Sadness

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 Between Us

  Dureau was accompanied by her toddler daughter during her fieldwork, and this provided a starting point for her exchanges with some of the Simbo women on motherly love. Where Dureau started her fieldwork thinking that she could fully relate to the Simbo women’s maternal love ( taru )—after all, she herself was another woman with a small child—she soon realized that taru was different from the maternal love she had projected. Taru for the Simbo women meant “sadness” as much as it meant “love.” Women who felt taru were compassionate with their children, and knowing their children’s fate, this often involved sadness. As one woman rhetorically asked Dureau: “How can you have taru ( love) without sore ( sadness )? You love them; you think of all the awful things in their lives, all the hard times [they will experience].” Simbo women did not always succeed in empathizing with Dureau, either. One time, Dureau’s daughter Astrid, then three years old, was “persistently ill.” Liza, a woman Dureau did not know very well, came and sat beside her on the doorstep, saying that she understood Dureau’s anxiety because her own son had died of measles four years previously. Upset by this story, Dureau expressed her sympathy, which prompted Liza to add, “Usually I don’t think of him. If one of my [other] children is ill, I remember and quickly take them to the clinic.” Liza had wanted to empathize, and comfort Dureau, perhaps simply seek connection, but she achieved the opposite effect. Dureau felt different: “ . . . while I felt horrified sympathy, I only distantly understood Liza’s sentiments, which spoke to profoundly different possibilities. Against her assertion about childhood mortality and her statement that her loss enabled her to feel empathy, I was aware that my worry was not her resigned foreknowledge.” Dureau knows she would have had the monetary and cultural capital to get Astrid better medical care than had been available to Liza’s son. Dureau would not have been resigned, or merely prayed to God, because her position in life afforded her to exercise more control. And she could not even begin to imagine resigning in the death of her child, let alone never thinking about her anymore. Liza and Christine Dureau had different emotions, because they lived in different realities. The current wisdom in anthropology is that it is possible to approximate, or sometimes even share, the emotional experiences of individuals from other cultures, but also that you should not be too sure too soon that you do. As one anthropologist points out: “the problem with empathy is not that it involves feelings but that it assumes that first impressions are true.”

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

  Back to my potato-peeling adventure: the local details of the loss of integrity that my body suffered are responsible for a noticeable chemical, sensory, and motor disturbance that will not leave me alone until I deal with the problem in some manner. I am not allowed to ignore or forget, because the negative valence of my feeling process forcibly takes my attention from other matters. It also nearly guarantees that I will learn the details of the event quite efficiently. There is nothing distant or detached in the contents of my mental experience. I will not peel potatoes ever again. Feelings Explained? What can we say confidently about feelings at this point? We can say that the uniqueness of these phenomena is closely tied to the critical homeostatic role they play. The setting for the generation of feelings is radically different from that of other sensory phenomena. The relationship between nervous systems and bodies is unusual, to say the least: the former are inside the latter, not merely contiguous, but in some respects continuous and interactive. As shown in the previous sections, body and neural operations fuse at multiple levels, from the periphery of the nervous system all the way to the cerebral cortices and the large nuclei subjacent to them. That, and the fact that the body and the nervous system are in a ceaseless cross talk motivated by homeostatic needs, suggest that feelings are based, physiologically, on hybrid processes that are neither purely neural nor purely bodily. These are the facts and the circumstances on both sides of the equation: the mental experience we call feeling, on one side, and the body and neural processes that are circumstantially connected to it. The further exploration of the physiology behind the neural and body aspects holds the promise of further illuminating the mental side of the equation. — We have discussed feelings as mental expressions of homeostasis and as instrumental in governing life. We have also noted that due to the machinery of affect that evolution has built around feelings, and the frequent engagement of that machinery, it is not possible to talk about thinking, intelligence, and creativity in any meaningful way without factoring in feelings. Feelings play a role in our decisions and permeate our existence. Feelings can annoy us or delight us, but that is not what they are for if we are allowed to think teleologically for a moment. Feelings are for life regulation, providers of information concerning basic homeostasis or the social conditions of our lives. Feelings tell us about risks, dangers, and ongoing crises that need to be averted. On the nice side of the coin, they can inform us about opportunities.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  When I looked at Claire I saw that there was no human who could do that for us. Fill the hole. That was the sad part of Sappho’s spaces. Where there had been something beautiful there before, now they were blank. Time erased all. That was the part nobody could handle. Some people tried to shove things in them: their own narratives, biographical crap. I was pretending that nothing had ever been there in the first place, so that I wouldn’t feel the hurt of its absence. I wanted to be immune to time, the pain of it. But pretending didn’t make it so. Everything dissolved. No one really wanted satiety. It was the prospect of satiety—the excitement around the notion that we could ever be satisfied—that kept us going. But if you were ever actually satisfied it wouldn’t be satisfaction. You would just get hungry for something else. The only way to maybe have satisfaction would be to accept the nothingness and not try to put anyone else in it. When I left Claire, I blocked Garrett in my phone. I also deleted the Tinder app. Then I went to Whole Foods and bought myself an expensive array of ingredients: a cod fillet, little clams, good olive oil, a bottle of white wine, black truffles, shallots, chanterelles. I finally bought Dominic the ingredients for his turkey, pea, and zucchini dish. Even though I’m not a great cook, we were going to have a little feast. First I stewed up his mess. I loved watching him eat, how absorbed in it and unselfconscious he was, gobbling quickly and getting right to the point. I loved the sounds he made with his black lips and pink tongue, all sloppy and smacking, totally engrossed in his meal. Occasionally he would stop midbowl, still chewing, and glance at me sideways for a moment as if to say, What are you looking at? I’m just eating. We all do it, you know. Then I cooked the fillet and clams in the wine and oil, browning the mushrooms and shallots to a crisp. It was delicious. I drank the rest of the wine and sat down with my Sappho. Sappho’s gaps are not intentional negative space, and I do not propose we read them as such. The words are gone and they are never coming back, I typed. We can try to fill the gaps with biographical knowledge, but this will not replicate the music. Guessing at gaps cannot simulate music. Nor can the silence of the gaps simulate the missing music either. But the silence comes closer.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  The timbre of a voice, the build of an ankle, the texture of a hand, a movement, a gesture—since few were as pronounced as Stephen Gordon, unless it were Wanda, the Polish painter. She, poor soul, never knew how to dress for the best. If she dressed like a woman she looked like a man, if she dressed like a man she looked like a woman! 2 And their love affairs, how strange, how bewildering—how difficult to classify degrees of attraction. For not always would they attract their own kind, very often they attracted quite ordinary people. Thus Pat’s Arabella had suddenly married, having wearied of Grigg as of her predecessor. Rumour had it that she was now blatantly happy at the prospect of shortly becoming a mother. And then there was Jamie’s friend Barbara, a wisp of a girl very faithful and loving, but all woman as far as one could detect, with a woman’s clinging dependence on Jamie. These two had been lovers from the days of their childhood, from the days when away in their Highland village the stronger child had protected the weaker at school or at play with their boisterous companions. They had grown up together like two wind-swept saplings on their bleak Scottish hill-side so starved of sunshine. For warmth and protection they had leaned to each other, until with the spring, at the time of mating, their branches had quietly intertwined. That was how it had been, the entwining of saplings, very simple, and to them very dear, having nothing mysterious or strange about it except inasmuch as all love is mysterious. To themselves they had seemed like the other lovers for whom dawns were brighter and twilights more tender. Hand in hand they had strolled down the village street, pausing to listen to the piper at evening. And something in that sorrowful, outlandish music would arouse the musical soul in Jamie, so that great chords would surge up through her brain, very different indeed from the wails of the piper, yet born of the same mystic Highland nature. Happy days; happy evenings when the glow of the summer lingered for hours above the grim hills, lingered on long after the flickering lamps had been lit in the cottage windows of Beedles. The piper would at last decide to go home, but they two would wander away to the moorland, there to lie down for a space side by side among the short, springy turf and the heather. Children they had been, having small skill in words, or in life, or in love itself for that matter. Barbara, fragile and barely nineteen; the angular Jamie not yet quite twenty. They had talked because words will ease the full spirit; talked in abrupt, rather shy broken phrases.

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

  Most provoked feelings result from engaging emotions that relate not just to the isolated individual but to the individual in the context of others. Situations of loss result in sadness and despair, whose presence solicits empathy and compassion, which stimulate the creative imagination to produce counters to the sadness and despair. The result can be simple—a set of caring gestures, the protection provided by physical contact—or complex: a song or a poem. The ensuing resumption of homeostatic conditions opens the way for recruiting more complex feeling states—gratitude and hope, for example—and a subsequent reasoned elaboration over those feeling states. There is a close association between beneficial forms of sociality and positive affect, and an equally close association of both with a suite of chemical molecules in charge of regulating stress and inflammation such as endogenous opioids. It is not possible to imagine the origin of the responses that became medicine or any of the principal artistic manifestations outside an affective context. The sick patient, the abandoned lover, the wounded warrior, and the troubadour in love were able to feel. Their situations and their feelings motivated intelligent responses, in themselves and in other participants in their respective situations. Beneficial sociality is rewarding and improves homeostasis, while aggressive sociality does the opposite. But it should be clear that I am not confining the arts to a therapeutic role today. The pleasures that can be derived from an art piece are still related to their therapeutic origin but can soar into new intellectual regions where they are joined by complexities of ideas and meanings. Nor am I suggesting that all cultural responses are intelligent and well-organized accomplishments that necessarily produce an effective answer to the original plight. Other examples of emotive reaction and cultural response include, on the positive side of the ledger, yearning to alleviate the suffering of others and taking pleasure in discovering a means to do so; delighting in finding ways to improve the lives of others ranging from the offer of material goods to playful inventions that result in happiness; taking pleasure in the consideration of nature’s mysteries and attempting to solve them. This is how many cultural ideas, instruments, practices, and institutions were probably born, modestly and in small groups. Over time they became places of worship, books of wisdom, exemplary novels, institutions of learning, declarations of principle, and charters of nations. On the negative side, violence toward and from other human beings played an inordinate role. Its leading cause was the engagement of a neural apparatus of emotions whose development possibly came to a peak in great apes and whose shadow continues to loom over the human condition.

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

  We, too, put chemical/single-celled memory to this simple use and benefit from it. This is the kind of memory present, for example, in our immune cells. We benefit from vaccines because once we expose our immune cells to a potentially dangerous but inactivated pathogen, the cells can identify that pathogen when they next encounter it and will attack it mercilessly when it attempts to gain a foothold in our organisms. The memories that hallmark our minds follow the same general principles except that what we memorize are not chemical modifications occurring at the molecular level but rather temporary modifications occurring in chains of neural circuits. The modifications are related to elaborate images of every sensory sort, experienced in isolation or as part of the narratives that flow in our minds. The problems that nature solved on the way to making image learning and recall possible are monumental. The solutions that nature found, at molecular, cellular, and system levels, are also admirable. At systems level, the solution most directly relevant to our discussion—the memory of images, for example, the memory of a scene that we perceive in visual and auditory terms—is achieved by converting explicit images into a “neural code” that will later allow, by working in reverse, a more or less complete reconstruction in the process of image recall. The codes represent, in non-explicit form, the actual content of images and their sequences and are stored in both cerebral hemispheres, in association cortices of the occipital, temporal, parietal, and frontal regions. These regions are interconnected, via two-way hierarchical circuits of neural cables, with the collection of “early sensory cortices” where the explicit images are first assembled. During the process of recall, we end up reconstructing a more or less faithful approximation of the original image, using reverse neural pathways, which operate from code-holding regions and produce effects within the explicit image-making regions, essentially where the images were first assembled. We have called this process retroactivation. 7 A now famous brain structure called the hippocampus is a major partner in this process and is essential for producing the highest level of image integration. The hippocampus also allows the conversion of temporary codings into permanent ones. Loss of the hippocampus in both cerebral hemispheres disrupts the formation of and access to long-term memory of integrated scenes. Unique events are no longer recalled even if objects and events can still be recognized outside a unique context. One is able to recognize a house as a house, but not the particular house where one has lived. The contextual, episodic knowledge acquired by personal, individual experience is no longer accessible. The generic, semantic knowledge is still recoverable. Herpes simplex encephalitis used to be a prominent cause of such a disabling loss, but Alzheimer’s disease has now become the most frequent culprit.

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

  When feelings, which describe the inner state of life now, are “placed” or even “located” within the current perspective of the whole organism, subjectivity emerges. And from there on, the events that surround us, the events in which we participate, and the memories we recall are given a novel possibility: they can actually matter to us; they can affect the course of our lives. Human cultural invention requires this step, that events be made to matter, that they be automatically classified as beneficial or not to the individual to which they belong. Conscious, owned feelings permit a first diagnosis of human situations as problematic or not. They animate the imagination and excite the reasoning process on the basis of which a situation will be found to be problematic or a false alarm. Subjectivity is required to drive the creative intelligence that constructs cultural manifestations. Subjectivity was able to endow images, minds, and feelings with novel properties: a sense of ownership related to the particular organism in which these phenomena were happening; the mineness that allows entry into the universe of individuality. Mental experiences gave minds a new impact, an advantage to countless living species. And with humans, mental experiences were direct levers in the deliberate construction of cultures: the mental experiences of pain, suffering, and pleasure became foundations for human wants, stepping-stones of human inventions, in sharp contrast to the collection of behaviors assembled up to that point by the workings of natural selection and genetic transmission. The gulf between the two sets of processes—biological evolution and cultural evolution—is so large that it makes one overlook the fact that homeostasis is the guiding power behind both. Images cannot be experienced, in and of themselves, until they are part of a context that includes specific sets of organism-related images, those that naturally tell the story of how the organism is being perturbed by the engagement of its sensory devices with a particular object. Where the object is—out in the world, elsewhere in the body proper, or recalled from a memory created by a prior imaging of something internal or external to the organism—is not important. Subjectivity is a relentlessly constructed narrative. The narrative arises from the circumstances of organisms with certain brain specifications as they interact with the world around, the world of their past memories, and the world of their interior. 8 The essence of the mysteries behind consciousness is made of this. An Aside on the Hard Problem of Consciousness The philosopher David Chalmers focused the investigation of consciousness when he identified two problems in consciousness studies.

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

  To be experienced, the patterns of operations related to pain or pleasure had to be turned into feeling, which is the same as saying that they had to acquire a mental face, which is the same as saying that the mental face had to be owned by the organism in which it occurred, thereby becoming subjective, in brief, conscious . Non-experienceable pain and pleasure mechanisms, by which I mean nonconscious and nonsubjective pain-related and pleasure-related mechanisms, clearly assisted early life regulation in an automatic and undeliberated way. But in the absence of subjectivity, the organism in which such mechanisms occurred would not have been able to consider either the mechanism or the results. The respective body states would not have been examinable . The collection of questions, explanations, consolations, adjustments, discoveries, and inventions that make up the noblest part of human history required a motive. Felt pain and suffering, on their own, but especially when contrasted with felt pleasure and flourishing, did move the mind and call for action. Provided, of course, that there was something to be moved in the mind, and there certainly was, especially as Homo sapiens developed, in the form of the expanded cognitive and language abilities discussed earlier. In the most practical terms, that movable something was the ability to think beyond what could be immediately perceived and the ability to interpret and diagnose a situation, understanding causes and effects. How correct the interpretations and diagnoses were, over the ages, is not the point. Obviously, they were often incorrect. The point was having an interpretation, correct or not, firmly motivated by a strong feeling, positive or negative. On that basis, it was possible for intensely social humans to motivate the invention, individually and in the collective space, of previously nonexisting responses. This movable, mental something involves not just what we sense as reality here and now, but reality as it might have happened or as it might have been forecast to happen. I am referring to recalled reality, a reality that can be altered by our imagination, processed in chains of remembered images of every sensory stripe—sight, sound, touch, smell, taste—images that can be cut in pieces and moved about, playfully recombined to form new arrangements and address specific goals: the construction of a tool, a practice, an explanation. None of this is incompatible with the earlier appearance, prior to Homo sapiens, of some limited cultural manifestations such as stone tools. 19 The movable something identified the relationships between certain objects, people, events, or ideas and the onset of either suffering or joy; it provided an awareness of the immediate and not so immediate antecedents to pain and pleasure; and it identified possible and even likely causes.

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

  Albert Bor g man speaks of the ' device paradigm', whereby we withdraw more and more from "manifold e n gagement" with the things surrounding us, and inst e ad r equest and get products designed simply to deliver some circum s cribed benefit. He cont rast s wh at is involved in heating our houses with the contemp o rary central heating furnace, and what this sam e function entailed in pioneer t imes, when th e w hole family had to be involved in c utting and stacking the wood, feeding the stoves o r fireplace, and the like. 8 Hannah Arendt focussed on the more and more ephemeral quality of modern objects of use. She ar g ued t hat ''the reality a nd reliability o f the human world rest primarily on th e fact that we are surrounde d by things more permanent than the activity by w hic h they a re produced." This comes under threat in a world of modem commodities. 9 And Rilke in the seventh of the Duino Elegies links the n eed to transmute t he world into interiority to the loss of substance of our contemporar y man-made world. Nirgends, G eliebte, wird Welt sein, als innen. Unser Leben geht bin mit Verwandlung. Und immer geringer sc hwindet das Aussen. Wo einmal ein dauerndes Haus war, sch lagt sich erdachtes Gebild vor, quer, zu Erdenklichem vollig gehorig, als stand es noch g a nz im Gehirne . . . . Ja, wo noch eins iibersteht, ein einst gebetetes Ding, ein gedientes, geknietes-, ha l t es sich, s o wei es ist, schon ins Unsichtbare hi n. Nowhere, beloved will world be but within us. Our life pa sses in transformation. And the extern al sh rinks into less and less. Where once an enduring house w as, now a cerebral structure crosses our path , completely belo nging to t he realm of concepts, as though it st i ll stoo d in the b r ain 5 01. • CONCLUSI ON ... Where one of them still survives, a Thing that was formerly pray ed to , worshipped, knelt before- just as it is, it passes into the invisible world. 1 0 On the other han d , the individual has been taken out of a rich c ommuni ty life and now enters instead into a series of mobile, changing, revocable asso c iations, often d esigned merely for highly spe c ific ends. We end up relating to each other through a series of partial roles. So muc h for the experiential consequences. But public consequences are also frequently c harged against instrumentalist society.

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

  But once this is said, is not the door still open to another kin d o f subjectivism , this time a species of relativism? Hum an societies differ gr e atly in their culture and values. They re pr esent different ways of be ing human , w e mig ht say. But perhaps there is no wa y, in the end, of arbitrating bet w e e n th e m when the y c lash. Perhaps the y are quite inc o mm ensu rable, a n d just a s Ethics of Inarticulacy · 61 w e rec og nize in general that the existence of certain goods is dependent on the e xi s te n c e of humans, so we might be forced to recognize that certain goods a r e o nly s uch granted the existence of humans within a certain cultural form. Unli ke the other attempts to relativize the good that I discussed above, I t h i nk this is a real possibility. T here may be different kinds of human r eal i za tio n which are really incommensurable. This would mean that there w o u l d be no way of moving from one of these to the other and presenting the t ra n sit i on without self-delusion as either a gain or a lo ss in anything. It wou ld j u s t be a tot al switch, generating incomprehension of one's past-something t ha t co uld in principle only come about through intimidation and brainwash i n g . I thi nk this is a real possibility , but I doubt if it is true. Of c ourse, there is another very poignant sense in which we may be u nable to choose between cultures. We may indeed be able to understand the t r ansition in terms of gain and loss, but there may be some of both, and an o ve rall j udge ment may be hard to make. S o me moderns see our predicament i n rela tion to earlier societies s om ewhat in this way. They have little doubt tha t we have a better science, that we have explored more fully the human potential for self-determining freedom. But this, they think, has gone a lo ng w ith an irretrievable loss in our attunement to our natural surroundings and our sense of community. Although for obvious reasons they are beyond being able to choose again for themselves, these moderns may genuinely believe that their lot is no better than t heir forebears'-as may emerge in their rel uctance to induct still premodern societies into our civilization.

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

  What the heave of the will betokens metaphysically, what the effort might lead us to infer about a will-power distinct from motives, are not matters that concern us yet. Subjectively and phenomenally, the feeling of effort, absent from the former decisions, accompanies these. Whether it be the dreary resignation for the sake of austere and naked duty of all sorts of rich mundane delights, or whether it be the heavy resolve that of two mutually exclusive trains of future fact, both sweet and good, and with no strictly objective or imperative principle of choice between them, one shall forevermore become impossible, while the other shall become reality, it is a desolate and acrid sort of act, an excursion into a lonesome moral wilderness. If examined closely, its chief difference from the three former cases appears to be that in those cases the mind at the moment of deciding on the triumphant alternative dropped the other one wholly or nearly out of sight, whereas here both alternatives are steadily held in view, and in the very act of murdering the vanquished possibility the chooser realizes how much in that instant he is making himself lose. It is deliberately driving a thorn into one's flesh; and the sense of inward effort with which the act is accompanied is an element which sets the fourth type of decision in strong contrast with the previous three varieties, and makes of it an altogether peculiar sort of mental phenomenon. The immense majority of human decisions are decisions without effort. In comparatively few of them, in most people, does effort accompany the final act. We are, I think, misled into supposing that effort is more frequent than it is, by the fact that during deliberation we so often have a feeling of how great an effort it would take to make a decision now. Later, after the decision has made itself with ease, we recollect this and erroneously suppose the effort also to have been made then. The existence of the effort as a phenomenal fact in our consciousness cannot of course be doubted or denied. Its significance, on the other hand, is a matter about which the gravest difference of opinion prevails. Questions as momentous as that of the very existence of spiritual causality, as vast as that of universal predestination or free-will, depend on its interpretation. It therefore becomes essential that we study with some care the conditions under which the feeling of volitional effort is found. THE FEELING OF EFFORT. When, awhile back (p. 526), I said that consciousness (or the neural process which goes with it) is in its very nature impulsive, I added in a note the proviso that it must be sufficiently intense.

• From The Erotic Mind (1995)

  Because thrilling turn-ons are often fueled by conflict and ambivalence, they are frequently the most difficult to change, particularly if painful or traumatic experiences are woven into them. As we become aware of how our turn-ons are linked to unpleasant memories, we can begin exploring more fulfilling, less conflicted erotic styles. Unfortunately, these more comfortable expressions of eros typically involve a distinct reduction in sexual intensity, an intensity that will be sorely missed. Ryan Revisited: Excitement lostEver since his father caught him playing with himself, Ryan had been at war with his sexual urges, a battle that had not only taken an enormous emotional toll but had also provided an inexhaustible source of risqué fascination. When he fell in love with Janet he was forced to face the fact that love and lust had long since become so thoroughly incompatible that he was unable to generate sufficient excitement with Janet to trigger an orgasm. Ryan’s therapy progressed rapidly. He discovered that struggle was the fuel for his compulsive urges and that calling himself a “sex addict” only amplified his conflict. Gradually, because he loved Janet, he freely chose to step away from his “affair” with porn shops and phone sex, concentrating instead on the novel experience of sex with a woman he cared about. He and Janet experimented more freely with sensuality and affection, and both enjoyed a deepening closeness. In response to this progress Ryan fell into depression. “It makes no sense,” he lamented. “Everything is going so well, yet a cloud follows me wherever I go. Everything is flat and colorless.” As much as Ryan appreciated his relationship with Janet, he also missed the passion of the raunchy sex he had spent a lifetime both fighting and pursuing, the sex that he had always counted on to distract him from unpleasant emotions. Although reluctant to admit it, Ryan was in mourning. As it does for so many people in his situation, Ryan’s growth stalled until he granted himself permission to recognize the depth of his attachment to forbidden lust. He needed to respect the lost rewards—not just the suffering—of the eroticism he was leaving behind. THE PAIN OF LOST HOPESAs you’ve frequently seen, problematic sexual patterns evolve to compensate for unmet needs or to soothe unhealed psychic wounds. One reason troublesome turn-ons are so tenacious is that they express an enduring hope that all can be made well and whole. To some degree, sexual reenactments shield us from the distressing reality that in emotional life what is lost can never be regained. When you alter an unfulfilling erotic pattern, you might begin to feel, more intensely than ever before, the emotional pain that your CET was originally designed to soothe. Understandably, you might shrink from that sting, choosing instead to endure the dull ache of the status quo. Yet, paradoxically, when you allow yourself to feel your pain fully, you free yourself from it. It is the acceptance, not the denial, of hurt that heals us.

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

  When the pain and the suffering were caused by others—by how they felt about others, by how they perceived others to feel about them—or when the pain was caused by considering their own conditions, such as confronting the inevitability of death, humans would have drawn on their expanding individual and collective resources and invented a variety of responses that ranged from moral prescriptions and principles of justice to modes of social organization and governance, artistic manifestations, and religious beliefs. — It is not possible to tell exactly when these developments would have taken place. Their pace varied significantly depending on the specific populations and their geographic location. We know for certain that by 50,000 years ago such processes were well under way around the Mediterranean, in central and southern Europe, and in Asia, regions where Homo sapiens was present, though not without the company of Neanderthals. This was long after Homo sapiens first appeared, about 200,000 years ago or earlier. 3 Thus we can think of the beginnings of human cultures as occurring among hunter-gatherers, well before the cultural invention known as agriculture, about 12,000 years ago, and before the invention of writing and money. The dates by which writing systems emerged in varied places are a good illustration of how multicentered were the processes of cultural evolution. Writing was first developed in Sumer (in Mesopotamia) and in Egypt, between 3500 and 3200 B.C. But a different writing system was later developed in Phoenicia and eventually used by Greeks and Romans. About 600 B.C., writing also developed independently in Mesoamerica, under the Mayan civilization, in the region of contemporary Mexico. We can thank Cicero and ancient Rome for the word “culture” applied to the universe of ideas. Cicero used the term to describe the cultivation of the soul—cultura animi—and he must have been thinking of the tilling of the land and its result, the perfecting and improvement of plant growth. What applied to the land might as well apply to the mind. There is little doubt about the principal meaning of the word “culture” today. Dictionaries tell us that “culture” refers to manifestations of intellectual achievement regarded collectively, and unless otherwise specified, the word refers to human culture. The arts, philosophical inquiry, religious beliefs, moral faculties, justice, political governance, economic institutions—markets, banks—technology, and science are the main categories of endeavor and achievement that are conveyed by the word “culture.” The ideas, attitudes, customs, manners, practices, and institutions that distinguish one social group from another belong to the overall scope of culture as does the notion that cultures are transmitted across peoples and generations by language and by the very objects and rituals that the cultures created in the first place.

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

  2 The simple idea, then, is that feelings of pain and feelings of pleasure, from degrees of well-being to malaise and sickness, would have been the catalysts for the processes of questioning, understanding, and problem solving that most profoundly distinguish human minds from the minds of other living species. By questioning, understanding, and problem solving, humans would have been able to develop intriguing solutions for the predicaments of their lives and to construct the means to promote their flourishing. They would have perfected ways of nourishing, clothing, and sheltering themselves, nursing their physical wounds, and beginning the invention of what became medicine. When the pain and the suffering were caused by others—by how they felt about others, by how they perceived others to feel about them—or when the pain was caused by considering their own conditions, such as confronting the inevitability of death, humans would have drawn on their expanding individual and collective resources and invented a variety of responses that ranged from moral prescriptions and principles of justice to modes of social organization and governance, artistic manifestations, and religious beliefs. — It is not possible to tell exactly when these developments would have taken place. Their pace varied significantly depending on the specific populations and their geographic location. We know for certain that by 50,000 years ago such processes were well under way around the Mediterranean, in central and southern Europe, and in Asia, regions where Homo sapiens was present, though not without the company of Neanderthals. This was long after Homo sapiens first appeared, about 200,000 years ago or earlier. 3 Thus we can think of the beginnings of human cultures as occurring among hunter-gatherers, well before the cultural invention known as agriculture, about 12,000 years ago, and before the invention of writing and money. The dates by which writing systems emerged in varied places are a good illustration of how multicentered were the processes of cultural evolution. Writing was first developed in Sumer (in Mesopotamia) and in Egypt, between 3500 and 3200 B.C. But a different writing system was later developed in Phoenicia and eventually used by Greeks and Romans. About 600 B.C. , writing also developed independently in Mesoamerica, under the Mayan civilization, in the region of contemporary Mexico. We can thank Cicero and ancient Rome for the word “culture” applied to the universe of ideas. Cicero used the term to describe the cultivation of the soul— cultura animi —and he must have been thinking of the tilling of the land and its result, the perfecting and improvement of plant growth. What applied to the land might as well apply to the mind. There is little doubt about the principal meaning of the word “culture” today.

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

  A preliminary answer, which we will address later in the book, is that cultural instruments first developed in relation to the homeostatic needs of individuals and of groups as small as nuclear families and tribes. The extension to wider human circles was not and could not have been contemplated. Within wider human circles, cultural groups, countries, even geopolitical blocs, often operate as individual organisms, not as parts of one larger organism, subject to a single homeostatic control. Each uses the respective homeostatic controls to defend the interests of its organism. Cultural homeostasis is merely a work in progress often undermined by periods of adversity. We might venture that the ultimate success of cultural homeostasis depends on a fragile civilizational effort aimed at reconciling different regulation goals. This is why the calm desperation of F. Scott Fitzgerald—“so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”—remains a prescient and appropriate way of describing the human condition. 13 8 THE CONSTRUCTION OF FEELINGS To understand the origin and construction of feelings, and to appreciate the contribution they make to the human mind, we need to set them in the panorama of homeostasis. The alignment of pleasant and unpleasant feelings with, respectively, positive and negative ranges of homeostasis is a verified fact. Homeostasis in good or even optimal ranges expresses itself as well-being and even joy, while the happiness caused by love and friendship contributes to more efficient homeostasis and promotes health. The negative examples are just as clear. The stress associated with sadness is caused by calling into action the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland and by releasing molecules whose consequence is reducing homeostasis and actually damaging countless body parts such as blood vessels and muscular structures. Interestingly, the homeostatic burden of physical disease can activate the same hypothalamic-pituitary axis and cause release of dynorphin, a molecule that induces dysphoria. The circularity of these operations is remarkable. On the face of it, mind and brain influence the body proper just as much as the body proper can influence the brain and the mind. They are merely two aspects of the very same being. Whether feelings correspond to positive or negative ranges of homeostasis, the varied chemical signaling involved in their processing and the accompanying visceral states have the power to alter the regular mental flow, subtly and not so subtly. Attention, learning, recall, and imagination can be disrupted and the approach to tasks and situations, trivial and not, disturbed. It is often difficult to ignore the mental perturbation caused by emotional feelings, especially in regard to the negative variety, but even the positive feelings of peaceful, harmonious existence prefer not to be ignored.

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

  Kleiman and Miep, and Bep Voskuijl too, have helped us so much. We’ve already canned loads of rhubarb, strawberries and cherries, so for the time being I doubt we’ll be bored. We also have a supply of reading material, and we’re going to buy lots of games. Of course, we can’t ever look out the window or go outside. And we have to be quiet so the people downstairs can’t hear us. Yesterday we had our hands full. We had to pit two crates of cherries for Mr. Kugler to can. We’re going to use the empty crates to make bookshelves. Someone’s calling me. Yours, Anne COMMENT ADDED BY ANNE ON SEPTEMBER 28, 1942: Not beina able to ao outside upsets me more than I can say, and I’m terrified our hidina place will be discovered and that we’ll be shot. That, of course, is a fairly dismal prospect. SUNDAY, JULY 12, 1942 They’ve all been so nice to me this last month because of my birthday, and yet every day I feel myself drifting further away from Mother and Margot. I worked hard today and they praised me, only to start picking on me again five minutes later. You can easily see the difference between the way they deal with Margot and the way they deal with me. For example, Margot broke the vacuum cleaner, and because of that we’ve been without light for the rest of the day. Mother said, “Well, Margot, it’s easy to see you’re not used to working; otherwise, you’d have known better than to yank the plug out by the cord.” Margot made some reply, and that was the end of the story. But this afternoon, when I wanted to rewrite something on Mother’s shopping list because her handwriting is so hard to read, she wouldn’t let me. She bawled me out again, and the whole family wound up getting involved. I don’t fit in with them, and I’ve felt that clearly in the last few weeks. They’re so sentimental together, but I’d rather be sentimental on my own. They’re always saying how nice it is with the four of us, and that we get along so well, without giving a moment’s thought to the fact that I don’t feel that way. Daddy’s the only one who understands me, now and again, though he usually sides with Mother and Margot. Another thing I can’t stand is having them talk about me in front of outsiders, telling them how I cried or how sensibly I’m behaving. It’s horrible. And sometimes they talk about Moortje and I can’t take that at all. Moortje is my weak spot. I miss her every minute of the day, and no one knows how often I think of her; whenever I do, my eyes fill with tears. Moortje is so sweet, and I love her so much that I keep dreaming she’ll come back to us.

• From A Sexplanation (2021)

  Your homework assignment leaving here is to have 200 one-minute conversations with each other. So with that, could each adult turn to their girl and share what they most hope for them as they go through puberty. [Alex] The script that we're given is like, you need to sit your kids down and have the talk and then you're done, right? -Yeah. -And you kind of frame it a different way. -Well, I'm a developmentalist. In other words, I think that sex ed can happen all throughout your age. It can happen at 60, it can happen in your 40s, can happen at two years old, four years old. But the language, the structure and what you're taking on for content looks different. We don't wait for people to say, I'm ready for algebra. We introduce that when they're developmentally ready to take on algebra. And I think some parents don't like to think of their kids as sexual at all. Lots of times a parent will come up and say, "I don't think my daughter's ready." And I'm looking at the daughter like, she's been taking notes, you know? It's you that's not ready. But you can have a talk at two about body parts. You could have a talk at six about taking care of your body, like brushing your teeth. You can have, those are all really sexual ideas. How do you take care of your body? What is your body parts, what do we call it? Where are you naked, what is privacy, what is intimacy? Who do you hug, who do you not hug? What is consent? You can have a conversation with a six year old about those things. You may not say penis, vagina, sexual intercourse right then, or you might. But I think it's part of this idea of a talk, well, when? Always. [Alex] Always have the talk. As I looked out into the sea of families, I couldn't help but think, good for them. Good for these little kids for getting the right information so they don't panic when they get their first period or erection. And good for these parents for normalizing dialogue about bodies and growing up, ultimately strengthening their relationships with their kids. Good for them. But what about me? My parents weren't equipped to prep me for my first wet dream or sex, or even an erection. They are waiting for me to come to them which just led to years of silence. And now I know how silence keeps shame alive. So if they were really waiting for me to come to them, maybe I should take them up on their offer. But where do I start? -What's your goal? -I think at the beginning, I was in a much more blamey space. -Yeah. -And now I definitely feel like people were just in a place that they were. -Yeah. -There's no blame.

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

  By contrast, the realm of desire i s that of chaos. Th e goo d so u ls en j o y order (kosmos), concord (xumphonia), and harmony ( h arm o n i a ), wh ere the bad are torn every wh ic h way by their desires and are • n p e r p et u al confl ict . P l a to ev en describes them as suffering from a kind of IIJ 116 • INWARDNESS 'civil war' (stasis). 1 And later on, in his graphic description of democratic an d tyrannical man, Plato imprints indelibly on the reader's mind the mi s erie s of remorse and inner s elf-destructive conflict that they suffer. Beside s being at one with himself, the person ruled by reason also enj o y s calm, while the desiring person is constantly agitated and unquiet , consta n t l y pulled this way and that by his cravings. And this in t urn is connected to a t h i r d difference. Th e good person is collected, where the bad one is distraught. The fir st enjoys a kind of self-possession, of centring in him self, which the o th e r wholly lacks, driven as he is by endless desire. Plato constantly str esses t he un limited nature of desire. The curse of one ruled by his ap p etites is tha t he can never be s atisfied; he is dragged ever onward. The desiring element, sa ys Plato, is 'by nature insatiable' (442.A, physei aplestotaton). The mastery of self through reason brings with it these three fruits: unity with oneself, calm, and collected self-possession. Plato help e d set the form of the dominant family of moral theories in our civ ilization. Over the centuries, it has seemed self-evident to man y th at thought/reason orders our lives for the good, or would if only passion did no t p revent it. A nd the backgroun d connections underlying this view ha v e remained much the same: to consider something rationally is to take a di spassionate s tance tow ards it. I t is both to see clearly what ought to be d on e and to be calm and self-collected and hence able to do it. Reason i s at one and the same time a power to see things aright and a condition of self-possession. To be rational is truly to be master of oneself. This outlook has been dominant but never unchallenged. Alt hough Christian theology incorporated much Platonic philosophy, and sanctity a n d salvation came to be expressed in Platonic-derived terms of purity and the "beatific vision", nevertheless the Christian emphasis on the radical conver sion of the wil l could never be finally accommodated in thi s synthesis.

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

  Wars constitute a special case because they can prompt both constructive remedies and endless cycles of violence begetting violence. There is nothing to be added to what Homer, the Mahabharata, and Shakespeare’s history plays illustrate on this issue. Whether homeostasis is approached from the solace and consolation angle or from the benefits produced by collective organization and sociability, religion and homeostasis can be persuasively linked in terms of their origins and historical endurance, the latter being indicative of robust cultural selection. I suspect that Émile Durkheim—who placed the roots of religion in collective rituals of tribal peoples rather than in the assuaging of individual or small group sufferings—might agree. Such collective behaviors, as Durkheim commented, unleashed powerful, rewarding emotions and feelings. The collective behaviors of Durkheim’s tribal peoples, however, are likely to have been prompted by homeostatic instabilities in the first place. The homeostatically stabilizing outcome for the individuals in the group would still apply. Karl Marx is supposed to have talked about religion as “the opium of the masses” (although he did not quite say that; he said, instead, that religion was “the opium of the people,” the “masses” probably being a post-Leninist retrofit). What could be more homeostatically inspired than the notion of prescribing opioids to treat human pain and suffering? Marx also wrote, in advance of that famous sentence, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.” Here is an interesting mixture of social analysis and probing scrutiny of the cultural mind. It combines his rejection of religion with the pragmatic recognition that religion can be a soulful refuge in a dehumanized and soulless world. Noteworthy, considering that Marx had no idea of how dehumanized and soulless the world would become, especially the world he was responsible for inspiring. Noteworthy most of all because of the transparent linkage of life state, feelings, and cultural responses. 11 The fact that the history of religions is rife with episodes in which religious beliefs led and still lead to suffering, violence, and wars, hardly humanly desirable outcomes, in no way contradicts the homeostatic value that such beliefs did have and clearly still have for a large part of humanity. Finally, just as in the case of artistic endeavors, I need to make clear that I do not see religions as mere therapeutic responses. That the initial motivation of religious beliefs and practices was related to homeostatic compensation is both plausible and likely. How such early attempts evolved is another matter. The intellectual constructions that followed have gone beyond the goal of consolation to serve as instruments of inquiry and formulation of meaning where the compensation element is only a vestige. Practical goals were followed by philosophical explorations of the meaning of humans and universe.

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

  Great poetry depends on layered feelings. The definitive exploration of layered feelings was the life’s work of a novelist and philosopher by the name of Marcel Proust. 8THE CONSTRUCTION OF FEELINGSTo understand the origin and construction of feelings, and to appreciate the contribution they make to the human mind, we need to set them in the panorama of homeostasis. The alignment of pleasant and unpleasant feelings with, respectively, positive and negative ranges of homeostasis is a verified fact. Homeostasis in good or even optimal ranges expresses itself as well-being and even joy, while the happiness caused by love and friendship contributes to more efficient homeostasis and promotes health. The negative examples are just as clear. The stress associated with sadness is caused by calling into action the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland and by releasing molecules whose consequence is reducing homeostasis and actually damaging countless body parts such as blood vessels and muscular structures. Interestingly, the homeostatic burden of physical disease can activate the same hypothalamic-pituitary axis and cause release of dynorphin, a molecule that induces dysphoria. The circularity of these operations is remarkable. On the face of it, mind and brain influence the body proper just as much as the body proper can influence the brain and the mind. They are merely two aspects of the very same being. Whether feelings correspond to positive or negative ranges of homeostasis, the varied chemical signaling involved in their processing and the accompanying visceral states have the power to alter the regular mental flow, subtly and not so subtly. Attention, learning, recall, and imagination can be disrupted and the approach to tasks and situations, trivial and not, disturbed. It is often difficult to ignore the mental perturbation caused by emotional feelings, especially in regard to the negative variety, but even the positive feelings of peaceful, harmonious existence prefer not to be ignored. The roots for the alignment between life processes and quality of feeling can be traced to the workings of homeostasis within the common ancestors to endocrine systems, immune systems, and nervous systems. They go back in the mists of early life. The part of the nervous system responsible for surveying and responding to the interior, especially the old interior, has always worked cooperatively with the immune and endocrine systems within that same interior. Consider some current details of this alignment.