Causes and resentments

 

 

What difference does cause make?

The Egyptians and Eastern Mediterranean cultures thought that thinking went on in the heart. There was strong evidence for this: the heart for instance spoke – it beat. Whereas for the Egyptians, nothing came out of the brain exactly.

The Greeks strongly believed, for the most part, in the extramission theory of vision – that miniscule rays issue from the eyes, which is how we see. In a sense, vision is touch – the rays touch the things seen. Even Leonardo da Vinci implies an extramissionist belief in his notebooks. In fact, as was shown in a widely circulated 2002 article by Winer, Cottrell, Gregg, et al., a survey of adult Americans finds that large numbers of adults, among whom are college students, still think something shoots out of the eye that “causes” vision.  When shown a three models of vision, one showing “rays” represented as dotted lines going out of the eye, one showing photons “entering the eye” and one mixing the photons entering the eye with the rays coming out of the eye, from 41 to 60 percent of the adults surveyed preferred the last choice. I’m not sure however if the adults really believed this or thought that if given three choices, one of which mixes up the first two choices, the safest bet is the half of one, half of the other choice. The last refuge of the student who didn’t have time to study the subject.

Until the 17^th century, the majority of physicians in the “Western” world believed that the passions were the result of various humors, usually put at four: blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm. The animal spirits were the middle men, so to speak, of the humors. Very subtle entities, the animal spirits were produced by the blood in the heart.

We – by which I mean myself and Occidental physicians and most of their patients – no longer believe any of these “cause” stories. By believe I mean that it doesn’t cross your doctors mind to check and see if some subtle vapor formed in the heart is picking up too much black bile, thus causing you to be depressed.

However, if the extreme change in the belief in causes – causes on an intimate scale, causes that helped one define one’s very self, down to thinking thoughts about the very self and feeling “feels” about the self – hasn’t caused any meta-change in the self’s concept of itself, hasn’t a place, so to speak, in the intellectual history of our ordinary life – is this proof that, basically, we don’t have any feelings about cause?

I ask this question because it isn’t often asked by historians. That is, not in this way. One traces the “progress” of science, but one doesn’t ask what effect that progress has on the Da-sein in question.

2.

I admire Carlo Ginzburg for being one of the historians who admits the existence of other disciplines into his historical method – but it astonishes me that he is one of the few who does so. In the anthropology of emotions, there has long been a dialogue over the study of how different cultures express emotions. But this dialogue has to do with the Other – with the “non-Western” peoples who, in the colonialist calendar, are primitive, live in another age – say the stone age – from our hip to the plastic Westerners.

I have long thought – it was the thought that drove my interest in the way happiness became a total social fact in modernity – that we should look to these anthropologists in order to understand the development of that modernity in places like France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain, etc.

For instance: Robert I. Levy, in an essay entitled Emotions, Knowing and Culture [1984], proposed two axes for analyzing emotions on the sense making level – that is, not as private experiences, but as experiences that enter into the public domain. On the one hand, he speaks of hyercognition – “Hypercognition involves a kind of shaping, simplifying, selecting, and standardizing, a familiar function of cultural symbols and forms. It involves a kind of making “ordinary” of private understandings.” In contrast to that stands hypocognition – “Hypocognition forces the (first order) understanding into some private mode.” Citing his own work on “sadness” among Tahitians (Levy claims that, while there are words for severe grief and lamentation, there are “no unambiguous terms that represent the concepts of sadness, longing, or loneliness… People would name their condition, where I supposed that [the body signs and] the context called for “sadness” or “depression”, as “feeling troubled” pe’ape’a, the generic term for disturbances, either internal or external;…”) Levy writes that these are some “underschematized emotional domains”, and that these are hypocognized. “One of the consequences of hypocognition is that the felt disturbance, the “troubled feelings,” can be interpreted both by the one who experiences them and by others around him as something other than ‘emotion’. Thus, the troubled feelings that persist too long after the death of a loved one or those that occur after some loss that Tahitian ideology holds to be trivial and easily replaceable are in the village often interpreted as illness or as the harmful effects of a spirit.”

Other anthropologists have named this form of emotional expression “situated”.

Levy’s idea has not, unfortunately, been taken up by intellectual historians. Perhaps this is because one thinks, still, of emotion as being a very intimate and incommunicable state of feeling, which, though perhaps aroused by an external incident, is wholly enveloped within the individual self, much as a tooth ache is felt by the possessor of the tooth and not by the dentist who pulls it. But the affections are not spontaneously invented within us, even if they are, of course, neurologically guided. In fact, one would expect that the kind of epistemic and social ruptures that are thought to constitute the great transformation within the Occident – defined as capitalism, or the industrial or scientific revolution, or the emergence of new encompassing institutions – should present situations that evoke feelings that are ‘underschematized’.

The feeling of cause, for instance, seems underschematized. And yet, much of our schooling is all about schematizing our sense of cause. And in so doing, it alienates us from a sort of idiot sense – a private, but shared, popular sense – of cause.

It is harsh, schooling. The accumulated social feeling about teachers often comes out in reactionary times when the whole process, the learning that one is entirely wrong about almost everything, is revenged.

It is an oddity of the work of Foucault, and of his followers, that though Foucault was very clear about the kind of epistemic rupture that he dates, approximately, to the late 18th and early 19th century, the rupture is not witnessed. On his account, it happens in a sense without any contemporary realizing it. I call this odd in that Foucault thought that he, on the contrary, could very well recognize the ‘end of man’ and the shifts that signaled another epistemic rupture. If we suppose that such things could be witnessed, perhaps the witnesses would struggle with hypo-cognition – perhaps they would not be able to interpret their feelings about what they witnessed, about the new thoughts they thought. Suppose, suppose.