Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Mud Vein (2014)

  After a week, he comes up the stairs with a handful of green bandages. “There’s no infection that I can see around the wound. It’s healing.” I notice that he didn’t say, Healing well. “The bone could still become infected, but we can hope the penicillin will take care of that.” “What’s that?” I ask, nodding toward his hands. “I’m going to put your leg in a cast. Then I can move you to the bed.” “What if the bone doesn’t fuse together properly?” I ask. He’s quiet for a long time as he works with the supplies. “It’s not going to heal properly,” he says. “You’ll most likely walk with a limp for the rest of your life. On most days, you’ll have pain.” I close my eyes. Of course. Of course. Of course. When I look up again, he’s cutting the toes off of a white sock. He fits it over my foot as gently as he can and pulls it up my leg. I force breath from my nostrils to keep from wailing. It must be one of his. The sock. The zookeeper didn’t give me any white socks. He didn’t give me anything white. Isaac does the same thing with a second sock, and then a third, until I have them lined from the middle of my foot to my knee. Then he takes one of the bandages from the bucket of water. It’s not a bandage, I realize. It’s rolls of a fiberglass cast. He starts mid foot, rolling the cast around and around until it runs out. Then he plucks out a new roll and does it again. Over and over until he’s used all five rolls and my leg is fully cast. Isaac leans back to examine his work. He looks exhausted. “Let’s give it some time to dry, then I’ll move you to the bed.” We stay in the attic room, forgetting the rest of the house. Day after day … after day … after day. I count the days we’ve lost. Days I’ll never get back. Two hundred and seventy-seven of them. One day I ask him to drum for me. “With what?” I can’t really see his face—it’s too dark—but I know that his eyebrows are raised and there is a trace of a smile on his lips. He needs this. I need this. “Sticks,” I suggest. And then, “Please, Isaac. I want to hear music.” “Music without words,” he says, softly. I shake my head, though he can’t see me do it. “I want to hear the music you can make.”

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  My voice is light, but something in my gut is telling that this is bad. We don’t have any more antibiotics. We don’t really have any more anything. I checked our supplies earlier: a couple tubes of burn cream and a surplus of bandages and alcohol wipes. We’ve been trying to save the power and use the logs from the well, but we are running low on those, too. I realize I’ve been waiting too long for Isaac’s answer. He’s staring at his plate, not really seeing anything. “Isaac…” I touch his hand and my eyes grow wide. “I’d say you have a fever.” My lips feel dry. I flick my tongue over the top of them while considering Isaac’s fever. “Let’s get you upstairs, okay?” He nods. An hour later he is trembling uncontrollably. I’ve shaken like this—I can remember each time. But my trembling was emotion. The body deals with attacks the same way—emotional or not. Isaac was always the one to make it go away. I can’t do the same for him. What he needs is beyond what my body can do for him. I can’t get him to wake up. He never told me what to do. His body says he’s hot—too hot—but this cabin is a freezer. Do I keep him warm, or cool him down? I sit next to him and try to pray. If I lean close to his face I can feel the heat rising off his skin. No one taught me how to pray. I don’t know who I’m praying to: an obese god who is always grinning? A god with a woman’s head that sits on a man’s body? A god with holes in his hands and feet? I pray to whichever it is. My mouth moves with words—begging, pleading words. I’ve never spoken to God before. I partly blame him for the bad that’s happened to me. I say I don’t, but I do. I’m willing to never blame him again if he just saves Isaac. I think he’s heard me when Isaac’s shaking suddenly stops. But when I lower my head to his mouth his breathing is shallow. I pray directly to the God with the holes in his hands. He seems like the one to talk to. A God that understands pain. “That’s Isaac,” I tell him. “He helped me, and now he’s here. He didn’t do anything to deserve this. And he shouldn’t have to die because of me.” Then I appeal directly to Isaac. “You can’t do this again,” I tell Isaac. “This is the second time. It’s not fair. It’s my turn to almost die.”

• From The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018)

  The battle is never ending because new infectious agents appear on the scene or because old ones change so much—often as a result of antibiotic therapy—that they come to behave as badly as if they were new. The saga of new corrections never ends, however. Nature is properly defensive and evasive, but medical science does not lack ingenuity or persistence. For example, when the cause of disease is a dangerous virus that is normally carried by a certain insect species, it is now possible to change the insect’s genome such that its carrier status is blocked. This is bold and new and freshly possible due to the discovery of a technique, CRISPR-Cas9, that permits successful modifications within a genome. 1 Nothing guarantees, of course, that the thwarted viruses will not mutate in response to the genetic dissuader and defy the new barrier they face by increasing their malignancy. And so it goes. Homeostasis knows how to play games of cat and mouse, and sometimes so do we. Using the same novel techniques, we will be able to produce modifications of the human genome aimed at eliminating certain hereditary diseases. This is another laudable and potentially valuable endeavor, but there is nothing easy about it because most hereditary diseases that plague humanity are caused not by only one troublesome gene but by several, sometimes many. Genes often operate in bundled fashion, a bit like toxic mortgages. Guaranteeing that the result of an intervention does not produce dangerous and unwanted effects is easier said than done. Far more problematic are some medically unconventional developments, for example, inducing genetic modifications aimed at guaranteeing favorable intellectual and physical traits or retarding and eliminating death. Here, too, the target of the intervention is the human germ line, and the interventions are also enabled by the bold new technique I mentioned earlier. There are serious issues to be considered in the implementation of the latter projects. At a practical level, there are important risks involved in the manipulation of genetic material that, to date, do not appear to have been properly addressed. More fundamentally, tinkering with the natural process of evolution has unforeseen consequences for the future of humanity, in strict biological terms and in sociocultural, political, and economic terms. If the aim is eliminating a disease that produces suffering and is not associated with any benefit, there is ample justification to proceed. Medicine’s classical injunction is “first do no harm,” and provided the injunction is carefully observed, one should applaud the tinkering. But what if there is no disease to begin with? On what grounds is it justifiable to try to improve one’s memory capacity or intellectual caliber by genetic means rather than by practicing intellectual puzzles? And what about physical traits—eye color, skin color, facial design, height? And what about the manipulation of gender ratios? It can be argued that these are “cosmetic” changes and that cosmetic surgery has been practiced for decades with little harm and plenty of satisfied customers.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  They were not so constrained by traditional ideas, and were likely to support any radical policy that gave them a higher profile in the assembly. There was new friction between the classes, and Athens was becoming a divided city. All these anxieties surfaced in Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes, which was presented in 467 and told the story of the apparently futile war between Oedipus’s two sons, Polynices and Eteocles. This grim story of fraternal rivalry may have recalled the recent tragedy of Naxos, when Greek had attacked Greek. Polynices, who had invaded his native polis, was guilty of hubris, while Eteocles seemed to embody the restraint and self-control that should characterize a true citizen: he loathes the ancient, irrational religion of the chorus of frightened women, who rush periodically onto the stage in ones and twos, asking disconnected questions and uttering witless and incomprehensible ritual cries. Yet Eteocles himself, the man of logos, falls prey to the pollution that his father, Oedipus, had unleashed, and that had contaminated the whole family. 96 At the end of the play, this miasma finally drove the two brothers to kill each other outside the walls of Thebes. Aeschylus had depicted a torn society, painfully caught between two irreconcilable worlds. Like Eteocles and the philosophers, some citizens looked down on the old religion, but could not entirely shake it off. It still held sway in the deeper, less rational regions of their minds. At the end of the play, the Erinyes, the ancient chthonian Furies, triumphed over the modern forces of logos. Athenians might regard themselves as rational men of the polis, in charge of their own destiny, but they still felt that they could be overtaken by a divinely inspired pollution that had a life of its own. Would Athenian hubris in Naxos produce fresh miasma and bring their city to ruin? The Greek mind was straining in two directions, and Aeschylus did not propose an easy solution. In their final lament, the chorus was split, half siding with Polynices, the others attending the funeral of Eteocles. In 461 a group of young Athenians led by Ephialtes and his friend Pericles mounted a concerted attack on the elders in the Assembly, which then deprived the Areopagus Council of all its powers. Their slogan was demokratia (“government by the people”). The coup completely overturned the political order. The Areopagus was replaced by the Council of Five Hundred and decisions were henceforth made by all citizens in the Popular Assembly. But the new democracy was not entirely benign. Debates were often rude and aggressive. The courts were made up of citizens, who were both judge and jury. There was no rule of law, and a trial was essentially a battle between the accused and his accusers. The Oresteia, a trilogy written by Aeschylus shortly afterward, shows how deeply Athens had been shaken by this revolution.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Gorgias, for example, wrote several handbooks on public speaking, and taught his pupils that it was possible to argue any case. He once wrote a famous defense of the indefensible Helen of Troy, and was himself an electrifying lecturer. When he arrived in Athens as an ambassador for Leontinum in 427, Gorgias became an overnight sensation, and young Athenians crowded into his classes. One of his students was Alcibiades, the nephew of Pericles, who once soundly defeated his uncle in an argument about democracy, using Sophistic methods. Alcibiades became a brilliant speaker in the assembly, and as we shall see, this had terrible consequences for Athens. Some of the Sophists’ pupils certainly abused the skills that they had learned, but this was not the Sophists’ fault. Gorgias believed that effective oratory kept freedom alive. Somebody who truly understood how to marshal an argument could defend the innocent and advance his polis. In a democracy, the Attic orator Antiphon once observed, “Victory goes to him who speaks best.” 20 This was not necessarily a cynical observation, but a statement of fact about the way democracy worked. If victory did indeed go to the person who argued most convincingly in the assembly, the Sophists’ skills could indeed ensure that the right prevailed. Not all Sophists concentrated on public speaking. The most prominent Sophist was Protagoras of Abdera, who had little interest in rhetoric. His specialty was law and government, but he also wrote about language and grammar, and produced a philosophical treatise on the nature of truth. He arrived in Athens during the 430s, and became a friend of Pericles, who commissioned him to write the constitution for the new settlement at Thurii in Italy. Protagoras taught his students to question everything. They must accept nothing on hearsay or at second hand, but test all truth against their own judgment and experience. There must be no more self-indulgent speculation about the cosmos, unsupported by hard evidence. Naïve reliance on traditional mythology was also unacceptable, if it contradicted the laws of common sense. The Sophists taught systematic doubt at a time of deepening anxiety. They had traveled widely. They knew that other cultures had different customs that worked perfectly well and concluded that there were no absolute verities. Where Parmenides and Democritus had castigated subjective conviction, Protagoras embraced it. One person’s truth would be different from his neighbor’s, but that did not mean that it should be dismissed as false. Every man’s perception was valid for him. Instead of seeing truth as a remote reality that was inaccessible to ordinary mortals, Protagoras claimed that everybody had a share. He simply needed to look into his own mind. “The measure of all things is man,” he wrote in his epistemological treatise, “for things that are, that they are; for things that are not, that they are not.” 21 An individual must rely on his own human judgments; there was no transcendent authority, and no Supreme God who could impose his view upon humanity.

• From A Sexplanation (2021)

  And if we don't give young people information about relationships, but also about the actual mechanics of all different types of sexual behavior, they are going to seek it out and they're going to consume it without us framing it. -The reason I think it's crucial to start discussing this with kids is because first of all, they're going to encounter it, right? It's impossible to go online and not come across pornography. They're gonna start to base their assumptions of what sex is like, what bodies look like, how bodies function, what pleasure is, based on what they're seeing because they don't know otherwise. They just don't have that porn literacy to understand that this is just about fantasy. But as soon as parents hear the word porn, no go. We don't even want to talk about this. It's the stick the head in the sand approach to pornography. -You know, what are people missing out on if they only see porn as an instruction manual? -So things like consent. I mean, when's the last time you watched a porn clip and at the beginning they were like, we're gonna have a negotiation about what we're gonna do. Is that okay with you? It just doesn't happen. -People need to know that when you see anal sex on screen, those are professionals. The truth is that in real life anal sex won't look like that. Lube is important. Can't be done without lube. You wouldn't see that in the porn. And also, there's probably going to be poop. And I think that's really important to say. -Yeah. -Because young, especially young, straight men, they're like, wait what do you mean? There's going to be, what are you talking about? I'm like, oh yeah, it's a bum, my friend. That's gonna happen, but it's edited out of that porn that you've watched 50 times on Pornhub, right? So having that discussion about what anal sex really looks like in real life, being gentle, being consensual, using lots of lube, taking your time. There's probably going to be like, sounds that you didn't expect. It's not gonna look like what you expect. So porn literacy is what we should be teaching. Not telling them that porn will hurt them or ruin them, or I don't know, make them into sex fiends or that they're not allowed, right? We should be telling them, that's fantasy. -But wouldn't it be better that we basically have better porn literacy? That we can, you know, that in schools that we spend resources figuring out like, what is the best way that parents can help kids understand, like, if you see this in porn, you have to understand this is a fantasy. -Yeah. -This is meant for adults. -I don't know that we need to teach porn. I do think it's important to teach people, to respect their bodies and consent and media choices.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  The same principle holds true for emotional aphrodisiacs. They come and go, changing from one to another. In pleasurable erotic experiences feelings flow primarily from negative to positive. For example, when moderate anxiety (negative) adds intensity to a sexual scene, it typically results in a sense of security (positive). When, however, anxiety keeps building without being transformed into some other feeling, its unpleasant or disruptive aspects become increasingly pronounced and eventually undermine your enjoyment. The erotic significance of negative emotions lies mostly in their ability to shift at just the right moment. Whenever this change occurs—and it is usually not through conscious choice—a burst of erotic energy is released. In her book about men’s sexual fantasies, Men in Love: The Triumph of Love over Rage, Nancy Friday focuses on the tension and transformation brought about by conflicting emotions. Men desire approval and closeness from women, but counterbalancing this need is an accumulation of unconscious rage against women, whom Friday calls “the great sexual naysayers.” She describes how men use sexual fantasy to transform frustration into love and acceptance: No matter what men do to with their imaginary lovers, her reactions are just the opposite of mother’s—she loves him for it. “Yes!” she shouts, “more!” A fantasy woman does not reproach her man for letting other men peep at her, for wanting to share her with another guy, for dreaming of her having sex with a dildo or a dog. Fantasy gives men the love of women they want, with none of the inhibiting feminine rules they hate. No matter how wild the man’s sexual frenzy, the woman does not punish, but rewards. Love conquers rage.15 A similar reversal seems to lie at the heart of many women’s fantasies. In a typical scenario an aggressive sexual male pushes through the heroine’s resistance, releasing a wild, lusty woman from the confines of her normal reserve. As her full erotic powers blossom, she not only ignites a white-hot desire in her lover, but she also manages to transform his aggression into the perfect blend of animalism, sensitivity, and gentleness. Her pleasure becomes his primary concern. She shows him the path to love. The transformation of one emotion into another, sometimes opposite one, is frequently more noticeable in fantasy than in real encounters. People who develop a comfortable acceptance of their erotic fantasies allow themselves to feel a wider range of emotions toward their fantasy partners than they do toward actual people. In addition, the unexpected aphrodisiacs are typically more easily recognized in fantasy because the fantasy itself is a safety factor. When you feel scared or angry in a fantasy, you imagine or remember feeling that way more than you actually feel it. Consequently, you can, for example, throw yourself into a dangerous or degrading fantasy scene you would never consider in real life because you know that you and your fantasy partner are both protected from harm.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  In times of social uncertainty, anthropologists tell us, ritual acquires a new importance. 33 Among displaced people, in particular, there is pressure to maintain the boundaries that separate the group from others, and a new concern about purity, pollution, and mixed marriage, which help the community to resist the majority culture. Certainly Ezekiel’s vision showed a fortress mentality. No foreigners were allowed in his imaginary city; there were walls and gates everywhere, barricading the holiness of Israel from the threatening outside world. Ezekiel was one of the last of the great prophets. Prophecy had always been linked with the monarchy in Israel and Judah, and it became less influential as the monarchy declined. But the priests, who had officiated in the temple, acquired a new importance, as the last link with a world that seemed irrevocably lost. They could have fallen into despair after their temple had been destroyed, but instead, a small circle of exiled priests began to construct a new spirituality on the rubble of the old. We know very little about them. Scholars call this priestly layer of the Bible “P,” but we do not know whether P was a single editor or, more probably, a school of priestly writers and editors. Whoever they were, P had access to several old traditions, some written down and others orally transmitted. 34 Perhaps they worked in the royal archive housed in the court of the exiled King Jehoiachin. The documents available to P included the JE narrative, the genealogies of the patriarchs, and ancient ritual texts that listed the places where the Israelites were believed to have camped during their forty years in the wilderness. But P’s most important sources were the Holiness Code 35 (miscellaneous laws collected during the seventh century) and the Tabernacle Document, the centerpiece of P’s narrative, which described the tent shrine that the Israelites had built in the wilderness to house the divine presence. 36 It was called the tent of meeting because Moses consulted Yahweh there and received his instructions. Some of P’s material was very old indeed, and his language was deliberately archaic, but his aim was not antiquarian. He wanted to build a new future for his people. P made some important additions to the JE saga, and was also responsible for the books of Leviticus and Numbers. Most readers find this priestly lore impossibly difficult; they usually skip the interminable accounts of convoluted, bloody sacrifices and the incomprehensibly detailed dietary laws. Why bother to describe ceremonies that, now that the temple was in ruins, were obsolete?

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  In 1869, James finally graduated, receiving a degree from Harvard's medical school. Oddly enough, he decided not to go into medical practice, feeling an unnerving hunger for some other kind of knowledge and an anxiety about what he would do for a career. The same year he graduated, his illness symptoms steadily became worse. For the next year, his level of depression increased and he contemplated suicide once again. Yet after reading a written piece on the topic of freedom by a man named Charles Renouvier, James began to recover from his depression. Though his mental condition improved, he would still experience physical signs of distress throughout his life. In 1872, he was asked by Harvard's then-president, a former chemistry teacher of his, to teach physiology. He took the offer, setting off the beginning of the rest of his career teaching at Harvard. The following year, he started teaching physiology and anatomy, moving on to psychology classes by the middle of the decade. By 1876, he had become an assistant professor in psychology. He soon met a woman and schoolteacher by the name of Alice Howe. The two were married by 1878 and would go on to have five children. The same year that he married, James signed on with Henry Holt to create what would have been his first notable published work - a textbook in psychology. However, James seemingly drifted away from the field of psychology and into the study of philosophy, as evidenced by his membership in Harvard's Metaphysical Club. Other notable faces that were part of the club during James' time were Oliver Wendell Holmes and Charles Sanders Pierce, who was a founder of pragmatism in America. James became fond of philosophy and, in particular, of pragmatism. This is a philosophical approach to assessing the truth of the meaning behind a theory or belief via its successful practical application. One of the doctrines that came about from pragmatism was radical empiricism, which was actually proposed by James. It states that experience has to be viewed both at the physical level as well as how meaning or values can arise as a result of that experience. He became deeply involved with this idea, and it would frequently be seen in his writings. In 1879, James began teaching a philosophy class at Harvard, attaining professorship in the subject just a year later. His first contribution to the field was an article entitled "The Sentiment of Rationality," which was published in 1880. One of his main points in the essay makes the claim that sentiments are the mark of rationality. The essay was meant to be applicable to both the sciences and everyday life. In it, he also delves into some aspects of materialism and idealism, proposing a compromise between the two. He gained an affinity for the idea that one could feel something intimate with the universe, as proposed by idealists, while the universe could also be unpredictable and wild, as proposed by materialists.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  The second g reat zone of tension contains the conflict between disengaged instrumentalism and the Romantic or modernist protest against it. The rise of modernism has made a difference in t his conflict. The short way of explaining this is to say that it has transform e d one of the forces in conte s t. Our conception of the creative imaginatio n, of epiphany, and of the realities they give us a ccess to has been transformed in the last century, and this has alte red our view of t he alternatives to disengaged reason. But in addition to the changes they ha v e w rought in this second zone of tension, the develo pments over the la st century which issued in modernism have also opened a breach betwee n the first zone and the second. The original Romantic expressivism, for all its tenden cy to exalt art, saw The Conflicts of Modernity · 499 expressive fulfilment as compatible with morality, defined in terms of the modern s tandards. For Schiller, the full de velopment o f the play drive would make it possible to be spontaneously moral; we would no longer have to imp ose rules on our unwilling desires. But subsequent developments, through Scho penhauer, through the Baudelairean repudiation of nature, call this pre•established harmony into question and, through this, raise the issue whether an aesthetically realized life would also, could also, be moral. Nietzsche offers the most direct challenge: the way to the harmony of yea-saying passes through the repudiation of the ethic of benevolence. But in less dire ways , a nyone in the post-Schopenhauerian stream has at least to raise the question whether artistic epiphany draws us to the same things that morality demands. Writers Hke Pound and Lawrence answer this question positively, but it obviously now remains a question; and when we consider some of the things they say, and Pound's p o litics in particular, one c a n wo nder whether they thems el v e s didn't fail to se e the conflict imp1icit in their own views. And so a third zone of potential conflict opens up: beyond the question about the sources o f our moral standards, and the one which oppos es disengaged instrumentalism to a richer fulfilment, there i s th e qu e stion whether these moral standards are not incompatible with that fulfilment; w h ether morality doesn't exact a high price from us in terms of wholeness.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  With all the courage I can muster, I fling open the door of the bathroom and pass him as he takes his turn inside. This is how I come to find myself standing naked in a stranger’s hotel room, shedding my clothes as he does his own preparations for me in the privacy of the bathroom. I am not versed in the rules of this game, and since I have, in the past hour, successfully impersonated a confident single woman, I am determined that my act must go on. I am showing him that I’m ready and willing. I’m not pretending that we aren’t here for the sole purpose of having sex; this seems like the only logical next play – but why is he just staring at me now that he’s out of the bathroom and just a few feet away? Shouldn’t he be voraciously feasting on me already? Should I not have acted so boldly? Is there any chance the ground will open and swallow me whole right now, teleporting me from the faux pas I seem to have committed? “Is this too much?” I finally break the silence and ask more timidly than I intend to, eyes wide, eyebrows raised – and, I realize, somewhat ridiculously for a woman who has just brazenly undressed for a man she met an hour ago. He matches my look with eyes just as wide and eyebrows equally raised and says, to my great relief, “Definitely not too much,” while picking me up like a newlywed and half placing, half tossing me on the bed. To say this moment feels dreamlike is an understatement of epic proportion. For 27 years, since I was little more than a teenager, I have had sex with only one man and expected that I would continue to have sex with this one man for the rest of my life. Since that first night with Michael, I have given birth three times, nursed three babies, fought gravity with only middling success and just – frankly – aged. I am terrified of what Jack – who has clearly been living a full life with his Cadillac Margaritas and his motorcycle and condoms in his wallet – will find when he gets closer to my body, but I’m expecting nothing less than horror, perhaps even some pity. Within seconds he has worked his way down my body and it is no small surprise when he whispers up to me, “You have a really nice pussy.” A sound bursts out of me that I pray is more laugh than cackle, prompting him to ask what’s funny.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  This is a painful and frightening experience. What this brings to light is the essential link betw ee n identity and a kind of orientation. To k now wh o you are is to be oriented in moral space, a space in which questions arise about what is good or bad , what is worth do ing and what not, what has meaning and importa nce for y ou and what is trivial and secondary. I feel myself drawn here to u se a spatial metaphor; but I believe this to be more than p ersonal predilection. There are signs that the li nk with spatial orientation lies very deep in the human psyche. In some very extreme cases of what are described as "narcissistic personality disorders'', which take the form of a radical uncertainty about oneself and about what is of value to one, patients show signs of spatial disorientation as well at moments of acute c risis. The disorientation and uncertainty about where one stands as a person seems to spill over into a loss of grip on one's stance in physical space. 1 Why this link between identity and orientation? Or perhaps w e co uld p ut the question this way: What induces us to talk about moral orientation in ter m s of t h e q uestion, Who are we? This second formulation poi nts us towards the fact that we haven't always done so. Talk about 'identity' in the modern sense would have been incomprehensible to our forebears of a couple of centuries ago. Erikson 2 has made a perceptive study o f Luther's crisis of faith and reads it in the light of contem p orary identity crises, but Luther himself, of course , would have found this description rep rehensible if not utterly incomprehensible. Underlying our modern talk of identity is the notion that questions of moral orientation cannot all be solved in simply universal terms. And this is connected to our post-Romantic understanding of individual differences as well as to the im p ortance we give to expres sion in ea ch person's discovery of his or her moral horizon. For someone in Luther's age, the issue of the basic moral frame orienting one's action could only be put in universal terms. Nothing else made sense.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  In each dialogue, he stole up on this difficult concept from a different starting point, so that what is preserved is a series of overlapping arguments that present a general idea of a form as an abstract object of thought by asking a number of different philosophical questions—but always trying to find out how this apparently abstruse notion had practical relevance in the unsettled and disturbing world of the fourth century. Socrates had attempted to discover the true nature of goodness, but he does not seem to have formulated this in a way that satisfied anybody—perhaps not even himself. In the early dialogues, Plato probably stuck closely to his master’s procedures. As we have seen, he made Socrates ask his interlocutors to consider different instances of a virtue such as courage, in the hope of finding a common denominator. If this type of behavior was brave and that was not, what did this tell us about the nature of courage per se? How could you behave virtuously if you did not know what virtue was? In the political turbulence of his time, in which the supporters of the competing polities—democracy, oligarchy, tyranny, aristocracy, monarchy—stridently argued their case, Plato believed that the only hope of achieving a solution was to find the underlying principles of good government. Like Socrates, Plato was disturbed by the relativism of the Sophists. He wanted to find a dimension of reality that was constant and unchanging but that could be grasped by a sustained effort of rational thought. Yet Plato departed from Socrates by putting forward an extraordinary suggestion. Virtue, he argued, was not a concept that could be constructed by accumulating examples of behavior in daily life. It was an independent entity, an objective reality that existed on a higher plane than the material world. The ideas of goodness, justice, or beauty could not be experienced by the senses; we could not see, hear, or touch them, but they could be comprehended by the power of reasoning that resided in the soul (psyche) of each human being. Everything in our material world had an eternal, unchanging form: courage, justice, largeness—even a table. If we stood on a riverbank, we recognized that the body of water in front of us was a river rather than a pond or an ocean because we had the form of a river in our minds. But this universal concept was not something that we had created for our own convenience.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  This emphasis on constructive activity leads to a new understanding of l a ng uage, which one can see again arisi ng in Hobbes and Loc ke. It is an o ff sho ot of the nominalist theories: words ar e ultimately given their meaning a rb itr aril y thro ugh definitions which attach them to certain things or ideas. B u t the function of language is to aid the construction of thought. We need l an g uage to build an adequate picture of thin gs. We couldn't match the world w ith a p ainstaking combination of individual bits of p erception, individual i d ea s . Through language, we can combine them in whole bunches , in whole cl a sse s, and this alone make s it possible to have genuine knowledge. 20 It follow s, of course, that words can also be terribly dangerous. They can h e th at through which we utterly lose contact with reality, if they are not 198 • I NWARDNESS prop erly anchored in experience through definitions. That is why bot h Hobbes and Locke are wary of them and at times almost obsessionally anxious that our w ords not run away with us. This fear of losing control i s the natural outgrowth of the role given to language here: to help u s t o maste r and marshall our thoughts. As Condillac says later, developing the Lockea n doctrine, lang u age gives us "empire sur notre imagination". 2 1 This centri ng on the constructive powers of language undergoes a furt he r crucial development in the late eighteenth century. Language and in gener al our representational powers come to be seen not only or mainly as directed to the correct portrayal of an independent reality but also as our wa y of manifesting thro ugh expression what we are, and our place withi n thin gs. And on the new understanding of ourselves as expressive beings , this manifestation is also seen as a self-complet i on. This expressive revolution identifies an d exalts a new poietic power, that of the creative imagination. I will return to this below; here I want to s ay only that this new shift further increases th e imp ortance of our poietic capacities. They are seen a s e ve n m ore central to human life. And this is the basis for the growing interest and fascination in them in all their forms-in language and artistic creation which rises at times almost to obsession in our century. 12 A DIGRESSION ON HISTORICAL EXPLANATION But this expressive facet of the modem identity has a deeper backgroun d which I have barely touched on . I am eager now to go on to this, but before I do, th er e is an issue ab6ut what I've been doing which needs to be clarified.

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  Not me, I liked it from the start; it sounds so reassuring, especially at night. You no doubt want to hear what I think of being in hiding. Well, all I can say is that I don’t really know yet. I don’t think I’ll ever feel at home in this house, but that doesn’t mean I hate it. It’s more like being on vacation in some strange pension. Kind of an odd way to look at life in hiding, but that’s how things are. The Annex is an ideal place to hide in. It may be damp and lopsided, but there’s probably not a more comfortable hiding place in all of Amsterdam. No, in all of Holland. Up to now our bedroom, with its blank walls, was very bare. Thanks to Father -- who brought my entire postcard and movie-star collection here beforehand -- and to a brush and a pot of glue, I was able to plaster the walls with pictures. It looks much more cheerful. When the van Daans arrive, we’ll be able to build cupboards and other odds and ends out of the wood piled in the attic. Margot and Mother have recovered somewhat. Yesterday Mother felt well enough to cook split-pea soup for the first time, but then she was downstairstalking and forgot all about it. The beans were scorched black, and no amount of scraping could get them out of the pan. Last night the four of us went down to the private office and listened to England on the radio. I was so scared someone might hear it that I literally begged Father to take me back upstairs. Mother understood my anxiety and went with me. Whatever we do, we’re very afraid the neighbors might hear or see us. We started off immediately the first day sewing curtains. Actually, you can hardly call them that, since they’re nothing but scraps of fabric, varying greatly in shape, quality and pattern, which Father and I stitched crookedly together with unskilled fingers. These works of art were tacked to the windows, where they’ll stay until we come out of hiding. The building on our right is a branch of the Keg Company, a firm from Zaandam, and on the left is a furniture workshop. Though the people who work there are not on the premises after hours, any sound we make might travel through the walls. We’ve forbidden Margot to cough at night, even though she has a bad cold, and are giving her large doses of codeine. I’m looking forward to the arrival of the van Daans, which is set for Tuesday. It will be much more fun and also not as quiet. You see, it’s the silence that makes me so nervous during the evenings and nights, and I’d give anything to have one of our helpers sleep here. It’s really not that bad here, since we can do our own cooking and can listen to the radio in Daddy’s office. Mr.

• From The Diary of a Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) (2020)

  I happened to drop Dussel’s soap on the floor and step on it. Now there’s a whole piece missing. I’ve already asked Father to compensate him for the damages, especially since Dussel only gets one bar of inferior wartime soap a month. Yours, Anne THURSDAY, MARCH 25, 1943 Dearest Kitty, Mother, Father, Margot and I were sitting quite pleasantly together last night when Peter suddenly came in and whispered in Father’s ear. I caught the words “a barrel falling over in \the warehouse” and “someone fiddling with the door.” Margot heard it too, but was trying to calm me down, since I’d turned white as chalk and was extremely nervous. The three of us waited while Father and Peter went downstairs. A minute or two later Mrs. van Daan came up from where she’d been listening to the radio and told us that Pim had asked her to turn it off and tiptoe upstairs. But you know what happens when you’re trying to be quiet -- the old stairs creaked twice as loud. Five minutes later Peter and Pim, the color drained from their faces, appeared again to relate their experiences. They had positioned themselves under the staircase and waited. Nothing happened. Then all of a sudden they heard a couple of bangs, as if two doors had been slammed shut inside the house. Pim bounded up the stairs, while Peter went to warn Dussel, who finally pre sented himself upstairs, though not without kicking up a fuss and making a lot of noise. Then we all tiptoed in our stockinged feet to the van Daans on the next floor. Mr. van D. had a bad cold and had already gone to bed, so we gathered around his bedside and discussed our suspicions in a whisper. Every time Mr. van D. coughed loudly, Mrs. van D. and I nearly had a nervous fit. He kept coughing until someone came up with the bright idea of giving him codeine. His cough subsided immediately. Once again we waited and waited, but heard nothing. Finally we came to the conclusion that the burglars had taken to their heels when they heard footsteps in an otherwise quiet building. The problem now was that the chairs in the private office were neatly grouped around the radio, which was tuned to England. If the burglars had forced the door and the air-raid wardens were to notice it and call the police, there could be very serious repercus sions. So Mr. Van Daan got up, pulled on his coat and pants, put on his hat and cautiously followed Father down the stairs, with Peter (armed with a heavy hammer, to be on the safe side) right behind him. The ladies (including Margot and me) waited in suspense until the men returned five minutes later and reported that there was no sign of any activity in the building.

• From Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989)

  We h ave t o M o ral Sources • Io 5 t ry t o o pe n out by this study a new understanding of ourselves and of our d eep es t m o r a l alle gi a nc es. 4.4 It is m y h unch that when we d o, w e shall see our moral predicament as both m or e c om ple x and more poten ti al ly co nflictual th an we d o at present. In pa rt i c u la r, I bel ieve that we shall fin d tha t we a r e a nd ca nnot bu t be on both s i de s of the gr eat in tramu ral moral dis putes I ment ioned ear lier betw een th e e s po u s al of hypergoods and th e def en c e of thos e goods which a re to be s acri ficed in the ir n a m e. This ma y seem a rather wild c laim. Greater articulacy can surely show th at we are unwittingly on both si de s, but how could it show that we must be ? C ouldn 't we then choose in greater luci d ity to repudiate one? Th e ' must , here doesn't aris e from any external argument, which I have t ried to show can be of no weight here. Rather it h as to do with ou r identity. In fact, our visions of the good are tied up with our understandings o f the self. We have already seen one facet of t h is connection in the close link discusse d i n section 2..1 between id entity an d moral orientation. We have a sense of who we are th r ough our sense of where we stand to the good. But this will also mean, as we shall see in d et a il later, that radically different senses of wha t the good is go along with qu ite d ifferent conceptions of what a human ag ent is, different notions of the self.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  • Even though I know something’s wrong erotically I can’t seem to define what the problem is. • In spite of my best intentions I’m unable to initiate a change—even though I know what I’d like to accomplish. • The attempts at change I do make don’t seem to lead me anywhere. • I’m uncovering disturbing memories or feelings that I don’t know how to handle. • I sense an inner conflict is sapping my energy but don’t know how to call a truce. • I continue to engage in certain sexual behaviors despite potentially damaging consequences. It’s not easy to find a therapist with whom you can work effectively. Believe it or not, many therapists, including some sex therapists, are uneasy about discussing the nitty-gritty details of eroticism. Interview several therapists and ask them to explain how they work with erotic problems such as yours. Be wary of therapists who seem to hold dogmatic beliefs about what healthy eroticism should be. Trust yourself and speak up if something doesn’t feel right. If you’re already in therapy for other concerns, you may be reluctant to initiate discussions of erotic issues even if you suspect they are related to what you’re working on. Therapists often don’t inquire about your sexuality, so you might have to bring it up yourself. If certain parts of this book feel particularly relevant, discuss them with your therapist as a way of raising the subject. Part IIIPOSITIVELY EROTIC9LONG-TERM EROTIC COUPLESThe creative use of learnable skills helps keep passion alive as intimacy deepens. Nowhere are the paradoxes of the erotic mind played out more delicately, boisterously, and sometimes tragically, than in the crucible of committed, enduring relationships. One paradox, surely the cruelest, is that those couples who achieve the close, emotional connection that virtually all of us crave inevitably end up softening if not eliminating the obstacles necessary for passionate sex. Dr. Tripp describes this unwelcome reality: As the partners make the necessary compromises to achieve a high contact with each other, they win intimacy and a genuine closeness, benefits which contribute to the comforts of daily living and to their ability to get along with each other. For a time, their sexual compatibility soars as well…. But all this blending and complementation not only does not contribute to the lastingness of sexual attraction, it soon begins to dissolve it. Thus, in well-balanced ongoing relationships, the compatibility of the partners tends to progressively improve while their erotic zest for each other markedly declines. Conversely, a genuine closeness is notable by its absence in the most intense forms of erotic interest, including the high romance that can so disconsolingly occur between utterly mismatched partners. Thus it is in new relationships and in marriages torn by fights and clashes—that is, where complementations and details of compatibility have not been worked out—that the highest erotic excitements flourish.1

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  In each of us a saturation-point is soon reached in all these things; the impetus of our purely intellectual zeal expires, and unless the topic be one associated with some urgent personal need that keeps our wits constantly whetted about it, we settle into an equilibrium, and live on what we learned when our interest was fresh and instinctive, without adding to the store. Outside of their own business, the ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives. They cannot get anything new. Disinterested curiosity is past, the mental grooves and channels set, the power of assimilation gone. If by chance we ever do learn anything about some entirely new topic we are afflicted with a strange sense of insecurity, and we fear to advance a resolute opinion. But, with things learned in the plastic days of instinctive curiosity we never lose entirely our sense of being at home. There remains a kinship, a sentiment of intimate acquaintance, which, even when we know we have failed to keep abreast of the subject, matters us with a sense of power over it, and makes us feel not altogether out of the pale. Whatever individual exceptions might be cited to this are of the sort that 'prove the rule.' To detect the moment of the instinctive readiness for the subject is, then, the first duty of every educator. As for the pupils, it would probably lead to a more earnest temper on the part of college students if they had less belief in their unlimited future intellectual potentialities, and could be brought to realize that whatever physics and political economy and philosophy they are now acquiring are, for better or worse, the physics and political economy and philosophy that will have to serve them to the end. The natural conclusion to draw from this transiency of instincts is that most instincts are implanted for the sake of giving rise to habits, and that, this purpose once accomplished, the instincts themselves, as such, have no raison d'être in the psychical economy, and consequently fade away. That occasionally an instinct should fade before circumstances permit of a habit being formed, or that, if the habit be formed, other factors than the pure instinct should modify its course, need not surprise us. Life is full of the imperfect adjustment to individual cases, of arrangements which, taking the species as a whole, are quite orderly and regular. Instinct cannot be expected to escape this general risk. SPECIAL HUMAN INSTINCTS. Let us now test our principles by turning to human instincts in more detail. We cannot pretend in these pages to be minute or exhaustive. But we can say enough to set all the above generalities in a more favorable light. But, first, what kind of motor reactions upon objects shall we count as instincts? This, as aforesaid, is a somewhat arbitrary matter.

• From The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (2018)

  Moreover, the companies that manage the distribution and aggregation of the information assist the public in a dubious way: the flow of information is directed by company algorithms that, in turn, bias the presentation so as to suit a variety of financial, political, and social interests, not to mention the tastes of users so that they can continue within their own entertaining silo of opinions. One should acknowledge, in fairness, that the voices of wisdom from the past—the voices of experienced and thoughtful editors of newspapers and radio and television programs—were also biased and favored particular views of how societies should function. In several cases, however, those particular views were identifiable with specific philosophical or sociopolitical perspectives, and one could either endorse the conclusions or resist them. The general public has no such opportunity today. Each person has direct access to the world via his or her own fully apped portable device and is encouraged to maximize his or her autonomy. There is little incentive to engage, let alone accommodate, the dissenting views of others. The new world of communication is a blessing for the citizens of the world trained to think critically and knowledgeable about history. But what about citizens who have been seduced by the world of life as entertainment and commerce? They have been educated, in good part, by a world in which negative emotional provocation is the rule rather than the exception and where the best solutions for a problem have to do primarily with short-term self-interests. Can they really be blamed? The widespread availability of nearly instantaneous and abundant communication of public and personal information, a manifest benefit, paradoxically reduces the time required for reflection on that same information. The management of the flood of available knowledge often requires a rapid classification of facts as good or bad, likable or not. This possibly contributes to an increase of polarized opinions regarding social and political events. The exhaustion over the flood of facts recommends withdrawal into default beliefs and opinions, often those of the group to which one belongs. This is further aggravated by the fact that no matter how smart and well informed one is, we naturally tend to resist changing our beliefs, in spite of the availability of contrary evidence. Work from our institute demonstrates this point for political beliefs, but I suspect it applies to a wide range of beliefs from religion and justice to aesthetics. The work shows that resistance to change is associated with a conflicting relationship of brain systems related to emotivity and reason. The resistance to change is associated, for example, with the engagement of systems responsible for producing anger. 3 We construct some sort of natural refuge to defend ourselves against contradictory information. Disaffected electorates across the world fail to show up at voting booths.