Liah Greenfeld's Blog - Posts Tagged "mind"

In the 16th century, in England, several remarkable things happened:

Social mobility, inconceivable before, became legitimate and common;
The ideal of Romantic love between a man and a woman emerged and “true love,” as we understand it today, was added to the human emotional range;
The word “people,” which earlier referred to the lower classes, became synonymous with “nation,” which at the time had the meaning of “an elite”;
Numerous new words appeared, among them “aspiration,” “happiness,” and “madness”;
The English society, previously a society of hierarchically arranged orders of nobility, clergy, and laborers under the sovereignty of God and his Vicar in Rome, was redefined as a sovereign community of equals;
The nature of violent crime, personal and political, changed, with crime that was not rational in the sense of self-interested becoming much more common;
The attitude to pets, especially dogs and cats, changed, transforming these animals in many cases from living multi-purpose tools to our friends and soul-mates;
The pursuit of growth -- rather than survival, as was the case before – became the goal of the economy;
Mental diseases which were later to be named “schizophrenia,” “manic-depressive illness,” and “depression” were first observed, shifting the interest of the medical profession, in particular, from other, numerous, mental diseases that were known since the times of antiquity.

Were these things connected? And, if they were, what were the connections between them? These are the questions I shall be exploring in this blog.

In the course of these explorations we shall

Arrive at a new interpretation of mental diseases with uncertain organic basis, such as schizophrenia and affective disorders, and find their actual causes – sought by psychiatrists without success for the past two centuries;
Resolve the mind/body, or psychophysical, problem which Western philosophy has not been able to resolve in over two millennia, and define the mind;
Redefine what it means to be human, when human life begins, and where the difference between us and other animals lies;
Deepen our appreciation of Shakespeare and Darwin;
Learn to understand (and thus, at the very least, make the first step towards the ability to prevent) tragedies such as Newtown mass shooting and Boston Marathon bombing;
Acquire a new and surprising angle at modern poetry and detective fiction;
Reconsider the bases of psychology;
And prove the empirical reality of the soul.
Possibly, we’ll do more, but certainly no less. This is my promise to the readers of this blog and I invite them to hold me accountable, if any part of it remains unfulfilled.

I come to this online activity after thirty years of research, thinking, and teaching on the subject of modern culture, that is, of the culture of modern societies. It is impossible to understand modern culture without the comparison with other type of cultures, and it is unproductive to study any culture without attention to its relation to the individual mind. Thus, though a social scientist, not a psychologist, by training and profession, I have been led by my research itself to focus on psychology’s central topics, and by the results of this research to conclude that looking at these topics from the social science point of view has a lot to offer to those interested in them. It is a great pleasure for me, therefore, to join the Psychology Today blogging community.

[Originally published on Psychology Today]

Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience

It is widely believed that human emotions, from love to ambition to pride or desire for freedom, for instance, are hardwired into our brain and that, therefore, both their range and their nature are universal, shared by humanity as a whole. This belief is wrong and itself reflects the fundamental universalism of modern Western, particularly American, thought and its tendency to consider all human consciousness and behavior as a function of biology. Both comparative zoology and comparative history show that, above the limited range of emotions we share, as animals, with other animal species, what moves human beings and makes them suffer in one culture or society may be dramatically different from the emotions shaping the living experiences in another one.

Emotions, or feelings, as the name suggests, are experienced through physical sensations. In this they differ from other mental experiences, usually called “cognitive.” The part of sensations in an emotion allows us to place it into one of three categories: primary emotions, secondary emotions, and tertiary emotions. Primary emotions are experienced through specific sensations and represent the direct reaction of the organism to the stimuli of its physical environment. They include such experiences as pain and pleasure, fear, positive and negative excitement (joy and anxiety), hunger and satiation, and their biological function is to increase the individual organism’s survival. It is clear that these primary emotions are common to humans and other animals.

We also share with other animals more complex, secondary emotions which lack a physical expression specific to them and are expressed through various combinations of physical sensations. These are emotions such as affection, which we see plainly in the species of birds (penguins, swans) and mammals (wolves) which mate for life and in the relations between mothers and their young among numerous species of mammals. Physically, affection is, most probably, expressed through sensations of pleasure and joyful excitement. Animals that are capable of affection are also capable of sorrow, which must express itself through similar neurobiological mechanisms as pain. This is what they feel when they lose, as often happens in the animal kingdom (think how many mothers lose their babies and vice versa) the object of their affection. One could add to these the feelings of sympathy and pity, on the one hand, and anger--outraged authority, which have been regularly observed in great apes and monkeys, as well as in social mammals such as wolves and lions. Secondary emotions also perform an obvious biological function: they strengthen the social order within the species and thus ensure the survival of the species. For this reason, like sensations, or primary emotions, which ensure the adaptation and survival of the individual organism, they indeed must be hardwired into the brain and produced genetically.

But this is not so with the great majority of our emotions, twice removed, so to speak, from their physical expression, which we don’t share with other animals. These tertiary emotions include common feelings, such as love, ambition, pride, self-respect, shame, guilt, inspiration, enthusiasm, sadness, awe, admiration, humility and humiliation, sense of justice and injustice, envy, malice, resentment, cruelty, hatred, and so on and so forth. It is not that other animals don’t have the capacity for these complex emotions: first, capacities can only be observed in realization, and therefore we do not know what capacities other animals have or don’t have; second, anyone who has lived with a dog knows that dogs --our pets--are capable of many of these feelings, for sure. We do not share tertiary emotions with other (wild) animals, even such closely related to our biological species as chimpanzees, precisely because they don’t have a biological function; they are not needed for physical survival, and so they are not hardwired into our bodies. They are produced culturally, and not genetically. The brain supports but does not provide for them. Saying that the great majority of human emotions are produced culturally implies that each one of them is a product of a specific culture, that is, an historical product. This means that the emotional experiences of people in different cultures are not the same and may even be very different. But emotional experience is a major part of our mental life, our mind. This, therefore, means that mental life associated with different cultures is likely to be different, i.e., that, while there is a specific brain structure that represents every human brain, there is no one human mind that can serve as the model of all minds. (This, among other things, further leads us to conclude that psychology must be cultural psychology.)

In the next post, I shall begin focusing on specific emotions, such as love, ambition, happiness, etc., which are central to modern existential experience.

[Originally published on Psychology Today]

Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience

The claim of this post is that such characteristic emotions as ambition, happiness, and love as we understand it today, which form the very core and define the emotional experience of so many of us, are not universal, but specifically modern in the sense of being a creation of the modern culture; that members of pre-modern societies were unfamiliar with them, i.e., did not experience ambition, happiness, and love; and that even at present these emotions play only a minor role in the emotional life of billions of people living outside modern Western civilization. The sources of these three emotions, in other words, are to be sought not in human nature, but in modern culture.

The focus of this post is ambition, while the following two posts will be devoted, respectively, to happiness and love. Still later posts will explain what in modern culture called these emotions into being. (I’d like to remind the reader that this blog is continuous, i.e., it follows the agenda set in the first post, with each new post continuing the arguments of the preceding ones.)

Emotions which are central to our experience, that is, emotions which are shared across significant populations, rather than moving exceptional individuals, are necessarily conceptualized--captured in specific words or in concepts which use words earlier applied to other experiences with a new meaning. Emotional vocabularies of different languages, even from closely related cultures, usually cannot be fully translated one into another. For instance, there is no translation for the French word ennui--English language appropriates it as such, because no concept in English coveys its meaning perfectly. In English, the emotion to which ennui refers and which French people, apparently (as we can judge from the very existence of a word for it) experience on a regular basis, must be described in many words. (Per Oxford English Dictionary: “the feeling of mental weariness and dissatisfaction produced by want of occupation or by lack of interest in present surroundings or employments.” It is much less than depression and significantly more than boredom.) For us not only the word, but the experience itself is foreign.

In the 16th century, numerous new concepts and words entered the English language to capture emotional experiences which were new for people in England and for a long time after that remained foreign for others. “Aspiration,” first used by Shakespeare, was one such completely new word. It denoted, as we all know, a hopeful desire to become, to acquire an identity of, something better or higher than one is, or has, at the present moment. (One would “aspire” to become an athlete or a writer, but not a thief or a slave, for instance). The word for this new emotion reflected the nature of a physical sensation that accompanied it--filling one’s lungs with pure, delicious air. That is, consciousness of such “upward desire” alone was enough to produce this physical sensation. [See Are Human Emotions Universal?] “Aspiration” was tightly connected to another new word, “achievement,” and, in fact, always presupposed it. One could aspire only to something one hoped to get to on merit: for example, to become rich, but not to win the lottery. Both these words (and several others) fell within the semantic space--that is, an area of meaning and experience--of the individual’s capacity and expectation to improve one’s identity and social position, to gain dignity, by one’s own effort. This area of meaning and experience itself was new. A new semantic space could emerge only if a possibility for self-creation that did not exist before came into being. The new emotions, therefore, while physically expressed through the existing neurobiological mechanisms, were a result of history.

The governing emotion within the new cluster was ambition. “Ambition” was an old negative term. Before the 16th century it was included among vices such as pride and vainglory and referred to inordinate desire for honor. Now it became neutral and would be characterized as base or noble, a sin or a virtue, depending on whether or not it was an aspiration and what kind of achievement it presupposed. The essential quality of ambition as an emotion now became its intensity. It is in connection with ambition that the word “passion”--which before that time referred to suffering, as in “Passion on the Cross”--began to acquire its current meaning of intense, overpowering emotion, an authentic movement of one’s innermost self. Ambition eventually became one of the two central modern passions. Love was to become the other one.

[Originally published on Psychology Today]
Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience