Awe

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 The Great Transformation (2006)

  Once people stopped arguing about doctrines and theories, they could acquire what Zhuangzi called the Great Knowledge. Instead of claiming that this could not mean that, they began to see that all apparent contradictions formed a mysterious, numinous unity. This coincidentia oppositorum brought them to the hub of the wheel, the axis of the Way, “the pivot at the centre of the circle, for it can react equally to that which is and to that which is not.” 31 The unenlightened state was like the vision of a frog who lived in a well and could see only a little patch of sky that he mistook for the whole. After he had seen the entire reality, his perspective was changed forever. 32 The Great Knowledge could never be defined; Zhuangzi would describe only its effects. It gave the sage a sensitive and intelligent responsiveness to each circumstance as it arose. He did not plan how he would act ahead of time; he did not agonize over alternative courses of action or stick to a rigid set of rules. Once he had ceased to obstruct the Way, he would acquire a spontaneity that resembled the knack of a talented craftsman. Zhuangzi told another story about Confucius, who was traveling with his disciples through a forest and met a hunchback who was trapping cicadas with a sticky pole. To Confucius’s astonishment, the hunchback never missed a single one. How did he manage it? He had clearly so perfected his powers of concentration that he had lost himself in his task, and achieved an ekstasis, a self-forgetfulness that brought him into perfect harmony with the Way. “Do you have the Way?” Confucius asked. “Indeed I have!” replied the hunchback. He had no idea how he did it! But he had practiced for months and could now bring himself into a state in which he was wholly focused on catching cicadas: “never tiring, never leaning, never being aware of any of the vast number of living beings, except cicadas. Following this method, how could I fail?” He had left his conscious self behind and let the qi take over, Confucius explained to his disciples: “He keeps his will undivided and his spirit energized,” so that his hands seemed to move by themselves. Conscious deliberate planning would be distracting and counterproductive. The hunchback reminded Zhuangzi of the carpenter Bian, who explained: “When I work on a wheel, if I hit it too softly, pleasant as this is, it doesn’t make for a good wheel. If I hit furiously, I get tired, and the thing doesn’t work! So, not too soft, not too vigorous. I grasp it in my hand and hold it in my heart. I cannot express this by word of mouth, I just know it.

• From A Sexplanation (2021)

  Are you asking because you want to make sure you don't get an STI? Then we gotta talk about what skins are touching and what fluids are coming into contact. Are you asking because you want to know what type of sex makes you feel close to someone or makes you feel connected to someone or makes you remember that person for a long time? It might have nothing to do with bodies and skin at all. [Soft ethereal music] Intimacy is a deep connection that we know when we feel it, but it's a little bit hard to define, right? The way that I think about sexual intimacy is that moment when you look into someone's eyes and you see yourself reflected back in a new way, like you've never seen yourself that way before. And sometimes our brain will say something to us kind of like, it'll say, "Did you feel that?" Like, just one of those like, holy cow kinda moments. But that gong of intimacy, I think, is a crucial part of what is this sex thing? It's being seen. -I love that so much it hurts a little. [laughs] -We reduce it to reproduction. It's really funny, if a kid says to us, like, what is sex? We'll say, sex is the way we make babies. But that's a complete lie. [laughs] Like, that's not what sex is at all. -Definitely not for me. -No, right, right? Not for most of us! Even like regular, straight people, sex is not about reproduction. If that were true, we'd all have about 15 kids. If that were true. It's a fraction of the amount of times that sex is about reproduction. Usually sex is about identity and connection and skin hunger and expression, right? Who we are. It's really important to us that when we're talking about sexuality, that we're talking about health, and sexuality isn't just about reproduction. It isn't just about sexually transmitted infections. It's not just about population. Sexuality is who we are, how we define ourselves in every way. It's about how we move through the world and how we laugh and how we wear our hair and how we're bold and how we're shy and what makes us go, "mmm" and also what makes us go, "Oh God." Our sexuality is always being reworked and changed. But how, when you walk through the room you're expressing your sexual self. I love that idea. You know, as you tilt back your head to laugh that you're expressing your sexual self, it's complex. [Alex] These definitions of sex, that sex is at the core of human connection and identity, are forcing me to some painful realizations. Because it would mean that by repressing my sexuality, I'm actually repressing a lot more than I thought. If sex is intertwined with every fiber of my being, just how much of my humanity am I missing out on?

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

  The scale of the events could actually be quite large and have equally large consequences. History provides instances of such antecedents, for example, the social upheavals that preceded the development of major systems of religious belief such as Judaism, Buddhism, and Confucianism—for example, the disruptive wars and the terrorism of the “Sea Peoples” that brought down the civilizations of the Mediterranean in the twelfth century B.C. in a setting that probably includes devastating earthquakes, droughts, and economic and political collapse. But thousands of years before the development of the golden Axial Age cultures—the period that spans the six centuries before the Christian era and that includes the explosion of Athenian philosophy and theater—humans had been inventing all manner of social creations as a response to their feelings. The feelings were not restricted to those of loss, pain, suffering, or anticipated pleasure. Included were also responses to yearnings for social community, as an extension to larger groups of feelings that began in care of progeny, attachment, and nuclear families, as well as the drive toward objects, people, and situations capable of yielding admiration, awe, and a sense of sublimity. The inventions prompted by feelings included music, dance, and the visual arts, along with rituals, magical practices, and busy, multitasking gods and goddesses with which humans tried to explain and resolve some puzzles of everyday life. Humans also formalized schemes of complex social organization, beginning with fairly simple tribal arrangements and progressing to the culturally structured life in the fabled kingdoms of the Bronze Age in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China. The mental movable something that yielded complex cultural developments also included the startling realization that on occasion no antecedent to pain or pleasure could be identified, no explanation could be found at all, there simply being pain or pleasure without any reason for either being apparent, just mystery. The resulting powerlessness, and even despair, are also likely to have been a sustained driving force behind human endeavors and have had a hand in arriving at and developing notions such as transcendence. In spite of the extraordinary triumphs of science, so much mystery remains that those forces are still durably at play in most world cultures. Feelings focused intelligence on certain goals, increased the reach of intelligence, and refined it in such a way that it resulted in a human cultural mind. To some degree, for better and worse, feelings and the intellect they mobilized have freed humans from the absolute tyranny of genes but only to keep us under the despotic rule of homeostasis.

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

  (In particular, Germans shouldn't ape Frenchmen. But Herder was also a passionate, and earl y , anti-colonialist.) This is one of the origina ting ideas of modern nationalism. The expressive view of human life went along naturally with a new understanding of art. If e xpression defines in a double sense, i.e. , bo th formulates and shapes, then the most important human activity will partake of this nature. The activity by which human beings realize their nature will also define in this double sense. It is art which comes to fill this niche. In our civi l ization, moulded by ex pressivist conceptions, it has come to take a central place in our spirit u al life, in some respects replacing religion. The awe we feel before artistic originality and creativity places art on the border of the numin ous , and reflects the crucial place that creation/expression has in our underst andi n g of h uman life. But in thus being made central, art was also rei nterpreted. If to defi ne myself is to bring what is as yet imp e rfectly determined to full definitio n , if the paradigm vehicle for domg this is artistic creation, then art can n o lon ge r be defined in traditional terms. The traditional understanding of art was a s The Expressivist Tum • 3 77 mimesis. Art imitates reality. This of course left a number of crucial question s open: in particular, the question of what k ind and level of reality was to be imitated. Was it the empiric al reality surrounding us? Or the higher reality of the Forms? And what was the relation between th em? B ut o n the new understanding, art is not imitation, but expression in t he sense discussed here. It makes som ething manifest w hile at the same time realizing it, c ompleting it. This is the shift which M. H. Abram s described so well in The Mi"or and the Lamp.13 The move from mimesis to expression was under way well before the Romantic period, through out the eighteenth century in fact. It fed on a host of things : in part, the new valuation of sentim e nt gave a higher significance to its expression; in part also, the new conceptions of the origins of language and culture in the expressive cry lent colour to the view that the earliest speech was poetical, that early people spoke in tropes because they spoke from the heart and the natural expression of feeling is poe try. This could easily combine with the primitivist sentiment th at the earliest, most primitive poetry was also the purest. Admiration for early, rugged, unspoilt, strongly expressive poetry grew in the second half of the eighteenth century, and turned people towards folk poet ry (Herder played a particularly impor tant role here) as weH as towards Homer, the Hebrew Bible, and even the entirely invented writer 'Ossia n ' .

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Like the Shang, the Zhou held a special “hosting” (bin) sacrifice every five years and invited the nature gods and ancestors to a great banquet. For ten days, the court made elaborate preparations, fasting, cleaning the temple, and bringing the memorial tablets of the ancestors from their niches and setting them up in the palace courtyard. On the day of the feast, the king and queen processed separately to the courtyard; then the younger members of the royal family, each impersonating an ancestor, were led in by a priest, greeted reverently, and escorted to their places. Animals were slaughtered in their honor, and while the meat was cooking, priests ran through the streets calling any stray gods to the feast, crying, “Are you here? Are you here?” There was beautiful music, stately feasting, and everybody played their roles with the utmost decorum. After the banquet—a holy communion with the ancestors, who were mystically present in their young descendants—hymns celebrated the perfect performance of the rite: “Every custom and rite is observed,” the participants sang; “every smile, every word is in place.”50 Every single facial gesture, every movement of their bodies, and every word that they uttered during the bin was prescribed. The participants left their individuality behind to conform to the ideal world of the ritual. “We have striven very hard,” they continued, “that the rites may be without mistake.” All was orderly and swift. All was straight and sure.51 The festival was an epiphany of a sacred society, living in close proximity with the divine; everybody had his or her unique and irreplaceable role, and by leaving their everyday selves behind, they felt caught up in something larger and more momentous. The ritual dramatically created a replica of the court of Heaven, where the High God, the First Ancestor (represented by the king), sat in state with the Shang and Zhou ancestors and the nature gods. The spirits conferred blessings, but they too submitted to the rituals of the sacred drama. The Shang had used the rites to gain the good offices of the ancestors and gods, but by the ninth century, it was becoming more important to perform the rituals precisely and beautifully. When they were perfectly executed, something magical occurred within the participants that gave them intimations of divine harmony.52 The ceremony concluded with an elaborate six-act ballet, which reenacted the campaign of Kings Wen and Wu against the last Shang king. Sixty-four dancers, clad in silk and carrying jade hatchets, represented the army, while the king himself played the part of his ancestor King Wen. Each act had its special music and symbolic dances, and hymns celebrated the establishment of the mandate: The Mandate is not easy to keep, may it not end in your persons. Display and make bright your good fame, and consider what Yin had received from Heaven. The doings of high Heaven have no sound, no smell. Make King Wen your pattern and all the states will trust in you.53

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

  The Inherent Sociality of Drives, Motivations, and Conventional EmotionsThe apparatus of drives, motivations, and emotions is concerned with the welfare of the subject in whose organism the responses inhere. But most drives, motivations, and emotions are also inherently social, at scales small and large, their field of action extending well beyond the individual. Desire and lust, caring and nurturing, attachment and love, operate in a social context. The same applies to most instances of joy and sadness, fear and panic, anger; or of compassion, admiration and awe, envy and jealousy and contempt. The powerful sociality that was an essential support of the intellect of Homo sapiens and was so critical in the emergence of cultures is likely to have originated in the machinery of drives, motivations, and emotions, where it evolved from simpler neural processes of simpler creatures. Even further back in time, it evolved from an army of chemical molecules, some of which were present in unicellular organisms. The point to be made here is that sociality, a collection of behavioral strategies indispensable for the creation of cultural responses, is part of the tool kit of homeostasis. Sociality enters the human cultural mind by the hand of affect.10 — The behavioral and neural aspects of drives and motivations have been especially well studied by Jaak Panksepp and Kent Berridge in mammals. Anticipation and desire, which Panksepp subsumes under the label of “seeking” and Berridge prefers to call “wanting,” are prominent examples. So is lust, both in its plain sex-related variety and in romantic love. The care and nurturing of progeny is another powerful drive complemented, on the side of those who are nurtured and cared for, by bonds of attachment and love, the sorts of bonds whose interruptions lead to panic and grief. Play is prominent in mammals and birds and is central to human life. Play anchors the creative imagination of children, adolescents, and adults and is a critical ingredient of the inventions that hallmark cultures.11 —

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

  The representation does not need to be “photographic,” although it can be. It is essential, however, that it preserve the internal relations among the parts of an entity such as angles between components, superpositions, and so forth. 3 Now stretch your imagination and think of maps not just of shapes or spatial locations but also of sounds as they occur in space, soft or rough, loud or faint, close or far away, and also think of maps built from touch, or smell or taste. Stretch the imagination a bit more and think of maps built from the “objects” and “events” that occur within the organism, that is, the viscera and their operations. Finally, the depictions produced by this web of nervous activity, the maps, are none other than the contents of what we experience as images in our minds. The maps of each sensory modality are the basis for the integration that makes images possible, and those images as they flow in time are the constituents of minds. They are a transformative step in the existence of complex living organisms, a fine consequence of the body–nervous system cooperation I have been addressing. Human cultures would never have come to pass without this step. The Big Conquest The ability to generate images opened the way for organisms to represent the world around them, a world that included every possible kind of object and other whole organisms; and, just as important, it allowed organisms to represent the world inside each of them . Before the emergence of mapping and images and minds, organisms could acknowledge the presence of other organisms and of external objects and respond accordingly. They could detect a chemical molecule or a mechanical stimulus, but the detection process did not include description of the configuration of the object that emitted the molecule or shoved the organism. Organisms could sense the presence of another organism because a part of that other organism had come into contact. They could also reciprocate the favor and be sensed. But the arrival of mapmaking and images provided a novel possibility: organisms could now produce a private representation of the universe surrounding their nervous systems . This is the formal beginning, in living tissues, of signs and symbols that “depict” and “resemble” the objects and events that the sensory channels of vision and hearing or touch manage to detect and describe. The “surround” of a nervous system is extraordinarily rich.

• 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.