Contentment

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

  To our mutual surprise and delight, we are still dating, almost two years after that first date in which he put me in a taxi and hurriedly shut the door behind me. An hour from now, I may feel sad and regretful, but I know that these feelings – the ones that make me sigh with deep inner peace, the ones that make me go mute with grief – come and go. When I walk down to the beach and watch children frolic in the waves and parents wrap them afterward in oversize beach towels, I miss my kids with unbearable intensity and I close my eyes, fighting with myself to be present. I love my time without my kids, the freedom and ease with which I am able to move through my days, but I think about them and pine for them constantly. When I am with them, I call #6 at night, telling him he’s been replaced by Georgia in my bed, venting about an argument I had with one of the kids, missing him. I have a full private life now, separate from my fulfilling and busy life as a mother. It’s a delicate balancing act to keep myself aloft, but it’s not terribly complicated. My kids are my priority; when they’re doing their own thing, I am free to spend time with #6 or my beautiful gaggle of girlfriends or to write or occasionally, still, to wander. #6 is gracious about relinquishing me to my children, saying he is attracted to me in part because I am such a committed mother. He has yet to meet them beyond a quick hello and that’s my choice now. When I’m with them, I want to be wholly with them. I suggested to him recently that he would be better served by a girlfriend who has more time to spend with him, but he waved the suggestion away: quality over quantity. We know we have a good thing. We make each other laugh, we care about each other and we have great sex – this seems like enough. As for my wanderlust, that’s a part of me that I steadfastly refuse to let go. #6 gives me everything I want from a man except for one significant thing that is impossible for him to provide: newness. I still want to be noticed, desired, flirted with, seen in all my naked glory; I want to peel clothes off men and run my hands along their warm skin. I won’t demean myself by not being forthright with #6, and I have to safeguard this side of myself I only recently discovered. When I have the chance, which isn’t often anymore as there are only so many hours in a day, I have sex with other men and I tell #6 when I do. He is apprehensive, but I tell him I love him, and I do. I struggled with sharing my feelings for him, terrified to reveal myself so nakedly.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  It took years to open up the depths of the self, through silence and a spiritual discipline that led the aspirant to realize the futility of desiring things that were only transient, and that it was stupid to prize individual qualities that were of no more importance than the grains of pollen that eventually made up a pot of honey. 32 The pupil must work patiently with a guru, who would help him to see what was really there, what was really important. The early Upanishads were not rebelling against the old Vedic ritualism so much as moving beyond it. Unless a sage learned to look through the external rites to their inner meaning, he would never become aware of the absolute reality of brahman at their core. The Chandogya said that priests who chanted the syllable Om mindlessly and mechanically were like dogs baying for food. 33 The gods had faded into the background. In these early Upanishads, Prajapati, the personalized expression of brahman, was no longer the lofty creator god but had become an ordinary guru, who taught his pupils that they must not regard him—Prajapati—as the highest reality, but seek their own atman: “The self that is free from evils, free from old age and death, free from sorrow, free from hunger and thirst,” he told them, “that is the self that you should try to discover.” 34 Devas and asuras also had to learn this important truth and had undergone exactly the same arduous training in inwardness as human beings. The Chandogya tells a story about the moment when devas and asuras first heard about the atman. “Come,” they said to one another, “let us discover that self by discovering which one obtains all the worlds and all one’s desires are fulfilled.” 35 So Indra, representing his devas, and Virocana, one of the leading asuras, arrived on Prajapati’s doorstep as humble Vedic students, carrying wood for their teacher’s fire. They studied with Prajapati for thirty-two years but were still no closer to finding the atman. Prajapati told them to dress up in their best clothes and look at their reflections in a pan of water. What did they see? A replica of themselves, beautifully attired and spruced up, they replied. “That is the atman; that is the immortal,” Prajapati told them, “that is the one free from fear; that is brahman.” 36 They left, delighted with themselves, and Virocana took this knowledge back to the asuras. The body was the atman, he told them; a person could win his heart’s desire in this life and the next simply by taking care of his physical needs: there was no need for sacrifice or ritual.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Loath as he had been to accept the responsible position of abbot in a monastery which was in trouble, he discharged its duties with great assuiduity. He continued Ratgar’s building operations, but without exciting the hatred and rebellion of his monks. On the contrary, Fulda once more prospered, and when he died, June 15, 822, he was able to give over to his successor and intimate friend, Rabanus Maurus, a well ordered community. The only prose writing of Eigil extant is his valuable life of Sturm.1164 It was written by request of Angildruth, abbess of Bischofheim, and gives an authentic account of the founding of Fulda. Every year on Sturm’s day (Dec. 17) it was read aloud to the monks while at dinner. Eigil’s own biography was written by Candidus, properly Brunn, whom Ratgar had sent for instruction to Einhard at Seligenstadt, and who was principal of the convent school under Rabanus Maurus. The biography is in two parts, the second being substantially only a repetition in verse of the first.1165 § 163. Amalarius. I. Symphosius Amalarius: Opera omnia in Migne, Tom. CV. col. 815–1340. His Carmina are in Dümmler, Poetae Latini aevi Carolini, I. II Du Pin, VII. 79, l58–160. Ceillier, XII. 221–223. Hist. Lit. de la France, IV. 531–546. Clarke, II. 471–473. Bähr, 380–383. Hefele, IV. 10, 45, 87, 88. Ebert, II. 221, 222.

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

  Feelings are the mental expressions of homeostasis, while homeostasis, acting under the cover of feeling, is the functional thread that links early life-forms to the extraordinary partnership of bodies and nervous systems. That partnership is responsible for the emergence of conscious, feeling minds that are, in turn, responsible for what is most distinctive about humanity: cultures and civilizations. Feelings are at the center of the book, but they draw their powers from homeostasis. Connecting cultures to feeling and homeostasis strengthens their links to nature and deepens the humanization of the cultural process. Feelings and creative cultural minds were assembled by a long process in which genetic selection guided by homeostasis played a prominent role. Connecting cultures to feelings, homeostasis, and genetics counters the growing detachment of cultural ideas, practices, and objects from the process of life. It should be evident that the connections I am establishing do not diminish the autonomy that cultural phenomena acquire historically. I am not reducing cultural phenomena to their biological roots or attempting to have science explain all aspects of the cultural process. The sciences alone cannot illuminate the entirety of human experience without the light that comes from the arts and humanities. Discussions about the making of cultures often agonize over two conflicting accounts: one in which human behavior results from autonomous cultural phenomena, and another in which human behavior is the consequence of natural selection as conveyed by genes. But there is no need to favor one account over the other. Human behavior largely results from both influences in varying proportions and order. Curiously, discovering the roots of human cultures in nonhuman biology does not diminish the exceptional status of humans at all. The exceptional status of each human being derives from the unique significance of suffering and flourishing in the context of our remembrances of the past and of the memories we have constructed of the future we incessantly anticipate. 3 We humans are born storytellers, and we find it very satisfying to tell stories about how things began. We have reasonable success when the thing to be storied is a device or a relationship, love affairs and friendships being great themes for stories of origins. We are not so good and we are often wrong when we turn to the natural world. How did life begin? How did minds, feelings, or consciousness begin? When did social behaviors and cultures first appear? There is nothing easy about such an endeavor. When the laureate physicist Erwin Schrödinger turned his attention to biology and wrote his classic book What Is Life?, it should be noted that he did not title it The “Origins” of Life. He recognized a fool’s errand when he saw it. Still, the errand is irresistible.

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

  On the contrary, there are shades and grades of regulation; there are steps along scales that ultimately correspond to the greater or lesser perfection of the regulatory process. This process corresponds to what is commonly experienced as feelings, and the two issues are closely related: the former, the relative goodness or badness of a given life state, is the basis for the latter, that is, feelings. On this note, it is remarkable to consider that in general we do not need to visit our physician to discover if the fundamentals of our health are fine. Nor do we need a blood test for that purpose. Feelings provide us with a moment-to-moment perspective on the state of our health. Degrees of well-being or malaise are sentinels. Of course, feelings can miss the onset of several diseases, and emotional feelings can mask the ongoing, spontaneous homeostatic feelings and prevent them from delivering a clear message. More often than not, however, feelings tell us what we need to know. There is no reason why we should rely on feelings alone to take good care of ourselves. But it is important to point out the fundamental role of feelings and their practical value, no doubt the reason why they have been preserved in evolution. Third, a comprehensive view of homeostasis must include the application of the concept to systems in which conscious and deliberative minds, individually and in social groups, can both interfere with automatic regulatory mechanisms and create new forms of life regulation that have the very same goal of basic automated homeostasis, that is, achieving viable, upregulated life states that tend to produce flourishing. I see the effort of constructing human cultures as a manifestation of this variety of homeostasis. Fourth, whether one considers single-celled or multicellular organisms, the essence of homeostasis is the formidable enterprise of managing energy—procuring it, allocating it to critical jobs such as repair, defense, growth, and participation in the engendering and maintenance of progeny. This is a monumental endeavor for any organism, all the more so for human organisms given the complexity of their structure, organization, and environmental variety. So large is the scale of the enterprise that its effects can begin at a low level of the physiology and manifest themselves at the higher levels of function, namely, cognition. For example, it is known that as ambient temperatures rise, not only do we need to adjust our internal physiology to losses of water and electrolytes, but we also function less well cognitively. That poor adjustment of internal physiology spells disease and death is no surprise. It is known that the number of deaths increases during prolonged heat waves, and heat waves also spell more murders and sectarian violence. 1 Students do significantly less well in exams, and civility is tied to the thermometer, too. 2 The relation between homeostasis and physiology holds for all levels of the living economy, from low to high.

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

  It is not difficult to imagine conversations about troubles and successes, about friendships and enmities, about work relationships or amorous ones, no matter how simple the conversations would be, and there is no reason to assume they would be that simple once Homo sapiens came into its own. What better time to mend ties broken during the day or cement new connections built during the day? What better time to discipline unruly children and instruct them? And think of the open sky and its stars and how they begged for answers about what it all meant—crepuscules, flickering lights, Milky Ways, a moon that moved about in the sky and changed its shape capriciously but predictably, eventual dawns. Chanting and dancing are not difficult to imagine either, or witchcraft. Polly Wiessner has written persuasively about firelight gatherings based on her contemporary studies with Ju/’hoansi Bushmen in southern Africa. 21 She has suggested that once foraging daytime duties were over, firelight opened the way for a productive use of the early night hours: conversations, abundant storytelling, gossip of course, the mending of what was humanly broken during a hard day’s work, the cementing of social roles in small groups of humans. The next time you enjoy sitting by a fire, ask yourself, why would humans still wish to build something as old-fashioned and often useless as a fireplace in their modern homes? The answer perhaps is that the hearth can still work in the rich cultural way it once did, that the idea of the potentially advantageous setting still produces an appropriately encouraging feeling of anticipation. Just call it magic. NOTES AND REFERENCES 1 ON THE HUMAN CONDITION 1. This statement does not apply to the nonstandard situations of manic or depressive states in which feelings may no longer be accurate indicators of the homeostatic state. 2. To read more on affect—drives, motivations, emotions, and feelings, turn to chapters 7 and 8. For other relevant work, turn to Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error (1994; New York: Penguin Books, 2010); Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt, 1999); Antonio Damasio and Gil B. Carvalho, “The Nature of Feelings: Evolutionary and Neurobiological Origins,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 14, no. 2 (2013): 143–52; Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Jaak Panksepp and Lucy Biven, The Archaeology of Mind (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012); Joseph Le Doux. The Emotional Brain (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996); Arthur D. Craig, “How Do You Feel? Interoception: The Sense of the Physiological Condition of the Body,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 3, no. 8 (2002): 655–66; Ralph Adolphs, Daniel Tranel, Hanna Damasio, and Antonio Damasio, “Impaired Recognition of Emotion in Facial Expressions Following Bilateral Damage to the Human Amygdala,” Nature 372, no. 6507 (1994): 669–72; Ralph Adolphs, Daniel Tranel Hanna Damasio, and Antonio Damasio, “Fear and the Human Amygdala,” Journal of Neuroscience 15, no.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Before he took the hemlock, Plato says, he washed his body, to save the women the trouble after his death. He thanked his jailor courteously for his kindness, and even made some mild jokes about his predicament. He was able to look death calmly in the face, forbade his friends to mourn, and quietly and lovingly accepted their companionship. Instead of destructive, consuming sorrow, there was a quiet, receptive peace. Throughout the Axial Age, sages had been preoccupied with death. Socrates showed that it was possible for a human being to enjoy a serenity that transcended his circumstances, in the midst of pain and suffering. Shortly after the death of Confucius, China entered a disturbing and frightening era, which historians call the period of the Warring States. It marked a decisive transition in Chinese history. In 453, three families rebelled against the prince of Jin, and created three separate states in Jin territory: Han, Wei, and Zhao. This was the real end of the long-declining Zhou dynasty: hitherto all the rulers of China had been enfeoffed by the Zhou king; these new states, however, were established simply by military force, and the Zhou king could do nothing about it. From this moment the larger and more powerful states were engaged in a desperate struggle for the sole domination of China. The chief contenders were the state of Chu in the south, which was only half Chinese; Qin, a rough, warlike state in western Shensi; the rich, maritime kingdom of Qi; the “three Jin”—the new states of Han, Wei, and Zhao; and Yan, near the northern steppes. At first the little principalities in the central plain tried to preserve themselves by diplomacy, but in the course of the next two hundred years, they were eliminated, one by one, and absorbed into the larger, more competitive kingdoms. The Warring States era was one of those rare periods of history when a succession of changes, each reinforcing the other, accelerates the process of development, and leads to a fundamental alteration of society. 46 When these struggles finally came to an end in 221, the political, religious, social, economic, and intellectual life of China was entirely different. But in the early years of the Warring States, most people would only have been aware that life on the central plain had suddenly become more violent than ever before. The horror of this experience intensified the quest for a new religious vision. Warfare itself had been transformed. 47 There were no more ritualized confrontations between courtly charioteers, each vying to outdo the others in generosity and courtesy. The militarized states fought to gain new territory, subjugate the population, and wipe out the enemy.

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

  The part of the homeostatic imperative that concerns “enduring” is transparent: it produces survival and is taken for granted without any specific reference or reverence whenever the evolution of any organism or species is considered. The part of homeostasis that concerns “prevailing” is more subtle and rarely acknowledged. It ensures that life is regulated within a range that is not just compatible with survival but also conducive to flourishing, to a projection of life into the future of an organism or a species . Feelings are the very revelation to each individual mind of the status of life within the respective organism, a status expressed along a range that runs from positive to negative. Deficient homeostasis is expressed by largely negative feelings, while positive feelings express appropriate levels of homeostasis and open organisms to advantageous opportunities. Feelings and homeostasis relate to each other closely and consistently. Feelings are the subjective experiences of the state of life—that is, of homeostasis—in all creatures endowed with a mind and a conscious point of view. We can think of feelings as mental deputies of homeostasis. 11 I bemoaned the neglect of feelings in the natural history of cultures, but the situation is even worse in relation to homeostasis and life itself. Homeostasis and life are left out altogether. Talcott Parsons, one of the most prominent sociologists of the twentieth century, did invoke the notion of homeostasis in relation to social systems, but in his hands the concept was not connected to life or feeling. Parsons is actually a good example of the neglect of feeling in the conception of cultures. For Parsons, the brain was the organic foundation of culture because it was the “primary organ for controlling complex operations, notably manual skills, and coordinating visual and auditory information.” Above all, the brain was “the organic basis of the capacity to learn and manipulate symbols.” 12 Homeostasis has guided, non-consciously and non-deliberatively, without prior design, the selection of biological structures and mechanisms capable of not only maintaining life but also advancing the evolution of species to be found in varied branches of the evolutionary tree. This conception of homeostasis, which conforms most closely to the physical, chemical, and biological evidence, is remarkably different from the conventional and impoverished conception of homeostasis that confines itself to the “balanced” regulation of life’s operations. It is my view that the unshakable imperative of homeostasis has been the pervasive governor of life in all its guises. Homeostasis has been the basis for the value behind natural selection, which in turn favors the genes—and consequently the kinds of organisms—that exhibit the most innovative and efficient homeostasis. The development of the genetic apparatus, which helps regulate life optimally and transmit it to descendants, is not conceivable without homeostasis. — Given the foregoing, we can advance a working hypothesis on the relation between feelings and cultures. Feelings, as deputies of homeostasis, are the catalysts for the responses that began human cultures.

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

  Curiously, however, automated homeostasis, beginning with bacteria, included and in fact required sensing and responding abilities, the humble precursors to minds and consciousness. Sensing operates at the level of chemical molecules present in the membranes of bacteria and is found in plants as well. Plants can sense the presence of certain molecules in the soil—the tips of their roots are sensory organs, in fact—and they can act accordingly: they can grow in the direction of the terrain where the homeostatically required molecules are likely to be. 5 The popular notion of homeostasis—if the reader can excuse the incongruity of having the words “popular” and “homeostasis” in the same sentence—conjures up the ideas of “equilibrium” and “balance.” But we do not want equilibrium at all when we are dealing with life, because thermodynamically speaking equilibrium means zero thermal difference and death. (In the social sciences, the term “equilibrium” is more benign because it simply means the stability that results from comparable opposing forces.) We do not want to use “balance” either, because it conjures up stagnation and boredom! For years, I used to define “homeostasis” by saying that it corresponded not to a neutral state but to a state in which the operations of life felt as if they were upregulated to well-being. The forceful projection into the future was signified by the underlying feeling of well-being. I recently encountered a kindred view in the formulations of John Torday, who also rejects the quasi-static view of homeostasis, the maintenance of status quo view. Instead, he embraces a view of homeostasis as a driver of evolution, a way into the creation of a protected cellular space within which catalytic cycles can do their job and literally come to life. 6 The Roots of an Idea We owe the idea behind homeostasis to the French physiologist Claude Bernard. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Bernard made a pathbreaking observation: living systems needed to maintain numerous variables of their internal milieu within narrow ranges so that life would continue. 7 In the absence of this tight control, the magic of life simply vanished. The essence of the internal milieu ( milieu intérieur in the original) is a large number of interacting chemical processes. The typical chemical processes and their key molecules can be found in the bloodstream, in viscera, where they help accomplish metabolism, in endocrine glands such as the pancreas or the thyroid glands, and in certain regions and circuits of the nervous system where aspects of life regulation are coordinated—the hypothalamus is the prime example of such a region. These chemical processes enable the transformation of energy sources into energy itself by ensuring that water, nutrients, and oxygen are present as needed in living tissues.

• From A Sexplanation (2021)

  [laughing] Let's put it that way. It's such a lie. [laughing] -So then how important would you say sex is to your relationship? -I'll let him answer first. [laughter] -It's pretty important. Yeah, it's something we really enjoy. -Mom, do we really enjoy it? [laughing] -I think he really enjoys it. [laughs] Yeah, it's enjoyable. -Yeah. -Yeah, I think it's important. -Important how? -It reinforces your relationship. -In every relationship I think one of the biggest tensions is always like, who wants to have sex more, right? Do you guys ever fight over that? -I think I want to have sex more, but I don't think we have any fight over it. [laughing] Why, is there a problem that answer? [laughing] -Mom, what is your experience? -Yeah, he definitely wants sex more. I think if I said no more often there would be tension. -And so then what do you do, Dad, to show your appreciation for Mom for sex? -Hm, that's a good question. -[laughs] Yeah. -What do I do for appreciation? Oh, I don't know, I just say, "Thank you." [laughing] -Mom, is there anything you would like? -Yeah, I would like him to be more appreciative and more affectionate, more considerate. -All right, you heard that, Dad, right? [laughs] So how does it feel now talking about these kind of stuff? Did it feel weird? Okay? -A little bit. -Yeah. [laughs] -It's good to have a relationship where you could talk about it, but necessarily you have to talk about it. I feel great that I have a good relationship with my immediate family and extended family. I just feel great about it. And it's something that you do over a long period of time, and I hope you do the same thing. -Well, I definitely want to have more of these types of conversations because I'm realizing, you know, how many more times will we see each other in a year? How many times will we actually have quality time to talk about these things? And how well do I actually know you as adults? How well do you actually know me in my adult life? I hope that you will always feel comfortable coming to me if you have any questions about my life, you're curious that there's nothing really out of bounds. And if there is, I'll tell you. And it's- that I can do the same with you. -Yeah, I think we've always felt that, we just haven't said it. But I hope through our actions that you've felt that. -Definitely. We'll end the interview here 'cause I want to ask you more about that engagement. -Engagement, what engagement? -The one-hour engagement. -I told you, it's a mock engagement. It's not a real engagement. -Yeah, right, right, right, right, right, I'll find out later. [Alex] Huh, well, that wasn't too awkward. It was kind of sweet. And my mom was totally cool with me beating off after my 3:00 pm pizza bagels.

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

  For numerous living creatures, however, and certainly for humans, this narrow usage of the term “homeostasis” is inadequate. It is true that humans still make good use and greatly benefit from automatic controls: as noted, the value of glucose in the bloodstream can be automatically corrected to an optimal range by a set of complex operations that do not require any conscious interference on the part of the individual; the secretion of insulin from pancreatic cells, for example, adjusts the level of glucose; likewise, the amount of circulating water molecules can be automatically adjusted by diuresis. In humans and in numerous other species endowed with a complex nervous system, however, there is a supplementary mechanism that involves mental experiences that express a value. The key to the mechanism, as we have seen, is feelings. But as the terms “mental” and “experience” suggest, feelings, in the full sense implied here, could only come to pass once there were minds and the respective mental phenomena, and once minds could be made conscious and have experiences.4 Homeostasis NowThe sort of automated homeostasis that we find in bacteria, simple animals, and plants precedes the development of minds later to be imbued with feelings and consciousness. Such developments gave minds the possibility of deliberate interference with preset homeostatic mechanisms and even later allowed creative and intelligent invention to expand homeostasis into the sociocultural domain. Curiously, however, automated homeostasis, beginning with bacteria, included and in fact required sensing and responding abilities, the humble precursors to minds and consciousness. Sensing operates at the level of chemical molecules present in the membranes of bacteria and is found in plants as well. Plants can sense the presence of certain molecules in the soil—the tips of their roots are sensory organs, in fact—and they can act accordingly: they can grow in the direction of the terrain where the homeostatically required molecules are likely to be.5 The popular notion of homeostasis—if the reader can excuse the incongruity of having the words “popular” and “homeostasis” in the same sentence—conjures up the ideas of “equilibrium” and “balance.” But we do not want equilibrium at all when we are dealing with life, because thermodynamically speaking equilibrium means zero thermal difference and death. (In the social sciences, the term “equilibrium” is more benign because it simply means the stability that results from comparable opposing forces.) We do not want to use “balance” either, because it conjures up stagnation and boredom! For years, I used to define “homeostasis” by saying that it corresponded not to a neutral state but to a state in which the operations of life felt as if they were upregulated to well-being. The forceful projection into the future was signified by the underlying feeling of well-being.

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

  But second, this whole itself is a magni fice nt creation of instrumental reason, now that of God, which has encomp asse d a universal maximization. Our powers of reason, which enable us to see th i s, c an lift us t o a grasp of the who l e and in this way bring us to want mo re th a n o ur particular interest. These two routes bring us from a narrow focus on immediate g ratifi cati o n for ourselves alone to a well- considered commitment to the long -ter m , general good. We have seen in previous c hapters that an import ant con tr o versy raged about these, with morali s ts of the extrinsic view only allowi ng f o r the first. The major stream of Deism encompass ed bot h. It w a s certai n ly impo rtant to realize "that true SELF - LOVE and soctAL are t he sa me" , 34 but w e Th e P rovidential Order • 281 also a re endowed with the capacity for sympathy, for a general benevolence , an d this is what is awakened by a rational perception of the who l e order of na ture. Self-love thus pushed to social, t o divine, Gives thee to make they neighbour's blessing thine. Is this too little for thy boundless heart ? Extend it, let thy enemies have part: Grasp the whole worlds of Reason, Life, and Sense, In one dose system of Benevolence: Happier as kinder, in whate'er degree, And height of Bliss but height of Charity. 35 Thus living according to nature once more is equivalent to living according to reason. But this now means l iving in full appreciation of the interlocking design. Minimall y , this can mean only drawing the ful l strategic benefit from one's knowledge of the design. More full y , it generally meant finding one's highest satisfaction in furthering the design itself. In this latter and more common v ersion, it was closely parallel to the theistic view it emerged from: the good life requir es tha t in carrying ou t the activities which have been marked as significant, one espouse the spirit of whatever has so marked them. In the theistic variant, this latter phrase designates God; in Deism it slides towards designating Nature's design. But in e ither case, humans are called to a broader perspective, to embrace the whole.

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

  10 This opposition of morality and "progress" was easy to interpre t in a primitivist sense. And so Roussea u has been interpreted, in his time an d o u r s . Bu t Rousseau's actual i dea, which is not primitivist, is m uch more chall e n gi n g Nature as Source • 359 a nd has actually been more influential. Though his popular image has often b e en of the admirer of the " noble savage", where his influence really c o unted-on other thinkers who themselve s had a tremendous impact-he w as not misunderstood. We have only to th ink of Kant, of the writers of the S t ur m und Drang, and the Romantic period. The view Rousseau himself p ropounded-or the views, because it may be ha rd to make Emile consistent in the end w ith the Social Contract-did not i nvolve going b a ck to the p r ecultural or pres ocietal stage. Rather the idea of a recovery of contact with nature was seen more as an escape from calculating othe r -dependence, from the force of opinion and the ambitions it engendered, through a kind of alignment or fusion of reason and nature, or in other ter ms, of culture/society on one hand, and the true elan of nature on the other. Conscience is the voice of nature as it emerges in a being who has entered society and is endowed with language and hence reason. 1 1 The general will represents the demands of natu r e, free from all distortion due to other-dependence or opinion, in the medium of publicly recognized law. What is often mistaken for primitivism i n Rousseau is his undoubted espousal of austerity against a civilization of increasing needs and consump tion. Rousseau often speaks in the language and evokes the p r inciples of the ancient Stoics. True strength involves having few needs, being content with the essential. " L'homme est tr es fort quand il se contente d'etre ce qu'il est; ii est tres faible quand ii veut s'elever au-dessus de l'humanite" ("When man is content to be himself he is strong indeed; when he strives to be more than man he is weak indeed"). It is our dependence on others, on appearances, on opinion which multiplies our wants, and t hus in turn makes us even mor e dependent. "Otez la force, la sante, le bon temoignage de soi, tous les biens de cette vie sont dans )'opinion; otez Jes doule urs du corps et les re mords de la conscience, tous nos maux sont imaginaires" ("Health, strength, and a good conscience excepted, all the good things of life ar e a matter of opinion; except bodily suffering and remorse, all our woes are imaginary"). True freedom is found only in austerity: 0 homme! resserre ton existence au ded ans de toi, et tu ne seras pas miserable.

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

  When one looks for the appearance of gastrointestinal tracts in evolution, one finds something resembling them in primitive creatures that belong to the Cnidaria family to which I referred earlier. As noted, cnidarians look like sacks, and they literally float for a living. Their nervous systems are nerve nets, thought to represent the oldest form of a nervous system. Nerve nets resemble the modern enteric nervous system in two ways. First, they produce peristaltic movements that facilitate the flow of food-containing water into, around, and out of the organism. Second, morphologically, they are remarkably reminiscent of an important anatomical feature of the enteric nervous system of mammals, the myenteric plexus of Auerbach. While cnidarians date to the Precambrian period, structures resembling what eventually becomes the central nervous system only appear in Platyhelminthes, in the Cambrian period. It is intriguing to think that the enteric nervous system might well have been the very first brain. Given my earlier comments on myelin, we should not be surprised to discover that the neurons of the enteric nervous system are not myelinated. The axons are bundled together and incompletely enveloped by a bulk insulation of enteric glia. This design may well allow for ephaptic conduction, the orthogonal axonal interactions that we mentioned in relation to the nonmyelinated neurons in the peripheral nervous system. Activity in a small number of axons would recruit neighboring fibers bundled together and lead to signal amplification. Recruitment of neighboring fibers innervating contiguous territories would produce the characteristic, vaguely localized feelings that arise from gastrointestinal operations. Several lines of evidence suggest that the gastrointestinal tract and the enteric nervous system play an important role in feeling and mood.26 I would not be surprised if the “global” experience of grades of well-being, for example, is importantly related to enteric nervous system function. Nausea is another example. The enteric nervous system is a major tributary to the vagus nerve, the main conduit of signals from the abdominal viscera to the brain. But there are other intriguing facts germane to the argument. Digestive disorders tend to correlate with pathologies of mood, for example, and curiously, the enteric nervous system produces 95 percent of the body’s serotonin, a neurotransmitter notable for its key role in disorders of affect and in their correction.27 Perhaps the most intriguing new fact to report here is the close relationship of the bacterial world and the gut. Most bacteria live with us in happy symbiosis, occupying space everywhere in our skin and mucosae, most abundantly at places where the skin and mucosae fold. But nowhere is the number higher than in the gut, where it reaches into the billions of organisms, more individual organisms than there are individual human cells in one entire organism. How they influence the world of feeling, directly or indirectly, is an intriguing topic for twenty-first-century science.28

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

  These are the moral, intellectual, and æsthetic feelings. Concords of sounds, of colors, of lines, logical consistencies, teleological fitnesses, affect us with a pleasure that seems ingrained in the very form of the representation itself, and to borrow nothing from any reverberation surging up from the parts below the brain. The Herbartian psychologists have distinguished feelings due to the form in which ideas may be arranged. A mathematical demonstration may be as 'pretty,' and an act of justice as 'neat,' as a drawing or a tune, although the prettiness and neatness seem to have nothing to do with sensation. We have, then, or some of us seem to have, genuinely cerebral forms of pleasure and displeasure, apparently not agreeing in their mode of production with the 'coarser ' emotions we have been analyzing. And it is certain that readers whom our reasons have hitherto failed to convince will now start up at this admission, and consider that by it we give up our whole case. Since musical perceptions, since logical ideas, can immediately arouse a form of emotional feeling, they will say, is it not more natural to suppose that in the case of the so-called 'coarser' emotions, prompted by other kinds of objects, the emotional feeling is equally immediate, and the bodily expression something that comes later and is added on? In reply to this we must immediately insist that æsthetic emotion, pure and simple, the pleasure given us by certain lines and masses, and combinations of colors and sounds, is an absolutely sensational experience, an optical or auricular feeling that is primary, and not due to the repercussion backwards of other sensations elsewhere consecutively aroused. To this simple primary and immediate pleasure in certain pure sensations and harmonious combinations of them, there may, it is true, be added secondary pleasures; and in the practical enjoyment of works of art by the masses of mankind these secondary pleasures play a great part. The more classic one's taste is, however, the less relatively important are the secondary pleasures felt to be in comparison with those of the primary sensation as it comes in.[433] Classicism and romanticism have their battles over this point. Complex suggestiveness, the awakening of vistas of memory and association, and the stirring of our flesh with picturesque mystery and gloom, make a work of art romantic. The classic taste brands these effects as coarse and tawdry, and prefers the naked beauty of the optical and auditory sensations, unadorned with frippery or foliage. To the romantic mind, on the contrary, the immediate beauty of these sensations seems dry and thin. I am of course not discussing which view is right, but only showing that the discrimination between the primary feeling of beauty, as a pure incoming sensible quality, and the secondary emotions which are grafted thereupon, is one that must be made.

• From A Sexplanation (2021)

  [laughing] Let's put it that way. It's such a lie. [laughing] -So then how important would you say sex is to your relationship? -I'll let him answer first. [laughter] -It's pretty important. Yeah, it's something we really enjoy. -Mom, do we really enjoy it? [laughing] -I think he really enjoys it. [laughs] Yeah, it's enjoyable. -Yeah. -Yeah, I think it's important. -Important how? -It reinforces your relationship. -In every relationship I think one of the biggest tensions is always like, who wants to have sex more, right? Do you guys ever fight over that? -I think I want to have sex more, but I don't think we have any fight over it. [laughing] Why, is there a problem that answer? [laughing] -Mom, what is your experience? -Yeah, he definitely wants sex more. I think if I said no more often there would be tension. -And so then what do you do, Dad, to show your appreciation for Mom for sex? -Hm, that's a good question. -[laughs] Yeah. -What do I do for appreciation? Oh, I don't know, I just say, "Thank you." [laughing] -Mom, is there anything you would like? -Yeah, I would like him to be more appreciative and more affectionate, more considerate. -All right, you heard that, Dad, right? [laughs] So how does it feel now talking about these kind of stuff? Did it feel weird? Okay? -A little bit. -Yeah. [laughs] -It's good to have a relationship where you could talk about it, but necessarily you have to talk about it. I feel great that I have a good relationship with my immediate family and extended family. I just feel great about it. And it's something that you do over a long period of time, and I hope you do the same thing. -Well, I definitely want to have more of these types of conversations because I'm realizing, you know, how many more times will we see each other in a year? How many times will we actually have quality time to talk about these things? And how well do I actually know you as adults? How well do you actually know me in my adult life? I hope that you will always feel comfortable coming to me if you have any questions about my life, you're curious that there's nothing really out of bounds. And if there is, I'll tell you. And it's- that I can do the same with you. -Yeah, I think we've always felt that, we just haven't said it. But I hope through our actions that you've felt that. -Definitely. We'll end the interview here 'cause I want to ask you more about that engagement. -Engagement, what engagement? -The one-hour engagement. -I told you, it's a mock engagement. It's not a real engagement. -Yeah, right, right, right, right, right, I'll find out later. [Alex] Huh, well, that wasn't too awkward. It was kind of sweet. And my mom was totally cool with me beating off after my 3:00 pm pizza bagels.

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

  33 But this was not the only reason. Or rather, this was the negative side of a positive reason, which was that it was largely through su ch work that sanctification took place. For Robert Sanderson, th e gifts of God to each one of us are t h e manifest a tions of his spirit in us. They impose the duty to l,lSe them. This manifestation of the Spirit ... imposeth on eve r y man the necessity of a Calling ... 0 then up and be doing: Why stand ye all the d ay Idle ? ... in the Church, he that cannot style himself by any ot her na m e than a Christian, doth indeed but usurp tha t too . If thou say est thou art "God Loveth Adverbs" · 22.5 of the body: I demand then, what is thy o f fice in the Bod y ? . ,·. If thou hast a Gift get a calling. 34 B u t all this business would be spiritually of no avail, if the intention were w r o ng. The aim must be to serve God. What did this mean concretely? N e ga tively, it meant that one n ot engage in work primarily for some other, me re l y self-related, p urpose. "They profane their lives and callings that i mpl oy them to get honours, pleasures, profites, worldly commodities etc. for th us we live to another end then God hath appointed, and thus we serve o ur se lves, a nd consequently, neither God, n or man". 35 A s Hall puts it, These businesses o f his Calling the Christian follows with a willing and contente d industry, not as forced to it by the necessity of humane L aws, or as urged by the law of necessity, out of t h e ... fear of want; nor yet contrarily, out of an eager desire of enriching h i mself in his estate, but in a conscionable obedie n ce to t hat God who hath made man to labour as the sparks to fly upward. 36 The concomitant of this was that we enjoy th e fruits of our labour only with moder ation, conscious that we need these fruits to live and continue God's work, but at no point allowing them to take on importance for themselves, to go beyond the instrumental significance which God has appointed for them. Positively, it meant that we see the purpose of our lives as "to serv e God in the serving of men in the works of our callings".

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

  Rather than corresponding to the objects, actions, or events, which normally dominate consciousness, these particular images correspond to general images of our bodies, as a whole, caught in the act of producing those other images. This new set of images constitutes a partial revelation of the process of making the manifest contents of mind deftly and quietly inserted along those other images. The new set of images is generated within the same body that owns those manifest contents, those that are now being shown in the multiplex stage-screen of our brains and that consciousness will let us own and appreciate. The new set of images helps describe nothing less than the owner’s body in the process of acquiring the other images, but unless you pay close attention, you hardly notice them. This overall strategy achieves a complex collage of (a) the fundamental images we experience and interpret as critical to the moment we are living in our minds and (b) the images of our own organisms in the process of constructing the said images. We pay little attention to the latter, although they are essential to construct the subject. We save our attention for the newly minted images that describe the fundamental contents of mind, the contents that we need to deal with if we are to continue living. This is one of the reasons why subjectivity and, more broadly, the process of consciousness have remained such a mystery. The strings of the puppetry remain conveniently hidden, as they should. None of this requires any homunculi or mysterious magic. It is so natural and simple that the best one can do is smile with respect and admire the ingenuity of the process. What happens when the images flowing in our minds arise from memory, in recall, rather than in live perception? This same account still applies. When recalled materials are inserted in the mind contents, they are interspersed with the ongoing percepts of the moment, and the latter, fully framed and personalized, provide the “anchor” necessary for the personal perspective. 2. Feeling: The Other Ingredient of Subjectivity The perspective generated by the musculoskeletal frame and its sensory portals is not enough to build subjectivity. Besides sensory perspective taking, the continuous availability of feelings is a critical contributor to subjectivity. The abundance of feelings generates a rich background state that one might well call feelingness. We discussed the process of constructing feelings in the previous chapters. Here we need to consider how feelings join sensory perspective to produce subjectivity. Feelings are a natural and abundant accompaniment of the images held in the manifest component of consciousness. Their abundance derives from two sources. One source concerns the ongoing state of life whose homeostatic level results in states of well-being or malaise, of whatever grade. The ebb and flow of spontaneous homeostatic feelings provides for an ever-present background, a more or less pure sense of being of the sort that those who practice meditation aspire to experience.

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

  Second, physiological operations rarely abide by thermostat-like set points. On the contrary, there are shades and grades of regulation; there are steps along scales that ultimately correspond to the greater or lesser perfection of the regulatory process. This process corresponds to what is commonly experienced as feelings, and the two issues are closely related: the former, the relative goodness or badness of a given life state, is the basis for the latter, that is, feelings. On this note, it is remarkable to consider that in general we do not need to visit our physician to discover if the fundamentals of our health are fine. Nor do we need a blood test for that purpose. Feelings provide us with a moment-to-moment perspective on the state of our health. Degrees of well-being or malaise are sentinels. Of course, feelings can miss the onset of several diseases, and emotional feelings can mask the ongoing, spontaneous homeostatic feelings and prevent them from delivering a clear message. More often than not, however, feelings tell us what we need to know. There is no reason why we should rely on feelings alone to take good care of ourselves. But it is important to point out the fundamental role of feelings and their practical value, no doubt the reason why they have been preserved in evolution. Third, a comprehensive view of homeostasis must include the application of the concept to systems in which conscious and deliberative minds, individually and in social groups, can both interfere with automatic regulatory mechanisms and create new forms of life regulation that have the very same goal of basic automated homeostasis, that is, achieving viable, upregulated life states that tend to produce flourishing. I see the effort of constructing human cultures as a manifestation of this variety of homeostasis. Fourth, whether one considers single-celled or multicellular organisms, the essence of homeostasis is the formidable enterprise of managing energy—procuring it, allocating it to critical jobs such as repair, defense, growth, and participation in the engendering and maintenance of progeny. This is a monumental endeavor for any organism, all the more so for human organisms given the complexity of their structure, organization, and environmental variety.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Then, of course, there are the couples—nobody knows how many—who go through the motions out of a sense of duty, though they receive minimal pleasure from it. They view sex as necessary maintenance, like doing laundry or grocery shopping. Some of us might consider this an unacceptable solution to sexual boredom, but for many couples it works. Most of what I know about long-term couples I’ve learned while doing therapy with individuals who discussed their relationships or in joint sessions with both partners. Of course, it’s useful to hear about the sexual concerns that motivate people to seek help, but it’s especially valuable to see how couples face their problems and take effective actions to make things better. I’ve also been enlightened by working with couples who entered therapy because of nonsexual problems. Lots of couples maintain active and apparently satisfying sex lives in spite of chronic disagreements and fights. In a logical world, the quality of a couple’s erotic life would bear some relationship to the quality of their overall relationship. But I’ve worked with a number of couples who learned to cooperate more and fight less only to discover that their sex lives got worse. They apparently needed upheaval to fuel their passions. Theories about how couples should behave sexually are of little value and often do great harm by setting up unrealistic expectations and distracting the couple from the delicate adjustments, compromises, and inspirations that have the best chance of working. What interests me is what long-term couples actually do, in concert or individually, to keep sex satisfying as they develop other positive aspects of the relationship—such as companionship, mutual support, and, in the most highly evolved relationships, a loving commitment to the other’s well-being and growth. In this section I want to call your attention to a set of crucial skills that erotic couples appear to develop and apply with remarkable regularity. Long-term couples who discuss their sex lives with me always end up focusing on several—sometimes all—of these skills in one form or another. How consistently couples recognize them and put them to good use appears to have a major impact on the quality of their sexual interaction. I’m quite certain that the majority of couples who conscientiously cultivate these skills will benefit. Nevertheless, when sexual interest is waning there are no sure-fire solutions. The great issues of erotic life are so much a part of the human adventure that they can’t be fixed like a leaky faucet; they can only be lived. In the living, possibilities emerge that defy logic, sometimes with happy results, sometimes not. Whether you are preparing for a future relationship or already involved in one, your journey will be infinitely more satisfying if you realize that the unfolding of eros is a work in progress that is never finished.