 1950s that more and more the idea of marrying for love was entering people’s minds, even if it still wasn’t entirely clear how to act on it.

Image from a 1959 photo-story entitled 'Vow of love', serialized in Grand Hotel magazine.

Another Grand Hotel reader wrote in the same year asking for similar advice; she was being courted by two men, one a goldsmith with his own shop and the other a poor labourer who often ‘didn’t even have the price of a cinema ticket’. However she and the labourer ‘loved each other very much and couldn’t live without seeing each other.’ Which suitor should she choose, she asked. The gently mocking response was ‘the labourer, naturally… or do you want to choose the goldsmith and die?’ While the answer was laughably obvious to agony aunt Wanda, and to us today, what is interesting is that it was not at all so to the reader in question. In a rural setting where a woman might have little education and no marketable skills or experience, depending entirely on her husband for financial security, marriage was often seen as too important to be decided by love.

However it was usually not as simple as a clear-cut choice between love and material comfort. Particularly in a close-knit rural community, where a couple might know each other growing up, or get engaged at a young age, it could be difficult to separate family expectations, companionship, familiarity and love. It is also of course impossible to know what any individual really meant or understood by love.

Diaries and memoirs do give some insight into what was felt and described as love, as well the cultural frameworks in which it was understood. Also interesting is the prominence of place given to the theme of love and/or marriage within the overall structure of the life-story. Some of the first-person texts I have looked at describe the courtship with their partner in classic romantic language, borrowing similes from nature, moon and stars, while giving no real sense of the relationship. Others describe the gradual growth of affection often giving great detail on the typical formalized progression of a relationship to official engagement and then marriage. Some admitted that the strictly regimented courtship of the middle-class couple – usually with a weekly schedule for the courtship agreed between the girl’s father and her fiancé, and meetings happening under family supervision – allowed little room for intimacy to develop before marriage.

There was no simple progression from marriages of convenience to ‘modern’ unions based on love either; one memoir recounted the decision of two friends who met at university, to marry for companionship but without love. Sometimes mass culture blended with and gave new life to traditional ideas too. Since separate gender spheres were more rigidly adhered to in rural southern Italy, with women generally keeping to the home, traditional ideas of romantic love were based on meaningful, longing glances exchanged between couples who never spoke a word. Magazines like Grand Hotel, whose main attraction was stories about love, fitted these traditional notions into their modern melodramas. When some memoirs described their love in these terms, it is difficult to tell whether they were more influenced by the magazines so popular in the 1950s, or these much older notions.

It’s almost impossible to tell how people really felt – even when reading their own personal accounts of their experiences – or what they really meant when they used the word ‘love’. However looking at social change through the lens of emotions rather than just material changes, can give much greater insight into how wider trends and developments impacted people’s lives, and how they negotiated them at an individual level. Reconstructing as much as possible the different ways that love might be understood in a society, how they arose and changed over time also allows us to understand how a choice that seems laughably obvious to a so-called modern readership, was anything but clear-cut to the person who had to make it.

Spinoza: Defender of the Passions?

Posted on September 17, 2012 by

Matthew J. Kisner is Associate Professor at the University of South Carolina and the author of Spinoza on Human Freedom: Reason, Autonomy and the Good Life (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Here Matthew writes for the History of Emotions blog on what Spinoza really thought about the passions, including whether or not he was a Stoic.

Baruch (later Benedict de) Spinoza (1632-1677) was a Jewish and Dutch philosopher, usually identified as one of the great early modern rationalists, alongside Descartes and Leibniz.  While Spinoza was notorious in his own time for his heterodox views on God and religion, he is today regarded as a central contributor to the enlightenment, a defender of realist political theory and a pioneer of modern biblical criticism.  Spinoza is also recognized as a great theorist of the passions, which play an important role in both his ethics and politics.

In his ethics, Spinoza is renowned for taking up a Stoic criticism of the passions.  He certainly has good reason to worry about them.  A central goal of Spinoza’s ethics is attaining virtue, specifically, the highest virtue, which he equates with our highest good (4p28).[i]  Since he conceives of our virtue as equivalent to our power (4def8), being virtuous means acting from our power, more specifically, our essential power, what he calls our conatus, the striving to persevere in existence.  In other words, virtue, for Spinoza, amounts to self-determination or, more simply, activity. It follows that our virtue is threatened by passivity, being determined and guided by external forces.  Consequently, our virtue is also threatened by the passions, passive affects that arise when we are acted on and determined by external forces.  In particular, since Spinoza understands reason as active, passive affects threaten to direct us contrary to reason’s counsel, for instance, to act for goods that are attainable by all.

Consequently, Spinoza claims that the passions lead us into competition with another and generate conflict: “men, insofar as they are torn by affects which are passions, can be contrary to one another” (4p34d).  Thus, when Spinoza considers the “bondage of the affects” in Part IV of the Ethics, there is little doubt that he is referring to the bondage of the passions.

While Spinoza clearly conceives the passions as potential threats to our virtue and the source of many problems, it not obvious that he regards the passions as necessarily bad, in other words, inconsistent with a life of virtue.  Sometimes Spinoza suggests this is the case: “lack of power consists only in this, that a man allows himself to be guided by things outside him, and to be determined by them to do what the common constitution of external things demands, not what his own nature, considered in itself, demands” (4p37s1).

If Spinoza understands our lack of power as consisting in determination by external things, then it seems that being affected by external things necessarily diminishes our power and, consequently, our virtue.  Partly for this reason, Spinoza is sometimes read as upholding the Stoic view—or, at least, a view commonly attributed to the Stoics—that the passions are inconsistent with virtue.  For instance, Susan James writes, in her article “Spinoza the Stoic,” “the claim that all passion is inimical to virtue, so that in so far as we become virtuous we become free of passion, was regularly decried by seventeenth-century philosophers and moralists as a Stoic aberration.  In cleaving to this view, Spinoza aligns himself with a controversial tenet of Stoicism, and would have been seen to do so.”[ii]

However, this does not seem to be Spinoza’s decided view.  He claims that passive desires, which are a kind of passion, can be good: “our active emotions, that is, those desires that are defined by man’s power, that is, by reason, are always good; the other desires can be either good or bad” (4app3).  If passions of desire can be good, it follows that they can increase our power and, consequently, our virtue. Spinoza also indicates that passions can increase our virtue when he allows for the existence of passive joy (laetitia).  Since he defines joy as “the transition to greater perfection” (3DOE2), the existence of passive joy implies that passive changes can constitute transitions to greater perfection.  Our perfection, in turn, is determined by our degree of power: “when I say that somebody passes from a state of less perfection to a state of greater perfection, I mean… that we conceive his power of activity, insofar as this is understood through his nature, to be increased or diminished” (4pref).  Thus, the passion of joy is a transition to greater power and virtue.  It follows that passions can be consistent with virtue and, furthermore, contribute to our virtue.  In this respect, Spinoza allows for the possibility of virtuous passions, a notion that the Stoics would regard as something of an oxymoron.

Spinoza has good reasons to uphold this more nuanced view of the passions.  First, he regards the passions as inescapable parts of our lives.  In rejecting a standard conception of human beings as substances or collections of substances, Spinoza asserts that our existence and essential nature depend upon external things.  Consequently, he regards humans as necessarily determined by external things and, thus, passive to some degree.  In fact, he criticizes both the Stoics and Descartes for failing to recognize that we are inevitably determined by external things and, consequently, subject to passions, such that we are incapable of eliminating them or fully mastering our emotions (5pref).  It is unsurprising, then, that Spinoza leaves room for the passions in the life of the virtuous: since the passions are inescapable, arguing otherwise entails that a virtuous life is impossible.

Second, Spinoza recognizes that passivity can be beneficial.[iii]  Most obviously, we are passive when external things act on us to produce sensations.  While Spinoza criticizes knowledge from sensation as “fragmentary [mutilate]” and “confused” (2p40s2), he nevertheless accepts that it provides us with some understanding of external things, which can promote our power: “the advantage that we get from things external to us” include “experience and knowledge” (4app27; see also 4p38).  Furthermore, Spinoza accepts that we require external things for our survival, such as nourishment and shelter, which entails that it is beneficial to be passively affected by them: “those things above all are advantageous which can so feed and nourish the body that all its parts can efficiently perform their function” (4app27; see also 2p14post4).  We also benefit from other people, not only because we require their labor and assistance for our survival, but also because they constitute the state, which contributes to our power (4app14, 4p73).  Finally, we benefit from rational people because they contribute to our rationality, which increases our power and virtue: “there is no individual thing in the universe more advantageous to man than a man who lives by the guidance of reason” (4p35c1; see also 4app9, 4app12).  The fact that passivity can be beneficial provides Spinoza with good reason to hold that passions can be beneficial, for they are the affective expression of passive change.

Third, Spinoza’s philosophy assigns an important role to the passions in the life of virtue as barometers of our power.  As we have seen, Spinoza conceives the affects of joy and sadness as corresponding to increases and decreases in our power.  According to this view, the affects of joy and sadness indicate or track whether our power is increasing or decreasing.  It follows that the passions of joy and sadness, being brought about by external things, inform us whether external things are increasing or decreasing our power, thereby informing us of their value.  Indeed, the passions provide the only information about the value of particular external things.  Spinoza holds that reason traffics in ideas of general things, more specifically, adequate ideas and common notions, which do not comprehend particular finite things.  Consequently, the passions provide our only source of information about how we are affected by particular external things.  This information is particularly important to moral matters, since it indicates how external things affect our power and, consequently, our virtue and perfection.  A virtuous person, then, requires the passions in order to determine, for instance, whether her peers and teachers are good influences, contributing to her virtue.[iv]

This discussion shows one important way that Spinoza breaks with the Stoics: by conceiving of passivity and passions as important aspects of a virtuous life.  Consequently, it also shows that Spinoza is not, as some scholars have suggested, intolerant of human passivity, vulnerability, and weakness.[v]

 

[i] Translations of Spinoza’s Ethics are generally taken from Spinoza: Complete Works, tr. Samuel Shirley, ed. Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2002). Passages are cited by part and proposition.

[ii] In The Rise of Modern Philosophy, ed. Tom Sorell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 289-316.

[iii] For a more detailed interpretation of Spinoza as tolerant of human passivity, see my Spinoza on Human Freedom: Reason, Autonomy and the Good Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

[iv] I provide a fuller defense of this third claim in “Spinoza’s Virtuous Passions,” Review of Metaphysics 61 (4): 2008, 759-83.

[v] See Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 502

On English melancholy

Posted on September 2, 2012 by

An academic got in touch with me last week, inviting me to a seminar on Stoicism, which was nice of him. On the seminar programme, he described me as ‘an author of books on happiness’. Alas I’ve only written one book (one that was published anyway), and it’s strange to have it described as ‘on happiness’. My friends, when they’re introducing me, also often say something like ‘he writes about well-being’, or ‘he writes about happiness’. And at the philosophy festival, How The Light Gets In, I was actually described as a ‘happiness guru’, which sounds pretty horrific – I think if I ever encountered a ‘happiness guru’ I would shoot them on sight, then mount their head on my living room wall.

I suppose I did have a blog called The Politics of Well-Being, and I do run something at Queen Mary called The Well-Being Project, and I have written quite a lot about the fad for measuring happiness (though usually from a sceptical point of view). It’s strange, anyway, to be thought of as a writer on happiness, as I’d say I naturally have quite a melancholic disposition – and I’m OK with that, and feel no need to try and dispel the occasional mists of melancholy so the sun shines unremittingly.

I believe there is a fine English tradition of melancholy. You see it particularly in English music – many of our greatest pop musicians are deeply melancholic. Think of Damon Albarn, who has described himself as ‘an English melancholic’, and songs of his like The Universal or End of the Century (or the wonderful album title ‘Modern Life is Rubbish’). Albarn even wrote a song called Melancholy Hill (Oasis, by contrast, don’t seem a melancholic band at all).

Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker also has a wonderful melancholy streak in him, so does Pulp guitarist and mournful crooner Richard Hawley, so does Badly Drawn Boy. Further back, Morrissey discovered a rich vein of poetry in English melancholy – and also discovered the humour in it, the reveling in the downbeat (‘I was looking for a job and then I found a job, and heaven knows I’m miserable now’). Paul Weller, Elvis Costello, even Sting all tap into that melancholy vein. Pink Floyd had it in spades – particularly the song Time, which, if you think about it, is an incredibly downbeat song for a rock band at the height of their popularity:

Every year is getting shorter
Never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught
Or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation
Is the English way
The time is gone
The song is over
Thought I’d something more to say

Alison Goldfrapp, mistress of melancholy

The uber-melancholist of the 1960s would have to be Ray Davies of the Kinks – I wonder if English melancholy in pop was in some ways a rebellion against US culture? The Beatles could tap into it too, particularly John Lennon, though Paul McCartney’s For No One is sublimely melancholic, as is Eleanor Rigby of course. The Stones seem much less in tune with that mood. Nick Drake is a perfect embodiment of the melancholic bard.

And then there are all those melancholic minstrelettes: Amy Winehouse, Adele, Alison Goldfrapp, Laura Marling – compare them to, say, Rihanna, Avril Lavigne, Lady Gaga, or Katy Perry. Their American counterparts don’t do melancholic. American female singers used to be able to do melancholic – think of Carole King or the Carpenters – but seem to have lost the capacity some time around the Reagan era. Lana Del Rey tries but comes across as mawkish. OK, some contemporary American female singers are masters of melancholy, like Cat Power. But they tend to be at the margin of American pop. In British pop, they’re front-and-centre.

'Always Dowland, always miserable'

English song-writers have themselves traced this melancholic vein in English pop back to the Elizabethan era. Damon Albarn, for example, looks back to Dr John Dee, and the link between Saturnian melancholy and creative power. Sting has performed a concert of the songs of John Dowland, the famous melancholic bard of the Elizabethan era, whose motto was ‘Semper Dowland, semper dolens’, or ‘always Dowland, always miserable’.

Why does this strain exist in our culture and temperament? It could be connected to the weather, to the seasons, and particularly to this time of year, when summer changes into autumn (‘it is November when the English begin to hang themselves’ was apparently a common saying on the continent in the 18th century). Robert Hooke, one of the founders of the Royal Society, believed he could plot his melancholy by tracking it against weather patterns.

But there are melancholy strains in other cultures too – think of German Romanticism and The Sorrows of Young Werther, the ennui of Baudelaire, the Jewish tradition of kvetching, the strain of Japanese melancholy found in the novels of Haruki Murakami, the Russian melancholy of Chekhov and Lermontov, or the blues of African-American music.

Anton Chekhov: 'A fine day to hang oneself'.

Really, then, melancholy is a sort of patchwork global construction, and English melancholy has certainly drawn on these other national variations (English pop drew heavily on American rhythm and blues, English comedy has drawn on Jewish kvetching, and English literature has drawn on Russian and German melancholics like Chekhov and WG Sebald).

Nietzsche may have famously declared that ‘humanity does not strive for happiness, only the English do that’, but I’d suggest English melancholy is much older and more prevalent than the Benthamite cult of happiness to which Nietzsche was referring. And I like the melancholy strain in our national character. I like the poetry it has led to, the humour, the mysticism. I like the scepticism of melancholia – the wise sense of human limits, human fallibility. The melancholy awareness of death and impermanence make life more beautiful, more poignant. I don’t think we should try and drive it out of our national psyche, like St Patrick driving out the snakes from Ireland.

At the same time, of course, you can indulge in too much melancholy and it turns into the sort of crippling depression that hit Coleridge, for example, and disabled his creative powers. Melancholy’s a bit like drugs – a little bit of it appears to be good for creativity but indulge too much and you incapacitate yourself (or even kill yourself). I think one can celebrate English melancholy, and also celebrate therapy. I don’t see Cognitive Behavioural Therapy as some sort of American invasion, some attempt to transform our national psyche and turn it into one big smiley face. After all, CBT came from Stoicism which is, let’s face it, a fairly melancholic philosophy. That’s probably why melancholy English thinkers like Matthew Arnold are so fond of it.

CBT prevents the mists of melancholy from turning into the storm-clouds of violent depression, when our negative beliefs turn into prisons, and (in the words of Thomas Gray in 1742), our mind “believes, nay, is sure of everything that is unlikely, so it be but frightful; and on the other hand excludes and shuts its eyes to the most possible hopes, and everything that is pleasurable; from this the Lord deliver us!” Amen to that.

Anyway, here is a Spotify playlist I have made of English melancholy pop. What have I missed out?