Awe

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

  This happens at the subcortical level—in the deep layers of the superior colliculi—and in the cerebral cortex, where signals from the varied mapping regions within each sensory stream are allowed to mix and interact. They do so by means of an intricate network of hierarchical neuronal interconnections. Thanks to this integrative operation, we can, for example, see a person whose lips are moving and simultaneously hear sounds that are synchronized to the movements of the lips. The interconnection of association cortices with early cortices is responsible for the integration. As a result, the separate components that contribute to the perception of a particular moment in time may come to be experienced as a whole. One of the components of consciousness corresponds to this large-scale integration of images. The integration occurs as a result of activating varied separate regions simultaneously and in sequence. It is something equivalent to editing a film by selecting visual images and bits of soundtrack, ordering them as needed, but never printing the final result. The final result happens in “mind” and on the fly; it vanishes as time moves on except for the memory residue that may stay behind, in coded form. All images of the outside world are processed in nearly parallel fashion with the affective responses that these same images produce by acting elsewhere in the brain—in specific nuclei of the brain stem and of the cerebral cortices that are related to body state representation, such as the insular region. Which means that our brains are busy not only mapping and integrating varied external sensory sources but simultaneously mapping and integrating internal states, a process whose result is none other than feelings. Now just pause for a second and consider the marvel that our brains accomplish as they juggle images of so many sensory kinds, of external and internal origin, and turn them into our integrated movies-in-the-brain. By comparison, film editing is a piece of cake. Meanings, Verbal Translations, and the Making of Memories Our perceptions and the ideas they evoke continuously generate a parallel description in terms of language. That description is also constructed with images. All the words we use, in any language, spoken, written, or appreciated by touch, as in Braille, are made of mental images. This is true of the auditory images of the sounds of letters and words and inflections and of the corresponding visual symbol/letter codings that stand for those sounds. But minds are made of more than direct images of objects and events and of their language translations. Also present in mind are countless other images regarding any object or event that pertain and describe their constitutive properties and relationships. The collection of images typically related to an object or event amounts to the “idea” of that object or event, the “concept” of it, the meaning of it, the semantics of it.

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

  Interestingly, another set of brain regions known as “association” cortices accomplishes the requisite integration of the images composed in the “early” ones. FROM CONCERT HALL TO MAPMAKING ROOM Where are maps made? It is accurate to say that the mapmaking structures are located in the central nervous system, provided it is clear that many intermediate structures in the peripheral nervous system are preparing and preassembling material for the central neural maps. In our case, the key mapmaking structures are located at three brain tiers: several nuclei of neurons in the brain stem and in the tectum (which includes the collicular nuclei); the geniculate nuclei placed higher up in the telencephalon; and, most abundantly and expansively, in numerous regions of the cerebral cortex including the entorhinal cortex and the related hippocampal system. These regions are dedicated to the processing of specific channels of sensory information. Vision, hearing, and touch arise this way, in interconnected islands of the nervous system dedicated to a particular sensory modality. Subsequently, the signals that are first segregated according to the modality are integrated. This happens at the subcortical level—in the deep layers of the superior colliculi—and in the cerebral cortex, where signals from the varied mapping regions within each sensory stream are allowed to mix and interact. They do so by means of an intricate network of hierarchical neuronal interconnections. Thanks to this integrative operation, we can, for example, see a person whose lips are moving and simultaneously hear sounds that are synchronized to the movements of the lips. The interconnection of association cortices with early cortices is responsible for the integration. As a result, the separate components that contribute to the perception of a particular moment in time may come to be experienced as a whole. One of the components of consciousness corresponds to this large-scale integration of images. The integration occurs as a result of activating varied separate regions simultaneously and in sequence. It is something equivalent to editing a film by selecting visual images and bits of soundtrack, ordering them as needed, but never printing the final result. The final result happens in “mind” and on the fly; it vanishes as time moves on except for the memory residue that may stay behind, in coded form. All images of the outside world are processed in nearly parallel fashion with the affective responses that these same images produce by acting elsewhere in the brain—in specific nuclei of the brain stem and of the cerebral cortices that are related to body state representation, such as the insular region. Which means that our brains are busy not only mapping and integrating varied external sensory sources but simultaneously mapping and integrating internal states, a process whose result is none other than feelings. Now just pause for a second and consider the marvel that our brains accomplish as they juggle images of so many sensory kinds, of external and internal origin, and turn them into our integrated movies-in-the-brain. By comparison, film editing is a piece of cake.

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

  It is also as if the continuation and monitoring of the process of cultural invention would have been possible by cognitive means alone, without the actual felt value of life outcomes, good or bad, having a say in the proceedings. If your pain is medicated with treatment A or treatment B, you rely on feelings to declare which treatment makes the pain less intense, or fully resolved, or unchanged. Feelings work as motives to respond to a problem and as monitors of the success of the response or lack thereof. Feelings, and more generally affect of any sort and strength, are the unrecognized presences at the cultural conference table. Everyone in the room senses their presence, but with few exceptions no one talks to them. They are not addressed by name. In the complementary picture that I am drawing here, exceptional human intellect, individually and socially, would not have been moved to invent intelligent cultural practices and instruments without powerful justifications. Feelings of every sort and shade, caused by actual or imagined events, would have provided the motives and recruited the intellect. Cultural responses would have been created by human beings intent on changing their life situation for the better, for the more comfortable, for the more pleasant, for the more conducive to a future with well-being and with fewer of the troubles and losses that would have inspired such creations in the first place, ultimately and practically, not just for a more survivable future but for a better lived one. The humans who first devised the Golden Rule, that we should treat others the way we want others to treat us, formulated the precept with the help of what they felt when they were treated badly or when they saw others badly treated. Logic played a role as it worked on facts, to be sure, but some of the critical facts were feelings. Suffering or flourishing, at the polar ends of the spectrum, would have been prime motivators of the creative intelligence that produced cultures. But so would the experiences of affects related to fundamental desires—hunger, lust, social fellowship—or to fear, anger, the desire for power and prestige, hatred, the drive to destroy opponents and whatever they owned or collected. In fact, we find affect behind many aspects of sociality, guiding the constitution of groups small and large and manifesting itself in the bonds that individuals created around their desires and around the wonder of play, as well as behind conflicts over resources and mates, which were expressed in aggression and violence. Other powerful motivators included the experiences of elevation, awe, and transcendence that arise from the contemplation of beauty, natural or crafted, from the prospect of finding the means to make ourselves and others prosper, from arriving at a possible solution of metaphysical and scientific mysteries, or, for that matter, from the sheer confrontation with mysteries unsolved. How Original Was the Human Cultural Mind?

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

  And what about the solutions that the human cultural mind advances? Are they a completely original human invention, or were they used, at least in part, by beings that preceded us in evolution? The confrontation with pain, suffering, and the certainty of death, contrasted with the unattained possibility of well-being and flourishing, could well have been—most certainly was—behind some of the creative human processes that gave rise to the now staggeringly complex instruments of culture. But is it not the case that such human constructions were assisted by older biological strategies and instruments that preceded them? When we observe the great apes, we sense the presence of precursors to our cultural humanity. It is known that Darwin was astonished when, in 1838, he first observed the behaviors of Jenny, an orangutan that had recently arrived in the London Zoo. So was Queen Victoria. She found Jenny to be “disagreeably human.” 5 Chimpanzees can create simple tools, use them intelligently to feed themselves, and even visually transmit the invention to others. Some aspects of their social behaviors (and those of bonobos in particular) are arguably cultural. So are behaviors of species as far apart as elephants and marine mammals. Thanks to genetic transmission, mammals possess an elaborate affective apparatus that, in many respects, resembles ours in its emotional roster. To deny mammals the feelings related to their emotionality is no longer a tenable position. Feelings could also have played a motivating role to account for the “cultural” manifestations of nonhumans. Importantly, the reason why their cultural achievements turned out to be so modest would be related to the lesser development or absence of traits such as shared intentionality and verbal language, and, more generally, the modesty of their intellect. But things are not so simple. Given the complexity and wide-ranging positive and negative consequences of cultural practices and tools, it would be reasonable to expect that their conception would have been intentional and possible only in minded creatures, as nonhuman primates certainly are, perhaps after a holy alliance of feeling and creative intelligence could devote itself to the problems raised by existence in a group. Before cultural manifestations could emerge in evolution, one would first have had to wait for the evolutionary development of minds and feeling—complete with consciousness, so that feeling could be experienced subjectively—and then wait some more for the development of a healthy dose of mind-directed creativity. So goes the conventional wisdom, but that is not true as we are about to see. Humble Beginnings Social governance has humble beginnings, and neither the minds of Homo sapiens nor of other mammalian species were present at its natural birth.

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

  Along with suffering pain, humans were able to experience its very opposites, pleasure and enthusiasm, in a wide variety of situations, ranging from the simple and trivial to the sublime, from the pleasures that constitute responses to tastes and smells, food, wine, sex, and physical comforts, to the wonder of play, the awe and flourishing that arise from the contemplation of a landscape or the admiration and deep affection for another person. Humans also discovered that exerting power, dominating and even destroying others, and causing pure mayhem and pillage could produce not only strategically valuable results but also pleasure. Here, too, humans would have been able to use the existence of such feelings for a practical purpose: as a motive for questioning why pain exists in the first place and perhaps to puzzle at the bizarre fact that under certain circumstances the suffering of others could be rewarding. Perhaps they would have used the related feelings—among them fear, surprise, anger, sadness, and compassion—as a guide to imagining ways of countering suffering and its sources. They would have realized that among the variety of social behaviors available to them, some—fellowship, friendship, care, love—were the very opposite of aggression and violence and were transparently associated with the well-being of not only others but their own. — Why would feelings succeed in moving the mind to act in such an advantageous manner? One reason comes from what feelings accomplish in the mind and do to the mind. In standard circumstances, feelings tell the mind, without any word being spoken, of the good or bad direction of the life process, at any moment, within its respective body. By doing so, feelings naturally qualify the life process as conducive or not to well-being and flourishing. 1 Another reason why feelings would succeed where plain ideas fail has to do with the unique nature of feelings. Feelings are not an independent fabrication of the brain. They are the result of a cooperative partnership of body and brain, interacting by way of free-ranging chemical molecules and nerve pathways. This particular and overlooked arrangement guarantees that feelings disturb what might otherwise be an indifferent mental flow. The source of feeling is life on the wire, balancing its act between flourishing and death. As a result, feelings are mental stirrings, troubling or glorious, gentle or intense. They can stir us subtly, in an intellectualized sort of way, or intensely and noticeably, grabbing the owner’s attention firmly. Even at their most positive, they tend to disturb the peace and break the quiet.

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

  Art becomes one of the, if not the, paradigm medium in which we express, h ence define, hence realize ourselves. This helps to set a paradigm of epiphanic art, based on this model of expression. We complete ourselves through ex pressions which reveal and define us. If we then think of nature as the emanation of some spiritual reality, the same model a pp lies. Nature as "visible Spirit", in Schelling' s phrase , must also be unders tood in expressive terms. We come to read na tur e as the embodiment of ideas or divine purposes; but no longer after the mo de l of Deism, where the purposes, purely instrumental, can be identified i n de pendently of what fulfils them. Rather the p u rpose or idea only comes to full definition in its embodiment. We read the former in the latter in the manne r of an expression .. Bringing about the epiphany consists in s howin g what i s expressed or embodied in reali ty . We have an epiphany of being. Obviously the interspatial mode I am trying to discern in Pound is ve ry different. The image may bring some object before us, as the opening lines of Epiphanies of Modernism • 4 77 Canto I bring us sailors launching their ship, and indeed the point of Imagist poetry was to make the object stand vividly before us. The epiphany comes through the presentation. But this is not to say that the object expresses anything. Pound's metaphors point to a quite different relation: e.g., that of a receiving set to radio signals (artists are "the antennae of the race"), or o f an electro-magnetic field to electrical energy. The epiphanic object brings these forces into our presence and makes th e m operative among us, but this is not an expressive relation; indeed, energies (unlike purposes or i deas) are not the kind of thing which can be exp re ssed. It is this non-e x press ive relation that I am trying to grope for when I say that the object sets up a kind of frame or space or field within which there can be epiphany. From within this model of epiphany, w e can see the point of insisting on a hard-edged, clear, highly particularizing portrayal of the object. When we're dealing with an expressive object, w e strive to see through it, for it is infused with the deeper meaning. But when the object serves to frame an epiphanic space, it must stand out distinctly, in its full opacity: the more defined the frame, the more distinct the message.

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

  Thus in Schelling's Naturphilosophie, different natural phenomena co r resp o nd to dif f erent levels of realization of spirit in nature. Nature is "visible Spirit". 47 Thi s certainly resembles th e old neo-Platonic theories of the Renai s sance, where the physical reality around us is also the embodiment of the Ideas. Wha t has changed is the very notion of embodiment. It is no longe r the manifestati on in the flux of an impersonal Form; it is rather understood on the model of the self-realization of a subject, completing and defining itse lf in the process of self-manifestation. The order of nature has g one through a su b jectivist twist. It follows that ou r acc e ss to it essentially turns on our ow n p ow er s of expressive self-definition, the artistic imagination as the early Schell ing conceives it; or 'reason' in the peculiar sense Hegel gives this term. But in the nineteenth century, this vision of cosmic order began to e rod e just as its predecessors had. Partly this was du e , no doubt, to the developm en t of nat ural science, which presented a universe much vaster and more bewildering in space, time, and evolution than the earlier orders had e nvisaged and rat ionalized. And to this we must add the developments i n bio logy in the latter half of the century, w hich introduced natural science int o the very depths of inner nature t hat the Romantics had originally made part o f the Eu ropean self-consciousness. The resul t for us has been a split-scr ee n vision of natur e. O n one side is the vast universe which scientific discovery continually reveals, huge and in some ways baffling, stretching far beyond our imaginative powers in both the gigantic and the minu scule; indifferent t o us and strangel y other, though full of unexpected beauty and inspiring a we . On the other side is the natur e whose impulse we feel within, with whi ch we Our Victorian Contemporaries • 4 1 7 c a n feel ourselves out of align ment and w ith which we can aspire to be in a tt unement. How these two are to be related is deeply problematical. This is on e respect i n whic h our cultural predi cament is utterl y different from w hat e x is te d before the eighteent h century, where the scientific explanation of the na tural order was closely aligned with its moral meaning, as we see b oth with Pla to and with the Deist conceptions of order. For us, the two have drifted ap art, and it is not dear how we can hope to relate them.

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

  But it als o reflected a change in the imagination and in the sense of our place in nature . Diderot leapt well beyond the availa bl e evidence when he wrote: Qu'est-ce que notre duree en comparaison de l'eternite des temps? ... Suite indefinie d'animalcules clans l'atome qui fermente, meme suite indefinie clans l ' autre atome qu'on appelle la Terre. Qui sait les races d ' animaux qui nous ont precedes? qui sait les races d'animaux qui succederont aux notres? What is the duration of our time compared with eternity? ... Just as there is an infinite succession of animalcu lae in one fermenting speck of matter, so there is the same infinite succession of animalculae in the speck called earth. Who knows what animal species preceded us? Who knows w hat will follow our present ones? 54 The new feeling for nature, which I described in Chapter 17, moved beyond the English garden, beyond the valleys of Switzerland where the wilderness touches human habitation and which Rousseau ri-tade famous, and comes finally to the inhospitable heights, where it meets in awe an immensity which seems utterly indifferent to human life. Ramond journeyed into these regions, and his books gave expression to this exaltation before the vastness of the untamed heights. They place us before the unchartable immen s i ty of tim e. Tout concoun a rendre les meditations plus profondes, a l eur donner cette teinte sombre, ce caractere sublime qu'elles acquierent, quand l'ame, prenant cet essor qui la rend contemporaine de tous les siecles, e t coexistante avec tousles etres, plane sur l'abime du temps. Everything works together to make our meditations deeper, and to give them this sombre h ue, this sublime character which they acquire, when the so ul, taking the leap which makes it contemporary with all centuries, and coe xistent with all beings, soars over the abyss of time. 55 Radical Enlightenment • 3 JI Charles Rosen quotes Ramond's descriptions of the Alps and Pyrenees, which bring to immediate visibility, as it were, in the accounts of different layers of r oc k and ice, the widely separated ages of their genesis. 56 Some startling findings of learned men combine here with the Romantic temper to produce a new sensibility, which has come to dominate our world. 19.4 W e stu m ble here across one of the many ways in which our conceptions of m oral sources are bound up with the kind of narrative structures in which we m ake sense of our lives.

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

  They constitute significant entries into the world of human-machine hybridization. Beneficial applications include exoskeletons for victims of accidents who become paraplegics or tetraplegics; exoskeletons are literally second, prosthetic skeletons, set around paralyzed limbs and anchored in the spinal column. These prostheses are moved by computers activated by an outside operator or by the patient. The latter can actually be guided by the patient’s intention to move, capitalizing on the capture of electric brain signals associated with the will to move. 3 We are well on the way to creating hybrids of living organisms and engineered artifacts, something akin to the cyborgs so beloved of science fiction. Immortality Woody Allen once joked that he wanted to achieve immortality by not dying. Little did he know that one day the idea of doing away with death would not be a mere joke. Humans have now figured that the possibility is real, and they have been quietly working toward that goal. And why not? If indeed it would be possible to prolong life indefinitely, should one forgo the option? The practical answer to this question is clear. It might be worth trying, provided one would not need to confront a supreme creator who might have other plans and provided this forever life could be lived as a good life, without the diseases that become so frequent with prolonged longevity—cancers and the dementias, mostly. The boldness of the project takes your breath away, and so does the arrogance it implies. But once you recover your composure—and weary of falling into the Stockholm syndrome pit again—you say, fine, but let me ask some questions. What are the consequences of such a project, immediately and in the long run, for the individuals and for the societies? What conception of humanity informs the endeavor to make humans eternal? In terms of basic homeostasis, immortality is perfection, the realization of nature’s undreamed dream of life perpetuity. The early conditions of homeostasis were such that they promoted the ongoing life and, unwittingly, life into the future. The unplanned devices ensuring future life included the emergence of genetic machinery. In our futuristic scenario, immortality would be the ultimate stage in the life enterprise, an achievement made all the more intriguing and commendable by the fact that it would arrive by way of human creativity. It appears natural, actually, when one considers that creativity is itself a consequence of homeostasis. But what about the downside? Not all things natural are necessarily good, nor is it advisable to let natural things run unchecked. Immortality would eliminate the most powerful engine of feeling-driven homeostasis: the discovery that death is inevitable and the anguish that the discovery generates. Should we not worry about the loss of such an engine? Of course we should worry. It can be argued that as backup engines of the process of homeostasis perhaps we might keep pain and suffering, due to causes other than death foretold, and pleasure, too. But would we really?

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

  And in Death in Venice what irresistibly attracts Gustav von Aschenbach, that highly controlled and discipline d c raftsman, admirer of Frederi c k the Great, to the effortlessly incarnate beauty of Tadzio is also drawing him ineluctably towards disease and death. The epiphanies of being for Mann have this profoundly ambiguous character. As for Proust, the revelation of time restored is bought at the cost of a pitiless destruction of the illusions of love. 6 All this can help explain the particular form of the modernist turn to interiority. Thinkers in the early twentieth century were exercised by a problem which is still posed today: What is the place of the Good, or the True, or the Beautiful, in a world entirely determined mechanistically? Hulme, for instance, took materialism as a serious challenge, identifying it through this sta tem ent by Munsterberg: Science is to me not a mass of disconnected information , but the certainty that there is no change in the univ e rse, no motion of an atom, and no sensation of a consciousness whic h does not come and go abso l utely in accordance with natural l aws; the certainty that nothing can exist outsid e the gig antic mechanism of causes and effects; necessity moves the emotions in my mind. 7 To counter the imperial claims of an all-embracing mechanism, strengthened b y the marc h of an advancing technology, the recourse couldn't simply be an ep iphanic des cription o f na ture. For not only had this very mechanism made 460 • S U B TL ER LANG U A GE S this response p roblematic, and Schopenhauer's vision undermined it; but th e recoil from the epiphanies of being branded it as wrong. It did not provide a genuine alternative to the instrumental world which gen erated the mechanist o utlook, which offered to reduce even our sensations and feelings to its exceptionless laws. The obvious recourse against this all-pervasive levelling was interiority: that the lived world, the world as experience d, known an d transmuted in sensibility and consciousness, couldn't be assimilated to the supposedly all- encompassing machine. Bergson, w ith his doct rine of the irreducibility of experience to external explanation, of duree to the s p atia l iz ed time of physical explanation, was the great source of liberation fo r Hulme. This kind of move, which brings philosophers together with artists and critics in an attem pt to recover what has been suppressed and forgotten in th e conditions of experience, has been repeated many times in th e twentieth century.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  The idea that our most erotic moments are born of conflict is not new. Freud certainly recognized it, though he conceptualized it differently. He believed that an eternal tension exists between the primitive, sexual, animalistic id and the overcivilized superego. Freud brought a radical message to his Victorian contemporaries: though you may do your best to suppress sexual urges in yourself or your children, they’re not going to disappear. Like Freudian psychology, the erotic equation describes the interplay of impulse and restriction. But I’ve always thought that Freud had a dark and pessimistic view of human nature, perhaps because his lifework chronicled the ravages of sexual repression. In any case, he concluded that even reasonably well-adjusted adults were doomed to frustration because the requirements of civilization must prevail over our unruly impulses.2 He didn’t seem to realize that we humans want some restrictions to push against. We just don’t want them to be so harsh that they choke off our sexuality entirely. MYSTERIES OF ATTRACTIONIn a world populated with an endless array of faces, bodies, and personalities, why are we sexually drawn to some, repelled by others, and indifferent to the great majority? Sexual attraction is one of life’s great mysteries. People often act as if this mystery were a fragile one. They fear that looking too closely at their attractions might dampen or destroy them. If you feel a similar reluctance to see all there is to see, let me offer you some assurances. I’ve talked in depth with hundreds of people who risked a closer look, and I’ve noticed a consistent pattern. Examining an attraction only disrupts or diminishes it if something about the attraction is detrimental to the person. In such cases, which we’ll discuss in detail in Part II, looking at the dynamics of the attraction may set off a self-protective alarm as its potentially destructive features become more apparent. Most people find that exploring their attractions deepens and enriches them. All of life’s truly great mysteries share this in common: the more you see of their inner workings, the greater is your awe. If you approach your attractions with respect, they will reveal some of their secrets to you. Although you will never figure them out entirely, even small insights can enlarge the arena of your conscious choice—which is always empowering. There are two primary types of attraction: lusty and romantic. Each springs from distinct motives and generates different kinds of passions. Those who aspire to a healthy erotic life must develop a comfortable relationship with both types of attractions, for each is part of our humanity.

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

  Those other structures are located at the visual sensory portal. What does the visual sensory portal consist of? The eye socket; the musculature in our eyelids and around the eyes with which we can frown and concentrate gaze; the lens with which we adjust the visual focus; the diaphragm with which we control the amount of light; the muscles with which we move the eyes. All these structures and their respective actions are well coordinated with the primary visual process but are not part of it. They play an obviously practical role; they are assistants, so to speak. They also play a somewhat loftier and unintended role that I will address later when we turn to consciousness. — The old internal world is a world of fluctuating life regulation. It can operate well or not so well, but how well it works is critical to our lives and minds. Accordingly, the imaging of the old internal world in action—the state of viscera, the consequences of chemistries—must reflect the goodness or badness of the state of that interior universe. The organism needs to be affected by such images. It cannot afford to be indifferent to them, because survival depends on the information that such images reflect regarding life. Everything in this old internal world is qualified, good, bad, or in between. This is a world of valence. The new internal world is a world dominated by the body frame, by the location and state of the sensory portals within that frame, and by the voluntary musculature. The sensory portals sit and wait within the body frame and contribute importantly to the information generated by the maps of the outside world. They clearly indicate to the organism’s mind the locations, within the organism, of the sources of images currently being generated. This is necessary for the construction of an overall organism image, which, as we shall see, is a critical step in the generation of subjectivity. The new internal world also generates valence because its living flesh does not escape the vagaries of homeostasis. But the vulnerabilities of the new internal world are smaller than those of the old. The skeleton and the skeletal musculature form a protective carapace. It sturdily envelops the tender old world of chemistries and viscera. The new internal world stands in relation to the old internal world as an engineered exoskeleton stands in relation to our real skeleton. 6 EXPANDING MINDS The Hidden Orchestra The poet Fernando Pessoa saw his soul as a hidden orchestra. “I do not know which instruments grind and play away inside of me, strings and harps, timbales and drums,” he wrote in The Book of Disquiet. 1 He could only recognize himself as a symphony. His is an especially apt intuition, because the constructions that inhabit our minds can well be imagined as ephemeral musical performances, played by several hidden orchestras, inside the organisms to which they belong.

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

  The dis ease which i s epidemi c in Venice and eventually 480 • SUBTLE R LANGUAGES overcomes Gustav von A schenbach is indeed expressi v e of something deeper. As with all true symbols it defies characteri z ation; but it has to do with sen sual fascination of effortless incarnate beauty which saps the will to impose form. This, however, is far from unambiguously good; indee d, ther e is nothing in Mann's universe which bears that description. Again, in the case of the expressionist painters I mentioned, above , n ot only (3) but also (1) seem negated; the claim to accurate representation is also being droppe d. In whatever form, this common negative trait of modernists issues in another, which has both a negative and a positive side. This is an awareness of living on a duali ty or plura lity of levels, no t t otally compatible , but which can't be reduced to unity. We recur here to the earlie r disc ussion of differ ent models of the self. The self of disengaged reason is and ought to be a single centre of strategic calculation. The Romantic expressive outlook points to an ideal of perfect integration, in which both reason and sensuality, the impu lse within and nature without, ar e har mo nized. B ut in the post- Sc hopenha uerian world of Thomas Mann there is no single construal of experience wh ich one can cleave to exclusively without disaster or impoverishment. The Magic Mount ain presents two radically incombinable modes of time-consciousness, one which approaches timelessness and anoth er which is constituted by the calendar of real events, of achievements an d failures in the world. Hans Castorp is drawn irresistibly into the first on the mountain, but he is also inevitably called back to the second by the imperious demands of world history, as war breaks out in 1914. One can't live b y either one alone, but neither can they be combined or synthesized. Human life is irreducibly multilevelled. The epiphanic and the ordinary but indispensable real can never be fully aligned, and we are condemned to live on more than one lev el -or else suff e r the impoverishment of repression. This brings us back to the inward turn which I mentioned at the outset.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Instead he asked Pasenadi to consider this: If he found that there was nothing dearer to him than himself, others must feel the same. Therefore, the Buddha concluded, “a person who loves the self should not harm the self of others.” 106 This was his version of the Golden Rule. Laypeople could not extinguish their egotism as thoroughly as a monk, who was devoted to the task full-time, but they could use their experience of selfishness to empathize with other people’s vulnerability. This would take them beyond the excesses of ego and introduce them to the essential value of compassion. Toward the end of his life, King Pasenadi’s wife died and he fell into a chronic depression. He took to driving around the countryside aimlessly, and one day discovered a park full of wonderful old trees. Alighting from his carriage, he walked among their enormous roots and noticed the way that they “inspired trust and confidence.” “They were quiet; no discordant voices disturbed their peace; they gave out a sense of being apart from the ordinary world and offered a retreat from the cruelty of life.” Looking at these marvelous trees, the king immediately thought of the Buddha, jumped into his carriage, and drove for miles until he had reached the house where the Buddha—now an old man of eighty—was staying. 107 For many of his contemporaries, the Buddha was a haven of peace in a violent, sorrowful world. The search for a place apart, separate from the world, and yet wondrously within it, that is impartial, utterly fair, calm, and that fills us with a confidence that, against all odds, there is value in our lives, was what many people in the Axial Age sought when they looked for God, brahman, or nibbana. The Buddha seemed to encapsulate this in his own person. People were not repelled by his dispassion, not daunted by his lack of preference for one thing or person over another. He does not seem to have become humorless, grim, or inhuman, but inspired extraordinary emotion in all who met him. His constant, relentless gentleness, serenity, and fairness seemed to touch a chord and resonate with some of their deepest longings. Like Socrates and Confucius, he had become what Karl Jaspers called a paradigmatic personality—somebody who exemplified what a human being could or should be. 108 These luminaries of the Axial Age had become archetypal models; imitating them would help other people to achieve the enhanced humanity that they embodied. One day a Brahmin found the Buddha sitting under a tree and the sight of his serenity, stillness, and self-discipline filled the priest with awe. The Buddha reminded him of a tusker elephant: there was the same sense of enormous strength and massive potential brought under control and channeled into an extraordinary peace. The Brahmin had never seen a man like that before. “Are you a god, sir?” he asked. “An angel . . . or a spirit?”

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  And when Zilu persisted, and asked what the life of the ancestors was actually like, Confucius replied again: “Till you know about the living, how are you to know about the dead?” 11 Confucius was no skeptic. He practiced the traditional ancestral rites punctiliously, and was filled with numinous awe when he thought of Heaven. Like the Indian sages, he understood the value of silence. “I would much rather not have to talk,” he once complained. Zigong was distressed. “If our Master did not talk,” he objected, “how can we little ones teach others about him?” “Heaven does not speak,” Confucius replied, “yet the four seasons run their course by the command of Heaven, the hundred creatures, each after its own kind, are born thereby. Heaven does no speaking!” 12 Heaven might not talk, but it was supremely effective. Instead of wasting time on pointless theological speculation, people should imitate the reticence of Heaven and keep a reverent silence. Then, perhaps, they too would be a potent force in the world. Confucius brought the religion of China down to earth. Instead of concerning themselves about the afterlife, people must learn to be good here below. His disciples did not study with him in order to acquire esoteric information about the gods and spirits. Their ultimate concern was not Heaven but the Way. The task of the junzi was to tread the path carefully, realizing that this in itself had absolute value. It would lead them not to a place or a person but to a condition of transcendent goodness. The rituals were the road map that would put them on course. Everybody had the potential to become a junzi, who—for Confucius—was a fully developed human being. In the old days, only an aristocrat had been a junzi, but Confucius insisted that anybody who studied the Way enthusiastically could become a “gentleman,” a mature or profound person. Zigong once suggested that the company adopt as their motto: “Poor without cadging, rich without swagger.” “Not bad,” Confucius said. “But better still, Poor, yet delighting in the Way; rich, yet a student of ritual.” Zigong immediately capped this by quoting a verse from the Classic of Odes: As thing cut, as thing filed, As thing chiselled, as thing polished. 13 Confucius was delighted: at last Zigong was beginning to understand the Odes! These lines perfectly described the way a junzi used the rites to burnish and refine his humanity. A junzi was not born but crafted. He had to work on himself in the same way as a sculptor shaped a rough stone and made it a thing of beauty.

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

  Feelings, and more generally affect of any sort and strength, are the unrecognized presences at the cultural conference table. Everyone in the room senses their presence, but with few exceptions no one talks to them. They are not addressed by name. In the complementary picture that I am drawing here, exceptional human intellect, individually and socially, would not have been moved to invent intelligent cultural practices and instruments without powerful justifications. Feelings of every sort and shade, caused by actual or imagined events, would have provided the motives and recruited the intellect. Cultural responses would have been created by human beings intent on changing their life situation for the better, for the more comfortable, for the more pleasant, for the more conducive to a future with well-being and with fewer of the troubles and losses that would have inspired such creations in the first place, ultimately and practically, not just for a more survivable future but for a better lived one. The humans who first devised the Golden Rule, that we should treat others the way we want others to treat us, formulated the precept with the help of what they felt when they were treated badly or when they saw others badly treated. Logic played a role as it worked on facts, to be sure, but some of the critical facts were feelings. Suffering or flourishing, at the polar ends of the spectrum, would have been prime motivators of the creative intelligence that produced cultures. But so would the experiences of affects related to fundamental desires—hunger, lust, social fellowship—or to fear, anger, the desire for power and prestige, hatred, the drive to destroy opponents and whatever they owned or collected. In fact, we find affect behind many aspects of sociality, guiding the constitution of groups small and large and manifesting itself in the bonds that individuals created around their desires and around the wonder of play, as well as behind conflicts over resources and mates, which were expressed in aggression and violence. Other powerful motivators included the experiences of elevation, awe, and transcendence that arise from the contemplation of beauty, natural or crafted, from the prospect of finding the means to make ourselves and others prosper, from arriving at a possible solution of metaphysical and scientific mysteries, or, for that matter, from the sheer confrontation with mysteries unsolved. How Original Was the Human Cultural Mind? Several intriguing questions arise at this point. On the face of what I have just written, the cultural enterprise originated as a human project. But are the problems that cultures solve exclusively human, or do they concern other living beings as well?

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

  And this is where incomparability co nnects up with what I have been ca11ing 'strong evaluation': the fact that these ends or goods stand indepen dent of our own desires, inclinations, or choices, that they represent stan dards by which t h ese desires and choices a re judged. These are obv iou s l y two linked facets of the same sense of higher worth. The goods which command our awe must also function in some sense as standards for us. Looking at some common examples of such frameworks will help to focus the discussion. One of the earliest in our civilization, and which is still alive for som e people today, is that associated with the honour ethic. The life o f the warrior , or citizen, or citizen-soldier is deemed higher than the merely private existence, devoted to the arts of peace and economic well-being. The higher life is marked out by the aura of fame and glory which attaches to it, or at least to signal cases, those who succeed in it brilliantly. To be in public life o r to be a warrior is to be at least a candidate for fame. To be ready to hazard one's tranquility, wealth, even life fo r glory is the mark of a real ma n ; and those who cannot bring themselves to this are judged with contempt as "womanish" (this outlook seems to be inherently sexist). Against this, we have the celebrated and influential counter-position put forward by Plato. Virtue is no longer to be found in public life or in excelling i n the warrior agon. The higher life is that ruled by reason, and reason itself is defined in terms of a vision of order, in the cosmos and in the soul. The higher life is one in which reason-purity, order, limit, the unchanging governs the desires, with their bent to excess, insatiability, fickleness, conflict. Already in this transvaluation of values, something else has altered in addi tion to th e conte nt of the good life, fa r -reach ing as th is ch ang e is. Pl at o' s ethic re quir es what we might call today a theor y, a re asoned ac c ount of wha t huma n life is about, and why one w ay is higher th an the othe rs . Th is flo w s inesc apabl y fr om the new moral status of reason .

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

  One way to deal with the problem is simply t o suppr ess one of these terms as irrelevant or illusory. This is the response of disenga ged naturalism, which rec og nizes only th e order of scientific explanation. But if we don't take this quick way with it, we can recognize an area of puzzlement and uncertainty in modern culture. The different ways of meeting this puzzlement have had a lot to do with our changing understanding of the creative imagination and its r ole in our moral life. But for those who retained a sense of the inner impulse of nature, its meaning began to change. This came partly from the scientific developments. And partly too, it was the continuing force of what I called above the a nti-Panglossian objection to all notions of providential order, that they made the structure of all things a bit too tidy and harmonious for our experience. There were other factors as we ll, which I will discuss in the next chapter. Th e shift finds one of its expressions in the philos ophy of Schopenhauer. For those who went through this change, the great current of nature to which we belong is no longer seen as somethin g c omprehensible, familiar, closely relate d to the self, and benign and comes more and more to be seen as vast, unfathomable, alien, and am oral, until we get reflections like those of Conrad's narrator Marlowe in Heart of Darkness, as he sees the natives dancing on the shores of the river: The earth seemed unearthly .... and the men were-No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it,-this suspicion of th eir not being inhuman. It would come slowly on one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you wa s just the thought of their humanity-like yours-the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly . Yes, it was ugly e no ugh; but if you were man eno u gh you would admit to yourself that t h ere was in y ou just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible fr an kness o f that noise , a dim suspicion of t h ere being a mea ning i n it w h i ch you-y ou so remote from the night of first ages-could compre h e nd. A nd why not? ... What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, de votio n, valour, rage-who can tell ?-but truth-truth stripped of its c loak o f tim e. 4 8 4z8 • SUBTLER LANGUAGE S 2.. The second change is obviously related.

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

  The power of the human imagination to refract and transfigure reali ty emerges mag nified ou t of th e Schopenhauerian turn. And in this it pushes in the same direction a s the art of anti-natu re and e ven ultimately as the transfigurations of re a lism. In different but parallel ways, they emphasize that the epiphanies of art involve a transmutation of what is there: despiritualized reality, or fallen nature, or the amoral will; rather than the revelation of a good which is ontic ally independent of us-even if it needs us to come to epi phany. This is not true of the Baud el a ire who speaks of the 'correspondences'; nor is it true of Schopenhauer himself, who sees t he artist as contemplating the Ideas. But it is true of those who followed in their wake, as these vestiges of ( neo)Pla tonism disap peared, encouraged in part by some of Baudelaire's own poetic practice. The temptation thus grows to an epiphanic art which will p rim arily celebrate our own powers, the self-centred and subjectivist art I spoke about above. I want to return t o this issue below. A third legacy of Schopenhauer is a further enrichment of our sense of the inner depths of a human being, a renewed sense of our link with the whole of nature, but as a great reservoir of unbridled power, which underlies our mental life. This has bee n ela borated by a great number of writers and artists--and' not least in the passage from Conrad' s Heart of Darkness that I quoted at the end of the last chapter-who h av e added to the force and imaginative reach of this pictur e of ourselves. And not just writers of literature; also men of science: one of the important authors deeply influenced by the Schopenhauerian climate of thought was Fr eud. It is a com mo nplace how Sc hopenhaue r a nticipated the Freudian doctrines of the unconscious determin ation of our thought and feeling. Even more important, the Schope nhauerian will was the ancestor to the Freudian id. But rather than taki n g the engaged stance in an attempt to renew c ontact, Freud takes a Cartesian stance to this inner world. The ai m i s by objectifying it to gain a disengaged understanding of it and, as a consequence, to liberate us from its obsessions, te rrors, compulsions. Freud ' s is a m agni fic ent a tte mp t to re gain our fr eedom and s elf- pos s essi on , the dig nity o f the diseng aged subject, in face of the in ner depths. Th is i s n o t to s a y that Fre ud 's proj ect didn't overl ap at a ll with that of the p o s t· Schopenh aue rian art ists.

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

  At first this view astounds us by the enormous number of special adjustments it supposes animals to possess ready-made in anticipation of the outer things among which they are to dwell. Can mutual dependence be so intricate and go so far? Is each thing born fitted to particular other things, and to them exclusively, as locks are fitted to their keys? Undoubtedly this must be believed to be so. Each nook and cranny of creation, down to our very skin and entrails, has its living inhabitants, with organs suited to the place, to devour and digest the food it harbors and to meet the dangers it conceals; and the minuteness of adaptation thus shown in the way of structure knows no bounds. Even so are there no bounds to the minuteness of adaptation in the way of conduct which the several inhabitants display. The older writings on instinct are ineffectual wastes of words, because their authors never came down to this definite and simple point of view, but smothered everything in vague wonder at the clairvoyant and prophetic power of the animals—so superior to anything in man—and at the beneficence of God in endowing them with such a gift. But God's beneficence endows them, first of all, with a nervous system; and, turning our attention to this, makes instinct immediately appear neither more nor less wonderful than all the other facts of life. Every instinct is an impulse. Whether we shall call such impulses as blushing, sneezing, coughing, smiling, or dodging, or keeping time to music, instincts or not, is a mere matter of terminology. The process is the same through-out. In his delightfully fresh and interesting work, Der Thierische Wille, Herr G. H. Schneider subdivides impulses (Triebe) into sensation-impulses, perception-impulses, and idea-impulses. To crouch from cold is a sensation-impulse; to turn and follow, if we see people running one way, is a perception-impulse; to cast about for cover, if it begins to blow and rain, is an imagination-impulse. A single complex instinctive action may involve successively the awakening of impulses of all three classes. Thus a hungry lion starts to seek prey by the awakening in him of imagination coupled with desire; he begins to stalk it when, on eye, ear, or nostril, he gets an impression of its presence at a certain distance; he springs upon it, either when the booty takes alarm and sees, or when the distance is sufficiently reduced; he proceeds to tear and devour it the moment he gets a sensation of its contact with his claws and fangs. Seeking, stalking, springing, and devouring are just so many different kinds of muscular contraction, and neither kind is called forth by the stimulus appropriate to the other. Schneider says of the hamster, which stores corn in its hole: