Where God Comes From by Livingston Ira

Author:Livingston, Ira
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780994000
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing

VII. Famous Poems Made Up of One Enormous Word

Scientists who investigate emotion tend to identify several basic or primary emotions—usually about six of them, divided into positive and negative. They distinguish emotions from closely related phenomena such as feelings and moods, and primary from secondary or mixed emotions.

Psychologist Paul Ekman, one of the pioneers in the field, divides his book Emotions Revealed into chapters on sadness, anger, surprise and fear, disgust and contempt, along with what he groups together as the “enjoyable emotions.” These seven, he says, are “experienced by all human beings” and “have clear universal expressions” on the face.

I’m not buying any of it.

When I consult my own experience (colored, admittedly, by my training in cultural theory), every single one of Ekman’s points seems profoundly wrong. Of course there aren’t precisely six emotions, or seven. And they are all complex and multilayered and can’t be divided unambiguously into positive and negative or pure and mixed. They can’t be distinguished categorically from feelings or moods. And they aren’t universal.

I want to say: I’m surprised at this kind of reductionism; it saddens me and makes me angry, and I have to admit to a certain amount of contempt—which of course I also enjoy, since the extent to which scientists are unable to give an even remotely adequate account of emotion leaves more room for the rest of us who think systematically about such things. I want to say, adapting a mean-spirited old witticism: a scientist studying emotion is like a dog walking on its hind legs. It’s not that it’s done well, but one is surprised to see it done at all.

To be fair, scientists are just getting started studying this sort of thing. I’m not talking here about psychoanalysts and therapists, who have been studying emotion through their own practices for more than a hundred years, but the guys in white lab coats, the ones who are committed to traditional scientific method, experiments and statistics.

Well, at least a start has been made, the scientists can say. Concepts and categories hard-edged enough to be tested and revised (they might say), even if they are all wrong, are an improvement over impressionistic mush and untestable philosophical phantasmagoria. This is how science works. And besides, isn’t making fun of scientists who study emotion the most reactionary kind of response? Cold rationality and hard science moving into the neighborhood of the warm and fuzzy? Harrumph!

To balance out the caricature of reductionist scientists, take an example from what is arguably the extreme other end of the spectrum.

Jorge Luis Borges’s famous short story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” is consummate postmodern fiction, in many ways the opposite of science. It’s the fictional story of a secret society that invents a fictional planet called Tlon, which is imagined in turn as having its own forms of fictional literature: a fiction of a fiction of a fiction. In the languages of Tlon’s northern hemisphere (the narrator explains),

the prime unit is not the verb, but the monosyllabic adjective. The noun is formed by an accumulation of adjectives.

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