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Science and Emotions after 1945
A Transatlantic Perspective
By Frank Biess, Daniel M. Gross The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-12651-7
CHAPTER 1
Humanists and the Experimental Study of Emotion WILLIAM M. REDDY
How should humanists approach experimental research in cognitive and affective neuroscience? By humanist I mean a scholar whose epistemological commitments dictate reliance on interpretive method. By interpretive method I mean any method that attempts to explore meaning, intention, or the meaningful dimensions of language, text, or action. It is appropriate to call such commitments humanist because their purpose is to grasp the personal. Humanists, in this sense, for the most part, assume that there are persons and attempt to acquire knowledge about persons as persons, where a person is an entity with a measure of self-consciousness, an entity that acquires and deploys linguistic and behavioral repertoires while engaged in formulating, weighing, and pursuing goals. Humanists do not pursue explanation of personal phenomena as mechanisms, cause-effect chains, or algorithms; the assumption is that persons are flexible, to a very significant extent, and that their flexibility is achieved by reflection and manifest in intentional behavior called action.
By cognitive and affective neuroscience I mean the lines of research deriving from experimental psychology, on the one hand, and neurophysiology, on the other, whose union has been made possible by brain-imaging technologies and other methodological breakthroughs. In these closely related fields it is now possible to study such classic phenomena of experimental psychology as priming effects, the Stroop effect, cognitive load, subliminal perception, and automaticity while mapping the brain activations of participants. Affective responses, whose close integration with cognition was already being recognized prior to the imaging revolution, have also been subjected to new kinds of scrutiny. Entirely new concepts have been devised to make sense of these findings, such as "top-down processing," "mirror neurons," "embodied cognition," and "emotion regulation." At present, researchers are obliged to consider the neurological dimension of any explanatory scheme they devise for cognitive or affective phenomena and to gather evidence on it if possible.
These developments have coincided with a remarkable convergence of interests and approaches around the question of emotions across a number of disciplines, including philosophy, anthropology, history, and literary studies. Do these two trends have anything in common? Can their proponents learn from each other? Some humanists have sounded a note of caution, asking why anthropologists, historians, and other scholars who rely on interpretive method should concern themselves at all with developments in neuroscience. Jan Plamper recently raised this question, warning historians of emotions: "At bottom, both Barbara [Rosenwein] and [William Reddy] are saying that scientific hypotheses confirm their interpretation of historical data. Yet others could have interpreted these data differently or adduced different data in the first place. They could have cited competing scientific hypotheses in support. All of which suggests that it is problematic to invoke universalizing natural science to bolster contingent humanities claims." The epistemological framework of neuroscientific research may be too different from that which prevails among scholars in "interpretive" disciplines such as history and anthropology. As a result, convergent or parallel findings may be intriguing, but they do not add up; that is, findings about emotional striving or effort on one side of the epistemological divide cannot be used to confirm similar findings on the other side. In addition to this problem of incommensurability, as some have called it, Plamper notes that, in the large interdisciplinary space of neuroscientific research, there are many models and many trends. How is the scholar who turns to such research to be sure that she is not just picking out trends that happen to resonate with her own interests?
The discussion that follows will (1) examine the historical development of theories about the concept of person; (2) consider whether experimentalists who treat personhood or consciousness as strictly a mechanical matter are engaged in performative contradiction, a form of contradiction that, it has been shown, has plagued social scientific and philosophical thinking about human nature in recent centuries; (3) examine a trend in emotion research among experimentalists and neuroscientists that sees the brain as the support of an interpreter or agent; and (4) suggest that the line of incommensurability should be drawn, not between experimental neuroscience and the humanist disciplines, but within neuroscience.
The Concept of the Person
That historians, literary scholars, and others have become interested in the emotions recently is partly a reflection of a renewed interest in the history of the person or self. This renewal of interest followed what might be termed a poststructuralist interlude that effectively put into question every aspect of personhood that had previously been accepted as commonsensical among Western-influenced humanists. That a person possessed rationality and intentions and used meaningful language—these assumptions were forcefully challenged. (Interestingly, poststructuralists had little to say about emotions, at least at first.) The claim was that these assumptions (that persons were rational, intentional, meaningful) were the inadvertent side effects of certain arbitrary ways of using language, such as the illusion of "presence" denounced by Derrida or the idea of an "author" questioned by Foucault. This renewal of interest in the history of the person also follows on the development of a powerful critique of gendered, racial, ethnic, and Orientalist practices that had wrongly justified the preeminence of the adult white European male. This preeminence had, for a long time, been explained in terms of a superior rationality and self-discipline, conceptualized in terms of a now questionable understanding of the person.
While its excesses have led to its partial eclipse, the "linguistic turn" has nonetheless accomplished a salutary clearing of the decks. What a person is and how a person may come to be are no longer regarded as self-evident or as matters that historians can afford to leave to the care of philosophers or psychologists. Recent Western-influenced cultural anthropology even before the linguistic turn, insofar as it has focused on cultural features of personhood, self-understanding, gender, and identity, had also brought forward lessons about the great variability in what counts as persons in various places, how persons are imagined to be structured, and how they interact.
To summarize one thread among these lessons, cultural historians and other humanists have come to recognize that in Western-influenced contexts for the last twenty-five hundred years Western thinkers, moralists, and ideologues relied on various commonsense schemas to describe persons, schemas that are actually the parochial constructs of a particular tradition, with no special claim to universality. Since the Greeks, schemas of personhood have generally included what are sometimes called faculties—each author or school drawing on a variable list of such faculties that included the will, reason, memory, imagination, emotion, senses, and appetites. Persons were, in Western-influenced contexts, believed to be frequently drawn into internal tugs-of-war in which, for example, reason contended with appetite for influence over the will or emotion dictated goals to reason or else overwhelmed reason. In works of literature, one sometimes finds these struggles staged as allegorical internal debates in which personified Reason and Desire argue with each other, each attempting to win Will over to its own side. (A prominent example is the thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose.) Christian theologians believed that original sin had resulted in a weakening of reason and the will and a strengthening of the passions, especially the passion of sexual desire, but also including avarice, gluttony, anger, and others. The historian John Martin has argued that, well into the early modern period, the European self was viewed as "porous," that is, open to all kinds of outside influences, including grace, temptation, and magic spells.
Descartes's rethinking of this tradition aimed at situating a self or mind within an entirely mechanical universe. Descartes did this by rigidly separating the world of the res extensa (things that take up space) and that of the res cogitans (things that think). Their sole point of interface, he believed, was in the brain, which mediated between sensory input and mind. He also argued that appetites and passions communicated with, influenced, or shook the mind through the pineal gland. Controversy soon arose as to whether personal behavior was strictly mechanical and predictable, as, for example, Thomas Hobbes argued, relying on a model derived from geometry, or included a spiritual component, as Descartes believed. Locke avoided the issue; for him, the mind was possessed of reason and received all inputs from the senses. From such seventeenth-century attempts at an explanation of human nature arose a very new vision of the person. Compatibly with the worldview of the scientific revolution, the person was imagined to be free of outside influences except for sensation. But the new thinking about the person continued to rely on the old vocabulary of faculties. In particular, the relation between reason and passion was imagined differently, but the two were quite consistently distinguished, as were other faculties such as memory and imagination. With the rise of a late modern secular outlook, the self has been reconceived as isolated, autonomous, but still containing faculties. One can see the old faculty style of thinking at work in the Freudian notions of the id, ego, and superego.
Such Western-influenced approaches to the person can be contrasted with, for example, that of the medieval South Asian sect known as the Kaula, as recently described by David Gordon White. Kaula ritual focused on the propitiation of yoginis, who were petulant, powerful goddesses first mentioned in sixth-century CE Sanskrit manuscripts. Kaula initiates sought to win the yoginis' favor by offerings of a number of prohibited substances, including blood, meat, fish, wine, and semen. After eating these offerings, the dangerous yoginis revealed themselves as ravishing young women willing to confer various supernatural powers on their devotees. Just as humans offered yoginis substances that pleased them, such as blood and semen, so yoginis conferred their favors through the sexual discharge of their vulvas. In Kaula ritual a yogini would take possession of a woman, whose female discharge during coitus (maithuna) was believed to be from the yogini herself. This precious fluid was consumed by practitioners along with the transformed offerings of other unclean substances. Drinking female discharge was not intended to be arousing, according to White, and has nothing to do with "the 'bliss' and 'fun' offered by the modern-day Tantric sex trade." Instead: "The 'happy ending' of these rituals is described time and again in the Tantras as well as the adventure and fantasy literature of the medieval period ...: both Yogini and Vira [virile hero] fly up into the sky, to sport there together for eons of time." The exchange of reproductive substances also transformed the Kaula initiate into a member of a divine clan or lineage able to pass its secret knowledge down through the ages.
In this cult's thinking, as was common more generally in South Asia, no distinction is made between reason and passion; the self is not divided between a spiritual part and a material part. Spiritual transformations involve the whole self, including what in Western thinking would have been called the body and its appetites. In the South Asian Sanskrit tradition, pleasure was the fruit of careful training. According to Daud Ali, the sex act entailed no pleasure unless it was carried out with "a vast array of accoutrements, material, verbal, and gestural, which were thought to be integral to its enjoyment."
Among Christian theologians, by contrast, pleasure was little more than an inborn incentive to satisfy the physical needs of the flesh. So Peter Lombard explained it in 1154: "And we say that concupiscence is always evil, because it is a burden and a penalty of sin, but it is not always sinful. For often we see that the Savior took pleasure according to the flesh in one or another thing, such as resting after labors, eating when hungry. Such enjoyment is no sin unless it be immoderate." Examples of cultural configurations that do not rely on anything resembling faculty theory or the spiritual-material divide implicit in the distinction between reason and passion could be multiplied at will.
The anthropologist Unni Wikan found that the Balinese also do not distinguish between reason and emotion, collapsing both into keneh (the "feeling-mind"). In Bali, when Wikan did fieldwork there in the 1980s, shaping the feeling-mind was an urgent collective concern. Many people strove to avoid even the slightest expression or experience of a negative emotion such as anger, fear, or grief. Such feelings rendered one vulnerable to black magic, which was believed to be responsible for approximately half the deaths on the island. Negative emotions meant a breach in the boundaries, or defenses, of the person, a draining away of strength. They were also regarded as contagious. To display grief after the death of a loved one was to endanger public health. Wikan's informants did not merely strive to avoid expressing negative emotions. By displaying the "bright face" they believed that they could gradually transform the feeling-mind. These two parts of the self, face and feeling-mind, were thus in constant, dynamic interaction.
In the languages of Southeast Asia, generally, no distinction is made between emotion and thought, just as none can be found in Homeric Greek or ancient Hebrew. In the Sanskrit tradition, there is no word corresponding to emotion. In the Kaula world, sexual arousal is not conceived of as a mere function of the material body. In all these examples, one can readily recognize that there are persons, that is, entities with intentions, capable of meaningful utterances and of action. In addition, in many non-Western contexts, as in many past Western-influenced contexts, personhood is not confined to human beings. More often, humans are just one type of person, and fundamental distinctions are often made among humans as well.
The Public Sphere and Performative Contradiction
Just as many scholars in humanist disciplines have learned that they must not take the construction of the person for granted, so they have learned to scrutinize with great care the relationships between authors and publics. In Western-influenced contexts, such relationships are practical realizations of a specific, local model of the person. With reference to authors and publics, one of the salient issues that arose during the poststructuralist interlude was the problem of "performative contradiction." Performative contradiction means acting in a way that conflicts with what one says. For example, it would be a performative contradiction to work hard to demonstrate to an audience that there is no such thing as a person. Such a goal, the meaningful practices it requires, and the assumptions those practices entail about the audience imply a strong belief in the existence of persons. One of the grounds on which Habermas critiqued Foucault's work was that Foucault fell into such performative contradiction. Hilary Putnam has similarly criticized Richard Rorty's pragmatism for failing to accord with Rorty's own intellectual practices.
But one way of elucidating Foucault's critique of the modern social sciences would be to say that social scientists systematically fall into performative contradiction themselves. The activities of social scientists are grounded on the assumption that their research is shared among, and evaluated on its merits by, rational persons, that is, their fellow social science experts organized into scientific publics. Yet the content of much social scientific work is grounded on the assumption that individual humans and human societies behave mechanically, operating on the basis of chains of cause and effect that can be uncovered through empirical research similar to that carried out by astronomers, physicists, and chemists. Such mechanical causation of behavior can be conceptualized as not rational, for example, when social psychologists explore "how stereotypes of social groups become activated automatically on the mere perception of the distinguishing features of a group member." Or the rationality of actors can be conceptualized as their so rigidly pursuing their own advantage that their behavior can be summarized by algorithms, as in rational choice theory.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Science and Emotions after 1945 by Frank Biess, Daniel M. Gross. Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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