Longitudes: A Collection of Essays, Ideas and Writing in Progress

In terms of the study of emotions, Antonio Damasio describes the 20th century as “the century of neglect.” If the research of emotion is said to begin with Aristotle, then by the end of 19th century we have a body of work that includes the writings of Pascal, Spinoza, Darwin, Freud, Sartre and William James among many others. But all of this success in the study of emotions was cut short in the 20th century when the study of emotion was given increasingly short shrift by scientists and thinkers who embraced a philosophically outdated Cartesian model of the mind in order to support the computational theories of intelligence made so popular by the “cognitive revolution” of the 1950’s. Today, the computational model of the mind advocated by the strong AI theory and Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar, has been upset—-philosophically by Searle, Merleau-Ponty and Dreyfus; in mathematics and physics by Penrose; and in the field of neuroscience by Damasio. Remarkable advances in brain study have provided us with a very different perspective––an emotional revolution, claims Damasio––which positions emotion as the very basis of reason. As the first mechanism of rational processes, it seems that emotion is a primal and practical necessity.

It is becoming clear that there are a whole host of medical ills that can be illuminated by emotional studies. Indeed, understanding how the emotional system works is crucial for the effective treatment stroke and mood disorders. Emotional studies have important applications in the social space as well; for while it is clear that what goes on in a culture economically, politically, and legally involves decisions that emerge out of rational processes, it seems that these rational processes evolve out of, and work alongside, emotional processes that have their origin in the survival of the organism; it appears that the way we produce moral behaviour is very closely tied to the emotional system in an evolutionary sense. Clearly, emotion has an immense role to play in our decisions as individuals and as a society; but how are we to understand this relationship between emotion and reason? What is an emotion? What is a feeling? And why is reason so dependent on both of them?

Damasio redefines the concept of emotion by amplifying its description into three categories:

1. Basic emotions––fear, anger happiness, as studied by Darwin and others––appear to be universal; even without the same names they are represented by the same behaviour in different cultures and even across certain species.
2. Background emotions, which are the most prevalent emotions we have. We are always in an emotional state, ie.discouragement or enthusiasm. Consciousness is always an emotive state.
3. Secondary or social emotions include compassion, shame, contempt, pride, and jealousy. These are entirely tied to social concerns, to those with whom and towards whom we act, others.

Secondary or social emotions were initially thought of as purely cultural constructions, but this has been shown to be not quite the case. While culture and education––the social environment as a whole––clearly plays an enormous role in directing the specifics of how emotions are applied, animal research has shown that a number of these emotions are present in primates who have been observed behaving compassionately, even towards other animals of other species. It seems as though these secondary emotions permeate our genetics and are as much a part of our biological make up as the primary emotions are.

Using William James as starting point, Damasio outlines the distinction and relationship between feeling and emotion–James’ inversion of the traditional view of the physiology of the emotion/feeling cycle has been been borne out by later research. James writes:

Our natural way of thinking about these standard emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion.

By interposing the body between the causative stimulus and the emotive mindstate, James shows the inseparability of mind and body; he also shows that body is represented in the brain, either directly or indirectly, and that the brain can map the body. However, James leaves out the possibility of an appraisal of the the stimulus itself. Although there is often no stimulus appraisal––fear may cause a direct body state––it does happen, especially when we are confronted with more complex situations. According to Damsio, James conflated emotion and feeling: on one hand James gives the impression that emotion is a variety of reactive behaviours; but then, on the other hand, he says that the perception that we get from the reaction is the emotion. This was shown to be an inconsistent view by the physiologists in the early 20th century.

In Damasio’s terms, emotion and feeling can be understood separately. Feelings involve cognition and are composite perceptions of:

1. partcular states of the body that are real or simulted
2. states of altered cognitive resouces
3. the deployment of certain scripts (descriptions) which can be really in the body or generated in the brain––ie. a desctiption of happiness
4. different states of cognitve ability in different body states––ie. time perception, learning attentiveness etc.
And all of this is connected to a causative state which is intentionality––how we feel ‘about’ or ‘towards’ something.

And human emotions are understood as:

1. largely unlearned programs of automatic actions and cognitive strategies aimed at the management of life. Largely but not 100% automatic––we can have some measure of control over them.
2. programs aimed at the management of life; one cannot do without emotions; they play an evolutionary role for the self and/or for the group
3. triggered by objects or situations that act on the mind, whether they are real or in the mind as a recollection; defects in particular aspects of emotion can be traced to lesions in certain parts of the brain.

In Damasio’s view, emotion involves an appraisal of stimulus, a triggering of emotion, and an execution of emotion and/or emotional states. Feeling involves an emotional trigger which stimulates brain structures to initiate a set of internal chemical changes which create changes to the viscera in the central nervous system. Thus, the experience of an emotion and the feeling associated with it involves a variety of changes in cognitive resources. Emotions change how we recall past experiences and perceive time; and they alter the relationship between our bodies and the world––even way in which we reason changes profoundly with emotive states. In brief, emotions and feelings change the way in which we attend to the world.

This relationship between emotion and feeling developed out of complex mechanisms of reaction built out of many other processes that were tied to survival: reward and punishment, scaling of internal needs, pain and pleasure. And it is certain that early creatures relied on such mechanisms long before emotions appeared as we understand them. In terms of survival, emotions and their components can be understood as exercising homeostatic or bodily regulating goals–they have everything to do with how an organism manages it’s life cycle. In our life cycle there is a mandate in our genome which drives us to persist and prevail––the emotional system is the latest expression in this blind desire to stay alive. As Damasio points out, the multitudes of cells in the body have a drive to persist, prevail and stay alive; to homeostaically manage the process of energy acquisition and transformation. This is the genesis of emotions and the birth of feeling: pleasure and pain.

It seems that there really is no separating mind, brain and body. The mind exists because there is a body; the body is the context for the mind/brain. The mind’s principle task is to examine and manage the internal economy of the organism. Feelings are always tied to the body, directly or indirectly; information about the body is so selective that it goes into specialised channels in the brain. Indeed, the brain creates chemical markers that have to do with specific bodily states. These markers allow the brain to carry out somatic perception which is key in the appraisal of stimulus (decision making) and the ability of emotional response to vary with context. Somatic-marker associations are reinstated, or recalled, physiologically and bias cognitive processing. In cases where complex and uncertain decisions need to be made, the somatic markers recall all reward and punishment experiences associated with the relevant stimuli, which are then summed to produce a net somatic state––that gut feeling. This overall state is used to direct (or bias) the selection of the appropriate action. Utilising the somatosensory cortex, the brain can even run internal simulations of responses or transformations in bodily states as representations in the mind. This is what Damsio terms the “as if ” body loop: it is as if the body was actually sensing or undergoing this or that experience recreated internally. This allows us not only to predict possible bodily or emotive states for ourselves but also to project them onto others. This clearly has relevance with regards to the secondary emotions outlined above as well as to predictive mental behaviour that rationalise potential outcomes.

According to Damasio, emotions are action programs which preceed feelings (which are the perception of these programs.) Emotions operate in multistage cycles and cannot be understood as being about or in one area of the brain that is a centre for this or that. They are modified by context––socialisation plays an important role––and reflect the ongoing management of life inside the organism; feelings give us a window into this internal life. Internal needs cannot be repressed. In the case of food, for example, the body declares a state of hunger because it wants to reach homeostasis and therefore lets this situation come into consciousness so that the mind can decide on appropriate action.

Cognitively speaking, we have multiple routes open to us. We have a fast route of decision making, which is biologically entrenched, and governed by powerful emotional, intuitive or “gut” responses to a given object or situation; and we have reason, traditionally understood as a slow methodical “cost-benefit” analysis. But these routes are not necessarily opposed to each other. In a healthy individual they work together in order to expedite the decision making process. Emotions also allow us to make decisions with out consciously confronting every option available to us; they allows us to freely and purposefully rationalise by removing or highlighting certain key options. Indeed, emotion seems to be the seat of practical reason itself; or, at the very least, it is the means by which it can function effectively. As some of Damasio’s patient studies have shown, damage to certain parts of the brain that are associated with emotion can have drastic effects in the realm of reasoning, both in terms of practical decision making and socialisation. And there have been those that, due to a break down in the somatic apparatus, have lost the ability to feel emotions while they can still intellectually understand their significance.

Emotion also plays a role in social processes that lead to social homeostasis. Most of our social engagements involve, to some degree at least, the projections into the social space of our biological needs. But the effectiveness and health of this social homeostasis would necessarily reflect the state of the culture itself and its emotional health and intelligence. It seems impossible, however, that a definitive account of this could be provided here. In the end it seems that everything we say about emotion needs to be put into context …

DAMASIO LECTURE: “Emotion, Feeling, and Social Behavior: The Brain Perspective”

DAMASIO LECTURE: MEDICINE TO SOCIETY I & II

Hubert Dreyfus on Merleau-Ponty, Computers and the mind:

PART II

For many critics James’ model of the emotions falls short as it does not explicitly demonstrate the role of emotion in higher cognition. Indeed, Sartre’s Esquisse d’une Theorie des Emotions attacks James’ conception of emotions as being too concerned with physiology. For Sartre, emotions are––whether we are willing to admit it or not––our own actions; they are ways in which we make prereflexive choices about how we deal with the world; they are acts which allow us to escape from the world or transform it according to our desires: spite, resentment, love, fear, joy and sorrow are kinds of “magical transformations of the world.”

Sartre was profoundly influenced by Hiedegger, and by Husserl, who influenced them both. For Heidegger, Husserl’s philosophy was incomplete because it did not take into account the historical being for whom such questions about existence and consciousness make philosophy possible in the first place. Heidegger views experience as necessarily situated in a world and in ways of being—Dasein is the being that cares about Being. Heidegger argues that Dasein, finding itself thrown into the world amidst things and with others, is thrown into its own possibilities, including the possibility and inevitability of its own mortality. The need for Dasein to assume these possibilities––the need for it to be responsible for its own existence––is the basis of Heidegger’s notion of authenticity.

Heidegger created the term “thrownness”––which is also used by Sartre––to describe the idea that human beings (Dasein) are “thrown” into existence without having chosen it. Existentialists consider being thrown into existence as prior to any other thoughts or ideas that humans have or definitions of themselves that they create (there are of course great differences here between Atheist and Christian points of view). In Kierkegaard’s words:

How did I get into the world? Why was I not asked about it and why was I not informed of the rules and regulations but just thrust into the ranks as if I had been bought by a peddling shanghaier of human beings? How did I get involved in this big enterprise called actuality? Why should I be involved? Isn’t it a matter of choice? And if I am compelled to be involved, where is the manager—I have something to say about this. Is there no manager? To whom shall I make my complaint?

Heidegger’s conception of authenticity, simply stated, revolves around the individual’s “throwness” into the world and the integrity and honesty with which the individual creates his own authentic subjectivity, only to reintegrate it back into the world. Sartre systematises Heidegger in his own way by positing that for humans, existence preceeds essence: thrown into the world, man makes himself because man asks ontological questions (Being for itself). Objects do not engage in ontological questioning, thus for objects essence preceeds existence (Being in-itself). But also Sartre believed that humans can also engage in Being for Others: A person who cannot embrace their freedom to confront existential absurdity and define their life seeks, in effect, to be “looked at”—to be made an object of another’s subjectivity. This creates a clash of freedoms whereby person A’s being or sense of identity is controlled by––in the mind of A at least––person B’s thoughts about A.

Like Heidegger, Sartre leans towards the view that consciousness and the world are a unified phenomenon and that there is no separating them; that even in attempting to ‘bracket’ conscious phenomena out of common notions of reality we cannot neglect the innate unity of what we have separated. However, Sartre also continues the tradition of the Cartesian dichotomy between the consciousness and the world. Creating what often seems to be an infuriating paradox, on one hand Sartre embraces Heidegger’s Dasein, on the other he extends the Cartesian/Husserlian distinction between Mind––or perhaps more acurately in Sartre’s case, the freedom of the will––and World. Despite the virtuosic and often confusing double talk Sartre employs to deal with this apparent contradiction, he is always clear about the ultimate point of his thought which rests firmly in his concepts freedom and responsibility. For Sartre consciousness is freedom and responsibility is the idea that we are the sole authors of our actions; we must accept the consequences of our actions—there are no excuses. In order to understand the apparent incoherence in Sartre’s position we must realise that he has no wish to justify his philosophy in terms of scientific or logical truths. For Sartre the only truth is action in “good faith.” Sartre is, above all else, concerned with individual and political honesty; the individual and the individual alone creates his own essence:

“If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be.”

Existentialist phenomenology, as put forward by Sartre, critiques and extends the Husserlian method by taking the position that a phenomenological examination of consciousness must take the world into account in terms of action, not simply passive intention. Like Husserl, Sartre’s concept of consciousness requires intentionality–-it is always about the things of the world. And again, like Husserl, Sartre is concerned with making the distinction between the phenomenal experience in the conscious mind and the immediate experiencing of material objects of the world. But, for Existential phenomenology, abstract consciousness is not a passive Husserlian realm like the transcendental ego, rather it is an active, dynamic engagement with or towards the things of the world. Thus Sartre views emotion as imposing itself on the world, transforming it according to a subjective scheme that works in accordance with the modified notions of being and authenticity that he took from Heidegger.

By postulating being as nothingness Sartre tries to separate it from the realm of worldly causality. In order to protect his conception of freedom, it is crucial for Sartre maintain consciousness as independent from the causal relations of the word, as distinct from the deterministic laws of physics. Introducing his own version of epoché, Sartre takes the position that, as we see ourselves as something distinct from the causal categories we impose on matter, we are obliged to make the distinction between the objective or scientific view, and the perspective of active, subjective, first person engagement. Therefore, from the point of view of Existentialist phenomenology, consciousness itself can be in no way considered as an object of itself––hence the break with Husserl––and, more importantly, it cannot be understood as being caused. For Sartre, consciousness is freedom itself.

Sartre’s conception of freedom allows him to hold the position that all action is chosen, and that the emotions are the pre-reflective choices which inform and permit action. Sartre removes causality from emotions, and––perhaps in an attempt to find a middle ground between physical determinism and the freedom of consciousness––describes them as “the terms by which” we make the choices that we do. An obvious argument emerges at this point: if emotions set the terms by which by which we make conscious choices, does that not imply––at least indirectly––causality? Sartre responds that emotions are not causes of behaviour but rather that they are “spontaneous out pourings of consciousness in which one takes the world in a certain way.” For Sartre, emotions are a way of structuring consciousness and he rejects any form of determinism with regards to the acts of the mind––the Freudian sub-conscious is impossible in Sartrian psychoanalysis; and the idea that emotions are fundamentally naturally selected responses to natural stimuli is rejected.

Sartre’s reading of James seems to reduce to James’ concept of emotions to naturally determined physiological responses that inform psychological states; and he criticises James for not giving enough weight to the free mental evaluations that cause emotions. Indeed, James’ essay on the emotions, taken alone, seems to describe only the essential mechanism of emotion and feeling; and while this explains ‘primal’ or early emotional responses that are completely concerned with survival, it does not explain emotional responses which are born out of more complicated mental processes. From this perspective James’ conception of emotion seems reductive and omissive when it fails to provide an alternative to the bodily means by which emotion can be generated in the organism and when it does not take the influence emotion on cognition and behaviour into account.

However, James’ views on emotions very complicated when viewed in the larger context of his work. James’ Principles of Psychology describes the relation of subjective consciousness in relation to the world and society and offers extensive examinations of how the phenomena of experience, including emotions, are interpreted by the individual and evolve with experience; The Will to Believe offers a view of the function of metaphysical mental states and their necessity in the creation of belief, which is in James’ view, of practical necessity to understanding the phenomena of experience spiritually. Emotion is seemingly always present, albeit sometimes tacitly, in the work of James. A broader reading of James indicates that, although emotions and feelings may be phylogenetic in origin and fundamentally physiological in nature, they are experienced, and enter the stream of consciousness where they are interpreted with regards to the highest interests of the individual. As James makes clear, experience is an unbroken stream that unifies the world, the body and the mind; it willfully looks backwards and projects forward in time and thereby constructs meaning, belief and truth out of existence.

Indeed, James’ view would seem to imply the following: the environmental context and physical manifestations of emotions, as they come to be represented as phenomena of experience, develop into mental states which are themselves recalled and reinterpreted; now not only with regards to the demands of the environment and the primal needs of the organism, but also in relation to each other. This creates the internal psychological states that create ideas of right and wrong, good and evil, personal belief and normative social values, and, indeed, subjectivity––the self in its various forms. Higher emotions––and this is not clearly stated by James––seem to emerge from conflicts between these mental states which may be only indirectly caused or influenced by events or stimuli considered external to the mind such as threats to the body and self, the extended self (ie. family, society, possessions etc), or belief and values. And, as Sartre also implies, these conflicts often seem imply choices which are driven pre-reflexively by the emotion that accompanies them. However, Sartre views any kind of implication of causal relations between biological/natural necessity and emotions as a negation of the soveringnty of the will; he rejects the existence of any kind of biological, psychological, historical or normative social determiner on the mind, asserting that this view ultimately leads to a deterioration of true conceptions of freedom and individual responsibility.

Sartre managed to instrumentally employ the structural and theoretical aspects of Husserl and Heidegger to critique the late 18th and early 19th century malaise and complacency brought on, in part, by Darwinian biological determinism, the historical determinism of Hegel, and later, the Psychological determinism of Freud. Sartre understood this condition to be a negation of human nature which is, above all, burdened with the responsibility of total freedom. Sarte’s “Existential Idealism” is born our his reaction to the action (and inaction) of his countrymen during the second world war; he accepts no excuses for collaboration with the Nazi’s, nor does he accept excuses for the absence of action against them. For Sartre freedom is transcendent; it cannot be repressed by science or logic and ultimately rests in the soverignty of the subjective will; emotions are the intentional assertions that the subjective will projects on to the world. But this unrelenting assertion that individual existence is the responsibility of freedom––which is rationalised by the seemingly unvalidated claim that consciousness is freedom precisely because it is not caused––raises problems.

The question that looms largest concerns meaning. Because Sartre’s conception of consciousness appears to move psychically in one direction––the emotions assert themselves pre-reflectively and intentionally towards the passive matter of the world, “magically transforming” it according to subjective choice, and thereby allowing the will to act––it is difficult to to know how or in what context the Sartrian notion of conscious freedom is to exert itself. Indeed, context would imply a causal influence, as a goal would imply a need or a desire. And what about ethics and cultural differences?

Whereas James describes consciousness as caused by an evolutionary process akin to natural selection that favours conscious traits in the survival of an organism—as a complex system of mind, body and world which informs and feeds back upon itself, thus creating understandings and beliefs out of the phenomena of experience which function in the highest interests of the organism—Sartre offers his concept of “bon foi”, which represents the universal spirit of existential responsibility. Where James’ pluralistic view gives play to individual, environmental, and social factors with regard to the interpretation and cause of emotion, Sartre’s philosophy seems to put all its faith in the subject…
TBC

What is an Emotion? William James (1884)

Jean Paul Sartre: The Emotions (fragment)

This is 1 out of 7 in a BBC series on Sartre

On James and Husserl:

In philosophical terms, the term phenomenology has had several interpretations, each of which has involved a study of the relationship between phenomena and consciousness via different methodologies and perspectives. Kant introduced the phenomenal view of experience, positing that the world cannot be understood in any way other than how we experience it––any understanding of world is necessarily phenomenal because all knowledge begins with experience which forms the fundamental intuitions of the mind. Hegel’s phenomenology continues and attempts to complete the work of Kant. Abandoning the hierarchichal notion of inner and outer experience, observer and object, Hegel views experience itself as being in the world as a phenomena of the Mind or Geist; for Hegel, it makes no sense to draw the distinction of things in themselves because in order for the phenomenon of experience to occur there can be no separation between the mind and the world; it is all ‘Spirit.’ As Merleau-Ponty points out, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Freud can all be seen, in one way or another, as early disciples of phenomenology. He writes:

[Phenomenology] is a transcendental philosophy that suspends affirmations of the natural attitude in order to understand them, but it is also a philosophy for which the world is always “already there”, before reflection, like an inalienable presence… it is the attempt at a direct description of our experience such as it is, and without regard to its psychological genesis, or to the causal explications that the savant, the historian, or the sociologist can furnish of it… it is in our selves that we will find the unity of phenomenology and its true sense.

Thus we can see a strong connection between phenomenology and existentialism; there is indeed a strong subjective position in phenomenology even as it strives to understand experience in terms which transcend psychological causes.

Edmund Husserl, the Moravian mathematician and logician, developed phenomenology into a highly influential discipline which began as a critical study of the psychological aspects of mathematical and logical truths. Husserl criticised logicians of his time for not focusing on the relations between subjective processes that lay at the root of pure logic; and offered a series of three strata on which logical thought could be understood. From a practical level of syntax and grammar, through a level of judgement which created laws to prevent contradiction and formal laws of possible truths, Husserl arrives at a ‘meta’ or ‘transcendental’ logic which frees the logician to work in the realm of universal logic wherein, theoretically at least, the psychological problems of formal categories (logic and mathematics) could be surpassed and all possible valid deductions could be potentially attained.

Extending his study to experience itself, Husserl’s Phenomenological method strives to understand the essential structures of experience by placing an emphasis on subjectivity and the examination of consciousness through the phenomena that appear to it. Husserl seeks out the structures that make experience possible by examining the relationship between the acts of our consciousness and the objects our consciousness, ultimately questioning how these acts and objects are made possible. Like Descartes, Husserl looks for a kind of certainty with regards to understanding consciousness; and, he does not believe that this certainty can be found solely in our immediate experience of the world. But where Descartes had to doubt the truth of all empirical observations until he could prove them solely on the basis of his subjectivity, Husserl views subjective consciousness as intentional with regards to the things of the world––it is always conscious of or about something. Thus, for Husserl, the things of our conscious experience begin with the things of the world––the Cartesian scepticism with regards to the world exterior to the self goes to far.

However, Husserl does want to attempt to examine the objects of experience as separate from any preconceived judgement of reality––he wants to discover them as conscious phenomena, not simply as entities existing in the world. He creates a distinction between phenomenology and ontology: we can see an object before us and understand it to be existing in reality; but we can also imagine the same object, dream of it or possibly hallucinate it. Simply taking an ontological account of how an object immediately appears to us does not describe the complete phenomenology of the possible ways in which we might experience an object in our minds. Using a technique he calls epoché, he ‘brackets’ reality out of experience; this allows him to go beyond the simple and immediate perception of objects and examine the essence of experience as a phenomena. Husserl came to understand experience as relying on a set of basic intuitions which are centred in what he calls the ‘transcendental ego.’ For Husserl, the transcendental ego and the intuitions make the various types of conscious experience possible and are fundamentally responsible for perception, mathematical truth, logic, and all the ways in which we engage meaningfully with the world.

Thus, the reality of the material world––and the objects that constitute it–– is not rejected by Husserl, but rather it is bracketed out in order to enable the clear identification of the structures of perception. The notion that conscious perception of phenomena is driven by properties that we see as emanating from objects themselves is rejected and replaced with the idea that perception is constituted by our intentionality directed towards objects. From the phenomenological standpoint, the object of perception is not understood simply as an external entity, nor is it seen as offering indications about what it is. It is a set aspects and attributes that imply one another under the overall idea or essence of a particular object. Thus we can see, dream, hallucinate and imagine an object, and each one of these functions is an experience of the attributes which constitute our general idea of that object. Later in his career Husserl uses this position to launch a critique of western science, challenging what he views as its dogmatic empirical and naturalistic orientation. He goes as far as to say that mental/spiritual functions exist in their own reality independent of any physical basis and that any science that cannot take this into account is not complete. While his conception of the transcendental ego and pure experience, as well as his discourse on intuitions, places Husserl in the tradition of German idealism epitomised by Hegel and Kant; and although his ‘bracketing’ of reality is clearly a development of Cartesian thought, there is also an element in Husserl’s phenomenology which resonates with work of the American psychologist and philosopher William James.

James recognises, as Husserl did, that the common notion of scientific empiricism was problematic; and while he is, in a sense, in line with the romantic critique of science, James does not wish to promote an antiscientific agenda; rather, he wants to ensure that science is realistic about its claims. James noticed that there was a very strong tendency for science to reduce the natural world into some thing artificial; and that there was a troubling connection between the kinds of claims science makes about a phenomenon and the way in which it is examined. James’ radical empiricism can be understood as concerning itself with an examination of the basis of knowledge, the nature of experience, and how the idea of ‘truth’ is to be properly understood in terms of verification, vindication, and belief. For James, experience cannot be laid out into a hierarchy and it is certainly under no obligation to justify itself to science and philosophy. But, while James takes the position that experience must be examined on its own terms, he rejects the idea that it can be properly understood when it is separated, bracketed, or otherwise removed from the visceral environment that spawns it.

Associationalist thought in its various guises––most famously in Aristotle and the classic empiricism of Locke, Hume, J.S. Mill––tends to take the position that understanding comes about by the continual association of unrelated and independent elemental entities. For James, the objects of the world are only known to the mind as phenomena, as experiences evolving in relation to each other with wilful and meaningful purpose. Thus he views the associationalist position as being mistaken when it claims that the fundamental feelings and observations of the world which construe understanding, the ego, and indeed consciousness itself are unaware of each other. James insists that for consciousness to occur at all there must be what calls a ‘supernumerary intelligence’, a wilful intelligent being, to bind these feelings and perceptions together. For James, the mind is a process of experience which creates the means by which anything can be understood to be existing at all––a non-subjective explanation involving association of constantly conjoined entities, analogies of ‘blank pages’ or ‘vessels’ being filled will not do. James’ “stream of consciousness” describes the ego as the subjective point of awareness that joins experience, permitting the ideas, emotions and feelings that went before to stand in conscious relation to those that are being experienced now and those that we might expect to experience in the future. For James, this explains the continuity of consciousness that is lacking in the associationalist model, but which is clearly a fundamental aspect of experience.

James’ radical empiricism seems to allow for subjectivity in a way that is consistent with experience; and, like Husserl, James understands consciousness as requiring selectivity and intentionality on the part of the individual. But where the exact nature of Husserl’s view on intentionality and its meaning for the human organism is the subject of ongoing debate, James is clear and, above all, pragmatic. The individual becomes conscious of phenomena which are of “highest interest” for him or her to pick out from the immense wash of background stimuli. These highest interests become the intentional focus of subjective consciousness; they give meaning to the objects of experience whose attributes move in relation to each other and traverse the realms of experience––from simple observation, to dreams and hallucinations. Thus the individual or the ego is the result, and in a sense the creator or perpetuator of, a conscious process in which selectivity and intentionality are of fundamental importance to survival. Survival depends on consciousness, not only in a practical sense of identifying and interpreting phenomena, but also in the abstract conditions of its own meaning and necessity: consciousness creates the conditions by which survival ceases to be an hypothesis and becomes an imperative.

For James, experience shows that consciousness, intentionality, and the will are fundamental; and he claims that when scientific theories exclude such fundamental elements they receive only the results that are representative of the narrow methods of inquiry that they employ, creating a warped or incomplete understanding of the subject of investigation. For example, it may well be that part of the way in which we understand the relations between phenomena does indeed have something to do with association, and that experiments involving the association of phenomena and consciousness could tell us something about the nature of the mind. James would claim, however, that this is not necessarily a complete picture of what is going on, and that in fact, most of our experiences do not work in this way at all. The practical, functionalist psychology put in place by James rejects the classic view of consciousness as a Cartesian substance. Rather, it is understood as a process of mental operations which manage a network of systems by way of the will, attention, and selection. It serves a practical purpose in terms of survial by allowing for the formation of coherent experiential interpretations of the world. James’ ideomotor theory of the will describes the functionality of the volitional element of consciousness: initally a collection of reflex responses to the phenomena of experience, basic behaivour becomes more and more adaptive until volition––which informs selectivity and later intentionality––is brought to bear on these initial reflexes; the will expresses itself on behalf of its highest interests; it is not separated from the body, but rather becomes the volitional version of bodily reflexes. Thus intentionality can be understood as a conscious, wilful engagement with the world that develops out of increasingly selective primordial responses to environmental stimuli which are in the higest interests of the organism.

Clearly, the criteria applied in process of choosing the objects of experience we pick out, or otherwise become aware of against the backdrop of the world at large, are central to the phenomenology of Husserl; but, for James, a fundamental part of the selective response to experience is based in reflex and instinct. The practical judgements we make about the objects of experience must necessarily reflect––in essence at least––the process of instinct/intentionality and the conscious stream of experienced phenomena. James’ view is pragmatic; it is not a logical or philosophical exercise; it is functional; ideas about ‘bracketing’ do not apply. In Jamesian terms, we accept as true those ways of understanding experiences that resonate with our highest interests. And this resonance sounds from our most mundane, primitive and banal needs and desires to our loftiest and most sublime aspirations; it rumbles ominously in our deepest fears and sings triumphantly of our greatest achievements. It traverses the empirical, the social, and the transcendental and forms the foundation for belief, insight, and the way in which we come to understand our experience of the world.

Husserl and James seem to part where phenomenology offers a formal representation of experience and psychology offers a material description of it. While the thought of James and Husserl share the basic same purpose––to reveal the purity of experience such as it is given––they interpret experience in very different ways. In its search for the essence, phenomenology treats experience as being, above all, intentional; experience is always subject to the formal structure of intentionality. James’ Radical empiricism employs a continuous conception of experience that is causal of psychological states like intentionality and belief; and this plays a crucial practical role in directing our selectivity and integrating our bodies and minds with the world in a way that quite literally keeps our highest interests in mind.

JOHN SEARLE “THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL ILLUSION”

Dostoyevsky’s Notes From the Underground attacks the enlightenment’s claim that freedom and happiness are synonymous by showing that in reality these two concepts stand in opposition to one another. Happiness, Dostoevsky seems to say, is the absence of freedom. He introduces us to the underground man, a mean and spiteful individual who, in a relentless quest to maintain and exert the integrity of his personal freedom, systematically destroys every chance he has for happiness by irrevocably alienating his peers and brutally shunning his only chance for love; he suffers from a disease of the liver but refuses to see a doctor, proclaiming “let it get worse!” Dostoevsky takes on the enlightenment myth which claims that rationality and freedom can be structured as an equation for human happiness and the creation of an ideal society: “2+2=4″ the underground man mutters, “as if that is what is most important to us.” Dostoevsky poses the following dilemma: if it is our personal liberty that we cherish above all; and, if the freedom of the will is to be understood as our most precious and humanising characteristic, do we not render ourselves, in some sense, inhuman when we blindly adhere to a role as part of the grand plan for the ideal society?

Dostoevsky makes it eerily clear that by going along with the enlightenment schema that which is “our most advantageous advantage” is, in fact, paradoxically left out of the equation, only to be replaced by an subverted concept of freedom that is all but meaningless. If the enlightenment’s myth of liberty twists the notion of freedom––consciously or otherwise––into something resembling its antithesis in order to create social contentment, the underground man responds to this subversion with a resounding “No!” For him freedom is the very foundation of being human, to sacrifice it in order to acquiesce to society is impossible; true individuality, wretched and miserable though may be, is the highest good.

Although he is tempted from time to time to resolve himself socially, the underground man would rather face the depravity of a life of spite than submerge himself in what he considers to be disingenuous social conventions and artificial hierarchies. But of course, from the perspective of the underground man, there is no depravity––his position is only understood as perverse from the point of view of the enlightened rationalists who value social cohesion over the richness of true individuality. Thus, Dostoevsky presents the emotion of spite, not simply as an emotional disorder, but as a philosophical principle which allows the underground man to exercise freedom even in the face of his own personal interests. Indeed, even the expected course of action his physical ailment would seem to demand presents a challenge to the freedom of the will and is therefore rejected by the underground man in an affirmation of his existence.

In the final analysis, the underground man is rendered impotent, incapable of any kind of coherent active engagement with the world. Making choices manifest in action involves making predictions and judgements which are value laden, often involving moving or changing one’s self––physically as well as psychologically––in relation to the Other; the underground man finds that he cannot realise the simplest decision because in doing so he would have to relinquish his freedom by recognising the Other or the group. This terrifies and disgusts him above all else. Understanding, choosing and acting are highly emotionally charged activities which involve some sort of compromise, acquiescence or coming to terms with the position of an Other, or situations which are beyond the immediate control of the self. The emotions associated with such circumstances are pushed aside by the underground man with disgust; he regards them with horror and allows himself only spite. But when spite cannot protect him; when he must face his emotions in the waning moments of the story when he his finally confronted with the possibility of love and happiness––not only his own, but also that of the young prostitute whom his decision will profoundly affect––he collapses in tears. In the end, the underground man refuses everything except his own will; ironically rejecting his only real chance to make his existence meaningful to another, he chooses to remain in the misery, and wretched safety of spite.

Dostoevsky’s critique of the Western european concepts of freedom and happiness echoes throughout his work. And, when we consider the way in which he extends this critique of happiness and freedom to the Roman Catholic Church in the Grand Inquisitor, we begin to understand that, for Dostoevsky, freedom, happiness and self affirmation rest in the realm of a personal and spiritual understanding of God and Creation. Like Augustine, Pascal, and Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky asserts that true individuality has a profound spiritual element which transcends the ‘herd’ mentality of popular religion, rational rhetoric and the material distractions of daily existence.

Dostoevsky’s underground man also offers us a subtle critique of the relationship between emotion and reason. As the underground man makes so painfully clear, the concept that emotions can be negated rationally, or that they can be made to take on predictable or instrumental roles is a questionable claim. But, on the other hand, can we really understand our selves as being completely controlled by our emotions like Goethe’s Werther? Both young Werther and the Underground man live at the limits of their subjective existence. But where the Underground man is capable of retreating from the unyielding social and physical world that surrounds him into his disgusting metaphysical burrow of spite and resentment, Werther’s only escape is death.

Werther’s suicide, however,cannot be properly understood as a simple evasion. While the Underground man asserts his existence by lacerating himself from the world through rational denial, eventually coming to rest in spite; Werther can only exist at the extremities of feeling. For Werther, the world itself transforms according to his emotions. When he is happy he sees only beauty; even the hard life of the peasants in the village seem charming to him. But when he is sad the world becomes cold and indifferent. Although joy and sorrow are his only proper domains, Wether’s narcissism transcends all. His infantile longings, coupled with his need rationalise his reality around his extreme emotive states dooms his chances of contentment in the working world of bourgeois society; and the possibility of a reasonable friendship with Lotte is rendered impossible. Dostoevsky and Goethe offer insight into the profound contribution of emotion to subjective experience. Psychologically speaking, emotion seems to both protect us from the world and allow us physical engagement with it; emotions allow us to form understandings of the world which permit us to act according to some rational schema. However, as the pathological cases of the Underground man and Werther make clear, the relationship between emotion and reason can be a dangerous one when it creates an understanding of the world in which the individual cannot properly integrate himself physically or socially. How then are we to understand this relation ship between reason, emotion and the mind? Are emotions simply products of the mind, or are they integrated responses to the world? Are emotions in some sense chosen, or are they biologically determined? Are emotions purely subjective experiences or do they adhere to some set of social, biological or psychological determiners?

this essay is not yet finished

The Science of Desire and the Dream of Reality:
Flaubert and the Modern Novel

”I would like to write a book about nothing,
a book without external links,
which would be held together by the internal force of its style …
just as the earth without being suspended moves in the air,
a book which would have almost no subject matter
or at least whose subject would be almost invisible
if that is possible.”

If we are prompted to describe Flaubert’s text as a ‘science of desire’, it is not to discredit his imagination or literary skill. Although the “emancipated student of Balzac” was acutely aware of his own literary tradition, he managed to transcend the massive figures that constituted it to forge a new conception of the novel and left behind him an incredible lineage of writers which include Joyce, Sartre, Kafka, Chekhov and Kundera among many others. This enormous achievement was singular not only in that he was able to compete with the likes of Balzac and Victor Hugo in a literary sense, but also in the way in which he managed to recontextualise old and introduce new literary devices and extend the role of literature beyond its well worn niche into the modern world of critique and science. The moeurs and mechanics of post Enlightenment Europe were changing radically and it is out of this environment that Flaubert’s aesthetic emerged.

By 1821, the date of Flauber’s birth, the French bourgeoisie had become rich and fearfully conservative; interest in the arts and literature stagnated and the the children of Flaubert’s generation grew up in an environment of commercialism where there was a general distrust for any kind of imagination or artistic creativity let alone deviation form the accepted social norms. The wealth that had been gained by the passionate revolutionaries of 1789 and the Napoleonic conquerers that followed them had turned the dynamism of french society in to a dull, lifeless monotony that left little place for artistic expression. There was, however, a group of young writers who began to turn out a steady stream of works that became increasingly bitter towards the bourgeois. Chief amongst the ranks of this new literary movement were Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. Their works could not have contrasted more sharply with those of Corneille or Racine in tone, content and in the harsh social criticism they put forward : if bourgeois society would not allow true literary imagination, literature would have to put itself in opposition to society. Motivated by the desire that this generation had to feel some of the passion that their parents and grandparents had experienced during the Revolution and the Napoleonic conquests as well as the disgust that they felt with the lifeless society in which they found them selves, the youth turned to the exotic and the passionate; the romance novels of George Sand2 became very popular and a romantic movement among the youth began to glow. Wives took lovers, people took to travelling and suicide became almost fashionable; perhaps warmed by Rousseau some 75 years earlier, Romanticism had caught fire in France.

As much as the young Flaubert felt himself to be a part of this new romanticism, he was also very critical of it and felt only scorn for those he heard ignorantly deriding the classics. Romanticism, for Flaubert, came from the awareness and cultivation of a deep natural drive and not simply from the act of mocking Montaigne or Rabelais. Although he greatly admired Hugo and Dumas, Flaubert was faced with a problem : the mode of this romantic expression itself was in the process of becoming stale but it seemed as though there was nowhere else to turn. There was a general mood among Flaubert and his contemporaries that the end of the road had been reached and that the form of the novel, such as it was, could no longer offer a medium for innovative expression. Flaubert realised that if he was to continue as a writer he would have to recontextualise the novel - both technically and conceptually - and as a result he began look to other disciplines for models by which he could frame and inspire his work. Above all, he seemed most interested in mathematics and the social sciences.

What then do we mean by this allusion to science as a method in the writing of Flaubert? How was this modern novel created and what does it tell us about the human condition? Flaubert had a clear understanding of the fact that he was living in a time that was approaching rapid change : the railroad and the increased access to the printed word via the steam driven printing press are only two examples of the many forces that were changing communication, economy, morals and life in general in the France and Europe of the mid 1800’s. These were the days of Hegel, Marx and Darwin and Flaubert wished to approach the novel with the appropriate geist :

“traiter l’ame humaine avec l’imparialité que l’on met dans les sciences pysiques.”3

Flaubert was suspicious of the ‘inspired artist’ and inspiration in general :

“méfions-nous de cette espèce d’échauffement qu’on appelle l’inspiration…”4

“Ecrire froidement”5

and:

“C’est pas avec le cour que on écrit, c’est avec la tete”6

Rather than rely on inspiration, he preferred to use a technique he called “la linge droite”7 , a kind anchor which would allow him to dig, “comme une taupe”8 , deeper and deeper into the work finally allowing him to emerge into a ‘reality’ of words and ideas. For Flaubert the work of writing was not founded on inspiration or genius but rather relied on an “apreté”, a kind of toughness or rigour that would allow him to create a work in which one would feel:

“une longue énergie qui court d’une bout a l’autre et ne fablit pas.” 9

As one would expect, the book did not come easily for Flaubert. For fifty-three months he agonised over every word - he poured himself into this book and when it was finished he declared: “La Bovary, c’est moi.” Flaubert wished to apply a new set of standards to the novel so that it could become a means by which one could examine the human condition from a point of detachment. Although Flaubert believed that literature should not be confused with the physical sciences, he hoped that what he called the “moral sciences” could take their place with the rest of the physical and emerging social sciences :

“Si les science morales avaient, comme les mathematiques, deux ou
trios lois primordiales à leur disposition elles pourraient marcher de l’avavnt. Mais elles tâtonnent dans les ténèbres…”10

Whether we can call Madame Bovary an object of science as much as we can call it a work of literature is open for question but Flaubert’s interest in science and scientific rigour does give us valuable insight into his motivation and crucial key insights into the construction and significance of his work.. There is no doubt that what Flaubert created was something new and mysterious, even viewed from the contemporary perspective; it is at once detached and passionate, cold and sensual. It is unlike anything that came before it and to this day continues to amaze and confuse readers who delight in its virtuosity and struggle to interpret its meaning.

As one digs deeper and deeper into the book, like Flaubert’s mole, one is struck with a strange sensation that becomes increasingly difficult to shake off. Flaubert seems have been to be able to ‘embed’ a kind of determinism into the very fabric of the text; the relations of the characters to each other and to their social and physical environment are dominated by it. This sensation seems to go beyond the mere fact that one might have read the text once or twice before - although this does seem to be a book that one should read at least once before reading it ‘for the first time’. Initially we can feel it more than we can intellectualise it, but as we get on this determinism, paradoxically, becomes the living pulse of the novel and as we approach the end it is this terrifying drive of self-realisation that dominates the story.

There are several letters exchanged between Flaubert and his friend Alfred de Poitteven11 discussing the deterministic nature of the universe and free will that are quite telling and, indeed, there are many references to the monotonous and deterministic nature of life within the book itself. If there is a certain machinal quality here it is certainly that of the highest order, like a magic clock or some other mysterious creation of the like. It is in this way that the book brings to mind the phenomenon of the Paper Theatre of the 1800’s12 , albeit in a very complicated and refined incarnation. While the characters in Flaubert’s story do seem to be limited to ‘two dimensions’ - created as they are almost entirely out of stereotype and cliché - the natural background is hyper-real and rendered with breath taking complextity and detail. As the novel progresses the initial pseudo-romantic expression of the physical environment is occasionally traded for an existential vision that touches the Sartrian.13 This existentialism is important because it represents the finest resolution of Flaubert’s gaze. In what amounts to a special kind of Flaubertian existential materialism, we find ourselves liminally bound on one extreme with the indifference of nature and on other - in the grandest image - a neutral, cosmic determinism. Flaubert moves us around in this world with staggering virtuosity : here we are looking down dispassionately on this world from above; there we find ourselves starting out inside someone’s’ private thoughts and feelings only to end up in the garden with the wood lice :

“Au fond de son âme, cependant, elle attendait un évévnment. Comme les matelots en détresse, elle promenait sur la solitude de sa vie des yeux déspérés, cherchant au loin quelque voile blanche dans les brumes de l’horizon…”14

and a page later :

“…dans le jardin… tout semblait dormir, l’espalier couvert de paille et la vinge comme un grand serpent malade sous le chaperon du mur, ou l’on voyait, en s’approchait se traîner des cloportes à pattes nombreuses…”15

Sometimes the very fragmentary descritptions of his characters physical attributes become almost indistinguishable from their surroundings. Flaubert shows us a natural world that is as strikingly beautiful as it is indifferent; one in which his creatures find themselves both interposed with and abstracted from their environment. He engages us in constant and subtle shifts of perspective which create a plurality of view points that make objective judgements very difficult. Additionally, the social environment in which the characters relate to each other is rendered in such a way that reference to it does not always need to be made in print although it is always clearly present.

This abundance of perspective and the ability to make understood what is not said is derived from the way in which Flaubert combines literary techniques and applies them towards the characters and events. Like lenses in a microscope or perhaps in a way analogous to how radioscopy allows us discern what lies under the surface, these techniques allows us to observe the events of the book on multiple levels. Three of these techniques are outstanding : Irony, Cliché and Free Indirect Discourse.

Cliché is the ‘material’ out of which all the characters are constituted and it shows itself both in situation and in the sparse dialogue. It is by this use of cliché that Flaubert is able to make clearly defined social and psychological objects out of his characters; it enables him to be categorical with them and to play these categories off of one another.

Charles Bovary opens the book with his emergence as the idiotic school boy and closes it with his pathetic death : he is the average bourgeois every man. Everything about him is mediocre and every desire that motivates him ends either in comfortable complacency, as is the case with his desire for Emma (at least in the short term), or disaster as is the case with his failed attempt to make a name for himself in trying to cure Hyppolites leg. He is the product of a nervous, nagging mother and a father who, although full of all kinds of grand statements, is as essentially complacent and mediocre as Charles himself. The final revelation of Emmas’ licentious activities and her death are impossible for him to comprehend as is everything that exists out side of his small sphere of comprehension - the Marquis’ ball for example. He seems completely oblivious to Emma’s passions but when he is finally made to face them they destroy him.

Homais is the incarnation of bourgeois values in the afterglow of the revolution : reason, ‘republican anticlericalism’, science and the printed word, all faded to empty rhetoric. He is the master at using the social ideals of the revolution (progress, humanism) to hide his lust for personal wealth. He is the empty ideologue and idealist and, as a result, is an abundance source of self-important nonsense. He is the spirit of Yonneville and epitomises the empty arrogance of the provincial Bourgeois.
Rudolphe - with all his contempt for the bourgeois - initially seems to stand in contrast to Homais but is, in the end, the other side of the same coin : he is the empty romantic and spouts out his own rhetoric as a result. His bold statements are completely self serving; he is the cliché of the fashionable romantic who uses romanticism as guise for lechery and self aggrandisement. Léon, Emma’s other love,r also shows these romantic tendencies but lacks the courage to act upon them decisively. He is just as empty as Rudolphe; where Rudolphe is brutish, Leon is timid. The cure and the merchant make for are equally stereotypical. Curé is completely useless in spiritual matters his existence is completely profane and completely useless and ignorant of all things spiritual. The draper Leureux masks his greed in obsequious, servile phrases and is completely shameless in his quest for money because in his world there is no shame in it.16

Cliché is also used in the description of Yonneville itself; it is the perfect stereotype of a backwards provincial town rendered with meticulous detail. Our arrival in Yonneville is like that of a lone spirit surveying a ghost town ; not a person is seen. As we begin the first chapter of part two, we fly in over the surrounding area moving over the beautiful landscape towards the centre of town which is described in intimate detail - we are even made aware of its backwards agricultural practices. We travel through the grave yard, through the church, the market in the main square until we reach the ‘Lion D’or.’ It is only then that we encounter the shadow - or rather the possibility of the shadow - of the pharmacist Homais bent over his desk. At this point the trip is over and we are taken directly to the cemetery where we encounter the sexton who has, in addition to burying the dead, taken to growing potatoes just next to the graves. We are then made privy to a fragment of a conversation in which the Curé says to him : “Vous vous nourrissez des morts.”17 We are then informed that:

“Depuis les événments que l’on va raconter, rien, en effet, n’a changé à Yonneville … les foetus du pharmacien comme des paquets d’amandou blanc, se pourissent de plus en plus dans leur alcool bourbeux…”18

There’s a sense in which Yonneville is a kind of eerie place out of time, a kind of 19th century ‘Pleasant Ville.’ Indeed, towards the beginning of our lonely flight into Yonneville we are told how, despite the construction of the construction of new roads in the area (ses débouchés nouveaux) the town has stood still and that from a distance it resembles a snoozing herd of cows.
Perhaps the most startling is Flaubert’s use of free indirect discourse or style indirect libre. moving the first person in and out of the third, creates a vertiginous effect and must have been very confusing for readers of the day who were not used to it. This effect seems to have been largely responsible for the moral confusion about the book. Certainly at times one can find oneself quite rightly asking : who is thinking this? the character? Flaubert? myself? He does it by maintaining the narrative in the third person but he puts <<<>>>

To this we must add Flauberts’ mastery of irony, which he uses equally well in the context of comedy as in pathos. <<<>>>>

Flaubert’s masterful and unrepentant use of cliché descends from the dialogue to permeate the very beings of the characters - it also creates the village Yonneville. Irony collides with these categorical characters moulded out of cliché and compel us, often subconciously, to move from our complacency into the position of critic. It is at the grand events of the novel that these elements of technique come together in all their majesty : the wedding, the ball, the agricultural fair and the cab ride though Rouen. Flaubert is always working his critical lenses and some of the most magical critical moments can sometimes be found hiding in the shadow of some larger event. What are we to make of the last phrase of part one, chapter two :“Elle l’avait aimé après tout”19 . Easily passed over, this sentence refers to Charles’ first wife - after her death - and begs the questions what? and who? : What kind of love is this - if it is love at all? Who is thinking this? Charles? Flaubert? Are we supposed to think it? Flaubert keeps us moving incessantly and often in multiple directions often snagging us on little hooks. All this is played out on a physical landscape that is at once the natural beauty of Normandy delivered to us with proper 19th century romanticism and the nausea of existential realism. In Flaubert’s world the material and the psychological ally themselves in a continual give and take….. join ….>>>>>

But what about Emma herself? What are we to make of her? What does she represent and where does she come from? As Flaubert’s own statement suggests, she is indeed none other than Flaubert himself but, like Charles’ hat “d’ordre composite”, she is a bizarre mix. She is Flaubert as he identified himself with his mother and his mistress, Louise Colet. His own transgressive drives mix with the domination his nervous mother had over him, the bourgeois society of which he was inextricably a part and his his bizarre relationship with the demanding Colet. After the death of Charles’ father and his sister - which occurred in rapid succession - Charles was left with his mother and his sister‘s baby daughter to care for. His mother was extremely nervous and hated for him to be away. He never broke with her, even after meeting Colet and went to great pains to keep them apart. After infrequent trips to Paris, or elsewhere, he always returned back to the tiny provincial town of Croisset where his family moved him after he began to be afflicted with bizarre epileptic attacks. Invariably he found his mother pacing nervously on the train platform, waiting for him to arrive. Flaubert showed almost no desire to leave or alter his situation and it seems almost as though he felt himself to be a willing prisoner to his circumstances.

The three Madame Bovarys - mother,first wife and Emma - that appear in the book are themselves a strange mixture of Flaubert, his mother and Colet. The patriarchal voice of Homais is, in part Falubert’s own father as well as the parochial voice of the bourgeois society. Léon is vaguely reminiscent of his admired friend, Alfred Le Pottevin, for whom he had so much hope and who in the end turned out to be a disappointment for Flaubert - as Léon was for Emma. There obsession with literature and the impossibility of escape for Emma (as for Flaubert himself) from the shackles of her environment and who she is - the escape into romantic literature was as endemic for Emma as it was for the youth of Fluabert’s generation. Everything in the book is an image or an artefact, a person or melange of different aspects of people and places that made up the physical, social and psychological material of Flaubert’s existence. With scientific rigour, he creates out of this material the most exquisite dream : instead of turning his gaze outwards, as his predecessors had done, he turns his focus inwards and lays his soul bare for examination. It is through the axial point of Flaubert that the characters and locations touch reality; that “linge droit” is dug inwards and the ‘reality’ of words and ideas it opens up exists deep inside Flaubert himself. He removes the outside world and creates (or finds) objects, from within himself, that resemble human instruments and activities; these objects become the loci of aesthetic contemplation : a critical dream of reality with each element perfectly placed to act out its part in the machine with exquisite precision. Still, there is something Emma that sets her apart. Her complete lack of conscious intentionality arouses something in us that is difficult to define in words. She finds her self in the middle of the most bizarre and self destructive activities often without seeming to know how she arrived there:

<<>>

She becomes increasingy estranged from the reality of her environment. Our conscious, rational minds are at pains to come to terms with her.

If, however, we consider that this object of Flaubert’s narrative is portrayed as a woman20 in parochial and patriarchal provincial France and, as such, is perhaps the perfect incarnation of subconsciously repressed desire - a desire with no chance of survival or full expression in the ‘conscious world’ that Flaubert presents to us and one that must constantly deny itself - we may be able to find some clues in deciphering the meaning of her character. Viewed in this light, Emma reveals herself as the incarnation of the psycopathological phenomenon of subconcious desire as it intrudes into the repression of everyday existence.21 His critique is of the society which, in its immaculate homogeneity, has raised reason to the status of religion; but this is a religion of profanity where transgression is not considered and the sacred no longer exisits : life and passion in the raw is repressed and expression of desire is channeled neurotically through the rational constructs of society. Desire manifests itself in other places and characters in the book but it is always restrained or is directed instrumentally towards the profanity of ‘reality’- towards money, status or sex : the drives of Rudolphe , Léon and Homais fade rapidly or change focus as they lose their practicality. Emma’s limitless passion is completly alien to them : even immediately after her gruesome death, the pharmacist and the curé continue with with their pointless and age old arguments over church and state and the characters continue as history has determined them showing little or no real sentiment over what has just happened - with the exception, of course, of Charles and the baby who are effectively destroyed by it but have absolutely no understanding of the situation. Emma’s desire is singular : it’s manifestation is transgressive to the extent that it removes her, quite literally, from the reality of society. It has no real tangible goal other than it’s own self realisation. Emma is passion that cannot or will not be mediated by society, made manifest in a society so repressed that understanding is impossible. She is all pathos, all Dionysian drive with no true Aplollonian vision to guide her - her romance novels will not suffice. All the while, as distubing as this all is, we recognise that there is something fundimental about Emma. Perhaps Flaubert is showing us that it is not reason or thinking that is the essence of being - as Descartes postulated - but rather desire.
Flaubert is pshycological in a way that was almost completely alien to the readers of his generation and Madame Bovary was put on trial for crimes against morality. He was aquitted after a lenghthy process that, by all accounts, Flaubert seemed to relish. <<>>Surrealism…

Questions,Other Notes and Ideas on Madame Bovary and Flaubert:

1. The Emotional Intelligence of Emma

“You must beware of turgid speeches
masking themselves as common
place passions”
Rodolphe p.177

Emma lives in a world apart which she has cobbled together from the language of romance novels. She uses romantic clichés – which have no grounding in reality – as the foundation of her thought and identity. Increasingly, this becomes all she sees and understands. When her world is challenged, her fear manifests itself as rage or retreat into piety; there’s an element here that’s almost bestial. Her self-delusion and laceration from the world reach such an extreme point that she is literally removed from existence. Although this is literature and Emma represents an extreme pathological case, her character does raise certain important points regarding the relationship between language and passion (as desire and emotion), and the ways in which we engage with the world through them.

– How is the nature of a given emotion dependent on the language we have to describe it? (metaphor etc.)

– If we had different language tools (or if our language functioned differently) would our experience of emotion be different?

– Are emotions in the mind or are they “in the world” (Decartes’ cogito vs. Heidegger’s Dasien) ? (passion/reason vs the ideas of mind and heart… chi)

– How do our assumptions – mind/body, inner/outer (dualism) or, our ideas of how love or anger “should be” – affect (or emerge from) our language and therefore influence our emotions?

– How are the passions related to personal and social narratives, and the drive to complete these narratives (consciously or sub-consciously) ? What’s the relation of the expression to the emotion?

– How does this narrative get out of control as it did with Emma?

How much choice (or control) do we actually have in deciding when and how we express our emotions? (Sartre’s mauvaise foi) Is it possible to change the nature of our emotions by changing our language; is our situation in it’s own way just as deterministic as Emma’s?

2. “Madame Bovary, C’est Moi” : What does this mean?

– Flaubert talked about burying himself in the work so that he could find the “straight line” (linge droit) which would allow him to dig “like a mole” (comme une taupe) and eventually emerge or open up a reality of ideas and words that was hitherto concealed.
– Flaubert detested the subject matter of this novel. Why did he write about it ?
– “méfions-nous de cette espèce d’échauffement qu’on appelle l’inspiration…” Flaubert was suspicious of inspiration and said, “write with the head, not the heart”, “…écrire froidment”
– “The highest point in art is not to make us laugh or cry, but to act in the fashion of nature and make us dream”
– “Treat the soul with the same impartiality that one uses in the physical sciences.”
– “ Don’t judge, show!”

What is he showing? Is this really – as it seems on the surface – a critique of french bourgeois provincial life (les moeurs de province) or something altogether different? How does Flaubert implicate us (our emotions) in the book? How does he set us dreaming?

– The novel raises issues about gender and the possibilities open to women with regards to self determination (Vargas’ bad girl). Is there is something deeper and more perverse going on here?

– Is Flaubert just making a statement about the plight of women or is he using this sexualization instrumentally to deal with a personal issue?

Baudelaire : “To accomplish this tour de force, it remained only for the author to divest himself of his sex, and to become a woman. The result is a marvel; for despite all his zeal as an actor he was unable to keep from infusing his male blood into the veins of his creation, and Madame Bovary, in the most forceful and ambitious sides of her character, and also the most pensive, remained a man.”

A Fragmentary Conversation About Emma Bovary with Myself:

– How do we interpret this book and Emma herself?
is it a critique of society?
do we sympathise with Emma for being caught in this situation, Do we detest her?
What is this book saying politically?
Is Flaubert making any kind of judgement at all or is this a kind of sadistic game?
What exactly is he playing at?
What do we think about Flaubert use of a female charater?

– Well, this is a complicated book and it’s made all the more difficult to access becuse of subtil way in which presents itself and the prejduces we might have in approaching it

– … that’s to say, how we might impose our own understanding of how a novel from this period should present itself and , in the grander scheme of things, what the role of litterature istelf should be in moral and aesthetic terms.

– Some still call this book as a “realist” novel or claim that it was a breakthrough because of the realistic way in which it describes mid 19th century society in Normandy.

– Certainly, this is part of it, and the novel – on the surface – does present itself in this way.

– And, without doubt we are reading something that has it’s basis in lived experience and obsevation… the very social material that makes up the charaters, thier motives and dialogue is taken from this environment that Flaubert knew so well

–I’m reffering to the social conformity, cold intrumental pursuit of wealth , fashionable romanticicm , the bougeois marriage (which was more about money and estate than love or passion), the place of women, the restrictions of class, social hypocrisy, blind allegience to the social doctrine of the day and the like .

– and certainly in his descriptions of the material world, Flaubert’s depth of detail can only come with a mode of obsevation that borders on the scientific in terms of its rigour.

– So I don’t think it to be entirely innacurate to call him a realist… However, I do think that this is just the begining with Flaubert and we know from his letters that he was interested in moving beyond this realist style of which he was obviously such a master..

– I think, we can say that actually that it is through of this masterful use realism that Flaubert takes us somewhere else all together , a place that litterature had not explored up until then or at least no in this way …

– and presents us with something that is so subtile that at first we have no idea what we’re dealing with, just perhaps and odd feeling that there is something unusual going on.

– So Let me see If I can roughy outline what I mean here

– Flaubert presents us with a kind of disconect between his characters and the natural world that surrounds them , this is most extreme in the estrangement of Emma’s inner voice and the reality of the natural world to which she has no emotional conection.
P34 …Convent Bginning of PT2 enrty into Yonneville

– in this way Flaubert accentuates of the evolving passionate narrative of Emma by posing it against, or lacerating it from the natural world, which is described with this breathtaking realism..

– Emmas passion is increasingly directed away from reality, towards her fantasies fuelled by romace literature P58 After the Ball , Trapped Etc … Down in her soul…

– as her passion reaches it’s peak, she becomes dislocated from society and even her lovers themselves. PAGE 100 (playing the virtuous housewife)

– now what’s interesting to notice here is how Flaubert paints these characters in relation to that of Emmma’s : they are categorical in a way, they fit into these very real social stereotypes that Flaubert detested somuch… they become almost 2 dimentional, unvarying, cliche and almost comic at times

– wheras the range of emma’s passion and the prodigious and uncontrollable nature of it’s evolution increasingly terrifies … these suppporting characters, pale in comparison to her.

WHERE DOES ALL THIS LEAD ?

– BY the end of the book she’s really is like a caged creature, desperate to maintain control, desperate to keep herself disengaed from the others…. she is tormented and killed, by her own desire…surrounded by all these pathetic and demonic creatures ….this is NOT Balzac . this, by the end, is like some kind of dream… seems more like a nightmare than anything else

SO what I’m Getting at here

– There’s a sense in which this realism is merely the surface of something or as Flaubert put it the “scaffolding” which “would allow him to dig like a mole , and to eventually emerge into a reality of ideas that was hither to unknown”

Explain … But Madame Bovary is, in a sense, his authorial judgment on such human frailties, a revelation of the fatality and fultility of living out such romantic dreams in the modern world.

– But Flaubert doesn’t stop there

– the accuracy and detail of Flaubert’s realism as well as his understanding of science allowed him to recognize that reality, or at least our understanding of it, could be brought into question by the change or suggestion of even the smallest things. And so we see him laying out these hooks for us – and sometimes they are very subtile. He’s drawing us into this “reality” he’s discovered – sometimes forcing us to question our very understanding of the things that make us most human, the very understanding of our emotioanl language PP…19 “She Loved Him, After All”

– In this way he Implicates us in the novel, forcing us to weave in our own thoughts and feelings, our own emotional “Mythology” with that of the book. He puts us in the thoughts of the charaters and forces us to make our own judgements

– Irony + Free indirect discourse 271… “But as She was Writing…”

– the combination of Flaubert’s nautural realism, the lacerated internal voice of Emma, the almost symbolic supporting characters and the ways in which Flaubert pulls us in to the book creates the sense that what we are dealing with is some kind of reality abstracted from itself … somekind of critical dream in which we the readers, are expected to play a crucial critical role. In this way Flaubert is realist in his technique, modern in his depiction of bourgeois values the kind of moral relativism he implies but, in a sense, also surreal in the way he engages us with the book PP …152 She Would Explore his room ….

– What then, if anything, does this book provide… what does it show us???

– Well I think for me the most striking thing that came to mind is the way that, personal and social narratives are created, accepted or used… and become accepted as truth or become (or create) objects of obsession

– It seems to me that dominant issue here is that of the relationship between language and emotion. I’d like to speak about this briefly, not in an attempt to offer somekind definitive of model as to how this relationship plays out but rather to open a path for investigation and discussion. I’ll then move on to examine a few points in the text that I found to be of interest in this regard

––Rousseau, sturuggling with language in his attempt to expess these feelings he had; to define them into something that we (or he for that matter) could understand as some kind of recognisable emotion.

––– how difficult it was for him to do this given, among other things, the bizarre nature of his relationship with Mme De Warrens and the unstable nature of his family life. I for one, felt quite sympathetic towards poor Rousseau in this regard, contantly striving as he was to pull emotion out of raw feelings, never able to constitute for himself the common narratives that define Mother, Lover, Protector, Father etc…

But, as sad as it was for Rousseau it’s also very interesting to think about how fragile our ideas about our emotions actually are, and that they might not be always exactly what we assume them to be. So, let’s pause here for a second and try to understand what we mean by this idea of a narrative as it relates to emotion.

–– Emotional Intellegence… We are linguistc creatures and we use language to understand and describe our world, to each other and to ourselves. Metaphor is one of our chief devices in this regard

– However, in a nutshell I think we can begin to undertstand it if we are willing consider the ideas that our emotions are engagement with the world, and that our emotions, such as we understand them, are in large part percived as they are due to accutulration and the language that goes along with it. A few points

– We engage with the world through emotion

– Emotion tends to involve desire which moves –sometimes in very complicated ways – within a narrative and compells the individual to engage with the world. (there’s always somekind of object or direction)

– This is Intentionality

– Emotions can be false. (physiological response just is but the understanding of the narrative may be misunder stood or it could change)

– Our langugage and acultration has a lot to do with the nature of the emotions we have. Metaphors we use the cliche’s we live by etc…

– The ways in which the subject responds to the pressures of these narrative can be intelligent depending on how the story of this narrative is pursued.

– Active engagement with these narratives can affect not only our behavior or our way of engaging in the world but also the world itself

Now, on one extreme one might not engage at all, it might not even come to mind that such a thing would be possible; on the other, one could neurotically over think the narrative. Like Hamlet for example: the locus of his desire lies in direct, clear , action, and is never questioned: he must, and will kill Claudius to avenge his father. However, Hamlet is so busy engaging, questioning, tweaking the narrative of his revenge and missing opportunities for satisfaction as they present themselves, that we begin to wonder if he’ll ever get around to actually doing the deed that honour demands of him. There is also this extreme case, as suggested by Flaubert, where the subject (or rather ltterary subject in Emma’s) attempts to completely replace one set of narratives for another which has been completely fabricated out of books , these romance novels etc

… I should also point out
this idea of narrative as it relates to our emotions is itself a kind of metaphor : If we took this idea litterally we’d be living in some kind of novel … so I’m not saying it’s definitive by anymeans as a model of how our emotions work, thing are more myserious than that. However, I think it’s quite helpful as a tool for litterary critique in trying to create a relation between the lived and the written.

SO , with all of this in mind I’d like to have a look at few parts of the book where we can see this emotional narrative taking place, being formed or manipulated. And also, more interestingly point out line here and there where Flaubert implicates us, the reader and our own narratives into the book and into the characters them selves.

Anger and Resentment – There’s this perverse way in which Emma seems to savour all her Emotions , Anger and resentment are no different P94 … Dirested against Charles, P101 she’s almost frustrated that her “narrative” of resent ment directed towards Charles is missing some of the elements it needed to make the narrative itself complete “ she wished that he would beat her…”

Ideas of Love – Emma, Leon, Rodolphe … 177 this contrast between Emma and Rodolphe’s ideas

Friendship – Homais P81

There is perhaps no single philosophical idea more inculcated in the Western psyche than that of Cartesian Dualism. Indeed, it seems very likely that many of the contemporary discussions going around regarding the “mind/body problem” would be perfectly comprehensible to Descartes as the vocabulary in use is essentially his. Although the Cartesian model and its subsequent implications for our notions of the subject became a major part of the modern paradigm, it is not without its problems and critics.

The goal of the Cartesian project is to lay a permanent, universal foundation for knowledge. To achieve this, Descartes claims that we “cannot possibly go too far in [our] distrustful attitude”––better to have a method that excludes some truths, than one that justifies some falsehoods. Descartes started his line of reasoning by doubting everything, so as to assess the world from a fresh perspective, clear of any preconceived notion. The four precepts that characterise the Cartesian Method:

1. “The first was never to accept anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such; that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitancy and prejudice, and to comprise nothing more in my judgement than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly as to exclude all ground of doubt.
2. The second, to divide each of the difficulties under examination into as many parts as possible, and as might be necessary for its adequate solution.
3. The third, to conduct my thoughts in such order that, by commencing with objects the simplest and easiest to know, I might ascend by little and little, and, as it were, step by step, to the knowledge of the more complex; assigning in thought a certain order even to those objects which in their own nature do not stand in a relation of antecedence and sequence.
4. And the last, in every case to make enumeration’s so complete, and reviews so general, that I might be assured that nothing was omitted.”

Descartes then applies the method to itself––challenging his own reasoning and reason itself–– in order to derive three things that are not susceptible to doubt and which support each other to form a stable foundation for the method:

1. that something has to be there to do the doubting (I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am ( i cannot doubt that I think)
2. The method of doubt cannot doubt reason as it is based on reason.
3. By reason there exists a God and God is the guarantor that reason is not misguided.

Thus Descartes discovers his first item of indefeasible knowledge, his famous cogito, ergo sum, “I think therefore I am.” This foundationalism allows for the expansion of knowledge from first principles.Descartes saw the universe as dividing into two types of entities: mental and physical. Following Aristotle, Descartes understood the universe as consisting of substances which have essential properties; the essence of physical reality is spacial is extension, while the essence of mind is thinking (any state of consciousness). For Descartes we are essentially thinking beings but we do have a body which is completely determined by the laws of physics; the mind is free the body is determined; the mind is indivisible but the body is infinitely divisible. Therefore mind is eternal while the body is mortal; we know our own minds in a way we cannot know the physical world. Each of us is innately aware of ourselves as a thinking thing, by an unmediated understanding I think, therefore I am. By posing this distinction between body and mind, physical and mental, Descartes was able to make room for science and religion to coexist thereby laying a large part of the foundation of the Enlightenment.

However, we have problems. How do these two domains, these two separate metaphysical realms relate to each other causally? how does the mind connect with the body and therefore, the external world; how can a nonmaterial mind can influence a material body? Descartes suggested that the pineal gland is “the seat of the soul”, or the place where the soul and the body connect. For Descartes the soul is unitary, and unlike many areas of the brain the pineal gland appears to be unitary as well; it seemed to offer a place where sensory stimulus could be unified––microscopic inspection reveals it is formed of two hemispheres. Descartes (incorrectly) believed that only humans have pineal glands, just as in his view, only humans have minds––thus the special nature of the pinneal gland is ‘proof’ that it is the point at which the mind and body connect. This also led him to the belief that animals cannot feel pain, and Descartes’ practice of vivisection––the dissection of live animals––became widely practised throughout Europe until the Enlightenment.

The “pineal solution” is problematic because its speculative and empirical nature seems to fly in the face of the first precept of methodic doubt; it is arrived at by guess work and intuition which contradicts Cartesian method. Some of Descartes’ followers tried to do away with this by suggesting that, in fact, there is no causal connection at all, that it is God himself who mediates our engagement with the physical realm. It is God who lifts our arm for us when we want it to go up or down. Hardly and improvement over the pinneal solution, the problems with this view are self evident.

Additionally, we ask ourselves : in light of this fundamental separation between mind and body, how do we reconcile the deterministic nature of the physical realm in which our bodies exist with the freedom of the will? Is free will merely epiphenominal in nature? The closest Descartes comes in responding to this is to claim that when we feel free we are free. Again by the rigourous methodic standards of his own method this does not seem sufficient as an explanation of such a fundamental problem. Given this separation between mind and body and the fundamental doubt we must maintain over the contents of our senses, we must now face the next problem of how we can know anything exists at all. Descartes deals with this in the following way: we can know true reality when we have clear and distinct ideas; God is good and perfect and as a result will only give us clear and distinct ideas (he is not a deceiver); the existence of God proves the validity of clear and distinct ideas; Clear and distinct ideas prove the existence of God. Clearly, these statements are not adequately defined or validated; the infuriating self validation of these propositions has been dubbed “the Cartesian Circle.”

From this we must logically continue by asking: how then do we know other people really exist? Can we make a compelling Cartesian case for the existence of other minds? The answer seems to be no. I cannot “know to be true” that anyone feels or knows anything at all. If I stick a needle into my thumb I feel pain; If I stick a needle into the thumb of the person next to me, I feel nothing at all––I can never observe or know someone else’s consciousness. Thus if we follow the Cartesian method we seem to be lead towards a scepticism with regards to the existence of other minds. Although it seems unlikely that this is a conclusion that Descartes would have desired, it does seem difficult to avoid a solipsistic end.

While responses to the problems have been discussing have been offered by the thinkers that followed Descartes––indeed, this has been one of the central tasks of modern philosophy––it seems that the crucial and lingering legacy of Cartesian thought lies in its revolutionary conception of the subject. In the 17th century, this conception laid the foundation for the modern idea of self and identity and set the mood––along with the thought of Bacon––for a new world of progress and mastery made possible by a new, radically humanistic perspective which objectified nature and, increasingly, humanity itself. As we noted above, the ontological model that results from Descartes’ method is dualistic: mind and body, internal and external; and this dualism favours the subject, the mind or the “I” as it is the seat of indefeasable knowledge. With Descartes the subject was no longer defined by ethics as it had been with Plato, Aristotle and Cicero; rather it became the locus of pure knowledge, uncertain of its relationship with the practical sphere of everyday life. Indeed, the modern idea of subjectivity owes much to Descartes as his dualist ontology penetrated deep in to the western psyche and has remained there despite the many criticisms of his method.

The last 250 years, however, have seen the emergence of diverse critical views of the Cartesian subject; but these critiques have not been with out problems of their own. For many contemporary critics, the various historical ideas of the subject are linked to power. The 17th century saw a philosophical movement towards the inner-self and away from the practical world. Descartes is seen as establishing a tradition which understands mental life as being contained inside the subject. Foucault claimed that this interiorisation of the subject was representative of a kind of rationality ‘designed’ for survival in the elite life of the courts; it separated public and private and delineated class and power. Merchant adds that this understanding of subjectivity contributed to the increasingly mechanised and emotionally detatched view of nature that had until then been viewed as living and female. And years before this, Marx too recognised the historic nature of Cartesian thought and understood that the social foundations on which is was based were shifting. Marx worked to establish a critique of subjectivity, pointing out that intellectual ideas are merely products of the conflicts of society; and claimed that what the Cartesian tradition––or philosophy in general––has taken to be human nature (the alienation of subjectivity) will be over come by communism which will place mankind in “the objective world.” The prophetic lucidity and immediate subsumption of the self into the larger reality of economic determinism which characterise Marx contrasts starkly with Freud’s claims that the ego, the conscious self, is essentially a construction of unconscious conflict between the id, reality and superego. Where Marx begins with the social conflicts that guide the historical consciousness of mankind towards a determined conclusion, Freud starts his study with the individual case of unconscious neurosis which can, through the development of general understandings via many case studies, be used to diagnose society and understand history––their deterministic claims about the fundamental nature of mankind rest in economics and psychology respectively.

Foucault’s contribution to the critique of the self does away with anything resembling human nature and views the subject as a construction; his project being the creation of “a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects.” Under the name of “discipline” Foucault represents a number of cultural technologies which, when implemented by the appropriate institution, create the subject, and collectively the modern soul. For Foucault the subject emerges at the intersection of cultural discourses on power and develops historically.

For Derrida too, the Cartesian subject is an historical creation which is undergoing its historical demise; but for Derrida the self emerges out of language rather than power. Derrida’s critique of the Cartesian “I” is that Descartes does not distinguish between “pronouncing” and thinking, thereby implying that the two are the same. However, in Derrida’s view once committed to language, the statement “I think, therefore I am” immediately inserts itself within “a system of deductions and protections” which must presuppose an Other. Thus, because of the inherent uncertainty of interpretation and the instability of meaning, pure self cannot exist––the very idea of it disappears in to language.

Looking into furthrer into the past we must also consider that, for Aristotle, the distinction between mind and body would not have been understood in the Cartesian sense. Aristotle discusses the soul, but the soul is not seen as being distinct from the creature itself––it describes form and essence. Indeed, even for Augustine, whose inward retreat into Christianity and rejection of the desires of the body can certainly be seen as a precursor to Descartes, this mind/body distinction is not clearly defined. This is not to say, however, that Aristotle and Augustine did not believe in the emotions; there is never the sense that these emotions are simply and only products of the mind, rather they appear more like experiences of the world which are understood as modalities of being.

Although Kant made the distinction between the world and observer, he nonetheless refuted Descartes by introducing the phenomenal view of understanding experience. He posited that the world cannot be understood in any way other than how we experience it––any understanding of the world is necessarily phenomenal because all knowledge begins with experience which forms the fundamental intuitions of the mind. Hegel’s phenoemenology continues and attemps to complete the work of Kant. Abandoning the hierarchichal notion of inner and outer experience, observer and object, Hegel views experience itself as being in the world as phenomena of the mind; for Hegel, it makes no sense to draw the distinction of things in themselves because in order for the phenomenon experience to occur there can be no separation between the mind and the world––it is all ‘Spirit.’

Above all it is Heidegger who seems to stand in direct opposition to Descartes, providing the turning point between the contemporary and the romantic critique of subjectivity. Hiedegger, in a sense, returns to and develops the ancient understanding of experience as an immediate unity of being in the world through a critique of the notions of time and presence. If Descartes asserts that that Being is reducable to two substances, mental and physical, then it is Hiedegger who most directly opposes this dualism by offering a unified conception of being in Dasein.

HEIDEGGER BBC 1-7

Passion In Manacles:
Hamlet, Orestes and the Crisis of Knowledge

Deprived of a rational foundation on which our understanding of the order the things can rest, our emotional engagement with the world is either held captive or is reduced to incoherent acts of barbaric violence and destruction. I believe this to be the central theme of Shakespeare’s Hamlet1 and the driving force behind the trial of Orestes in Aeschylus’ The Oresteia.2 With the intention of developing a deeper understanding of the nature of emotion in times of epistemological crisis, I offer here an analysis of Hamlet’s delay which will begin with a brief look at the three most common theories of explanation. Following this, I will introduce a fourth, less common view, that not only incorporates the themes and inconsistencies of the previous three, but also expresses an historically consistent condition in which reason, knowledge and understanding are in a state of disunity. Then, in order to add depth to the understanding of this theme, I will look briefly at the character of Oedipus as we know him through Sophocles’ Theban Plays.3 Finally, I will introduce for comparison the plight of Orestes which – as it comes through the trials of slaughter and madness and finally emerges into the light of reason and hope – mirrors the despair of Hamlet’s irremediable condition in a remarkable way.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1599-1601) is one of the most examined, criticised and discussed works in all of Western literature. And indeed, perhaps the most debated topic of the play is the Danish prince’s agonising hesitation in exacting revenge for the murder of his father. In searching for potential avenues – and there are a great many of them – by which one might arrive at some explanation for the prince’s inability to act, we find three basic theoretical themes dominating the field of inquiry: the theological, the moral and the psychological.4 Although they all hold positions which contribute to an understanding of the play in someway or another, it is my view that they are also incomplete because they adhere blindly to a restrictive assumption about the nature of art.

Hamlet is an intelligent man. He’s an intellectual, a philosopher and a lover of the theatre. He is also a protestant; he went to school in Wittenburg, home of Martin Luther and centre of Protestant intellectual life late in the 16th century. While this much is clear, what is not clear is the religious affiliation of the Ghost claiming to be the immortal spirit of Hamlet’s father: is the Ghost Catholic or Protestant? This problem is the crux of the theological approach to understanding Hamlet’s paralysis. In act 1 scene 4, Hamlet and Horatio consider the two protestant alternatives with regards to the nature of the Ghost: either it is a demon sent from hell to torment and corrupt Hamlet, or it is an angel come from heaven to instruct him. Neither of them consider purgatory, as this would have been a purely Catholic concern. The Ghost, however, describes himself in purely Catholic terms; he states that he comes from purgatory, which arouses confusion and raises questions about the credibility of his claims. Hamlet, being the rational, intelligent fellow that he is, decides that validation is needed; and, after proof of the Ghost’s claims are provided by Claudius’ reaction to the play within a play, it seems that Hamlet can act with a clear conscience. And he does act, killing Polonius by accident, mistaking him for Claudius. Hamlet then goes off to England and has no way of getting to Claudius until the end of the play. This theological perspective seems to neatly resolve the problem, showing that there is no real hesitation after all, and that Hamlet acts as expediently as conditions permit once sufficient evidence has been given to verify the claims of the Ghost.

But what of this instance just before the death of Polonius, where Hamlet approaches Claudius at prayer with a drawn dagger? He already has his evidence, which is confirmed by Horatio – his peer and most trusted friend – and yet he hesitates out of theological concerns which are purely Catholic. This confusing situation is then accentuated later in the play by the impassioned words of Laertes, Polonius’ son, come to seek revenge on Hamlet for the death of his father and sister:

To cut his throat i’th’ church. (IV, VII, 125)

Additionally, Hamlet himself speaks continually of his delay, questioning it again and again, from different perspectives; he is painfully aware of it until the waning moments of the play. Even after the truth of the Ghost’s claims are assured, we are still left with the problem of Catholic/Protestant confusion as well as the distinct impression that Hamlet is yearning for satisfaction but is restrained by something almost metaphysical. This approach, while explaining the delay in a superficial way, does not deal effectively with the deeper and more confusing questions it raises.

The theory that Hamlet’s hesitation is brought on by a certain moral repugnance aroused by the anachronistic nature of the conflict between 16th century Christian doctrine – whether it be Catholic or Protestant – and the essentially pagan act of revenge which he is asked to perform, only leads to more confusion. While it does, in a sense, render the Catholic/Protestant quagmire essentially moot by replacing it with the larger issue of Christianity vs. Paganism, this moral perspective is ultimately rendered impotent because it cannot find support in the play itself. Nowhere in the play do we find any real objections from the characters themselves with regards to the moral implications of revenge. We’ve seen Laertes’ response on the subject of revenge and, indeed, Hamlet himself seems quite satisfied after killing Polonius, all the while thinking it was Claudius that he was running through:

Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell.
I took thee for thy better. (III,IV, 31-32)

Hardly the words of someone who is incapacitated by the moral implications of revenge.

The psychological perspective, most famously posed by Ernest Jones in his book Hamlet and Oedipus,5 meticulously develops Freud’s interpretation of the play which asserts, as the title of Jones’ book suggests, that Hamlet delays because he is in the grips of a repressed Oedipal complex. Jones asserts not only that Claudius is an usurper politically, but that he has usurped Hamlet oedipally; in effect, Claudius has done what Hamlet desires to do: kill his father and sleep with his mother. This, according to Jones, explains Hamlet’s inability to act as a psychological problem: Hamlet cannot kill Claudius because of repressed Oedipal guilt and because, sub-conciously, he views Claudius to be nothing less than his own alter ego. Given that Claudius has usurped Hamlet both politically and psychologically, killing Claudius – according to this interpretation – would mean killing himself. This explains, perhaps, the frequent mixed references to suicide and revenge as well as the fact that it is only after the Queen is dead and Hamlet knows himself to be dying, that he is finally able to move swiftly and decisively in exacting his revenge; the restraint of Oedipal guilt is