Liah Greenfeld's Blog - Posts Tagged "modernity"
Modern Emotions: Aspiration and Ambition
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
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
Modern Emotions: Happiness
Our Declaration of Independence includes the pursuit of happiness among the inalienable human rights, alongside life itself. It is so included because the founding fathers evidently assumed that such pursuit was a human universal of the most important, that human beings, in other words, have always and everywhere had the capacity for experiencing happiness and have been naturally drawn to it. The readers of this blog would, probably, agree with this assumption and it is quite likely that many would consider happiness the very purpose of human existence. And yet, this assumption is wrong. Happiness is a modern emotion. No one – no society, no language – had a concept of it before the 16th century, when the idea of happiness first appeared in England, and this means that it was inconceivable for people who lived before the 16th century and to those who lived outside of England even for some time after it. If it was inconceivable, it could hardly been experienced, and certainly could not be consciously desired and pursued. As to whether it could be felt, desired, and pursued unconsciously we cannot know, because for obvious reasons, we cannot have any evidence regarding this possibility.
The English word “happiness” was created in the 16th century. At that time it had no equivalent in any other language. The words in French, German, or Russian, with the help of which we translate it, specifically meant “good luck,” a concept that existed in English as well, the word for any kind of luck being “hap.” The idea of “good luck” itself went back to the pagan antiquity. From the eudemonia of the Ancient Greeks on, all the synonyms of it connoted the benevolence of fate. To experience good luck meant to be subject to such benevolence, to be “blessed.” Luck was an objective state, not an emotion. The Greek eudemonia, in fact, could not be experienced at all, one of its defining characteristics was an easy and honorable death, and it was impossible to say whether one was or was not subject to the benevolence of fate until one was dead.
Luck, good or bad, is completely outside of one’s control, therefore, one cannot blame oneself for not being lucky or take pride in one’s good luck. Jewish monotheism rejected the idea of luck, opposing to it a view of the world predicated on the concept of justice. Man became to a certain extent responsible for his own fate. Under the influence of Jewish monotheism, which began to spread sometime in the 6th century BCE, eudemonia was reinterpreted and could now be applied to actual experience. From our, modern, perspective, however, it was certainly not a happy experience. The word now referred to the acceptance of mortality. Because the task of philosophy was to prepare one for death, eudemonia became the goal of philosophy. Today, when we translate eudemonia as “happiness,” this leads to the misconception that happiness is the goal of philosophy. But, actually, the advice of the philosophy which pursued eudemonia was to live a life that, while free of actual suffering to the extent that was possible, would be so devoid of enjoyment that one would not regret leaving it when time comes – a sort of nirvana. Such life was considered the “good life,” and eudemonia became a name for it.
This interpretation was reinforced and at the same time further modified in the Christian thinking. “Good life” acquired the meaning of faith, in particular, the absolute faith in eternal life, which often sought to express itself actively. Therefore Christian felicity (a derivative from Latin for “luck” – felix, which we also wrongly translate as “happiness”) could be found in martyrdom, an especially painful death one chose to demonstrate how free of fear of death one was.
Happiness has nothing in common with the phenomena whose names are used to translate this utterly novel English experience into other languages. To start, it is a joyful and pleasant emotion. Of course, human beings, like animals, have always been familiar with the sensations of joy and pleasure. Happiness incorporates them but implies much more. Examine yourselves and you’ll recognize that the word refers to a lasting, profound, fully conscious feeling of satisfaction with one’s circumstances – the sense that one’s life fits one like a glove. This implies that one experiences existence as meaningful, feels there is a reason for being here and now, and that one has a firm and satisfactory identity. Above all, perhaps, happiness is experienced as an achievement. It is a conscious realization that one reaps the results of right choices.
It is an historical fact that for much of human history people could not be happy. This was not because the capacity for happiness did not exist, but because happiness the emotion did not exist. It was created at the dawn of modernity. In future posts I’ll discuss what exactly brought this new experience, so important in our emotional life today, into being. Perhaps the reader already begins to see what connects the modern emotions on which we focus: ambition, happiness, and love, together.
[Originally published on Psychology Today]
Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience
The English word “happiness” was created in the 16th century. At that time it had no equivalent in any other language. The words in French, German, or Russian, with the help of which we translate it, specifically meant “good luck,” a concept that existed in English as well, the word for any kind of luck being “hap.” The idea of “good luck” itself went back to the pagan antiquity. From the eudemonia of the Ancient Greeks on, all the synonyms of it connoted the benevolence of fate. To experience good luck meant to be subject to such benevolence, to be “blessed.” Luck was an objective state, not an emotion. The Greek eudemonia, in fact, could not be experienced at all, one of its defining characteristics was an easy and honorable death, and it was impossible to say whether one was or was not subject to the benevolence of fate until one was dead.
Luck, good or bad, is completely outside of one’s control, therefore, one cannot blame oneself for not being lucky or take pride in one’s good luck. Jewish monotheism rejected the idea of luck, opposing to it a view of the world predicated on the concept of justice. Man became to a certain extent responsible for his own fate. Under the influence of Jewish monotheism, which began to spread sometime in the 6th century BCE, eudemonia was reinterpreted and could now be applied to actual experience. From our, modern, perspective, however, it was certainly not a happy experience. The word now referred to the acceptance of mortality. Because the task of philosophy was to prepare one for death, eudemonia became the goal of philosophy. Today, when we translate eudemonia as “happiness,” this leads to the misconception that happiness is the goal of philosophy. But, actually, the advice of the philosophy which pursued eudemonia was to live a life that, while free of actual suffering to the extent that was possible, would be so devoid of enjoyment that one would not regret leaving it when time comes – a sort of nirvana. Such life was considered the “good life,” and eudemonia became a name for it.
This interpretation was reinforced and at the same time further modified in the Christian thinking. “Good life” acquired the meaning of faith, in particular, the absolute faith in eternal life, which often sought to express itself actively. Therefore Christian felicity (a derivative from Latin for “luck” – felix, which we also wrongly translate as “happiness”) could be found in martyrdom, an especially painful death one chose to demonstrate how free of fear of death one was.
Happiness has nothing in common with the phenomena whose names are used to translate this utterly novel English experience into other languages. To start, it is a joyful and pleasant emotion. Of course, human beings, like animals, have always been familiar with the sensations of joy and pleasure. Happiness incorporates them but implies much more. Examine yourselves and you’ll recognize that the word refers to a lasting, profound, fully conscious feeling of satisfaction with one’s circumstances – the sense that one’s life fits one like a glove. This implies that one experiences existence as meaningful, feels there is a reason for being here and now, and that one has a firm and satisfactory identity. Above all, perhaps, happiness is experienced as an achievement. It is a conscious realization that one reaps the results of right choices.
It is an historical fact that for much of human history people could not be happy. This was not because the capacity for happiness did not exist, but because happiness the emotion did not exist. It was created at the dawn of modernity. In future posts I’ll discuss what exactly brought this new experience, so important in our emotional life today, into being. Perhaps the reader already begins to see what connects the modern emotions on which we focus: ambition, happiness, and love, together.
[Originally published on Psychology Today]
Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience
The Modern Mental Disease
Modern humans—that is, people who live in societies such as ours, democratic, prosperous, relatively secure, and offering its members numerous life-choices, people like you and me, in other words—are different from humans who lived or live in other types of societies. We experience life differently from them: perceive reality differently and feel emotions that other humans did not have.
Human experience was revolutionized in the 16th century England. In the previous posts we have already discussed such new emotions as ambition, love, happiness, and their connection to the new form of consciousness, which came to be called “nationalism” and formed the cultural framework of modernity. Nationalism implied a special image of society as a sovereign community of equal members (a “nation”) and of reality in general. In its original, English, form it was essentially democratic. As it spread, it carried the seeds of democracy everywhere. Considering a living community sovereign (the source of all laws), it implicitly but drastically reduced the relevance of God and, even when combined with religion and presented in a religious idiom, which happened often, was to all intents and purposes secular. It was dramatically different, in other words, from the fundamentally religious, hierarchical consciousness which it replaced, and it shaped the way we live today. Among other things, the new consciousness made the human individual one’s own maker: it implied we had the choice to decide what we want to be; it dramatically increased the value of human life, encouraging us to realize it to the fullest extent—in other words, it gave us dignity and freedom. The society built on its premises of equality and popular sovereignty was an open society, in which the individual had the right to define one’s own identity, a society which made one’s identity one’s own business. It is not coincidental that the new emotions discussed in previous posts, which emerged when the English society was redefined as a “nation,” were in some way connected to the individual’s ability to define oneself and that the two great modern passions—ambition and love—in fact answered a new need which this ability created: the need for help in identity-formation.
Unfortunately all these benefits of nationalism—the dignity, freedom, and equality, both empowering and encouraging the individual to choose what to be – did not come unaccompanied by costs, and for all the enrichment of our life experience contributed by love and happiness, these costs would be impossible to disregard. The liberty to define oneself has made the formation of the individual identity problematic. A member of a nation cannot learn who or what s/he is from the environment, as would an individual growing up in an essentially religious and rigidly stratified, non-egalitarian order, where everyone’s position and behavior are defined by birth and divine providence. Beyond the very general category of nationality, a modern individual must decide what s/he is and should do, and thus construct one’s identity oneself. Modern culture cannot provide individuals within it with consistent guidance, with which other cultures provide its members. By providing inconsistent guidance (for we are inevitably guided by our cultural environment), it in fact actively disorients us. Such cultural insufficiency is called anomie. Already over a century ago, it was recognized as the most dangerous problem of modernity. For many people, the necessity to construct one’s identity, to choose what to make of oneself, became an unbearable burden.
At the same time as the English society was redefined as a nation, and ambition, happiness, and love made their first appearances among our emotions, a special variety of mental illness, different from a multitude of mental illnesses known since antiquity, was first observed. It expressed itself in degrees of mental impairment, derangement, and dysfunction, the common symptoms of which were social maladjustment (chronic discomfort in one’s environment) and chronic discomfort (dis-ease) with one’s self, the sense of self oscillating between self-loathing and megalomania and in rare cases deteriorating into the terrifying experience of a complete loss of self. Some of the signs of the new disorder were similar to the symptoms of familiar mental abnormalities. In particular, the new illness, like some previously known conditions, would express itself in abnormal affect—extreme excitement and paralyzing sadness. But, in distinction to the known conditions in which these symptoms were temporary, in the new ailment they were chronic and recurrent. The essence of the new disorder, however, was its delusionary quality, that is the inability to distinguish between the inner world and the outside, which specifically disturbed the experience of self, confusing one regarding one’s identity, making one dissatisfied with, and/or insecure it, it, splitting one’s self in an inner conflict, even dissolving it altogether into the environment. Sixteenth-century English phrases such as “losing one’s mind,” “going out of one’s mind,” and “not being oneself” captured this disturbed experience, which expressed itself in out-of-control behaviors (that is, behaviors out of one’s control, out of the control of the self), and, as a result, in maladjustment and functional incapacitation.
None of the terms in the extensive medical vocabulary of the time (which included numerous categories of mental diseases) applied to the new mental illness; neither could it be treated with the means with which the previously known mental illnesses were treated. It required a new term—and was called “madness.” It also called into being the first hospital in the sense in which we understand the word (the famous Bedlam), the first medical specialization, eventually named “psychiatry,” and special legislation regarding the “mad.” It is this clearly bipolar and delusional disease which would be three centuries later classified as distinct syndromes of schizophrenia and affective (depressive and manic-depressive) disorders.
We shall follow the history of this modern disease and analyze it in the following posts.Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience
Human experience was revolutionized in the 16th century England. In the previous posts we have already discussed such new emotions as ambition, love, happiness, and their connection to the new form of consciousness, which came to be called “nationalism” and formed the cultural framework of modernity. Nationalism implied a special image of society as a sovereign community of equal members (a “nation”) and of reality in general. In its original, English, form it was essentially democratic. As it spread, it carried the seeds of democracy everywhere. Considering a living community sovereign (the source of all laws), it implicitly but drastically reduced the relevance of God and, even when combined with religion and presented in a religious idiom, which happened often, was to all intents and purposes secular. It was dramatically different, in other words, from the fundamentally religious, hierarchical consciousness which it replaced, and it shaped the way we live today. Among other things, the new consciousness made the human individual one’s own maker: it implied we had the choice to decide what we want to be; it dramatically increased the value of human life, encouraging us to realize it to the fullest extent—in other words, it gave us dignity and freedom. The society built on its premises of equality and popular sovereignty was an open society, in which the individual had the right to define one’s own identity, a society which made one’s identity one’s own business. It is not coincidental that the new emotions discussed in previous posts, which emerged when the English society was redefined as a “nation,” were in some way connected to the individual’s ability to define oneself and that the two great modern passions—ambition and love—in fact answered a new need which this ability created: the need for help in identity-formation.
Unfortunately all these benefits of nationalism—the dignity, freedom, and equality, both empowering and encouraging the individual to choose what to be – did not come unaccompanied by costs, and for all the enrichment of our life experience contributed by love and happiness, these costs would be impossible to disregard. The liberty to define oneself has made the formation of the individual identity problematic. A member of a nation cannot learn who or what s/he is from the environment, as would an individual growing up in an essentially religious and rigidly stratified, non-egalitarian order, where everyone’s position and behavior are defined by birth and divine providence. Beyond the very general category of nationality, a modern individual must decide what s/he is and should do, and thus construct one’s identity oneself. Modern culture cannot provide individuals within it with consistent guidance, with which other cultures provide its members. By providing inconsistent guidance (for we are inevitably guided by our cultural environment), it in fact actively disorients us. Such cultural insufficiency is called anomie. Already over a century ago, it was recognized as the most dangerous problem of modernity. For many people, the necessity to construct one’s identity, to choose what to make of oneself, became an unbearable burden.
At the same time as the English society was redefined as a nation, and ambition, happiness, and love made their first appearances among our emotions, a special variety of mental illness, different from a multitude of mental illnesses known since antiquity, was first observed. It expressed itself in degrees of mental impairment, derangement, and dysfunction, the common symptoms of which were social maladjustment (chronic discomfort in one’s environment) and chronic discomfort (dis-ease) with one’s self, the sense of self oscillating between self-loathing and megalomania and in rare cases deteriorating into the terrifying experience of a complete loss of self. Some of the signs of the new disorder were similar to the symptoms of familiar mental abnormalities. In particular, the new illness, like some previously known conditions, would express itself in abnormal affect—extreme excitement and paralyzing sadness. But, in distinction to the known conditions in which these symptoms were temporary, in the new ailment they were chronic and recurrent. The essence of the new disorder, however, was its delusionary quality, that is the inability to distinguish between the inner world and the outside, which specifically disturbed the experience of self, confusing one regarding one’s identity, making one dissatisfied with, and/or insecure it, it, splitting one’s self in an inner conflict, even dissolving it altogether into the environment. Sixteenth-century English phrases such as “losing one’s mind,” “going out of one’s mind,” and “not being oneself” captured this disturbed experience, which expressed itself in out-of-control behaviors (that is, behaviors out of one’s control, out of the control of the self), and, as a result, in maladjustment and functional incapacitation.
None of the terms in the extensive medical vocabulary of the time (which included numerous categories of mental diseases) applied to the new mental illness; neither could it be treated with the means with which the previously known mental illnesses were treated. It required a new term—and was called “madness.” It also called into being the first hospital in the sense in which we understand the word (the famous Bedlam), the first medical specialization, eventually named “psychiatry,” and special legislation regarding the “mad.” It is this clearly bipolar and delusional disease which would be three centuries later classified as distinct syndromes of schizophrenia and affective (depressive and manic-depressive) disorders.
We shall follow the history of this modern disease and analyze it in the following posts.Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience
