Self and Emotional Life

by Adrian Johnston

  Either it is possible to show that wonder bears in itself the possibility of resisting its own deconstruction, that is, the possibility of transgressing the realm of sheer autoaffection, or we have to admit, on the contrary, that the only effective deconstruction of the relationship between wonder and autoaffection comes from the possibility that wonder may be destroyed, that the capacity to wonder may be definitely impaired. The only effective deconstruction of subjectivity requires in this case a theoretical elaboration of what the loss of affects is: the subject’s total disconnection from her affects. The second term of this alternative is envisaged today only by neurobiologists, never by philosophers or psychoanalysts.

  Again, whatever Derrida may write against Descartes’s theory of passions, aiming at deconstructing mainly the Cartesian conception of the couple formed by wonder and generosity in the Treatise, a certain notion of wonder is still and always implied in and by deconstruction. For Derrida, there is no deconstruction of wonder without wonder. Heteroaffection is still an affect. The possibility of losing the very ability for the individual to feel or get affected by something or someone is never envisaged.

  One of the major points of discussion between philosophy, psychoanalysis, and neurobiology concerns not only the possibility of heteroaffection, but the possibility of a hetero-heteroaffection (if we may speak thus), that is, an affection of the affects themselves that causes their ruin or their disappearance. A heteroaffected subject is still an affected subject. A hetero-heteroaffected subject is “disaffected.” Most of the time, the impairment of emotional processes produces an indifference that coincides purely and simply with a disability to wonder. Damasio states that the loss of wonder is the emotional and libidinal disease of our time. After brain damage, the emotional brain is traumatized, and in very serious cases the subject loses any interest in life in general. Surprise, interest in novelty, amazement, astonishment just disappear. Detachment, “cold blood,” unconcern determine the patient’s behavior. About a patient of his named Eliott, Damasio writes: “He was cool, detached, unperturbed even by potentially embarrassing discussion of personal events. He reminded me somewhat of Addison de Witt, the character played by George Sanders in All About Eve.”16 The brain, more than the Freudian psyche, might be seen as the biological intruder that challenges not only autoaffection, but also heteroaffection in its philosophical sense.

  What happens to wonder in a neurobiological age? Who is this new subject, stranger to surprise, amazement, and admiratio? The analyses to follow here do not constitute a demonstration properly speaking. It’s rather about giving to the reader some reference points in suggesting a certain number of important texts, in crossing these texts and making them respond to each other. The aim is to create a network of references and discussions that permits, from the noncognitivist and nonreductionist point of view of Continental philosophy, comprehending the stakes of the redefinition of psychical life and the emotions undertaken by the neurosciences today.

  1.

  WHAT DOES “OF” MEAN IN DESCARTES’S EXPRESSION, “THE PASSIONS OF THE SOUL”?

  The distinction drawn by Descartes between “passions in the soul” and “passions of the soul” indicates the ambiguity of The Passions of The Soul. If passions proper (affects that cannot be confused with the consequences, “in” and on the soul, of simple bodily movements and reactions) are passions rooted in the intimacy of the soul, does it mean that the structural definition of affect is the autoaffected structure? Or, are these passions that the soul “refers only to itself” the paradoxical name of a specific mode of being of the unity between the body and the soul, in which both are at one with each other’s alterity and difference?

  General Presentation of The Passions of the Soul

  Descartes’s treatise is divided into three main parts. The first part, which comprises the first fifty paragraphs, presents a general definition of the passions and a description of the union of the body and the soul in passionate behaviors. The second part is devoted to the distinction between the “primitive” and the “derived” passions.1 Descartes explains that all particular affects derive from the six primitive passions: wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness. Part 3, entitled “On Specific Passions,” consists in a description of these derived passions. In this third part, we find the famous definition and description of generosity (générosité). The analysis of wonder appears in the two last parts of the treatise.2 A strong, intimate link binds wonder to generosity and forms what we may call an ethical loop within the Treatise. A theory of affects or passions, for Descartes as for all classical philosophers, necessarily leads to the constitution of an ethics.

  Passions “in” the Soul Are Consequences of Bodily Movements

  The passions of the soul constitute a specific kind of affect, which Descartes defines only in paragraph 27 (“Definition of the Passions of the Soul”). The first part of the treatise is divided in three. First, from sections 1 to 27, Descartes characterizes passions in general; then, from sections 27 to 30, he analyses the passions of the soul proper; and then, from sections 30 to 51, he shows that the passions are the very locus of the union of the body and the soul. In the end of this last section, he asks in what way the soul is able to master its passions. Generosity appears at that point.

  Descartes distinguishes a general sense of the expression passions from a restricted sense. In its general sense, a passion must be understood as a passion in the soul: “We should recognize that what is a passion in the soul is usually an action in the body.”3 Passions “in” the soul are the effects of bodily actions. There are two essential kinds of bodily movements: the invisible movements that are internal to the body—circulation of the blood and agitation of the animal spirits—and the movements that provoke visible muscular actions: fear, anger, anxiety, and so on. The major agents of the first kind of movements are the heart and the brain (the locus of the small material particles called “animal spirits”). The two main paragraphs devoted to blood circulation are 7 and 9. Discussing Harvey, Descartes explains:

  All those not completely blinded by the authorities of the ancients, and willing to open their eyes to examine the opinion of Harvey regarding the circulation of the blood, do not doubt that the veins and arteries of the body are like streams through which the blood flows constantly and with great rapidity. It makes its way from the right-hand cavity of the heart to the arterial vein, whose branches are spread out through the lungs and connected with those of the venous artery; and via this artery it passes from the lungs into the left-hand side of the heart. From there it goes to the great artery, whose branches are spread out to the rest of the body and connected with the branches of the vena cava, which carries the same blood once again into the right-hand cavity of the heart. These two cavities are thus like sluices through which all the blood passes upon each complete circuit it makes through the body.4

  In section 10, Descartes completes this description in presenting the movement of the animal spirits:

  The finest parts of the blood, which have been rarefied by the heat in the heart, constantly enter the cavity of the brain in a large number. What makes them go there rather than elsewhere is that all the blood leaving the heart through the great artery flows a direct route towards this place, and since not all this blood can enter there because the passages are too narrow, only the most active and finest parts pass into it while the rest spread out into the other regions of the body. Now these very fine parts make up the animal spirits.… What I am calling “spirits” here are merely bodies: they have no property other than that of being extremely small bodies which move very quickly, like the jets of flame that come from a torch.5

  These inner bodily movements, based on the fundamental movement of the blood and activated by the heart-brain loop, are structurally linked to the way in which “external objects act upon the sense organs.”6 The relationship between inner and external affections cause perceptions in the soul. Perceptions are the first kind of passion in t
he soul. They are representations of external objects.

  The second kind of bodily movements consists of muscular movements. Animal spirits enter the brain and help it to move the nerves, which in their turn move the muscles, as Descartes explains in the second part of section 7: “Finally, it is known that all these movements of the muscles, and likewise all sensations, depend on the nerves, which are like little threads or tubes coming from the brain and containing, like the brain itself, a certain very fine air or wind which is called the ‘animal spirits.’”7 The muscular movements also produce passions in the soul. Descartes gives the example of fear. After positing the existence of the pineal gland, he declares: “Moreover, just as the course which the spirits take to the nerves of the heart suffice to induce a movement in the gland through which fear enters the soul, so too the mere fact that some spirits at the same time proceed to the nerves which serve to move the legs in flight causes another movement in the gland through which the soul feels and perceives this action. In this way then, the body may be moved to take flight by the mere disposition of the organs, without any contribution from the soul.”8 We are then to understand, after this first moment, that passions “in” the soul designate the different modalities of the soul’s passivity. The soul is passive when it is affected, on the one hand, by perceptions (the soul represents the external objects) and, on the other, by motor actions (the soul feels these actions). In both cases, this passivity is caused by the body’s activity, to which the soul reacts.

  Again, this passivity does not characterize passions proper, that is, passions “of” the soul. We still do not know for the moment what they are. In order to articulate them, Descartes first presents the “functions of the soul” (in section 17): “These are of two principal kinds, some being the actions of the soul and others its passions.”9 Analyzing the two categories of activity and passivity is of capital importance, to the extent that, as we will see, passions “of” the soul are somewhere in between activity and passivity. The actions of the soul are “our volitions, for we experience them as proceeding directly from our soul and as seeming to depend on it alone.”10 Some of our perceptions may also be considered to be actions of the soul: “those having the perceptions of our volitions and all of the imaginings or other thoughts which depend on them.”11 Even if these perceptions may be understood as passions, like all perceptions, “we do not normally call [them] ‘passions,’ but solely … ‘actions’” to the extent that they are “one and the same thing as the volition” or the imagining. There is then a kind of active passivity (that of cognition and volition in general) distinct from the affective passivity caused by bodily movements.

  Descartes posits the necessity of bringing to light a third kind of perception: a perception that differs from those caused by the effect of external objects on the senses as well as those that are in reality actions of the soul. This third kind corresponds to the “passions of the soul” proper. The restricted sense of the word passions appears in section 25: “we usually restrict the term to signify only perceptions which refer to the soul itself. And it is only the latter that I have undertaken to explain here under the title ‘passions of the soul.’”12 Then comes the specific definition: “We may define them generally as those perceptions, sensations or emotions of the soul which we refer particularly to it, and which are caused, maintained and strengthened by some movements of the spirits.”13

  Passions of the Soul Are Related to the Soul Alone

  These passions may be called “perceptions,” but they differ both from volitions and cognitive acts (i.e., from the actions of the soul) and from sensations (i.e., from passions in the soul caused by bodily movements). The passions of the soul are effectively related to the body: they are caused by some movements of the spirits, but they are not caused by the body; they designate a certain kind of disturbance that appears to characterize psychical affects as such. These affects are said to “agitate and disturb [the soul] strongly.”14 They are emotions of the soul.15

  These emotions are provoked by the union of the body and the soul itself, as if the soul could then feel itself as united to the body. That is why these passions “move and dispose the soul to want the things for which they prepare the body.”16 This feeling of psychosomatic unity is made possible thanks to the intermediary of the pineal gland, which is the material locus of the union. Descartes states: “There is a little gland in the brain where the soul exercises its functions more particularly than in the other parts of the body.” This gland is the “principal seat of the soul.”17 According to the definition of the gland, we clearly see that the seat of passions is not the heart, but the brain. We must then admit that the soul has its own body, the pineal gland, which is located in the brain. And, the passions of the soul are provoked by this particular soul’s body.

  The discussions in Descartes about the metaphysical as well as ethical dimension of the passions focus, as we will see, on the status of this peculiar “body.” The brain appears to be the soul’s bodily existence. At the same time, such a body may be regarded as paradoxically dis-incarnated and abstract. Is the brain in Descartes the mirror of the soul, another figure of itself, its alter ego in autoaffection? Or is it a genuine other, the presence of alterity in sameness, the bodily breach within the subject’s self-determination?

  From Wonder to Generosity

  These questions form the heart of the inquiry on wonder, the most fundamental of all six primitive passions. Let’s recall its definition in section 52: “When the first encounter with some object surprises us, and we judge it to be new, or very different from what we knew in the past or what we supposed it was going to be, this makes us wonder and be astonished at it. And since this can happen before we know in the least whether this object is suitable to us or not, it seems to me that wonder is the first of all the passions. It has no opposite, because if the object presented has nothing in it that surprises us, we are not in the least moved by it and regard it without passion.” Wonder is the only passion that involves no evaluation of its object. It merely presents the object as something novel or unusual. A particular object seems so worthy of attention that we marvel at it, without making any judgment about whether it is good or evil. As such, wonder produces no change in the heart or the blood, which would prepare the body for movement. It affects only the brain, rather than the heart and the blood, but it does involve the movements of the animal spirits into the muscles, thereby fixing an “impression” of the object in the brain. And, that explains the function of wonder: to “learn and retain in our memory things of which we were previously ignorant.” It is our response to the features of the world that are worthy of our consideration, something useful both for the preservation of the mind-body union and for the soul itself in its pursuit of knowledge.18

  Wonder is prior to judgment and will. Because it is nonjudgmental, wonder makes no hierarchy regarding what it wonders at. It is pure openness to the extraordinary. But, what is the extraordinary? On the one hand, the extraordinary seems to be alterity as such, everything that is not the soul and interrupts its self-identity. People who are indifferent to wonder and surprise are in that sense locked in themselves, unable for this reason to perceive the uncanniness of the world. This is why they are said to be unable to become philosophers. On the other hand, if wonder is the passion of alterity, why does it restrict bodily movements to their minimum? Why is wonder motionless? Why doesn’t it give way to tears, cries of joy, different manifestations of pleasure? Wonder is a silent and striking passion that imposes stillness on the body, as if the novelty and strangeness of objects and of the world in general is reflecting the beauty and extraordinary presence of the soul, its mirroring and reflection in the brain. It defines the philosophical disposition as a passion raised by the sameness between spirit and the world.

  This ambiguous function of wonder is pursued and underscored in Descartes’s study of generosity. Generosity produces a kind of self-directed wonder, or esteem, grounded in our recognition
“that nothing really belongs to us other than the free disposition of our volitions,” along with sensing “in ourselves at the same time a firm and constant resolution to use them well.” Generous people are those who “are entirely masters of their passions” and limit them to the contemplation of our potentialities.19 Generosity is esteem for ourselves, an appropriate judgment about our worth that should be developed as a habit. It has the following features: (1) knowing that nothing is really ours except the freedom to control our willing, and that we should only be praised and blamed for using that freedom well or badly; and (2) feeling within ourselves a strong constant resolution to use our free will well, to always have the will to carry out what we think is the best course of action.20 This is what it would be to pursue virtue in a perfect manner; what we esteem in ourselves is a virtuous will. Generosity is then a way of overcoming the disruptions of the passions, giving us control over them.

  At the same time, people of generosity are “easily convinced” that others also have the same capacity to exercise free will for good or evil ends. Therefore, if we have generosity, we will not prefer ourselves to others.21 We find the ambiguity already mentioned again. Although generosity is a perception directed at the self, combining a knowledge of what is truly important in and for ourselves with the will to act on the basis of that knowledge, it generates esteem for others: generous people do good without self-interest; are courteous, gracious, and obliging; and live free from contempt, jealousy, envy, hatred, fear, and anger. Generosity is a species of wonder combined with love, which involves having proper pride or rightful self-regard.22 This self-esteem is thought by Descartes to make it possible to have the right kind of regard for others: if we value ourselves appropriately, then we will respond to others appropriately.23 We can understand the esteem Descartes refers to as a basic form of respect. In generosity, we recognize the worth of others, so that respect, veneration, and magnanimity follow wonder. Furthermore, generosity strengthens a healthier form of regard for others and prevents hatred, because we regard them as equally capable of a virtuous will.24 The vices that the virtue of generosity can be contrasted with are pride and vicious humility. Descartes is optimistic that everyone can attain the virtuous will, no matter how weak they are, though ignorance is the greatest obstacle. Generous or noble-minded people find it important to do good for others and disdain their own interests: “They are always perfectly courteous, affable, and of service to everyone” and “entirely masters of their Passions.”25 If we have generosity, we respect people appropriately and have no remorse, because we know that we have done our best. At one point Descartes notes that he prefers the term generosity to the term magnanimity because “the Schools” do not understand this virtue.26 Moreover, we have little cowardice or fear: we are self-assured because of our confidence in our own virtue.27 This explains why generosity is the key to the virtuous life.