Brann.indd © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007, Unit 6, Th e Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW [Expositions 1.1 (2007) 053–070] Expositions (print) ISSN 1747-5368 doi:10.1558/expo.v1i1.53 Expositions (online) ISSN 1747-5376 Question: Are Human Beings Ultimately Aff ective? EVA BRANN St. John’s College, Annapolis Th is paper considers arguments for fi nding human beings to be centrally rational or basically aff ective. Th e former view, initiated by the predomi- nant philosophers of antiquity, prevailed in the West until Spinoza and (among those after him) Heidegger made aff ectivity primary. Th e thesis is that this choice is not primarily psychological but ontological and that the question must be pursued metaphysically. I. Th e psychic hierarchy Th e question of the title is asked, in various ways, over and over in the philosophical and psychological tradition of the West. Or better, it is answered in various ways, often without being asked. It is inherent in the dominant model of the human soul of the Platonic-Aristotelian mainstream, a soul that has two chief parts, one of which is a-rational [alogon] while the other has reason [logon echon], as Aristotle says in the Nicomachean Ethics (1102 a 29).1 Both parts are subdivided in vari- ous ways that I will return to later, but the aff ects, or the passions, are always located in the a-rational part. “A-rational,” reasonless, does not mean “irrational,” unreasonable; only reasonable beings can be unrea- sonable, for only they can contravene their reason. Moreover, the a-ra- tional part of the soul is regarded as having, in turn, parts amenable to reason, though not actively rational. Hence arises the question whether the passions are ultimately obedient, recalcitrant, or just indiff erent to reason. And if they are in some mode or degree fi nally ungovernable by reason, then the question is whether they are so as mere, brute, in- defeasible facts of our psychic constitution regarded as insuperably and ultimately non- or a-rational, or as evidence of a defi cient or perverted rationality, or perhaps even as testimony to our ultimate, healthily in- Brann.indd 53Brann.indd 53 15/06/2007 11:09:1715/06/2007 11:09:17 54 Question: Are Human Beings Ultimately Aff ective? © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007 suppressible aff ectivity. Th e Western tradition is quite routinely termed “rationalist.” If, how- ever, the question proposed, “Are human beings ultimately aff ective?” is sometimes answered positively from within that tradition, we should perhaps reconsider that label. I will begin with three preliminary observations about the early clas- sical psychology, where by psychology, a word apparently not used by the Greeks and rare in English before the nineteenth century, I mean the theoretical soul-framework of human beings, the “account” [logos] of their psychic economy. First, the account that assigns to the human soul two—subdividable —major parts is very persistent. It extends into modern theory; for instance, it appears in Freud’s elaborately worked out “topography” of the soul, which has broadly two locations, or systems, the Uncon- scious and the Conscious. Very interesting questions, to be considered a little later, arise in modernity—as in antiquity—about a third mid- dle division, its subordination and function. So also in contemporary neurophysiology a division between the feelings, including emotion, and “higher order” cognition is an assumed working hypothesis, to be confi rmed or modifi ed. Th ese variously elaborated theories seem to rest on our ever-repeated experiences of an original opposition of psychic events. Th ere is the physical sense that feelings take place in the heart or at the skin; think- ing seems to exercise the head or brain. Th ere is the experience that what my reason commands, another self resists: “For what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I” (Rom. 7.15). And, more particularly, there is the sense that it is the body which is the locus of a passive opposition: “Th e spirit indeed is willing, but the fl esh is weak” (Matt. 26.41). Indeed, and this is the second observation, the lower part of the soul is usually thought of as more involved in the body. Th e body in time, as the receptor and conduit of the senses, is thought of as itself passive and as a source of passions in the soul, as well as a recalcitrant resister —resistant not by reason of activity but of passivity—to the legiti- mate commands of the soul’s reasoning part. Th e soul’s vulnerability to Brann.indd 54Brann.indd 54 15/06/2007 11:09:4415/06/2007 11:09:44 Brann 55 © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007 passion, its capacity for suff ering, is expressed in the root meaning of pa/qoj, the Greek word for “passion.” Its aff ectivity is, in this scheme, thought of as proportionate to its nearness to the body, its never quite perspicuous involvement with the fl esh and its aff ections. And third, this mainstream psychology represents the appropriation of the soul by the philosophers in this respect, that the part in which the passions are located is named as a privative of the rational part: without reason [a-logon] versus having reason [logon echon]. Th ere are various ways to account for the priority of lo/goj (reason and its ar- ticulate speech) in the traditional psychologies: 1. Whatever is refl ected upon and expressed is ipso facto in the me- dium of rational speech, which is therefore inevitably the domi- nant capacity; whoever thinks about anything is, willy-nilly, fi rst and last, in the apprehensive rather than the aff ective mode —doing rather than done to. Th us the primacy of reason in a psychology is simply inherent in the fact that it is a lo/goj, an account. Th ose who like to give verbal accounts will think that reason is to be in charge just by reason of their métier. It will be a professional preference—or deformation. 2. Another cause for according reason a higher position might be a judgment that disciplined action, which is to say vigorous ful- fi llment of one’s capacities, is superior to supine receptivity, to being mere formable material, the subject of infl uences, be they of the external or internal senses—that to be moved is less fi ne that to move oneself. 3. Again, it might be that, just as experience at any age shows that the soul or consciousness is often at odds with itself, so experi- ence in maturity teaches that if the eff ortfully analytic—I am tempted to use the term “digestive”—rational part is at work and ultimately in charge, the passions are transubstantiated into fuel for human activity and well-being. Here this psychology becomes an ethics—the ethics of reason as the guide to human good and goodness. Brann.indd 55Brann.indd 55 15/06/2007 11:09:4515/06/2007 11:09:45 56 Question: Are Human Beings Ultimately Aff ective? © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007 Th e chief proponent of this identity known to us and the fi rst full- fl edged psychologist in the sense given above is Plato’s Socrates, speak- ing in the dialogue Republic, where he gives the psycho-ontological rationale for his notorious claim that to know and to be good are the same. Th is position can fairly be said to establish a tradition, already expressed more aphoristically among the Presocratics, of aggression by reason toward the aff ects and their poetic expression. When Socrates introduces his no-quarter-given critique of emotive poetry by referring to “that ancient diff erence between philosophy and poetry” (Republic 607b), he must surely have puzzled Homer in Hades sorely, for the bard had sung of no such battle; moreover, he must have driven Aris- tophanes in Athens to a sarcastic pursing of the month, since the comic poet thought—witness the Clouds—that philosophers, a tribe to him indistinguishable from sophists, were a nasty novelty. However, when Socrates says “ancient” [palaia], he probably means it fi guratively for “fundamental,” “close to the human roots.” Th us, ever since, in the main tradition, reason has been prosecutorial toward the passions in life and in literature, while they have been mutely persistent. But, of course, the tradition being essentially dialectical, the priva- tion of rationality, the “a-rational” part of the soul, is upheld from time to time in a positive mode—a fancy way of saying that the opposition mounts a deliberate defense of the passions as more basic to human nature than reason. I know of no such explicit initiative in antiquity. Homer and the tragedians, Socrates’ antagonists (albeit well-loved and well-known by him), don’t argue back; they simply, as I said, exist and persist. But in modern times such reaction sometimes takes the form of dry realism, as when Hume says, famously, in the Treatise of Human Nature, “Reason is, and ought to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other offi ce than to serve and obey them” (Hume 1960, 2.3.3). At other times it appears as romanticism, the philosophi- cally knowledgeable revolt of the poets in behalf of the emotion-infused imagination. Th us Shelley, in his “Defense of Poetry,” which ends with the announcement that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” claims in the beginning that “reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow Brann.indd 56Brann.indd 56 15/06/2007 11:09:4515/06/2007 11:09:45 Brann 57 © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007 to the substance,” and that “poetry is connate with the origin of man.” As “Romantic reaction” is a descriptive term for the particular roman- tic movement (c. 1780–1850) that followed the enlightenment of the philosophes and the formalism of Classical artists, so, in general the vin- dication of emotion seems to be a reactive in the life of ideas—while in the life of people the reverse takes place: Th e aff ective life is given; rationality is imposed. Finally the reestablishment of the emotions is a more recent initiative in “emotion studies.” It appears as a “New Romanticism,” an attempt “to return the passions to their central and defi ning role in our lives that they have so long and persistently been denied, to limit the pre- tensions of ‘objectivity’ and self-demeaning reason which have exclu- sively ruled Western philosophy, religion, and science since the days of Socrates,” and to do this, curiously enough, by showing that the emo- tions “have a ‘logic’ of their own.” Th ese quotations are taken from the preface to Robert C. Solomon’s infl uential book, Th e Passions (1976, xvi, 14). Since then, neuroscience in particular has turned to the long- neglected study of emotions. Th e brain mechanisms subserving the emotions are apparently all subcortical, which means they are evolu- tionarily older than the “higher,” that is, more recent, brain functions and correspondingly more basic to survival. Some of these fi ndings are set out for lay readers in Antonio Damasio’s Th e Feeling of What Hap- pens (1999). II. Th e terms of the question To shape a question about the siting of aff ects in the psychic economy is curiously diffi cult. I have chosen to ask whether they are ultimate, from a sense that something about their primacy or fi nality is worth fi nding out, but without quite knowing what I am looking for. For example, an answer that is not satisfying is the evolutionary one: Ultimately, that is to say, fi rst in our species’ development, long before we became animals having reason, our ancestors were animals having emotions. Th e emotionality of animals, particularly of the primates that do not have fully developed verbal rationality is currently undoubted by evolutionists and animal ethnologists; it was certainly Darwin’s nec- Brann.indd 57Brann.indd 57 15/06/2007 11:09:4515/06/2007 11:09:45 58 Question: Are Human Beings Ultimately Aff ective? © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007 essary central assumption in his recently revived book Th e Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1998 [1872], Ch. 1). Yet temporal priority cannot simply determine present hierarchy; how a species evolved cannot defi nitively tell what an individual really is. Th us, in the case of the emotions, to say that they are subserved by a primitive brain structure does not necessarily imply that they are primary in our psychic constitution or that they ought to be given primacy in our conduct of life. In fact, it might be taken to mean the opposite: “primitive” is not necessarily an honorifi c. If biological primitiveness, that is, our evolutionary past, doesn’t fi ll the bill, perhaps the inquiry should turn to the possible primacy of the passions in the present human condition. Should we rehabilitate the passions from being the privation, the a-logical aspect of our human being, and accord them the honor of fi rstness in our evolved human- ity? Th at seems to be something we would want to think out, since it aff ects fi rst our self-management and then, as an immediate con- sequence, our conduct toward others. But even attention to the Stoic preoccupation with that issue as well as a lot of reading of the romantic rebels convinces me that it is a question satisfactorily answerable only on the basis of an even prior problem. Is our aff ectivity ultimate in the sense of being irreducible—irreducible to, that is radically independ- ent of, our rational being? Should readers think this is a curiously unlikely perplexity, I must remind them that what was the most widespread, inclusive, long-last- ing and modernity-anticipating movement of antiquity, Stoicism, held just the opposite opinion: that the passions in fact ultimately come under lo/goj, that they are le/kta (utterances), as they said, namely propositions. Th us they held that the passions were judgments, albeit mistaken ones: the appraisal of an event or circumstance as mattering when it doesn’t. Th is view turns out to be extremely sophisticated, al- though it is reductively physicalist. To reduce a complex story to a few words, the mainstream Stoics think that some external incidents cause a kind of upset or upheaval, a blip of turbulence in the wave-like me- dium [pneuma] that organizes and animates bodies and is the network of rationality carrying information to and decisions from a command Brann.indd 58Brann.indd 58 15/06/2007 11:09:4515/06/2007 11:09:45 Brann 59 © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007 center [hegemonikon] located in the heart.2 If this upset is accepted, that is, allowed to resonate undamped, a passion state takes place. Ne- ostoicism, the claim that emotions are ultimately rational appraisals of our particular condition, is a current movement; its chief proponent is Martha Nussbaum in Upheavals of Th ought (2001). Stoic theory then gives a clear answer to the question of the ultimacy of aff ectivity. It is not basic: propositional rationality is. It is not clear to me that either the old or the new Stoics succeed in this rationalist reduction. Somewhere a moment of pure disturbance, what the Old Stoics themselves called a pre-passion [propatheia], steps in. But even if, or especially if, this diffi culty is set aside, there remains something counterintuitive in the Stoic position. It seems to reduce to one side, that of a fi nal rationality, our (or at least my) sense that human feeling is indeed indefeasibly suff used by thought—and the converse. An opposite alternative is the claim that human beings are ultimately aff ective. Th e great—and somewhat abstruse—proponent of this po- sition is Spinoza. Th e diff erence between him and the “romantics” is that, in the Ethics (1843 [1675]), he sites the ultimacy of the aff ec- tive human mind in a daring metaphysics. Again, abbreviating uncon- scionably: God and nature are identical, and human beings are one of God’s ways of being, his “modes.” Human beings are desire; “Desire [an aff ect] is the very essence of man…” (Part III, “Defi nitions of the Aff ects,” no. 1). It is the conscious appetite for remaining in being, for active, productive persistence, and in this it is indeed a way of being God, who is nature in all its drive toward self-maintenance. Th erefore, aff ect (Spinoza’s term: aff ectus) is absolutely ultimate. But it is not pas- sive; the aff ects turn into passions when inadequately comprehended. For Spinoza “inadequate” means “unclear and non-comprehensive.” Th us passions are turned into actions through being adequately, that is clearly and comprehensively understood. Th erefore, virtue is knowl- edge, and the Ethics is a guide to adequate knowledge. Yet even pas- sions comprehended and so turned into virtues are fi rst and last aff ects. It is no wonder that Spinoza was highly regarded by the Romantics. My opening question was about the standing of aff ect in the human constitution. So, then, what is meant by “aff ect”? Brann.indd 59Brann.indd 59 15/06/2007 11:09:4615/06/2007 11:09:46 60 Question: Are Human Beings Ultimately Aff ective? © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007 Aff ectus for Spinzoa (usually rendered “emotion”) is an aff ectio (usu- ally rendered “modifi cation”) of the body as it is represented in the mind (Ethics, Part III, defi nition 3). It is the idea of an impingement, external or internal, that increases or diminishes the body’s power. Th us the aff ections are “doings to” [ad-facere] the body and the aff ects are “done to” us. So they are in the fi rst instance, that is, until mastered by the mind, passivities or passions. Eventually, in the eighteenth century, the aff ects came to be generally called “emotions,” “out-movings” or displacements of the soul. Th e term recognizes the fact that aff ects are experienced as—or rather that they are the experience of—some sort of turbulence, which usually, though not exclusively, originates in an external aff ection of the senses and resonates in an internal sensibility. Moreover, though Spinoza’s metaphysical theory of the fundamental aff ectivity of all Being can scarcely be mainstreamed, there is some- thing that rings very true to human experience in the basic notion of emotion as being defi nable as a sense of expansion or contraction, of the well-being or dis-ease of consciousness. To me the deepest diffi cul- ty in getting hold of aff ect, feeling, passion, emotion, sentiment—the heap of terms gathering together the whole gamut of connotations —is to understand how being in the passive mode can be experienced as vigorously animating us and as being the voucher for our being alive. I believe that Spinoza was preoccupied with this very problem in looking for a way to turn passive aff ect active and thereby passion into virtue, in the primary Latin sense of virtus: effi cacy, power. So now, with some meaning accrued, are we ultimately aff ective? Stoics defi ne us as animals having reason who assent to propositions evaluating their physical turbulences; Spinoza understands us as beings whose essence is desire, the longing to persist productively. Th e main- stream opinion is that we are animals with ultimately split natures. We are schizophrenic at root: passionate and thoughtful, emotional and rational, passively aff ected, actively controlling. It is within this dual nature that my question arises most clearly and that the answer is of the greatest consequence. III. Th e psychic constitution Th e thought that of the two roots of our nature neither one is ulti- Brann.indd 60Brann.indd 60 15/06/2007 11:09:4615/06/2007 11:09:46 Brann 61 © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007 mately reducible to the other is not the same as the notion of their mutual interaction or suff usion. No single word displays this truth bet- ter than the name of reason’s—as the Germans say—“ownmost” activ- ity: philosophy. For that word combines a passion term and a thought term: philos, “loving friend” and sophia, “skilled wisdom.” So from its fi rst use by Heracleitus, who together with his accomplice-adversary Parmenides, co-founded the enterprise so named and started it on its dialectical way, philosophy was understood as passionate to the core: the longing for genuine Being and the desire to capture it in words. As thought is moved by aff ect so, conversely, human feeling, the pas- sive yet vital movement of the soul, is shot through with reason, at least in human beings. Th at fact shows itself above all in the most apparent structure of the emotions, their “intentionality.” In its modern use this term refers to the directedness or “aboutness” of acts of consciousness: We think this or that and of or about this and that. Emotions too seem to be intentional: We love or hate this and that, are in fear of or feel bold about this and that. It is this feature of emotions that we express quite easily. Getting the “feel” of the feeling is much harder. Moreover, the Stoics say that every emotion is a proposition misguidedly assented to. We claim, wrongly: “I am afraid of losing my child—and so I ought to be.” Th e Stoics, in contrast, actually argue that grief for a lost child is a mistake. Whether or not that is really all such an emotion is—a very counterintuitive claim—it surely is part of most feeling that we are positively or negatively inclined to it. For example, Goethe’s Faust makes his salvation or damnation depend on his ability to reject present contentment. May I perish, he says, “Were I to say to just one moment / Oh, stay awhile, thou art so fair” (Goethe 1949, Part 1, 1702). And so it is with all emotions. We receive or reject them by a mental mo- tion of assent which appears to be separable from the pleasure or pain attendant on the emotion. Furthermore, the emotions have a taxonomy, an ordered interrela- tion, about which there is, to be sure, no agreement, for writers about the emotions are fertile in personal schemes. Nevertheless, such order- ing would not be feasible if the aff ects were not amenable to rational analysis. Brann.indd 61Brann.indd 61 15/06/2007 11:09:4615/06/2007 11:09:46 62 Question: Are Human Beings Ultimately Aff ective? © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007 But the most interesting application of reason to emotion, the thorni- est theoretically and most consequence-laden practically, is that of con- trol and rectifi cation. Both Plato and Aristotle think that parts of the a-rational soul are amenable to reason, though not as actively reasoning but rather as accepting reason’s rule. Aristotle says in the Nicomachean Ethics: But perhaps nonetheless there is in the soul something that must be regarded as besides reason that opposes and goes counter to it…But this also seems to have a part in reason…for it obeys the rule of rea- son… (1102 b). How it is possible that what is not-reason should hear reason is a perplexity. Th is much is clear, however: that though there is perhaps some mutuality, the relation is conceived asymmetrically, since it is reason that is to rule, and passion, of course located in the a-rational [alogon] part of the soul, that is to be ruled. Passion may blind-side, blank out, deform reason, but reason informs the feelings, which are after all, conceived as aff ects, passivities. Moreover, it isn’t clear that the aff ect that suff uses, as I said, the higher power is not perhaps specifi c to, even located within, that power, a conception that complicates the understanding of the nature of lo/goj but maintains its immunity to lower emotional contagion. In the Platonic Symposium, for example, Pausanias distinguishes between a Heavenly and a Popular Aphrodite (180 d), and in the Phaedrus, Socrates assigns to the soul, in the fi gure of a chariot whose charioteer represents reason, two horses, which rep- resent the impulsive parts of the soul. One of these is by nature close to reason while the other can be subdued but only by reason becoming forcible (246 b). And, of course, the ancients knew all about spoiled reason, the quibbling tricks of a logical cunning that is in the service of gain and power. Th e practitioners of this manipulative reason appear in the Platonic dialogues as Socrates’ opponents and in Aristophantic comedy as Socrates himself. Th ey are the “wisdom-mongers,” the soph- ists, as opposed to the “wisdom-seekers,” the philosophers. Neither the interaction nor the subordination of the parts of the soul gives a determinate answer to the question of the ultimacy of one ele- ment or to the prior question, whether the parts are indeed fi nally in Brann.indd 62Brann.indd 62 15/06/2007 11:09:4615/06/2007 11:09:46 Brann 63 © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007 some sense autonomous. Before the passage quoted above, Aristotle says that it scarcely mat- ters whether the parts [moria] of the soul are real and the soul is “part- able” [meriston] in the way that a body or any whole is, or whether these distinctions exist only in thought, as convexity is distinguishable from concavity. According to him, all this is of no importance for dis- tinguishing the thoughtful from the thought-less part of the soul. Indeed, introspective experience is the guide here; a fi rst phenom- enological description of our psychic economy has to be, and is even for contemporary neuroscience, experiential. For how would the brain scientist know what physical structure or event to look for without soul-like terms to guide the investigation? Th at said, however, it does turn out that the diff erent “parts” of the soul, above all the emotive and the reasonable parts, are locally, structurally, and functionally distinct: Very grossly, the limbic system on the border between the brain stem and forebrain (containing among other structures the hypothalamus and amygdala) is associated with emotional life, and the forebrain, in particular the cerebral cortex, with rational functions (see Raius 2002, 202–38). Brain science thus appears to give a physical warrant to talk about the “parts” (or later, the “faculties”) of the soul, be they taken an emergent epiphenomena of the brain or non-physical entities sub- served by neurophysicological structures. It seems to me, therefore, that the grand fi gure which underlies Pla- to’s Republic, assigning to the soul a constitution which, when writ large resembles a polity, has plausibility and usefulness. It suggests that we may appropriately ask: Who or what rules, serves, provides, and is what we ultimately are? But those questions require that the two main parts of the soul be somewhat more diff erentiated. IV. Th e psychic parts From Plato to Freud the soul or psyche has been conceived, recall, as double in the basic sense of having two parts, a-rational [alogon] and having reason [logon echon], but, on closer inspection, as having three, and thence, in later authors, through division or addition on to many. Th us a count of the sub-parts of the soul used by Th omas Aquinas in Brann.indd 63Brann.indd 63 15/06/2007 11:09:4615/06/2007 11:09:46 64 Question: Are Human Beings Ultimately Aff ective? © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007 his Summa Th eologiae3 yields a dozen, even leaving out the lowest rung of distinctions, although even this multiplicity is fundamentally tripar- tite. Freud, at least in his “topography” of the psyche, laid out in the essay “Th e Unconscious” (1915), distinguishes the Unconscious (Ucs), the Preconscious (Pcs), and the Conscious (Cs), again a triple. Th us the schema that seems to underlie all psychology, whether by way of adoption, adaptation, or counterproposals, are the triple parti- tions of Plato and Aristotle. Th e parts of the Platonic soul-structure, its “forms or dispositions” [eide kai ethe], are set out in the Republic (435 d). Th ey comprise the rational part [logistikon] and the non-ra- tional part, which is divided in two, the spirited [thymos] and the ap- petitive [epithymetikon, 439 d-e]. Of these the lowest, desirous part is specifi cally called a-rational; the middle part, which includes feelings of shame and pride, is shown to be particularly responsive to reason, but is not itself reason. One might say it is reasonable but not rational. Th ere is, in the tradition, some argument whether desire and appetite, the low-grade aff ects comprising the lowest part, are to be counted among the passions proper. But the motions of the soul belonging to the middle part are surely emotions; in fact one translator, Raymond Larson, renders thymoumetha, “we show spirit,” forthrightly as “we feel emotions”: “We learn with one, feel emotions with another and desire the pleasures of nourishment, procreation, and so forth with a third part” (436 b). I cite this—I believe acceptable—translation because it points up what will become the mainstream view: Th e passions or emotions occupy the central location in the constitution of the soul. Th ey do so even more unequivocally when Aristotle adds a lowest part, the “vegetative” or “natural” [physikon] part which is common to all living things. To it he assigns life functions like nourishment and procreation (Nicomachean Ethics 1102 b). Th e middle part is the aforementioned—still a-rational—part capable of being obedient to reason; here the virtues are to be found together with the passions. It is no accident that the fi rst pathos Aristotle takes up in his treatment of the passions in the Rhetoric (Book II) is anger, aroused by a slight to honor, which is certainly a “thymotic” passion. Th omas Aquinas amalgamates these schemata into one enormous Brann.indd 64Brann.indd 64 15/06/2007 11:09:4715/06/2007 11:09:47 Brann 65 © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007 plan, in which, once again, the passions have a topographically central place in a tripartite soul consisting of an “intellectual,” a “sensitive” and a “vegetative” part. Th e middle, the sensitive, soul includes, toward the bodily side, the senses, divided into the internal senses such as imagi- nation, and the external senses such as sight. Toward the intellectual side we fi nd the passions, divided into the desirously receptive ones such as love and the strenuously aggressive ones such as pride. Th ese subdivisions are, of course, adaptations of Socrates’ epithymotic and thymotic parts. Note that in all psychic “topographies” (the word is Freud’s) location has signifi cance, one end being higher in dignity and dominance. What, however, does it mean to be central? For central is what the passions are by position. Th is is true even in Freud’s schema. For, although emotions are at home in the infernal Unconscious (Freud’s epigraph for Th e Interpretation of Dreams is a line from the Aeneid: “If I can’t bend the gods above I will move the gods below,” 7.312), they come close to consciousness and dominate the fantasy life of the Preconscious. So in what sense are the aff ects in general and the passions in par- ticular central? Just insofar, one might say, as they are crucial to human being but not ultimate. Th e human center is passionate; the passions are what we gladly suff er, with gladness and suff ering in about equal proportion, and the passions are what we strenuously battle, with vic- tory and defeat about equally the issue. In the ancient formula for a human being as a “living thing having reason” [zoon logon echon], the passions belong to the living, the animal or animated side. Th ose who think that a part of the soul is separable from the embodied living be- ing and is capable of separate survival, as Socrates, perhaps speaking mythically, intimates in the Phaedo and Aristotle surmises in On the Soul (408 b), mean the rational part. Its dignity is for this, along with other reasons, greater even in its incarnate phase. Of the mainstream ancients one must therefore say: Th e human being is centrally but not ultimately aff ective. But that is not the end of it, for the ancients or the moderns. Both Plato and Aristotle subdivide the rational soul into a part that discur- sively “thinks things through” [dia-noia] and a higher part that sees Brann.indd 65Brann.indd 65 15/06/2007 11:09:4715/06/2007 11:09:47 66 Question: Are Human Beings Ultimately Aff ective? © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007 directly, intuitively [noesis]. Th is latter part is understood, very explic- itly by Aristotle in On the Soul (429 a), to be in one aspect receptive. Indeed, its peculiar passivity is analogous to that of sense-perception, though, on the other hand, it is also nothing like it, for it is bodiless. Th us its faculty, the intellect [nous], is passive insofar as in receiving the knowable forms of all things it is said to become them, though its pas- sive receptivity is also an active fulfi llment. Th is analogy of intuition to feeling is what Pascal means when he says that “the heart has its reasons that the reason does not know”—not that the heart is a-rational, but that it gets things directly, receptively. So now we might be allowed to say that in this understanding of a two-tier rationality (still maintained by Th omas but denied by Kant),4 we are ultimately aff ective, meaning receptively open to being touched and entered by intelligible being. But that aff ectivity is a far cry from passionate aff ectivity, from the bodily feelings, the sensory aff ections, and the intentional feelings called passions or emotions. Yet this high aff ectivity, the receptivity to being, is a human capacity that must be considered in this context since it is, at one point at least, transmuted back into what is ordinarily called a feeling. Moreover, the claim is made that it is in fact only that feeling which opens us to meta-physi- cal intimations. Th is function of the metaphysical aff ect is set out most explicitly by Heidegger in the essay “What is Metaphysics?” (1998). He means to reclaim aff ectivity as ultimate in human existence. Th e aff ect he turns to is not an emotion but a mood. “Mood,” in its narrow signifi ca- tion, is distinguished from emotion by its non-intentional character. Love and hate, bold confi dence and fear, pride and shame are “about” something, that is, about the objects of love or fear or the reasons for confi dence and shame. A mood, on the other hand, is about nothing. It is a diff use, unfocused feeling. Who could doubt that human beings have been moody through the ages? Yet the curious fact is that the ancients, at least until late in antiquity, made no great point of being subject to such intentionless aff ects or of analyzing them. Th eir inter- est, particularly that of the Stoics, the most purposeful students of the passions, lay precisely in the “intentional object” of an aff ect, for it was Brann.indd 66Brann.indd 66 15/06/2007 11:09:4715/06/2007 11:09:47 Brann 67 © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007 through its appraisal that they sought relief. To be sure, there was the long-lasting humoral theory which included in its four states melan- cholia, a depressive mood, but it was recorded as a medical category. In medieval theology acedia, a slothful disgust with the spiritual life, was only one of several moodlike conditions of the religious life. It was, however, regarded not primarily as an aff ect but as one of the seven capital theological sins. In modern times the Romantics were certainly preoccupied with diff use feelings of searching longing and pleasurable reminiscence. But it was only in 1844, when Kierkegaard published Th e Concept of Anxiety, that the intentionlessness of mood was made explicit and put to philosophical use. Th is anxiety would in the twentieth century be- come what might be called its paradigm mood. Kierkegaard, observing that the concept of anxiety is ignored in psychology, says that “it is al- together diff erent from fear and similar concepts that referred to some- thing defi nite, whereas anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of a possibility” (1980 [1844] 1.15). “Freedom’s actuality” describes a presentiment of a capability—an as yet unfi xed sense of a freedom to be free. Th is was Adam’s condition before the Fall, a “dreaming” state of innocence, before he knew the diff erence between good and evil. In that dream state of uneasy repose, Adam has “indeed nothing against which to strive.” At this point Kierkegaard has recourse to the verbal trick that will have great consequences in Existential philosophy: Th e “nothing” which Adam has to strive against in the mood of dreaming anxiety turns into an intentional object. “But what eff ect does nothing have?” Kierkegaard asks. “It begets anxiety.” Th us the inherited sinful- ness of the human race originating in Adam’s fall is conditioned not, as in the tradition, on the perversion of the will, the rational faculty of desire, but on a mood, an aff ective sense of the freedom to be possibly bad (41–46). Heidegger adapts for his essay this Kierkegaardian transmutation of the nothing that anxiety “is about” into a meta-physical Nothing. Th e mood (in German Stimmung, “attunement”) of anxiety opens the human being to Nothing. In their uncanny alienated indiff erence to existence, beings as a whole distance themselves from us. Th e human Brann.indd 67Brann.indd 67 15/06/2007 11:09:4815/06/2007 11:09:48 68 Question: Are Human Beings Ultimately Aff ective? © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007 foothold in existence is gone. Anxiety is revealingly about the Noth- ing that environs existence. Th us anxiety becomes our access to the wonder of beings. We realize, we feel, that they are something and not nothing: Anxiety is the fundamental metaphysical feeling (Heidegger 1998, 102). Th at Heidegger is, in this perennial duality of the Western tradi- tion, on the side of ultimate aff ectivity, is confi rmed by comparing Be- ing and Time (1927) with the somewhat later “What is Metaphysics?” (originally published 1929, postscript added in 1943, introduction in 1949). In the book anxiety had functioned almost oppositely to its role in the essay: Instead of taking Dasein, a human existence, beyond the beings that constitute its world, it arose from Dasein’s sense of having been cast into its world (Heidegger 1927, 134 ff ., 184 ff .). What seems to me remarkable is that in this vacillation about the role of anxiety, one factor remains fi rm: that a mood—anxiety in particular and at- tunement, mood, in general—is ontologically fundamental to human existence. For not only do all the features that characterize human ex- istence in ordinary terms—emotions and understanding —eventuate from this aff ectivity as ground, but it itself is the defi ning mode of existence: openness to the world. I know of no more unsentimentally positive answer to the question, “Are human beings ultimately aff ec- tive?” Is that the last word? Has the question been answered once and for all? Of course not. Each hierarchical placement, topographical setting, human valuation of the passions depends not only on a psychology but on an ontology. Hence to accept one or another view of the ultimacy of the passionate part of human nature is to accept—explicitly or implic- itly—a view of the world and of being itself. To realize that is the fi rst fi rm outcome of an inquiry such as this. Endnotes 1. References to classical texts are to the standard paginations. Most translations are by the author. 2. Zeno of Citium (b. 334) and Chrysippus (280–207) were the founders of Stoicism whose doctrines dominated all later discussions. Th e Stoic system, Brann.indd 68Brann.indd 68 15/06/2007 11:09:4815/06/2007 11:09:48 Brann 69 © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2007 gleaned from their fragments, is set out by Julia E. Annas in Hellenistic Philoso- phy of Mind (1992), part III. 3. For the parts involved in the passions, see Summa Th eologiae, First Part of the Second Part, qu. 22, art. 2. 4. 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