Filozofija: Virtue or Having a Soul for Each Emotion

PART 2 - CONTINUATION OF Having a Soul for each Emotion (part 1)

This is why it is time to discard the traditional, human-all-too-human, dichotomy according to which there are a priori good emotions and a priori bad emotions (deadly sins). (9) When an emotion takes the form of virtue — when love takes the form of faith, when envy takes the form of righteous indignation and justice, when wrath or hatred takes the form of Pauline reconciliation or kattalage (10), and forgiveness (11) — it becomes no less destructive, terrifying and terrorizing than vice. In this sense Robespierre was right in claiming that virtue is powerless without terror, while terror is lethal, disastrous without virtue,(12) just as von Trier probably made the best film (Dogville) at the point of where the terrible and the cathartic power of Pauline grace or charis (13) are indiscernible from the terrible and disastrous power of vengeance.
In either form, virtue or vice, emotions protect us from the pure and banal evil of indifference — banal in our everyday life, pure in sadism. Virtue and vice are two forms which prevent emotional experience to be neutral: whatever I am experienced in, be it sloth, greed, gluttony, lust, singing, cooking, gardening or doing whatever I have to do to survive — my “being experienced in” is that in which I am niether neutral nor indifferent. If I could be neutral, some of my mental states would be unemotional; if I could be indifferent I could experience neither virtue nor vice. Our thesis involves the idea that beliefs are not unemotional or non-emotional cognitive antecedents of emotions: there is no such thing as neutral belief, be it ideological, scientific, artistic, political, or philosophical cognition. Thus we propose the formula which was inspired by Ledoux's book The Emotional Brain. However, this would require a whole new chapter, but for the time being: belief is “emotion = 0”.

Emotion is that in relation to which an experience is produced. A child's initial experiences are produced in relation to the emotions which are directly expressed by their caregivers. Spitz, for instance, reports about what happened to the children in orphanages and hospitals who were separated from their parents and fed and watched over by indifferent adults who did not express any emotion in relation to them. In the first two months of separation an infant “becomes increasingly unapproachable, weepy and screaming” (1952). In the third month “the withdrawal of the child becomes complete, the infant assumes the pathognomonic position, its expression becomes increasingly rigid, the developmental level regresses” (1952). After five months infants

… become lethargic, their motility retarded, their weight and growth arrested. Their face becomes
vacuous; their activity is restricted to atypical, bizarre finger movements. They are unable to sit,
stand, walk or talk … In 37.7% of the cases observed the progressive deterioration of the total
personality led eventually to marasmus and death by the end of the second year of life. (1952)

The infant does not need unemotional cognitive antecedents for emotions to be triggered. Instead, it needs direct expressions of emotions by the other in relation to which experience can be produced as that through the contents of which it must undergo so that the arrest of mental and physical development is prevented.

According to our thesis, a child first experiences emotions in the form of virtue: whatever emotions there are on the face, in the voice, etc., of the other, they are better than the deadly abyss of indifference, for even the most unpleasant and painful emotions (expressed by the others) are those in relation to which experiences are produced. We can say that a child is predisposed to experience an emotion in the form of virtue: because of his helplesness (or impotence), the child is unable to extend the emotional action tendencies directly into actual actions; he is forced to learn to live with the emotions without acting on them, that is, without executing actual actions in place of emotional experience. Crying as acting out may be one of the exceptions; however, “to act out” is not “to act on”, and, as Spitz' observations show, crying exhausts emotional action tendency very quickly and to the point of not being able even to cry any more (i.e., to the point of autism). Powerlessness is the core motivator why a child is forced to intensify his emotion in place of extending it directly into actual action.

This brings us to the question of what intensity is. Instead of viewing it as a degree of emotional pleasentness and unpleasentnes, or as a power of emotional expressivity and dramatization, or as a rawness with which emotion strikes us, we may conceive it as the rate of change through which we pass from the capacity of “having experience” to the capacity of “going through experience.” Ex-per-ientia, a “coming-from and going through” (14): for the subject to have an experience is to come from the process of production of experience (i.e., to be the by-product of the process of its production); for the subject to undergo an experience is to go through its trans-historical contents, to construct a history of certain emotion out of its past experiences. In the case of emotionaly deprived children, whereby the process of the production of experience was arrested, nothing came out from the
process, no subject of experience, as though the process would have been turned into an end in itself, and there was no subject by whom the virtuality of action tendency could have become either exhausted by the execution of actual actions, or actualized by not merely having an experience, but also by undergoing it.

Whereas evil is that by which we are prevented from having experience, that is to say, from coming out of the productive process by which experience is produced, vice is that which prevents us from undergoing the experiences we have, or from going through the experiences we came out from. In World War Two, “muselmanns” (15) were the victims of pure evil in the Nazi concentration camps. As for vice, this is the problem that Shakespeare addresses in Macbeth: time is subordinated to the movements of execution of actual actions, which means that the only autonomous movement of time itself is that of the anticipation of actual action which allow the subject to have an experience of what happened, but not to go through the contents of experience. Macbeth immediately crowns his thoughts with acts: there is no time in between action tendency (with its purpose being represented in uncrowned thought) and actual action — no time to go thrugh the contents of experience. Macbeth experiences actual actions as dread exploits: while he does have experiences, but does not go through them, his actual actions are dread exploits or executions of action tendencies, so that he can only experience emotions in the form of vice. (16)

We call the subject's passage from “having experience” to “going through trans-historical contents of experiences” intensification. By its intensification emotion can pass from one form to another: vice can be transformed into virtue— by virtue of movements derived from time alone, not from actual actions. We pass from the formula of vice to the formula of virtue: emotion is “intensity = 0” transforms into emotion is “intensity = n – 1”. The speed of this passage, or rate of change, might be higher in childhood than in adulthood: the speed with which a child passes from having the experience of language, for instance, to going through this experience, is so great that a child can learn to speak two or more languages simultaneously in a relatively short period of time.
From Kirkegaard's emphasis that faith can only become the virtue of love when one is mature enough to be put to trial (Abraham at the age of seventy), it would be, perhaps, too hasty to conclude that a child can only experience love, or any other of the emotions, in the form of vice (egotistic love, narcissistic love): there is a special sort of wisdom that seems to be the privilege of childhood emotional life, and that could be its virtue, namely the wisdom of learning, not of learning how to be wise or become wiser. It is not by chance that children and the eldest among us have certain species of wisdom in common: because of their physical inability to execute actual action immediately after perceiving the action tendency, they are predisposed for learning how to intensify the (unexecutable) contents, how to perceive the movements derived from time, not from actual actions, how to actualize the virtual capacity to undergo experience, and not only the capacity to have experience, how to perceive the inner gap between the action tendencies and the processes of inhibition.
Our thesis involves the idea that such intensification, while it cannot happen without being placed in an interval between two actual actions, it also cannot be actualized by execution of any executable actual action: niether altruistic actions nor any other good work can be designed as the actualization of tendency to pass from vice to virtue. Paul is right: it is not by the good works of actual actions that we are saved through faith, but by grace. (17)
Even though children may be predisposed to experience an emotion in the form of virtue, each emotion is first experienced in the form of vice, so that the passage or intensification by which vice is transformed into virtue is not a passage into habitual way of life, but an utterly violent de-con-sctruction of our experiential world. Grace, by which intensification is actualized, can be first experienced as unbearably de-con-structive power which endangers the execution of every possible actual act which could previously be conceived of as a representative of some cardinal virtue. In this sense, virtue is not a habitual way of mind: if habit is the function of time which anticipates executable actual actions (as with Macbeth), virtue de-con-structs our habitual way of mind, so that the function of time, which is out of joint (as with Hamlet), becomes the most radical form of change (18).

Just as we claim that there is no such thing as vicious emotions, we claim that there is no such thing as cardinal virtues: each emotion sooner or later takes both forms, that of virtue and vice, and both forms protect us from the abyss of indifference which is evil. Each emotion is in principle movable by time alone, when “time is out of joint”, and not neccesarily by actual action, when “time anticipat'st my dread exploits” – even envy, which Elster explicitely calls “vicious emotion” (1999, 167).
Kant saw this possibility of time-movement of emotion, which only takes the form of vice when it is extended directly into actual action, or when it breaks out, very clearly: “Movements of envy are … present in human nature, and only when they break out do they constitute the abominable vice of a sullen passion that tortures oneself and aims … at destroying others' good fortune” (1996, 576–577).
This is the major point of divergence from Elster's theory: “We have nevertheless, I think, a general tendency to infer from the premise that it is bad to act on a certain emotion that it is bad to have it in the first place” (1999, 168). If Elster is right, then, according to our thesis, it is bad to have emotions in the first place, for we claim that each emotion sooner or later takes both forms, virtue and vice. One of the most relevant features of the theory of emotions is to be found, perhaps, in its capacity to go beyond what is general, to go beyond human-all-to-human tendencies and inferences, to explore what is supposedly general, ordinary or banal, in order to present us with what could be singular, extraordinary and exceptional. If a theory of the emotions cannot go beyond the most general apprehension of amour-propre,which La Rochefoucauld formulated as “ʽthe love of oneself and of all things in terms of oneselfʾ” (85), than it is uncapable of going beyond amour-propre's connection with the actual acts of deception and self-deception. Vice is not the only form amour propre can take. In order to find its virtue we have to search for the trans-historical content elements of its experiences. It could be that Lacan succeeded in founding them, as he connected amour-propre with the notion of freedom and its constitutive dimension — resistance: “that resistance of amour-propre, to use the term in all the depth given it by La Rochefoucauld, and which is often expressed thus: I can't bear the thought of being freed by anyone other than myself” (Lacan 2002, 107).

In one word: virtue consists of having a soul for each emotion. To pray for such a soul is to pray for grace, which, by right (i.e., by amour-propre) protects us from being freed by any actual action other than the unexecutable (or uncrowned) thought.

NOTES:

(1) On differenciation, see Deleuze (1994, 207 - 221)

(2) On "knowing how" and "knowing that", see Ryle 2009, 14 - 17.

(3) See http://daniellenicole.hubpages.com/hub/Cute-and-Meaningful-Love-Quotes-and-Sayings.

(4) See http://daniellenicole.hubpages.com/hub/Cute-and-Meaningful-Love-Quotes-and-Sayings.

(5) See http://daniellenicole.hubpages.com/hub/Cute-and-Meaningful-Love-Quotes-and-Sayings.

(6) On the relationship between stimulation and stimulus information, see Gibson (1986, 47–63).

(7) On action tendencies and inhibitory tendencies, see Frijda (1987, 155–161).

(8) On emotional deprivation, see Bettelheim (1972, 397).

(9) On four principles of distinction between good and bad emotions, see de Sousa (1990, 306–333).

(10) On reconciliation, see Paul (Romans 5.10), see also Badiou (2003, 70).

(11) On forgiveness, see Derrida (2006, 27–60).

(12) On virtue and terror, see Robespierre (2007, 115–117).

(13) On grace, see, Paul (Galatians 2.21), see also Badiou (2003, 86).

(14) On ex-per-ientia, see Agamben (2007, 38).

(!5) On “muselmann”, see Bettelheim (1943, 417–451). See also Agamben (2008, 41–87). Bauman (2000)

(16) Time, thou anticipat'st my dread exploits.
The flighty purpose never is o'ertook
Unless the deed go with it. From this moment
The very firstlings of my heart shall be
The firstlings of my hand. And even now,
To crown my thoughts with acts, be it thought
and done … (Shakespeare 1992, 131)

(17) On grace and works, see Paul (Romans 11.6).

(18) On Hamlet and time as the most radical form of change, see Deleuze (1994, 89)

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