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 The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Some parents feel guilty if they take time away from the kids to focus on their relationship. Couples need to remind themselves that their connection is the core of the family and cultivating it is, in the long run, one of the best things they can do for their children. By the time kids are able to entertain themselves with a minimum of supervision they should also be able to grasp the concept of Mom and Dad having private times when they are not to be interrupted (except, of course, for emergencies). A lock on the bedroom door is essential. A playful sign such as, “Do not disturb. Mommy and Daddy snuggling” is not only a practical help but also communicates positive messages about sensuality and affection—the best sex education there is. SUSTAINING AND BUILDING ATTRACTIONOne of the key challenges of long-term loving is how to keep attraction alive. Attraction tends to be stimulated most strongly by the new, the unfamiliar, or the unattainable—all features that decrease with day-to-day living. How then do erotic couples maintain their mutual appeal? Years of observing and questioning have led me to conclude that, while no simple answers exist, there are two basic strategies. The first is to stay in touch with the original attractions that brought you together in the first place. The second involves recognizing new sources of attraction as the relationship evolves. Most erotic couples rely on a combination of both. Regardless of the specific problems that bring them to therapy I always ask couples what first drew them to each other. Not only does the ensuing discussion provide me with valuable background information, it also gives them an opportunity to focus on crucial memories that may have been overshadowed by more recent conflicts and concerns. Erotic couples make a point of remembering their original attractions because they realize that even small remnants of these attractions can be powerful aphrodisiacs. For instance, passionate lovers focus on specific physical features that continue to be arousing, even when both of their bodies may have seen better days. This is a positive manifestation of the lusty objectification many people find objectionable. Erotic couples are also aware that attraction is inspired by much more than the physical, so they also pay careful attention to the behaviors and attitudes that turn them on. At least as important as recognition of attractive features is the ability to bolster your partner’s sense of attractiveness by making affirmative statements about him or her and to accept and value your partner’s perceptions of you. Thelma and Max: That look

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Seasoned lovers, sometimes after years of struggle and turmoil, eventually achieve minimal conflict between their shared bond and their individuality. Their intimacy facilitates rather than interferes with each individual’s growth. Theirs is the “being-love” Abraham Maslow wrote about, as opposed to the far more common “deficiency-love.”3 Whereas deficiency-love is motivated by the need to fill in or compensate for one’s missing aspects, being-love is a union of self-acceptance and the capacity to love. Those who find their way to being-love are blessed by simultaneously feeling at home with oneself and the beloved. And what becomes of passion as love matures? It changes, to be sure. Sometimes it fizzles—but by no means inevitably. Many couples never lose sight of a remnant of their original passion, although they experience it in less boisterous forms. They recognize that eros, if it is to survive the ravages of time, familiarity, and routine, requires a special kind of nurturing and a unique set of skills. SKILLS OF EROTIC COUPLESIt’s easy to see how enduring coupledom can undermine both attractions and obstacles, which—according to the erotic equation—are two key ingredients for passion. Yet there’s plenty of room for optimism. All across the land, creative couples are maintaining fulfilling sex lives for ten, twenty, thirty years or more. In the early 1980s Blumstein and Schwartz studied thousands of couples in the United States, including married ones, straight cohabitors (not married), and lesbian and gay couples.4 Although the frequency of sex dropped over time for all types of couples, the vast majority continued to enjoy it regularly. Interestingly, married couples tended to remain the most active, with almost two-thirds reporting some sort of sex at least once a week, even after ten or more years together. Long-term gay and lesbian couples had sex together less often, but most still did so at least once a month.5 What fascinates me is how long-term couples nourish a vital spark of eroticism, despite all the factors that can conspire to reduce it. Sadly, we know far too little about this. For one thing, couples rarely discuss the details of their sex lives—often not even with each other. When they are willing to talk openly, as they sometimes do with sex researchers or couple’s therapists, their beliefs about how they sustain sexual interest may be quite different from how they actually do it. Erotic couples regularly employ simple tricks to invigorate desire, techniques that could be provocative or hurtful to their partners if they were revealed. For instance, more than a few committed men and women engage in harmless flirtations with others. If their partners were to witness the flirting, some would become jealous. But many of these partners reap the benefits of having highly stimulated lovers, without having to confront all the reasons why.

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

  In contrast to the aristocratic search fo r m ilitary g l ory, which was seen as wildly destructive an d as frequently turnin g to the piratical quest for plunde r, commerce is a constru ct ive and civilizing force, binding men together in peace and forming the basis of "polished,, mores. The ethic of glory is confronted here with a fully articulate d alternative view, of social order, political st ability, and the good life.1 4 This "bourgeois " ethic has obvious levelling consequen ces, and no on e can be blind to the tremendous role it has pla ye d in con sti tu ti ng mo dem ''God Loveth Adverbs" • 215 li be ral socie ty, through the foundin g revolutions of the eighteenth century a nd beyond, with their ideals of equality , t heir sense of universal right , their work ethic, and their exaltation of sexual love and the family. What I have b een calling the affirmation of ordinary li fe is another massive feature o f the modern identi ty , and not only in its "bourgeois" form: the main strands of r ev olutionary thought have also exalted man as producer, one who finds his h ighest dignity in labour and the transformation of nature in the service of life. The Marxist theory is the best known but not the only case in p oint. The transition I have been talking about is easy to identify negatively , i n terms of the ethics it (partly) displaced. But for my purposes here, it is imp o rtant to understand the positive new valuation it p u t on ordinary life. Th e displaced traditional views were connected with conceptions of moral sources. The idea that our highest activ ity was conte mplation was contingent on a view of the world order as struct ured b y the Good; the ethi c of honour sa w the love o f fame and immortality as the source of g reat deeds and exem plary courage. Both could offer a positive account of what made their favoured version of the good life really a higher form of existence for man. Wh at was the corresponding account for the various ethics of ordinary life? To see this aright we have to return to a theological point of origin. The affirmation of ordinary life finds its origin in Judaeo-Christian spirituality, and the particular impetus it receives in the modern era comes first of all from the Reformation.

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

  "Such a man can for a time wind himself up, as it were, and determine that the notions of the disordered brain shall not be manifested. Many instances are on record similar to that told by Pinel, where an inmate of the Bicêtre, having stood a long cross-examination, and given every mark of restored reason, signed his name to the paper authorizing his discharge 'Jesus Christ,' and then went off into all the vagaries connected with that delusion. In the phraseology of the gentleman whose case is related in an early part of this [Wigan's] work he had 'held himself tight' during the examination in order to attain his object; this once accomplished he 'let himself down' again, and, if even conscious of his delusion, could not control it. I have observed with such persons that it requires a considerable time to wind themselves up to the pitch of complete self-control, that the effort is a painful tension of the mind. . . . When thrown off their guard by any accidental remark or worn out by the length of the examination, they let themselves go, and cannot gather themselves up again without preparation. Lord Erskine relates the story of a man who brought an action against Dr. Munro for confining him without cause. He underwent the most rigid examination by the counsel for the defendant without discovering any appearance of insanity, till a gentleman asked him about a princess with whom he corresponded in cherry-juice, and he became instantly insane."[511] To sum it all up in a word, the terminus of the psychological process in volition, the point to which the will is directly applied, is always an idea. There are at all times some ideas from which we shy away like frightened horses the moment we get a glimpse of their forbidding profile upon the threshold of our thought. The only resistance which our will can possibly experience is the resistance which such an idea offers to being attended to at all. To attend to it is the volitional act, and the only inward volitional act which we ever perform. I have put the thing in this ultra-simple way because I want more than anything else to emphasize the fact that volition is primarily a relation, not between our Self and extra-mental matter(as many philosophers still maintain), but between our Self and our own states of mind. But when, a short while ago, I spoke of the filling of the mind with an idea as being equivalent to consent to the idea's object, I said something which the reader doubtless questioned at the time, and which certainly now demands some qualification ere we pass beyond.

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

  All thi n gs therein moove without intermission; ye a the earth, the rockes of Cauc asus, and the Pyramides of AEgypt, both with the publi k e and the ir own motion. Constancy it selfe is nothing but a languishi n g and wavering dance"). 4 But nevertheless, or perhaps just because of this, Montaigne proposes to describe himself. Indeed, the point of the sentence just quoted is to justify his kind of self-descriptio n, which doesn' t seek the exemplary, t he universal, or the edifying but simply follows the contours of the changing reality of one bei ng , himself. This li fe, however, "basse et sans lustre", w ill reveal as much as any other, because "chaque homme porte la form e entiere de l'humaine condition" ("every man beareth the whole stampe of humane condition "). 5 Mont aigne stri ves to come t o a c ert a in equili br iu m eve n withi n th e ev e r-c hangi ng by ide nt ifyin g an d com i n g to t e rms with th e p atte rns which r ep r ese nt his own part ic ula r wa y of livin g in flux . So alt ho ugh " we hav e no co m muni ca tion with being," Mont aign e sou ght , and fo und so me i nn e r pe ace i n , his " maist r esse for me" (" my Mis tris form e"). 6 Se l f- knowl e dge i s the i nd ispe ns able k ey to self -acc ept ance. Co mi n g to be a t home within the limit s of our co ndi tio n pre suppose s th at w e grasp th es e limi ts , th at we le arn to draw th e ir cont o u rs fro m wit hin, as it wer e. In thi s new sense, shorn of pretensi ons to universality, n ature can once ag ai n be ou r ru le . J 'a i p r i s ... bien s i mplement et cruement po ur mon re g ard ce precepte a ncie nt: que nous ne s�aurions faillir a suivre nature, qu e le souverain precepte c ' es t de se confor mer a elle. Je n ' ay pas corrige, comme Socrates, p ar force de la raison m es comp l ex i o ns natu r elles , et n'ay aucunem ent t ro ub le par art mo n inclination.

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

  I8o • INWARDNESS I have . .. taken for my regard this ancient prece p t, very rawly a n d simply: That "We cannot erre in followin g Nature": and that t he soveraigne do cument is , for a man to conf orme himselfe to her. I have not (as Socrates) by the powe r and vertue of reason, corrected my natural complexions, nor by Art hindered mine inclination. 7 It is in this spirit th a t we have to understand the precept: "Mener l'huma i n e vie conformement a sa naturelle conditio n " ("lead my life c onfo rmably to i t s nat urall condition") . 8 To liv e right is to live within limits, to eschew th e presu mption of supe rh uman spirit ua l as p irations. But the limits which ar e rel e vant for me are mine; to live by s ome universal model is another one of those chimaeric goals which E picurean wisdom a n d Christian humili ty should warn us to avoid . To attain his just measure, Montaigne took his distance from the excesses of moral rigour as much as from those of passion . Je me deffens de la temperance comme j'ai faict autrefois de la volupte. Elle me tire trop arriere, et jusques a la stupidite. Or je veus estre maistre de moy, a tous sens. La sagesse a ses ex c es, et n'a pas moins besoin de moderation que la folie. As I have heretofore defende d my selfe from pleasure, so I now ward my s elfe from temperance: i t haleth m e too far back , and even to stupidity. I will now every way be master of my selfe. Wisdom hath hir e xc e s ses, and no Jesse nee d of moderation, then follie. 9 Montaig n e repudiates t h e superhuman standards so often held up b y the m or al tradition . A quoy faire ces pointes eslevees de la philoso p hie sur lesquelles aucun estre humain ne se peut rassoir, et c es regles qui excedent nostre usage et nostre force? To what purpose are these heaven-looking and nice points of Philosoph y, on which no humane bein g can establish and ground it selfe?

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

  S p o c k. 2.9 2. • THE A F F IRMA TIO N OF ORD IN A R Y LIFE T he nature of this change has often been mis u ndersto od. Some cr iti c s h av e taken the historians of f amil y life to have bee n making the preposterous cl ai m th at before modern times, p eople didn't reall y love their children and ne v e r married for love. It is easy to show that these views are absur d . Obvio us l y human beings of all ages and climes have car ed for their children; and eve n the striking differences from to day in the place given to family and prop erty considerations in making marriages in the o ld days is less significant w h e n one reflects that this probably onl y concerne d the rich and propertied. M o s t peasants probably a t least tried to marry spouses they were attracted to . But this misses the nature of the change. It is not the a ctual plac e o f affection but the sense of its importance. What changes is not that p eop l e begin loving their children or feelin g affection for their spouses, but that th es e dispo sitions come to be seen as a crucial part of what m akes life worthy an d significant. Whereas previously these dispositions were taken as banal, excep t perhaps that their absence in a marked de g ree might cause co n cern or condemnation (just as today some mild degree of benevolent sentiment for my neighbours, in the absence of a good reason for hostility, is taken for granted; but its marked absen c e-a virulent hatred of them witho ut g ood c ause-would occasion critical remark), now they are se en as endowed with crucial significance. The change in sensibility, in other words, is precisely the one whose philosophical expression I have been tracing: it concerns what aspects of life are marked as significant. The difference lies not so much in the presence/absence of certain feelings as in the fact that much is made of them.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  People became too agitated by their strong opinions; they were too anxious to discover the truth. So a Skeptic would kindly undermine their certainty, flushing all this intellectual turmoil out of their systems. Sextus Empiricus, the first Skeptical writer, who lived in the third century CE, explained that Pyrrho and his disciples began by trying to find truth in order to gain peace of mind. But when they were unable to achieve this to their satisfaction, they gave up and immediately felt much better. “When they suspended judgement, tranquillity followed as it were fortuitously, as a shadow follows a body.” 62 So they became known as skeptikoi (“inquirers”) because they were still looking, had not closed their minds, but had learned that an uncluttered attitude, open to all possibilities, was the secret of happiness. The Axial Age was well and truly over for these Hellenistic philosophers, and yet in their work we find ghostly relics of the great pioneering spiritualities that sages and prophets had been exploring for more than five hundred years. The heroic striving of Confucius, the Buddha, Ezekiel, and Socrates had been replaced by a more modest, attainable, and, as it were, “budget” version. In Zeno’s ideal of a life attuned to nature, there was a hint of Daoism, but instead of yearning to change the world by aligning himself with the natural process, the Stoic simply resigned himself to the status quo. There is a fatalism in all these third-century Greek philosophies that was anathema to the Axial Age. The Buddha had warned his disciples not to become attached to metaphysical opinions; the mystics of the Upanishads had reduced their interlocutors to silence by pointing out the fallacy of rational thought, but they had not simply “suspended judgement” like the Skeptics. They had used the experience of dismantling ordinary habits of thought to give people intimations of a mystery that lay beyond words and conceptual ideas. The renouncers of India had left the world behind, but not to live in the suburban Epicurean Garden, and the Buddha had insisted that his monks must return to the agora and practice compassion for all living beings. Herein lay the difference. These Hellenistic philosophers made no heroic ethical demands. They all claimed to lay aside the abstruse metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle and go back to Socrates, who had tried to teach men how to live. They wanted the peace of mind that Socrates had possessed when he had faced his unjust death with equanimity. They were also popularizers like Socrates, who had talked to everybody, learned and uneducated alike. But Socrates had never claimed that a human being’s sole aim should be to eliminate disturbance. Zeno, Epicurus, and Pyrrho all wanted a quiet life and were determined to avoid the extremity and striving of the great Axial philosophers. They simply wanted ataraxia, to be trouble-free.