The Vehement Passions, a book Review

[Doyle Saylor <djsaylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello All,
This is another essay prepared for Pen-L I'm adapting for the Marxism list.
The book I am looking at is unusual in the historical look at emotions from
roughly Aristotle onward in Western culture.  One might hope that some day
similar studies of Africa and Asia will come along to look at how peoples in
various places understand strong feelings.

Greetings Economists,
Interest in Emotions has been on the rise for a decade in a variety of
fields.  Information Technology research at some schools like MIT have been
trying to find methods for directly showing emotions with software methods.
In philosophy, Martha Nussbaum, wrote a major tome on the subject,
"Upheavals of Thought".  In Neuroscience the book "The Feeling of What
Happens, Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness", by Antonio
Damasio reveals how much new and profound knowledge has accumulated about
the brain's workings.   Much more in many other areas of typical U.S.
research have been focused upon emotions.  Not counting the pop culture self
help books, the therapy industry etc.

Nothing like "The Vehement Passions" by Philip Fisher, 2002, Princeton
University Press has appeared though.  For the left like most people in the
modern world we still remain convinced by the need for rational discourse.
See my previous essay today on "Face Blindness".   Strong passions
(religious passion being the typical Feudal European arena for passion) are
what Capitalist social systems moved away from as they grew out of the
European Enlightenment.  The book, "The Vehement Passions", takes a look at
the long history of various era's, civilizations, empires, etc., to portray
an understanding of emotions reshaped by the means of producing brainwork
and the long term shifts that has meant to everyone.

The context to best judge this book though is our times.  Truly we are in a
position to address aspects of what human emotion means to our times in ways
that our ancestors couldn't.  Nothing like movies existed before the 20th
century, much less the capacity to add artificially emotions to cultural
content.

The primary vehicle for knowledge in our global system is the written word.
The tool I am using right now where I write my thoughts down for you to
read.  The written word cannot carry emotion based information like a motion
picture can that can show a face projecting inner feeling.  (see today's
other essay from me on Face Blindness)  Computerized communications could
carry images of our faces to show how we feel, or more likely we will
manufacture emotions to be consumed.  In this context this book is highly
valuable historical look at what has gradually grown distant and
inaccessible to our peoples, the 'Vehement Passions'.

We are captives of our writing tool.  The movies can show faces, show
feelings, but we can't use movies except passively.  We can't truly exchange
them which is so much of what makes emotions important to us, the sense that
we feel about someone else and they return our feelings.  Emotions activate
our bodies, and except for depression are what we use to gauge action.  We
act though in a social setting.  We feel and someone else feels.  We love
someone and they love us, and we act based upon that.   We rage at them and
they cower trembling with fear.  To feel a part of the left means; we really
will act as a 'leftist'.  So this book breaks ground in our times in
understanding what has long lain dormant in our society, strong passions.

The great passions are a rich cultural territory, with much literature
devoted to the subject.  page 42, Vehement Passions,

"Anger and the other vehement passions-fear, shame, grief, and
wonder-provide the most telling experiences that we commonly have of
self-identical being, of undivided being.  In modern culture our
paradigmatic character, Shakespeare's Hamlet, is by contrast the best
example of the modern inability to be undivided.  One meaning of vehemence
is the capacity to be thoroughly and completely in a given state, whether
that state be fear or grief, anger or love.  Hamlet's irony, his layers of
feeling, his self-distance, his afterthoughts and reversals are all features
of a psychology in which the self is no longer self0identiacal.  It is no
longer characterized by what we might call thoroughness.  It is angry, but
able to see the other side of the matter; in love, but disgusted with love;
committed to vengeance, but unable to believe completely in what it is about
to do."

Doyle:
Without contact with strong feelings we lose a sense of wholeness to our
lives.   When I write the words they are recorded for whenever you read
them, but emotions are rooted in time.  Page 72 The Vehement Passions,

"These examples describe extreme fear exactly because they describe a narrow
zone of nearby future time-contiguous future time-that defines the imminent
future.  The imminent future is the symmetrical partner to the immediate
past.  Between the two rest the thin, near-zero duration of the present
moment."

Doyle:
If we began to create emotions not just for passive information like motion
pictures, but the use in the moment of information we become suddenly aware
of a vast unknown about how understand our lives.   Our verities, page 152,

"When this much is said, it has to be added that the cultural attention to
fear from romanticism through Kierkegaard and Heidegger is itself a pocket
of self-doubt within a civilization of confidence, and even arrogance about
the human will.  The lyrical descriptions of the sublime, of dread, and of
angst are themselves a local heresy within the technological optimism about
the will and human power that has been the overwhelming fact of the past two
hundred years.  Emerson has written the passionate and lyrical mood music of
this civilization, not Kiekegaard and Heidegger.  It should be no surprises
that it has been within a literary culture that has  itself become
marginalized within society that the disguised remnants of the religious
thematics of profound fear-renamed the sublime, or Kierkegaardian
"psychology," or existentialism-have found their strongest and perhaps their
only audience."

Doyle:
Suppose somehow we returned strong feelings to our lives, what could we
anticipate?  Well almost certainly people who go through a great social
upheaval feel their liberation like, page 46, The Vehement Passions,

"the vehement passions reinstall an absolute priority of the self, with its
claim to be different from and prior to others both in the claims of its
will and  in its account of the world.  The passions are the states of a
king in a world in which all others are merely subjects.  Where we speak of
the passions, we are, in political vocabulary, recreating a monarchical
world in which there is only one real self.  This is also the world of
monotheism.  There is only one will, and that is the will of God.  Such a
God is more commonly a God of wrath than a God of reason.  God creates and
destroys, because these are, finally, the only two act of the will."

Doyle:
We gain a sense that if we really feel it is the nearness of others that
determine whether or not we feel a certain way.  The sense of popular
sovereignty that a revolution leads to is fundamentally how someone feels
power in their life.  If racism were gone then African Americans could feel
that nearby whites were no longer figures of oppression and distrust.  The
feeling that one's inner sovereignty of strong feelings really were worth
trusting.  That in a sense then if we begin to manufacture feelings for
consumption we are trying to activate people and in their motion they feel
they have the power to act.  Not sit down and watch.

We use this sense of judgment all the time.  page 106 The Vehement Passions,

"On the other hand, if we imagine discovering about an eighty-year-old man,
because of evidence that has only now come to light, that sixty years ago he
committed a crime equal in horror and cruelty to those mentioned above, it
is often felt to be hard, now that sixty years have passed, to imagine any
severe sentence's being imposed at all.  In the immediate aftermath of the
crime, so centrally is anger a feature of what we are calling justice that
it is hard to think of any punishment as strong enough.  But once we move to
the opposite extreme and picture a full lifetime between the crime and its
moment of punishment, it is often hard to imagine a punishment lenient
enough."

Doyle:
My impression is that we can see in this book the outlines of what our
civilization demands of what we produce in our emotions.  We are made to
feel a certain way that works within our system.   A system that mostly
requires we write down our thoughts to matter, and forget about how we
really feel since that would interfere with the rational process.  That
working with emotions though is shifting as we come ever closer to using
media in real time to communicate our feelings.  Using communications
immediately absolutely demands we know how others feel.

What is that structure that shapes our emotions?  Can we use strong feelings
to regain a sense of wholeness to our mental lives?  Can we think about this
territory in such a way as to truly consider the many questions the left
'feels'?

This book opens up the debate in ways that have been really impossible for
us to consider.  Most emphatically suggesting a profound depth to our minds
we can once again ponder as those who debated their feelings about the
Monarchy and Church in France, or in Russian, or China the ancient regimes,
and Capitalism itself.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor


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