Godly Expectations: Monasticism and Social Norm Dynamics

Amma Sarah of the Desert Mothers once rebuked a male monastic by saying, “It is I who am a man; and you are like women!”[1] In a similar subversive tone to traditional gender norms she stated, “According to nature I am a woman, but not according to my thoughts.”[2] The following is a commentary which frames Sarah’s ability to push the normative envelope through the cognitive sciences, not to explain away what made her special, but to argue that she and her fellow women monastics were particularly insightful into human nature and the roadblocks for radicality which come from trying to live a normal life. By choosing the desert, Ammas Sarah, Theodora, and Syncletica and their cohort could explore lines of thought that still teach us more than a millennia after they left the cities to pursue a relationship with their deity.

Figure 1: Amma (Mother) Syncletica of Alexandria (Public Domain Photo from Wikipedia)  

Active Inference is a research program which can model the dynamics of social norm development and enforcement. Brains are described as “prediction machine[s]”[3] which generate expectations about the behavior of the self and others.[4] [5] When these expectations are met, no response is required, but when expectations are not met an individual must reduce their prediction error by updating their normative expectations (learning) or imposing the norm (acting).[6]

An example may be helpful: if I am having a conversation with someone and they say something non-normatively offensive, I might learn by realizing my offense was an inappropriate reaction or I might act by criticizing them for the statement. In the world of Mediterranean antiquity, the social expectations of relevance derive from gender essentialism, the belief that gender norms are innate and natural;[7] Amma Sarah once partially subverted the norms by explaining that she was not a woman “in [her] thoughts,” suggesting her ability to go beyond “nature.” [8] Gender essentialism was a cornerstone of Mediterranean norms for women, such as expectations for:

- Submission to male authority.[9]

- Control over their sexuality and to not sexually “tempt” men.[10]

- Childbearing and childrearing.[11]

Even today, gender essentialists often enforce said norms with violence against women,[12] [13] but there is an argument to be made that some early Christians opposed these norms. We have at least one example of a female apostle,[14] Jesus called for men to take responsibility for their sexual feelings,[15] Paul denied gender essentialism as being true for Christians,[16] and traditional family structures were placed lower on the hierarchy of Christian priorities.[17] While normative uniformity cannot be assumed amongst early Christians, at least some Christians of antiquity seem to have held views which subverted aspects of essentialism. Yet, some forms of Christianity would reject these new norms and go on to be patriarchal like the broader Roman society.[18]

Active Inference is a helpful framework for understanding why some forms of Christianity deradicalized their gender norms and why the Desert Mothers were able to subvert Mediterranean gender norms so effectively. We can conceptualize Christian expectations of social norms as THE KINGDOM OF GOD.[19] The Rome of antiquity did not look like the Christian expectation of the KINGDOM, which would result in prediction error. In response, many Christians of antiquity took action to shape the world to their expectations: they refused to participate in Roman customs which did not align with their vision of the KINGDOM,[20] built hospitals to help the sick, [21] and shifted world history as they converted their friends and neighbors. The action that failed, however, was overcoming the sticky concept of the gender essentialism which early Christians seemed to have denied or deprioritized; many Christians “learned” to accept the expectations associated with gender essentialism because they were unable to effectively alter Mediterranean culture in this domain.

For the Desert Mothers, going into the desert enabled them to join and develop a Mediterranean subculture which better aligned with aspects of KINGDOM expectations. According to John Chryssavgis, the Desert Mothers “[radically broke] with social constraint[s]” tied to gender norms to pursue “freedom from subjection, freedom from possession, and freedom from exploitation.”[22] Because their non-normative actions were not reacted to with punishment or rebuke from gender essentialist Romans, the pursuit of such freedoms were at less risk of being inhibited. Instead, the communities the desert monastics built were able to align with expectations mainstream Christians had “learned” away from.

Christians who stayed in Roman society changed it from the inside, facing uncomfortable compromises along the way, while Christians who avoided the dynamics of norm-enforcing action were able to build radically different types of communities on the outside, though lacking the wide-scale impact in their own era. However, the actions of Ammas Sarah, Theodora, and Syncletica would go on to influence Christian practice for over 1,500 years afterward.[23] [24] By following their radical Christian expectations to the end, strategically leaving a society which would hinder them, their expectations continue to shape Christian and feminist thought today as gender essentialism is slowly replaced with social expectations of gender which are more aligned to the universalism of Paul and the general pragmatic push towards human flourishing.

References

Bishop, Judith L. "They Kept Their Skirts On: Gender-Bending Motifs in Early Irish Hagiography." In Constructing Gender in Medieval Ireland, edited by Sarah Sheehan and Ann Dooley, 115-32. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Chryssavgis, John. "The Desert Fathers and Mothers." Chap. 22 In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Patristics, edited by Ken Parry. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2015.

Colombo, Matteo. "Maladaptive Social Norms, Cultural Progress, and the Free-Energy Principle." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 43 (2020).

Foxhall, Lin. Studying Gender in Classical Antiquity / Lin Foxhall. Key Themes in Ancient History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Guerrero-Molina, Mónica, Juan Manuel Moreno-Manso, Eloísa Guerrero-Barona, and Beatriz Cruz-Márquez. "Attributing Responsibility, Sexist Attitudes, Perceived Social Support, and Self-Esteem in Aggressors Convicted for Gender-Based Violence." Journal of interpersonal violence 35, no. 21-22 (2020): 4468-91.

Heaps, Jonathan, and Neil Ormerod. "Statistically Ordered: Gender, Sexual Identity, and the Metaphysics of “Normal”." Theological Studies 80, no. 2 (2019): 346-69.

Horden, Peregrine. "The Earliest Hospitals in Byzantium, Western Europe, and Islam." Journal of Interdisciplinary History  (2005): 361-89.

Kidd, Erin. "The Virgin Desert: Gender Transformation in Fourth-Century Christian Asceticism." The Lyceum 8, no. 2 (2007).

King, Margot H. "The Desert Mothers: From Judith to Julian of Norwich." 14th Century English Mystics Newsletter 9, no. 1 (1983): 12-25.

Krawiec, Rebecca. "Gender and Monasticism in Late Antiquity." Chap. 6 In Shenoute & the Women of the White Monastery: Egyptian Monasticism in Late Antiquity. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Lin, Yii-Jan. "Junia: An Apostle before Paul." Journal of Biblical Literature 139, no. 1 (2020): 191-209.

McClellan, Daniel O. YHWH's Divine Images: A Cognitive Approach. Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2022.

Parr, Thomas, Giovanni Pezzulo, and Karl J Friston. Active Inference: The Free Energy Principle in Mind, Brain, and Behavior. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022.

Perry, Samuel L, Elizabeth E McElroy, Landon Schnabel, and Joshua B Grubbs. "Fill the Earth and Subdue It: Christian Nationalism, Ethno‐Religious Threat, and Nationalist Pronatalism." Paper presented at the Sociological Forum, 2022.

Salisbury, Joyce E. Perpetua's Passion: The Death and Memory of a Young Roman Woman. London, UK: Routledge, 2013.

Tison, Remi, and Pierre Poirier. "Communication as Socially Extended Active Inference: An Ecological Approach to Communicative Behavior." Ecological Psychology 33, no. 3-4 (2021): 197-235.

Zamfir, Korinna. "Returning Women to Their Place? Religious Fundamentalism, Gender Bias and Violence against Women." Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies 17, no. 51 (2018): 3-20.

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[1] Chryssavgis, John. "The Desert Fathers and Mothers." Chap. 22 In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to the Patristics, edited by Ken Parry. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2015.

[2] Kidd, Erin. "The Virgin Desert: Gender Transformation in Fourth-Century Christian Asceticism." The Lyceum 8, no. 2 (2007).

[3] Parr, Thomas, Giovanni Pezzulo, and Karl J Friston. Active Inference: The Free Energy Principle in Mind, Brain, and Behavior. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022, 192.

[4] Tison, Remi, and Pierre Poirier. "Communication as Socially Extended Active Inference: An Ecological Approach to Communicative Behavior." Ecological Psychology 33, no. 3-4 (2021): 197-235, 204.

[5] Colombo, Matteo. "Maladaptive Social Norms, Cultural Progress, and the Free-Energy Principle." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 43 (2020).

[6] For more information on the action/learning response to prediction error, see Parr, Pezzulo, and Friston, Active Inference, 3-14.

[7] Foxhall, Lin. Studying Gender in Classical Antiquity / Lin Foxhall. Key Themes in Ancient History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, 3-4.

[8] Kidd, "The Virgin Desert.”

[9] Krawiec, Rebecca. "Gender and Monasticism in Late Antiquity." Chap. 6 In Shenoute & the Women of the White Monastery: Egyptian Monasticism in Late Antiquity. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002, 122.

[10] Krawiec, "Gender and Monasticism," 122-123.

[11] Heaps, Jonathan, and Neil Ormerod. "Statistically Ordered: Gender, Sexual Identity, and the Metaphysics of “Normal”." Theological Studies 80, no. 2 (2019): 346-69, 365.

[12] Guerrero-Molina, Mónica, Juan Manuel Moreno-Manso, Eloísa Guerrero-Barona, and Beatriz Cruz-Márquez. "Attributing Responsibility, Sexist Attitudes, Perceived Social Support, and Self-Esteem in Aggressors Convicted for Gender-Based Violence." Journal of interpersonal violence 35, no. 21-22 (2020): 4468-91.

[13] Zamfir, Korinna. "Returning Women to Their Place? Religious Fundamentalism, Gender Bias and Violence against Women." Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies 17, no. 51 (2018): 3-20.

[14] Lin, Yii-Jan. "Junia: An Apostle before Paul." Journal of Biblical Literature 139, no. 1 (2020): 191-209.

[15] Matthew 5:27-30.

[16] Galations 3:26-29.

[17] 1 Corinthians 7:6-7.

[18] Perry, Samuel L, Elizabeth E McElroy, Landon Schnabel, and Joshua B Grubbs. "Fill the Earth and Subdue It: Christian Nationalism, Ethno‐Religious Threat, and Nationalist Pronatalism." Paper presented at the Sociological Forum, 2022.

[19] This ALL CAPS formalism is taken from literature on prototype theory and cognitive linguistics, as exemplified by McClellan, Daniel O. YHWH's Divine Images: A Cognitive Approach. Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2022, 75-109.

[20] Salisbury, Joyce E. Perpetua's Passion: The Death and Memory of a Young Roman Woman. London, UK: Routledge, 2013.

[21] Horden, Peregrine. "The Earliest Hospitals in Byzantium, Western Europe, and Islam." Journal of Interdisciplinary History  (2005): 361-89.

[22] Chryssavgis, "The Desert Fathers and Mothers," 334.

[23] Bishop, Judith L. "They Kept Their Skirts On: Gender-Bending Motifs in Early Irish Hagiography." In Constructing Gender in Medieval Ireland, edited by Sarah Sheehan and Ann Dooley, 115-32. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

[24] King, Margot H. "The Desert Mothers: From Judith to Julian of Norwich." 14th Century English Mystics Newsletter 9, no. 1 (1983): 12-25.

The Energy of Life: The Cognitive Science of Oscar Wilde

When I was a child, I believed that the truest philosophy would be the one which gave me superpowers. While this idea was naïve, there is a kernel of truth behind it: some life philosophies present a path which are achievable and lead to concrete benefits, while others are so ambitious that their achievement is unimaginable. Žižek’s ideally ethical person is a “monster without empathy, doing what is to be done in a weird coincidence of blind spontaneity and reflexive distance, helping others while avoiding their disgusting proximity” (Milbank & Žižek, 2009, sect. 4.4). While this notion is interesting and audaciously humorous, I often find myself liking people and thinking before I make ethical decisions and am not expecting that to change soon. Other theories of the good or meaningful life are boringly achievable, such as the various self-help books which offer pre-made activities which promise a positive change in outlook on life.

The works of Oscar Wilde present a middle way: a methodology which is ambitious and engaging enough to be worthwhile, while practical enough that one can follow the path. Wilde tells us our minds exist in a nexus point between nature and art, with nature hostilely attempting to infect mind with its violence and mundanity (Wilde, 1989, p. 1040). He proposed that art could be used to oppose nature’s cruel impositions upon us, and that if the ideology of realism can be overcome by turning one’s own life into art, then the arts can be used as a tool to overcome and even shape nature (Wilde, 1989, pp. 991-992). That the theory is compelling is not enough to make it practical; because a life must be lived, any theory of meaning must be expressible in the lives of individual humans. An examination of three theories in cognitive science will show that the popular notice that Wilde had great insight into the human experience is correct. Down to the details of his essays, plays, and poems, Wilde’s project for meaning anticipated some of the most cutting-edge ideas in the science of the brain, and his accuracy is an additional reason to consider taking on the project of an artistic life because it means an attempt has the potential of success.

Prototype theory is a cognitive-linguistic theory which states that individuals do not use necessary and sufficient conditions to categorize phenomena (Coseriu, Willems, & Leuschner, 2000). Instead, they have a mental model of a prototype, a mental construction consisting of a set of features associated with the category. Some of these features are strongly associated with the category, while some are only mildly associated with the category. When individuals classify objects, they classify them not in a black and white dichotomy, but rather as a spectrum. Research subjects were shown to classify animals as a spectrum even though animal taxonomy would imply a binary categorization; to the average person a swallow is more of a bird than an ostrich because swallows better match up with the typical bird prototype (Geeraerts, 2016).

We can look to The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde, 1989) to see that Wilde masterfully used prototypes in his fiction. The play is a smorgasbord of romantic comedy tropes, such as: miscommunications which lead to drama, a simple moral at the end, several couples who find love together, and much more (Millgram & Class, 2022). Each trope is a feature which is highly associated with the prototype of romantic comedies, and because of the preponderance of these features in the play, The Importance of Being Earnest is a token that almost entirely embodies said prototype. Wilde’s theory of art is that to create good art one must fill an artistic form with content (Wilde, 1989, p. 1027). These tropes are important formal features of the romantic comedy genre, and prototypes are the cognitive aspect of form which Wilde fills with the events of the plot.

The conceptual mapping theory of analogy (Holyoak & Stamenkovic, 2018; Gentner, 1983) explains how the brain can use comparisons, metaphors, similes, and so on to transfer understanding of one topic to another. According to the theory, the domains involved in an analogy can be classified as either being the source or the target. The source domain is the conceptual schema the analogy is pulling from. The target domain is the phenomenon which is meant to be understood through the lens of this new conceptual schema. For example, if one claims that “love is a battlefield” the source is battlefields, and love is the target. The conceptual structure of battlefields can then be used to better understand how love works: a breakup is like being shot through the heart, passion is like an explosion, and so on. However, it is important to note that conceptual mappings do not exclusively reveal traits of the target. Some aspects of conceptual mapping discover similarities between two domains, while other aspects create apparent similarities between domains (Black, 1979, p. 456); these created similarities can generate an illusion of understanding even when the conceptual structure of the source is dissonant with the reality of the target.

Conceptual mapping change how humans process information. When Thibodeau and Boroditsky (2011) gathered research subjects to ask them to solve a fictional problem involving rising crime rates, some subjects were told about the scenario with the metaphor of crime being a virus while others were presented with crime as a beast. Subjects who were taught about the scenario with the analogy of a virus were more likely to suggest making systematic changes to how the city government addressed issues like poverty. Members of the beast group were more likely to suggest that crime be prevented with increasing uses of force by police. The differences between how the two analogy groups decided to handle the problem were greater than the differences between how individuals with opposing political views answered the scientists’ questions; because the conceptual structure of virus prevention involves the slow process of a community working together, while beasts invoke an immediate physical threat, each subject’s experience of the target domain was altered, and their problem-solving mechanisms reflected this shift.

Wilde’s poem, “The Burden of Itys,” shows conceptual mapping being utilized to improve one’s writing. The poem’s main character is a student, sitting on the banks of the Thames. As the main character examines the river and its surroundings, he begins to compare the nature around him to things he had learned about Greek myth and Catholicism. When Wilde is attempting to show that the beauty of the river is far greater than anything of the church, he uses the source domain (Catholicism) and its out of tune hymns to the beautiful “songs” of the birds in the target domain (Thames) (Wilde, 1989, p. 737). Similarly, The Portrait of Mr. W. H. tells the story of a man who has become obsessed with a theory involving the identity of the subject of some of Shakespeare’s poetry. The implied romantic hold the subject had over Shakespeare is used to conceptually map the obsession the story’s main character has over this theory, to the point where the theory holds so much power over its researchers that the notion of dying for the sake of the theory is within the possibility space (Wilde, 1989, p. 1200); like one would die for a true love, one would die for a true theory.

The free energy principle is a neurological framework which attempts to ground neuroscience in physics and information theory, while also acting as a unified theory for life and behavior (Friston, 2010; Schwartenbeck, FitzGerald, Dolan, & Friston, 2013); it characterizes living beings through mathematical descriptions of learning and action. A full explanation of the theory is beyond the scope of this paper, but central to its modeling is the division of organisms to sensory, inner, and active states. When sensory information is transduced by a living being, the data is compared to the models in the inner states. Typically, some form of surprise will occur due to the imperfection in the models; this surprise is measured by an increase of free energy (Friston, 2010, p. 127).

According to the free energy principle, the reduction and manipulation of surprise through the reduction of free energy is the best way for complex systems to survive in an entropic universe. When an organism processes surprising sensory data they have two options: they can alter their models, learning from the surprise and therefore reducing the surprise, or they can take some form of action to make their sensory environment match up with their models so the surprise is no longer relevant. Both solutions lead to a decrease in free energy. According to this principle, the behavior of all life and all dynamic systems on Earth can be modeled by this framework, and this relationship between surprise and learning is the explanation for all action.

In Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (1989) we see Lady Chiltern as a perfect case study. Lady Chiltern believes that her husband, Sir Robert Chiltern, is an ethically ideal man. When she receives surprising information which implies, and later reveals, that he has a shady past, she decides to act by willfully pushing him to behave as if he were still her ideal. The play ends with her realizing how much pressure she has put on him by putting him on a pedestal; she decides to develop a more accurate model of Sir Robert, allowing him to better express his own model by taking action and pursuing his ambitions.

When these theories are synthesized the achievability of Wilde’s call for our lives to reflect art becomes clearer. Prototypes are a kind of model which exist in the inner states of human organisms. These prototypes can act as source domains for conceptual mapping or can be understood when made into an analogy’s target. When an analogy is made, some of the mappings will be discovered, while others will be created. Upon closer examination of the situation, the created aspects of the mapping will become apparent. This will lead to surprise in the inner states and a spike of free energy because the analogous reasoner expects the source and target to have the same structural map. When a prototype-analogy leads to such a surprise, the surprised human can learn the differences between the two domains or they can act so the domains align. This shows an important subtlety in Black’s philosophy of analogy (1979). It is not just that created similarities in conceptual mapping are illusory similarities between domains, but that the created similarities change the world, both based in how individuals perceive the world and in how individuals act in response to the world.

Wilde offers the example of children who read stories about glamorous scoundrels, who then reenact the exploits from the fiction. This is “usually attributed to the influence of literature on the imagination. But this is not so. The imagination is essentially creative, and always seeks for a new form. The boy-burglar is simply the inevitable result of life’s imitative instinct” (Wilde, 1989, p. 983). When the youths read the stories, a prototype for the glamorous scoundrel is developed. They then compare their lives to this prototype, and in some ways, they learn how their lives cannot match up with the scoundrels; their crimes end up being small-scale theft of sweets instead of grandiose highwaymen exploits. In the ways they can act, they shape their lives (target domain) based on the structure of the stories (source domain) by staging play acted robberies in their own neighborhoods. This expression of reduction of free energy for a prototype-analogy aligns with Wilde’s description of the basis of life: “the energy of life, as Aristotle would call it—is simply the desire for expression, and Art is always presenting various forms through which this expression can be attained” (1989, p. 985). Prototypes are the cognitive aspects of these forms, and the analogous reasoning and the informational surprise dynamics of the free energy principle leads to their expression.

The task of making life into art becomes the task of selecting and internalizing an artistic prototype one would like to manifest. The mission is to reduce learning in the form of accepting domain differences, and to maximize actions which change the world so that the differences are erased. Without infinite will, resources, and skill this cannot be perfectly achieved, but more work to match up created conceptual structures can always be done. If I decide I would like my life to embody a cyberpunk thriller, I will probably have to accept that I will never get a robotic limb which can turn into a sword, but I might develop my skills as a computer programmer and learn Japanese. Wilde shows us how this is best done in De Profundis, in which he turns a bad breakup and encounter with the law into the tragic tale of a Christ-figure (1989, p. 929-930), living out the rest of his short life in the mold of the form of tragedy.

The power of art to generate prototypical domains, which can then be easily applied to an individual’s life, contributes serious credibility to Wilde’s ideas on meaning. Each of the cognitive science theories I have covered are based in the real potential for human decision-making and action. Presuming the truth of the above theories, because humans are artistically oriented beings and because we are amongst the most powerful forces within our environment, the art humanity creates changes reality by inspiring us to shape the world around us in the image of painting, song, and literature. Wilde’s call is for people to overcome realism, and all this takes is the projection of artistic prototypes onto the world, triggering human action. Once the domains of art and nature begin to clash, the only limit is human creativity and ingenuity; while humanity’s capabilities have restrictions, the dynamics of the free energy principle have kept life going on Earth for three billion years, shaping the face of a planet and giving us the subject for which we seek meaning.

References

Black, M. (1979). More about metaphor. In A. Ortony, Metaphor and Thought (pp. 19-41). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Camus, A. (1955). The Myth of Sisyphus. New York: Vintage International.

Coseriu, E., Willems, K., & Leuschner, T. (2000). Structural Semantics and 'Cognitive' Semantics. Logos and Language, 1(1): 19-42.

Millgram, E., & Class. (2022). What Is Ornamental Drama? The Meaning of Life (PHIL 3820/5191). Salt Lake City: University of Utah.

Friston, K. (2010). The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory? Nature reviews neuroscience, 11(2): 127-138.

Geeraerts, D. (2016). Prospects and problems of prototype theory. Diacronia, A53: 1-16.

Gentner, D. (1983). Structure-Mapping: A Theoretical Framework for Analogy. Cognitive Science, 7(1): 155-170.

Holyoak, K. J., & Stamenkovic, D. (2018). Metaphor Comprehension: A Critical Review of Theories and Evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 144(6): 641-671.

Kraus, K. T. (2020). Kant on Self-Knowledge and Self-Formation: The Nature of Inner Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Milbank, J., & Žižek, S. (2009). The Monstrosity of Christ (Short Circuits). Cambridge: MIT Press. Schwartenbeck, P., FitzGerald, T., Dolan, R., & Friston, K. (2013). Exploration, novelty, surprise, and free energy minimization. Frontiers in psychology, 4: 710.

Thibodeau, P. H., & Boroditsky, L. (2011). Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning. PLos ONE, e16782.

Wilde, O. (1989). An Ideal Husband. In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Stories, Plays, Poems, & Essays (pp. 482-551). New York: HarperCollins.

Wilde, O. (1989). De Profundis. In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Stories, Plays, Poems, & Essays (pp. 873-957). New York: HarperCollins.

Wilde, O. (1989). “The Burden of Itys.” In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Stories, Plays, Poems, & Essays (pp. 736-745). New York: HarperCollins.

Wilde, O. (1989). The Critic As Artist. In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Stories, Plays, Poems, & Essays (pp. 1009-1059). New York: HarperCollins.

Wilde, O. (1989). The Decay of Lying. In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Stories, Plays, Poems, & Essays (pp. 970-992). New York: HarperCollins.

Wilde, O. (1989). The Importance of Being Earnest. In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Stories,

Plays, Poems, & Essays (pp. 321-384). New York: HarperCollins.

Wilde, O. (1989). The Portrait of Mr. W.H. In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Stories, Plays, Poems, & Essays (pp. 1150-1202). New York: HarperCollins.

Becoming Osiris: Sculpture and Self as Art

        The only two things that can induce awe are nature and art, and only one of those can kill you. That one might make their life into art, expressing awe and other aesthetic emotions through an individual person, is a compelling possibility; the works of Oscar Wilde present many avenues, frameworks, and techniques that one might use to bridge the gap between imagination and our lives, but while Wilde presents life as a narrative art, I find the art of the self to better resemble the art of sculpture. This is a key differentiation because while life is far too chaotic for an individual to take full narrative authorship over it, the carving of a self into someone who represents certain ideas or motifs structurally reflects the task of self-development. The sculptor of a self takes on the role of Prometheus and of clay, and the fire of the ideal both lights and energizes the process.

There is a difference between something being tragic and something being a tragedy. Tragedies are a form of narrative with specific rules and structures; Aristotle tells us that they should involve a change in fortune for a character from good to bad as a result of some “great error or frailty” (Aristotle, 1907, sect. XIII). Central to Aristotle’s theory of tragedy was that this error or frailty must be the fault of the main character, rather than the result of another’s mistake or random happenstance (Lear, 1992, p. 323). The suffix -ic (“having some characteristics of” (Sjoerdsma, 2008)) used to modify the word tragedy to tragic  can be used to describe sad events, natural disasters, losing one’s keys, or something resembling the tone or structure of a tragedy without fully matching it.

The tragedy/tragic divide is an example of a roadblock to accepting the notion that life can be a narrative art. While it seems clear that someone’s life can be tragic, a life fitting the strict narrative structure of a tragedy without one having to ignore significant portions of a particular life may be impossible. For example, Aristotle implies that a tragedy should not have a “multiplicity of plots” (Aristotle, 1907, sect. XVIII), whereas in life the storylines seem endless as chains of events come in and out of our attention; fitting a life into a singular plotline would require one to ignore too much of the life itself. This is also the case for other narrative forms, such as the hero’s journey, where the main character in a story is described as delving deeply into a singular unknown on a quest (Hartman & Zimberoff, 2009). Empirical psychology tells us that the brain evolved explicitly to deal with the unknown, and that these “delves” occur multiple times in a day as the brain faces prediction problems (Hughes, et al., 2014). One might project a hero’s journey onto leaving a hometown for college, the first few years of marriage, or a road trip to New York, but a singular hero’s journey cannot fit onto a whole life without ignoring important aspects of that life. As will be evidenced later, Wilde believed that art should be unified in idea and form; cutting out major portions of a life fails that criterion.

Because Wilde believed that the creation of art is the filling of form with content (Wilde, 1989, p. 1027), the fact that narrative forms may be incompatible with a life makes it difficult to accept the life as art notion. However, Wilde so well motivates the problem he is attempting to solve that it is tempting to give him the benefit of the doubt. His poem, “The Burden of Itys,” describes a student at Oxford, sitting near the banks of the Thames. As he ponders his surroundings his mind wonders as he compares his surroundings to Greek myth and Catholic imagery, eventually realizing that his thoughts are directionless and formed entirely by things he has been taught by others:

“’Tis I, ‘tis I, whose soul is as the reed

Which has no message of its own to play,

So pipes another’s bidding, it is I,

Drifting with every wind on the wide sea of misery.”

(Wilde, 1989, p. 744)

        In De Profundis Wilde presents us with a choice on this matter: either we can remain chained to the burden of being the creation of others, or we can forge our own path and create ourselves; he says it is rare for someone to manage this (Wilde, 1989, p. 926), but describes human beings as becoming the “realization of an ideal” (Wilde, 1989, p. 928) as a way to do so. In the same passage he compares this realization to the conversion of ideas into images during the process of art creation. If one is uncomfortable with being the product of their social environment, and Wilde’s offer of self-creation is viable, then pursuing Wilde’s method may be worthwhile. However, it is key to notice that the problem, as presented in ”The Burden of Itys,” is not that one’s life is the result of our surroundings, but that our characteristics are the result of our surroundings.

        Considering that life is supposedly a “supreme” art (Wilde, 1989, p. 1016), it is strange that it is not automatically obvious which sorts of forms are compatible with human life. Poetry has haiku, epic, and limerick; film has action, horror, and B-movies; dance has religious, social, and ballet. Form, in this context, is an “outline or container” held together by a “unifying essence” (Loesberg, 2015, p. 10). There are many forms of art which are not life but which are about lives. Biographies give form to lives through structured descriptions of them. Poetry about a romantic partner takes a small piece of one’s experience of them and contains it in art. Sculptures and portraits have a special power not to depict or idealize a life, but to depict or idealize a self.

        I once visited the Delphi Archaeological Museum, my spouse and I were to be married in Greece and we visited Delphi on our way to the venue. While browsing the displays we came into a room with several statues that had been brought in from the Louvre; my wife asked our guide a few questions and I wondered into a corner which was going to be ignored by the tour. In front of me was an ancient statue of Antinous, the lover of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, who was deified by the Caesar after Antinous’s tragic and untimely death. Antinous was depicted as Osiris, the murdered god whose corpse was scattered in the same river in which Antinous drowned. I found myself emotionally overwhelmed in the moment, struck not by the love Hadrian had for the narrative life events Antonous experienced, but for the love Hadrian had for Antonius as a person. Wilde must have been similarly struck given that he mentions or alludes to Hadrian’s love for Antinous multiple times in his fiction and poetry (Wilde, 1989, p. 24; 225; 834).

To understand why this resonated and to figure out how to articulate an artistic form compatible with the self, it will be helpful to break down what Wilde stated about the forms which are helpful or problematic in the creation of art. Realistic forms, devised from the examination of day-to-day life, were anathema to Wilde’s vision for art (Wilde, 1989, pp. 972; 978-979; 991). Wilde celebrated ambition in form to the point where if the ideal which unifies a form is ever fully realized, the form is dead and is at best an avenue for critique (Wilde, 1989, p. 1031). Inversely, the forms that shape art or self should be larger-than-life, imaginative, and just out of our grasp, just like Antinous qua Osiris.

             The problem with life as a narrative art is that we are not the authors of our own lives. Fate, entropy, the law, etc., take on that role as much or more as our own wills. I have often found myself engrossed in a tragic or dramatic moment in my life, fully committed to the feeling, only for something ridiculous and comedic to occur and ruin my brooding. This is in contrast with how sculpting works as a metaphor for making the self into art. The transforming of self into art is a slow, iterative, process; while both sculpture and portraiture are both able to describe a similar process for self-as-art, the fact that sculptors work with hard materials that are much more difficult to shape better reflects the tough task of altering the self. This act of sculpting might be a mundane reflection of nature, which Wilde warns against, or it may be infused with ideas worthy of the artistic task. When seeing Antinous, it was not the story of his life that struck me, but the obvious impact that his personality had on Hadrian; the sculptures of Antinous qua Osiris were merely an artistic expression of how Antinous had already shaped himself.

An example of a unifying idea in a formal sculpture which aligns with Wilde’s ambitious take on form is that of the mythic archetype. Archetypes  are high-level concepts of human beings which are symbolically charged, have a set of traits associated with them, and which can be exemplified by mythic or fictional characters who embody the archetype, or humans who attempt to come close to it. For example, the archetype of WARRIOR-KING  is an individual who exudes power and authority, has a weapon given to them from the gods, spouts laconic wisdom, and is exemplified by deities like Zeus or Thor, or historical figures like Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan. These humans can be judged by how they express the archetype which best describes their selves, both in terms of where they embody the ideal and where they fail; Wilde himself clearly wanted to be judged through the archetype of the TRAGIC HERO, and I suggest we honor him by examining his successes and failures through that lens.

        Transitioning to the notion of self-sculpture from life-narrative can better solve the problem presented in “The Burden of Itys.” If the life-narrative were the central artistic problem to solve, nothing occurring within the poem would necessarily be an issue. The young man, lost in a sea of conformity, would simply be an event in the central plot. The poem does not complain that the main character does not have narrative momentum, but that his character is not crafted by himself. To fix this is not to project a structure onto one’s life, but to grab a chisel and make active decisions about how to shape one’s character.

By conceptualizing our appearance and character through the lens of sculpture, the individual is not asked to plot the day-to-day events of their life, but instead to become an artist of the self. Whereas life narratives try and falsely impose order onto the chaos of life, the shaping of the self is a task which reflects the truth of self-development. This self-development must then be framed by Wilde’s theory of art and beauty, pushing oneself towards wonderful and impossible ideals; trying to lose a few pounds might is the job of a self-sculptor who lacks the ambition of a great artist, but the attempt to embody the TRAGIC HERO by Wilde is a fantastic expression of such a project. In this task of self-creation, the moment of success is clear: to shape oneself to the point where one can look in the mirror and have an awe-filled experience as striking as looking into the eyes of Antinous one afternoon in Delphi, right at the GOD OF FERTILITY AND DEATH.

References 

Aristotle. (1907). Poetics (4th ed.). (S. H. Butcher, Ed.) London: Macmillan and Co. Limited. 

Hartman, D., & Zimberoff, D. (2009). The Hero’s Journey of Self-transformation: Models of Higher Development from Mythology. Journal of Heart-Centered Therapies, 12(2): 3- 93. 

Hughes, C. M., Baber, C., Bienkiewicz, M., Worthington, A., Hazell, A., & Hermsdörfer, J. (2014). The application of SHERPA (Systematic Human Error Reduction and Prediction Approach) in the development of compensatory cognitive rehabilitation strategies for stroke patients with left and right brain damage. Ergonomics, 58(1): 75-95. 

Lear, J. (1992). Katharsis. In A. O. Rorty (Ed.), Essays on Aristotle's Poetics (pp. 315-340). Princeton: Princeton University Press. 

 Loesberg, J. (2015). Wildean Interpretation and Formalist Reading. Victorian Studies, 58(1): 9- 33. 

Sjoerdsma, R. D. (2008). -Al, -ic, -ical. Journal of Singing, 64(3): 269-271. 

Wilde, O. (1989). De Profundis. In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Stories, Plays, Poems, & Essays (pp. 873-957). New York: HarperCollins. 

Wilde, O. (1989). “The Burden of Itys.” In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Stories, Plays, Poems, & Essays (pp. 736-745). New York: HarperCollins. 

Wilde, O. (1989). The Critic As Artist. In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Stories, Plays, Poems, & Essays (pp. 1009-1059). New York: HarperCollins. 

Wilde, O. (1989). The Decay of Lying. In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Stories, Plays, Poems, & Essays (pp. 970-992). New York: HarperCollins. 

Wilde, O. (1989). The Picture of Dorian Gray. In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Stories, Plays, Poems, & Essays (pp. 17-167). New York: HarperCollins. 

Wilde, O. (1989). “The Sphinx.” In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Stories, Plays, Poems, & Essays (pp. 833-842). New York: HarperCollins. 

Wilde, O. (1989). The Young King. In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Stories, Plays, Poems, & Essays (pp. 224-233). New York: HarperCollins.

Notes on Oscar Wilde and Markov Chains

I am interested in Markov chains, the free energy principle, entropy, and their relevance to empirical psychology. Because of their apparent relevance to empirical psychology, they also have interesting philosophical implications. As I have been doing an in-depth study of Oscar Wilde, I would like to share where my research is at.

In "The Burden of Itys" Wilde talks about how our inner worlds are the result of our surroundings, both the physical environment we are in at the moment and our past experiences, especially our past experiences with people. The character in the poem has a stream of thought made entirely of what he had heard from others, with only minor spurts of potentially original introspection. He mostly focuses on Greek/Roman myth, Catholic imagery, and the river Thames he is sitting by.

This reflects the Fristonian perspective that one might abstract an organism into a Markov chain which is fully dependent on its past and the information it is receiving in the moment. Friston likes to talk about how one can perfectly anticipate the external world from a partitioned internal Markov chain. We might think of the character in "The Burden of Itys" as a steady state, flowing between different states in a chain. I call it, "The Chain of Itys."

To discover it, I first went through the poem and marked when he was pondering on the four main subjects that cross his mind throughout the poem: Catholicism, his surroundings (Oxford and the Thames), Greek/Roman myth, and his own personal introspection. A screenshot:

Yellow is his surroundings, uncolored is Greek/Roman myth, and red is Catholic imagery. There was no original introspection in this passage.

I then counted, not the number of instances of thought, but the number of transitions. I defined a transition as Wilde switching between one mode of thought to another. Each line counts as a single thought, though he is able to switch thoughts within a line. In the example above, he starts at surroundings, then transitions from surroundings to surroundings twice. He switches from surroundings to Greek/Roman, then from Greek/Roman to Greek/Roman, etc.

Here is the final count:

The top section is total transitions, the bottom section uses the same data to make proportions. This can then be used to make a Markov chain in R:

And a simulated proportion of instances can be generated next to the actual count, to ensure the model is functional:

What is the philosophical relevance to this?

In other parts of Wilde's work he talks about making life into an art, primarily comparing it to the narrative arts. However, I am skeptical that Wilde's theory of art can actually be applied to life, both for practical reasons and because I think that narrative and life are categorically different. However, this does not mean that thinking of life as art is a dead end for thinking. If I can connect Wilde's ideas to Markov chains/the free energy principle, I can easily connect that to the neuroscience of Mark Solms, which can then be directly plugged in to psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, especially Jungian psychoanalysis, is not empirical psychology, for good reason.

While Jung's thought is about as far from science as schools of thought come, I think it has potential as a framework for life as art. This is especially the case if I can leverage both Wilde's ideas and contemporary psychology to critique/build on the weaknesses in Jung's thought.

This is where I am at now. I put together an essay on Wilde's theory of art and why we should focus not on life as art, but self as art, claiming that sculpture is a better metaphor for life than narrative. I will post that as well, eventually my plan is to draw a bridge from the sculpture argument to the psychoanalytic one I mention here.

The Master, by Oscar Wilde

While I am not a performer at heart or in skill, I have been thinking a lot about Oscar Wilde lately. I decided to do a reading of "The Master." I am currently working on a philosophical project, examining his ideas of art and life as art.

From the video description:

Oscar Wilde often wrote about and compared himself to Jesus of Nazareth. "The Master" is his most audacious expression of this pattern, which was enabled by the equally audacious The Life of Jesus, by Ernest Renan. Renan's book, published in 1863, was one of the earliest and most prominent attempts to think of Jesus not as God incarnate, but as a philosopher and a man. Not since the Ebionites had this been a common opinion in Christian communities, but Wilde embraced this new way of thinking of the Nazarene.

If Jesus was a man, couldn't Wilde be God?

https://youtu.be/17Y9urJQfIM

Supracognitive Consciousness

I recall taking my first psychology course, senior year in high school, and learning about Freud’s notion of the unconscious. According to Freud (1899; 1901), there were processes happening inside my brain which were totally out of my willful control; while the father of psychoanalysis’s more specific theories would go on to be discredited (Crews, 2018), modern psychology and neuroscience has confirmed the depths to which “I” am unaware of and powerless over what is going on inside my head (Holmgren, et al., 2019; Melnikoff & Bargh, 2018; Stanovich, 2018; Stanovich & West, 2000). At the time, the idea that part of my thinking was unconscious was quite shocking as it undermined my assumptions about unity of mind and it took a few months for me to find grounding in my altered perspective on self.

In comparison to Freud, a more empirically informed expression of the unconscious comes from Ray Jackendoff (1996) and his model of inner speech and attention. To Jackendoff, all thinking is unconscious. What we might folk-perceive as thought, our internal dialogue and imagery, is merely a second-order manifestation of what is happening more deeply in the brain. This is not to say that inner representations are useless or play no role in thought, but that they are not thought itself. All healthy vertebrates seem to be capable of thinking about what is in their immediate environment, and perhaps even have some internal representation via imagery. To Jackendoff, humans have the advantage of second-order phenomena expressing as words instead of just pictures, and this ability has led to our seemingly significant advantage in intelligence.

Jackendoff’s account is that we have a field (metaphorically) of consciousness and an attentional system which allows us to place more or less focus on different aspects of the conscious experience. One might pay considerable attention to just one aspect of consciousness, mostly ignoring the rest, or pay general attention to all of consciousness, with a loss of detail towards any particular part. Consciousness consists both of what is occurring in our sensory apparatus and our inner speech/imagery; attention can be paid to anything in consciousness. Our thinking, then, focuses on what we are paying attention to, and this dynamic is what makes language so powerful. That language is distinctly separate from thinking, unlike the cognitive view of language, yet acts as a tool for our thinking, unlike a pure communicative view where language only helps us share our thinking with others, is what makes his view supracommunicative.

If I wanted to think about politics but could only focus on external stimuli, I would be required to go out and sensorily experience aspects of politics to gather any insight. From these experiences it seems unlikely I would be able to develop higher-order models, a la Marx or Smith, but instead only observe basic interactions between other humans and come to identify alliances and family relationships, something other primates are also capable of doing (Cheney & Seyfarth, 1996). Via just sensory experience I can never hold in my attention the entire process of production, the psychological states of workers, or abstract concepts like the “invisible hand.” Attention is just too limited to sensorily handle that much information (Miller, 1956). Language, however, manages to pack these huge processes into tiny chunks that fit into our attentional system like a glove. Human thinking can then be applied to these broader conceptual frameworks, and we can end up with (for better or worse) free markets and dialectical materialism.

The biggest weakness in Jackendoff’s paper is that he leaves thinking as a black box, a mysterious process which has a causal role with no explanation itself. Jackendoff might protest my disagreement by citing all of cognitive science as a way to fill in this blank, but even with a cognitivist conceptualization of thinking being given, there does not seem to be an explanation for the tie between unconscious thinking and the phenomenological aspects of inner speech. How does our information processing give rise to the words in our head? This issue is not tackled.

However, if a causal link can be drawn between thinking and inner speech I think Jackendoff’s account is quite powerful. His model demystifies consciousness by claiming its identification with though is an “illusion” (Jackendoff, 1996, pg. 28) without having the claim that all of consciousness itself is an “illusion” (Dennett, 2018); demystification can be helpful in seeing subjects through a scientific lens. The inner attentional model gives an account on how language gives humans a cognitive advantage, while not dismissing other beings as having no language and therefore no thought (Descartes, 1998 [1637]). I have yet to encounter a compelling definition of “thinking” which can exclude animals from being able to think, Jackendoff does not attempt to make this leap. His theory also brings inner speech conceptually closer to sensory experience by having both be aspects of the same smaller process. This reflects how inner speech and sensory audition seem to be intrinsically tied (Alderson-Day & Fernyhough, 2015) and lets us focus in on specific parts of the brain, such as Broca’s area, to further explore the link between language and cognition.

Drawing the causal link remains a big “if” and goes far beyond the scope of this paper. I am currently investigating the Free Energy Principle, gaining traction amongst both Bayesian brain cognitivists and post-Freud psychoanalysts (Joffily & Coricelli, 2013; Friston, 2010; Solms, 2021; Connolly & van Deventer, 2017), as a way to bridge the gap between thinking and phenomena. Regardless of whether or not said inquiry is successful, Jackendoff’s work on the supracommunicative view both provides an exciting perspective on the nature of consciousness and a compelling argument for how language boosts our ability to think. I have been paying attention to the language of this paper for the last four hours and have produced a, at least relative to monkeys, complex work of high-order thought, something that would make my naïve teenage self proud. Per Jackendoff, the words in this paper are not a mere communication of my thoughts, but a tool I used to develop my thinking.

References

Alderson-Day, B., & Fernyhough, C. (2015). Inner Speech: Development, Cognitive Functions, Phenomenology, and Neurobiology. Psychological Bulletin, 141(5): 931–965.

Cheney, D. L., & Seyfarth, R. M. (1996). How monkeys see the world: Inside the mind of another species. University of Chicago Press.

Connolly, P., & vanDeventer, V. (2017). Hierarchical Recursive Organization and the Free Energy Principle: From Biological Self-Organization to the Psychoanalytic Mind. Front. Psychol., 8, 1695.

Crews, F. (2018). Freud: The Making of an Illusion. London: Picador.

Dennett, D. C. (2018). Facing up to the hard question of consciousness. Phil. Trans. R. Soc., 373: 20170342.

Descartes, R. (1998 [1637]). Discourse on Method. In R. Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy (pp. 1-33). Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.

Freud, S. (1899). The Interpretation of Dreams. Leipzig: Franz Deuticke.

Freud, S. (1901). The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Germany: A. A. Brill.

Friston, K. (2010). The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory? Nature reviews neuroscience, 11(2): 127-138.

Holmgren, M., Kabanshi, A., Langeborg, L., Barthel, S., Colding, J., Eriksson, O., & Sörqvist, P. (2019). Deceptive sustainability: Cognitive bias in people's judgment of the benefitsof CO2 emission cuts. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 64(1): 48-55.

Jackendoff, R. (1996). How language helps us think. Pragmatics & Cognition, 4(1): 1-34.

Joffily, M., & Coricelli, G. (2013). Emotional Valence and the Free-Energy Principle. PLoS Computational Biology, 9(6): e1003094.

Miller, G. (1956). The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information. Psychological Review, 63, 81-97.

Solms, M. (2021). The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness. New York: WW Norton & Company.

Stanovich, K. E. (2018). How to Think Straight About Psychology (11th ed.). New York: Pearson.

Stanovich, K. E., & West, R. F. (2000). Individual differences in reasoning: Implications for the rationality debate? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23(5): 645–726. doi:https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00003435

Nietzsche’s French: On Whorfian Emotional Efficiency

Does reading how Nietzsche describes ressentiment change the way people experience feelings adjacent to jealously? He says: “they make evil-doers out of friend, wife, child and anyone else near to them. ‘I suffer: someone or other must be guilty’ – and every sick sheep thinks the same,” (Nietzsche, 2007, pg. 94) and with those words he both gives us a conceptual pitch for what these sorts of feelings are, while also giving us a (French) word to describe it. The idea that languages are able to describe unique emotions is not unique to French: “schadenfreude” in German describes the satisfaction of witnessing another’s suffering and the Dutch word “uitwaaien” is a feeling of calm which emerges on walks in the windy outdoors.

Two possibilities present themselves. First, that learning an emotion word is simply that, an addition to one’s lexicon. Emotions are emotions, and at best different forms of learning gives one rational coping tools to deal with them. If one learns the word “schadenfreude” and finds themselves experiencing it more often than they had before, that is the result of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. The alternative is that having a word for an emotion, in and of itself, makes some sort of change in how the emotion is experienced.

This debate has long been waged in psychology and neuroscience, framed as emotional essentialism vs. constructivism (Barrett, 2017). The essentialist stance is that feelings are hardwired brain functions which are universal across normal-functioning human beings. Constructivists believe that emotions are unique to individuals, as influenced by culture, and built by one’s conceptual framework. One aspect of constructivism which is Whorfian is the idea that having a lexical tag for an emotion concept alters one’s actual experience of the emotion itself (Lindquist, Barrett, Bliss-Moreau, & Russell, 2006). One central conjecture is the idea that having a tag makes emotion processing more efficient (Barrett, 2006), and because cognitive load is experiential (Ayres, 2006), an increase in efficiency would lead to a different experience in a particular emotion. Given work by neuroscientist Mark Solms, who claims that emotions are the primary way in which conscious organisms experience the world (2021), this aspect of constructivism would lend some credibility to the more dramatic claims Whorf gave of language defining our relative views of the world (1940).

There is strong evidence that “affect labeling,” that is, naming an emotion which is being experienced, changes the emotion process beyond what normal cognitive activity can do. One fMRI study, by Lieberman et al (2007), asked subjects to view a series of emotionally charged faces over a series of five different tasks (additionally, a control task of viewing shapes). Each face triggered an emotional response in the subjects, corresponding to limbic system activity in the brain, and this neural activity was measured in comparison to which task was being done. Whether one was matching faces to genders, matching faces, to other faces’ genders, or matching faces to similar emotions, no task was able to decrease amygdala activity in the same way as simply noting, verbally, which emotion was being expressed. Similar work, focusing on asking subjects about their personal experiences while emotion labeling, have found a marked decrease in distress when the practice is done (Lieberman, Inagaki, Tabibnia, & Crockett, 2011).

Distress is, of course, experiential and the neuroscientific and psychological studies agree: having a word for an emotion state can alter one’s qualitative experience and this change cannot be fully explained through a more generic claim of “cognitive activity.” If one is scientifically conservative, they can focus on the studies listed and which those exist elsewhere. More ambitiously, an excited constructivist may conclude that emotional Whorfianism is a universal assessment of how emotions work in the brain. However, this does not prove the more ambitious aspects of the lexical-emotional tie: claims that some cultures possess fully unique emotions (read: regardless of cognitive efficiency) (Spiegel, 2017) is to be determined.

I have found the essentialist critique of lexical labels to be fairly weak. One paper, written by Sauter, LeGuen, and Haun (2011) in support of Ekman’s idea of “basic emotions” (1992), published data on German and Yucatec Maya speakers on differentiation of emotions in the context of lexical categories. Yucatec Maya is a relatively unqiue language; it does not have separate words to for two of the universal emotions proported by essentialists (and many moderates in the essentialist/constructivist debate): disgust and anger. Someone speaking Yucatec Maya would describe the emotion of a man screaming at the TV or avoiding a dead animal carcass with the same words (p’eek, p’uha’an, or ts’ı´ik). This is not the case in German. A visual aid will help before I describe the task:

Figure 1

Researchers paired up three dichotomies of emotional expressions: disgust/anger, disgust/sadness, and anger/sadness. Each task involved only one pairing. Participants were shown the most extreme version of the pairing, and then shown a series of faces which expressed “in between” feelings and were asked to select which extreme face the current part of the series was closest to; they were then assessed by accuracy. The idea here is that if Yucatec Maya lack a lexical differentiation between disgust/anger linguistically (having a separate word from both for “sadness”) that some sort of special struggle in noticing the differences between disgust and anger faces should arrive one all three tasks get compared. The results? 

Figure 2

The team noted how there seemed to be a universal pattern of expression differentiation, regardless of lexical differences between speakers of the two languages. People seems to have an easier time matching very angry faces with the angriest face and a harder time doing the same for ambiguous faces. By this framework, it seems that emotions are innate.

There are four issues I can identify with applying this study as evidence against emotional Whorfianism (of the efficiency variety): 1) No control was put into place on people’s ability to differentiate emotions from information other than facial expressions (tone of voice, context, etc.); my ability to match up pictures may have nothing to do with my ability to experience or understand emotions 2) one major critique of the Ekmanian school of emotion (I borrow this argument from Barrett, 2017) is that scientists often train their subjects on the emotions in question before actually gathering any data (i.e. the extreme faces were shown to subjects and that dichotomy framed the entire experience for them) 3) not all the data in the anger/sad continuum hit statistical significance, meaning we should probably only be looking at disgust/anger and sad/disgust 4) when only looking at those two continuums, this seems like evidence for a Whorfian emotional efficiency; the terms which the Yucatec Maya had no lexical tag to differentiate them led them to worse performance than the Germans, but when the linguistic playing field was equal the two groups were equally effective at differentiating the faces.

So, does reading On the Genealogy of Morals give someone access to a new sort of emotion? Nietzsche would certainly say, “No.” He was under the impression that he was describing the experiences of the ignorant, across time and culture, and that all peoples of a certain type experienced ressentiment. However, the Whorfian emotional efficiency model may better align with Nietzsche’s goals and with the truth of how emotion processing works. When we study an emotion, say in a philosophy book, and gain a new word for it there is evidence that shows that when we apply this word (regardless of any other form of understanding) we can handle the situation with more cognitive efficiency. Different languages have different words for different emotions, and some languages lack labels for particular types of feelings. Because of this, one’s language (or languages) does impact one’s experience of the world via the emotions and by (at least) the cognitive load they place on us. However, Barrett (2017) notes that one does not need to study other languages to get the benefits of this Whorfian efficiency; by paying attention to our affective experience it is possible to create our own lexical tags to describe our emotional experiences, thereby gaining the benefits of the special role language plays in emotion processing. I call this specific emotional satisfaction of finishing an essay while flying over the Atlantic because the initial draft I wrote earlier in the week got deleted, “no plane no gain.”

References

Ayres, P. (2006). Using subjective measures to detect variations of intrinsic cognitive load within problems. Learning and instruction, 16(5): 389-400.

Barrett, L. F. (2006). Solving the Emotion Paradox: Categorization and the Experience of Emotion. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10(1): 20-46.

Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Ekman, P. (1992). An Argument For Basic Emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 6(3/4): 169-200.

Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words. Psychological Science, 18(5): 421-428.

Lieberman, M. D., Inagaki, T. K., Tabibnia, G., & Crockett, M. J. (2011). Subjective responses to emotional stimuli during labeling, reappraisal, and distraction. Emotion, 11(3): 468-480.

Lindquist, K. A., Barrett, L. F., Bliss-Moreau, E., & Russell, J. A. (2006). Language and the perception of emotion. Emotion, 6(1): 125-138.

Nietzsche, F. (2007). On the Geneaology of Morality. (K. Ansell-Pearson, Ed., & C. Diethe, Trans.) New York: Cambridge University Press.

Sauter, D. A., LeGuen, O., & Haun, D. B. (2011). Categorical Perception of Emotional Facial Expressions Does Not Require Lexical Categories. Emotion, 6(1): 1479-1483.

Solms, M. (2021). The HIdden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness. London: Profile Books.

Spiegel, A. (2017, June 1). Invisibilia: A Man Finds An Explosive Emotion Locked In A Word. Retrieved from NPR: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/06/01/529876861/an-anthropologist-discovers-the-terrible-emotion-locked-in-a-word

Whorf, B. L. (1940). Science and Linguistics. Technol. Rev., 247-248.