Rethinking Emotion: Interiority and Exteriority in Premodern, Modern, and Contemporary Thought 9783110259254, 9783110259247

Table of contents :
Contents
Rethinking Emotion: Moving beyond Interiority. An Introduction
I. Modes of Interiorization: Emotion before the Great Dichotomy
From Moving the Soul to Moving into the Soul
Presenting the Affect. The Scene of Pathos in Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Its Revision in Descartes’s Passions of the Soul
The Art of Prayer. Conversions of Interiority and Exteriority in Medieval Contemplative Practice
Contact at a Distance. The Topology of Fascination
Chardin: Inwardness – Emotion – Communication
II. Interiority/Exteriority: Thinking and Writing Emotion
“… that until now, the inner world of man has been given … such unimaginative treatment”. Constructions of Interiority around 1800
Inside/Out. Mediating Interiority in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Rat Krespel
Keller’s Cellar Vaults. Intrusions of the Real in Gottfried Keller’s Realism
Toward a Genealogy of the Internalized Human Being. Nietzsche on the Emotion of Guilt
“The Real Horizon” (beyond Emotions). What Proust (Wordsworth, Rousseau, Diderot, and Hegel) Had ‘in’ Mind
III. Thinking beyond Interiority: Reconceptualizing Emotion after the Great Dichotomy
The Role of the Lived-Body in Feeling
Artificial Emotions. Melodramatic Practices of Shared Interiority
Feelings on Faces. From Physiognomics to Neuroscience
Emotions and Other Minds
Whereabouts. Locating Emotions between Body, Mind, and World
Notes on Contributors

Citation preview

Rethinking Emotion

Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies

Edited by Scott Denham, Irene Kacandes and Jonathan Petropoulos

Volume 15

Rethinking Emotion Interiority and Exteriority in Premodern, Modern, and Contemporary Thought

Edited by Rüdiger Campe and Julia Weber

DE GRUYTER

ISBN 978-3-11-025924-7 e-ISBN 978-3-11-025925-4 ISSN 1861-8030 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2014 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: Meta Systems Publishing & Printservices GmbH, Wustermark Cover image: Gail Albert Halaban Printing: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Contents Rüdiger Campe and Julia Weber Rethinking Emotion: Moving beyond Interiority An Introduction 1

I. Modes of Interiorization: Emotion before the Great Dichotomy Catherine Newmark From Moving the Soul to Moving into the Soul On Interiorization in the Philosophy of the Passions

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Rüdiger Campe Presenting the Affect The Scene of Pathos in Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Its Revision in Descartes’s Passions of the Soul 36 Niklaus Largier The Art of Prayer Conversions of Interiority and Exteriority in Medieval Contemplative Practice 58 Brigitte Weingart Contact at a Distance The Topology of Fascination

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Beate Söntgen Chardin: Inwardness – Emotion – Communication

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II. Interiority/Exteriority: Thinking and Writing Emotion Bernhard Greiner “… that until now, the inner world of man has been given … such unimaginative treatment” 137 Constructions of Interiority around 1800

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Contents

Julia Weber Inside/Out Mediating Interiority in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Rat Krespel Rainer Nägele Keller’s Cellar Vaults Intrusions of the Real in Gottfried Keller’s Realism

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Daniel Cuonz Toward a Genealogy of the Internalized Human Being 202 Nietzsche on the Emotion of Guilt Claudia Brodsky “The Real Horizon” (beyond Emotions) What Proust (Wordsworth, Rousseau, Diderot, and Hegel) Had ‘in’ 219 Mind

III. Thinking beyond Interiority: Reconceptualizing Emotion after the Great Dichotomy Bernhard Waldenfels The Role of the Lived-Body in Feeling

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Hermann Kappelhoff Artificial Emotions Melodramatic Practices of Shared Interiority David Freedberg Feelings on Faces From Physiognomics to Neuroscience Joel Krueger Emotions and Other Minds

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Rebekka Hufendiek Whereabouts Locating Emotions between Body, Mind, and World

Notes on Contributors

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Rethinking Emotion: Moving beyond Interiority An Introduction [Literary] criticism stands under the aegis of an inside/outside metaphor that is never being seriously questioned. Paul de Man 1 Nichts ist drinnen, nichts ist draußen: Denn was innen das ist außen. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 2

Questions, perspectives, claims The notion of interiority and its central role in our understanding of emotional life and individuality are phenomena that belong to classical Western modernity. From antiquity to early modernity, affects or passions were mostly conceived of either as external physiological forces that act on a passive subject and provoke it to engage in certain actions or as scene-like situations in which the affected person responds to an ensemble of other actors under specific circumstances. Not until the turn of the eighteenth century were emotions located within the subject as an important category that crystallized, together with other elements of psychic life, to form the core of individuality. In conjunction with sensation, feeling, and thinking, emotions began to form what in German is called Innerlichkeit 3 – a neologism that marks a programmatic distinction of the “inner world” or “interiority” of a person from the “outside 1 De Man, Paul. “Semiology and Rhetoric.” Paul de Man. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. 3–19, here 5. 2 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. “Epirrhema.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche. Part 1: Sämtliche Werke. Vol. 2: Gedichte 1800–1832. Ed. Karl Eibl. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1988. 498. / “No thing’s inside, outside neither: / In is out and both are either.” (Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. “Epirrhema.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Selected Poems. Trans. John Whaley. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998. 127.) 3 See the entry “Innerlichkeit” by Renate von Heydebrand. Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Ed. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer. Basel: Schwabe, 1976. Vol. 4. 386–388. According to Heydebrand, the word Innerlichkeit is first used by Klopstock in 1779. Taken up

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world.” This by no means implies that interiority had not long affected particular aspects of life, speech, and action or interaction. On the contrary: the Stoics had spoken of “inner meaning” and “inner freedom;” the interiority of person and soul was a crucial theme in medieval Jewish and Christian mysticism; Luther recognized an “inner word” as opposed to the “outer word;” and spiritual movements in France, England, and Germany in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries pitted the interiority of belief against the exteriority of religious institutions (the catchphrase here is the ‘invisible church’). All of these cases concerned particular religious or social, hermeneutic or ethical aspects of human existence. It was only in the course of the eighteenth century, however, that the concept of interiority became firmly related to emotionality and thus central to understanding individual existence. This historical moment is a turning point both for the semantics of interiority and for the understanding of emotion. The connection between interiority and emotionality depends on the fact that the idea of interiority emerges from a process of distinction. To speak of interiority is necessarily to create an opposition between “inside” and “outside.” Emotions, for their part, have been understood, ever since the eighteenth century, essentially by means of the distinction between inner experience and outward forms of expression, with a first, important, beginning in Descartes’s Passions of the Soul, published in 1649. In its application to emotion, the inward/outward distinction affects an individual’s entire existence and is thus tied in with fundamental epistemological as well as social transformations. Epistemologically, the foundational distinction is the one Descartes draws between res cogitans and res extensa. But the distinction between ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ can also be seen as a consequence of the functional differentiation of society in modernity, which, according to sociologist Niklas Luhmann, “shifted gradually to the place previously occupied by the above/below distinction.” 4 Both, the new philosophy of the Scientific Age and the functional reorganization of society, remained tied in a variety of ways to the Christian motif of the soul’s interiority, a motif rooted in Paulinian and Augustinian theologies and continued by the Lutheran Reformation in particular. Prior to the eighteenth century, however, such ideational, social, and religious processes of differentiation followed their own historical trajectories, each of them operating under by a number of German authors such as Goethe, Herder, Hamann, Jean Paul, Novalis, and E. T. A. Hoffmann, it is above all Hegel who discusses the word in several of his philosophical writings with regard to questions concerning the relationship and reconciliation of the inward and the outward, as well as subjectivity and universality. 4 Luhmann, Niklas. Theory of Society. Trans. Rhodes Barrett. 2 vols. Stanford: University of California Press, 2013. Vol. 2. 266.

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specific conditions and evolving according to different paradigms. Only with the onset of the long eighteenth century did the various aspects of the inside/ outside differentiation meet and solidify for the first time, and they did so in the discursive field of passions and affects, perceptions and emotions. Thus, while their ideational, social, and religious origins were in many ways unrelated to the discourse on emotions, once the distinction between interiority and exteriority had been established in the field of emotion, it had a particular impact on the modern theorization of emotion generally. This theorization of emotion is in many ways still with us today. Even contemporary discussions of emotion still assume the dichotomy between inner and outer – or are at least still subject to its long-lasting effects.5 The present volume analyzes the consequences of the “inner world/outer world” reorganization for the discourse on emotions. The essays presented here address an historical as well as a systematic concern. On the one hand, they examine the development of the inner/outer dichotomy in different paradigmatic areas of knowledge and in different time periods. On the other hand, they aim to identify significant conceptual changes and specific difficulties in the theorization of mind or soul that resulted from such conceptual reorganizations and the way they were applied to emotions. For us who are teaching and writing in various humanities disciplines, the subject of the volume is of particular significance since it also concerns our own ways of thinking and arguing. In focusing, with the studies collected in this volume, on the distinction between interior and exterior as it emerged in the eighteenth century, we also intend to review and reconsider how profoundly making and elaborating this distinction has affected the way in which literary studies and the humanities in general have conceived of their own theories and practices. The semantics of interiority and the eighteenth century discourse on emotion have in fact been taken up and served as important references in the formation of the discipline we call ‘the humanities,’ a discipline that was established in Europe in the nineteenth century. This develop-

5 As Charles Taylor puts it: “In our self-understanding the opposition inside–outside plays an important role. We think of our thoughts, ideas or feelings as being ‘within’ us, while the objects in the world which these mental states bear on are ‘without.’ […] But strong as this partitioning of the world appears to us, as solid as this localization may seem, and anchored in the very nature of the human agent, it is in the large part a feature of our world, the world of modern, Western people. The localization is not a universal one, […] rather it is a function of a historically limited mode of self-interpretation, one which has become dominant in the modern West and which may indeed spread thence to other parts of the globe, but which had a beginning in time and space and may have an end.” (Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 111.)

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ment is particularly evident in the debates conducted in literary and historical studies in German-speaking countries at the time – most importantly, perhaps, in the philosophical underpinnings of what Germans to this day call the Geisteswissenschaften (“human sciences,” yet literally the “sciences of mind” or “spirit”).6 The discourse on interiority as it emerged from Romantic concepts has probably been more widely accepted and applied as a way to explain cultural facts in this context than anywhere else. This can, for instance, be seen in the works of philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, who famously distinguished between the Geisteswissenschaften, the human sciences, where “inner experience” (Erlebnis) 7 is the basic definition of the mental fact, the fact that is elucidated by understanding, and the Naturwissenschaften, the natural sciences, which explain the facts of the natural world in terms of causes and effects. The notion of interiority, understood here as that which is externally expressed in the cultural documents of literature as well as in the cultural sphere of laws and institutions, was further developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Georg Simmel’s cultural sociology and in the young Georg Lukács’s form-of-life aesthetics. With the advent of new schools of thought in literary studies and the humanities in Europe and the U.S. after 1945 (New Criticism, Immanent Critique, Formalism, and Structuralism), the influence of the distinction has garnered less and less scholarly attention. What has fallen to the wayside, however, is more the manifest theorization and articulation of the assumptions that underlie the distinction between inner and outer than the language of interiority. This language and its many implications have continued to play a central role that, more often than not, has gone unnoticed. Given a number of developments in both the humanities and the cognitive sciences in the last two decades, we believe that a special opportunity presents itself today to explore and clarify the historical and systematic basis of how interiority has been thought and might be rethought today. There are, first, wide-ranging developments in critical and historical studies. Work presented, mostly in the U.S., under headings such as Affect Theory or the Turn to Affect has concerned itself with issues in cultural and critical theory. It has a counterpart in American as well as European discussions on the History of Emotions. While both approaches are important for situating our own undertaking and while we wish to contribute indirectly to both, they both differ methodologi-

6 The concept of Geist as “mind” or “spirit” dates back to eighteenth-century German Idealism, especially to Hegel’s understanding of the term. Leaving aside this historical foundation, the term is today often translated as “human sciences” or “humanities” instead. 7 Dilthey, Wilhelm. Selected Works. Vol. 1: Introduction to the Human Sciences. Ed. Rudolf A. Makreel and Frithjof Rodi. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. 61.

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cally from ours. Affect Theory – the somewhat earlier development of the two – tends to presuppose that “affect” allows us to refer to embodied situations involving people and objects in space and time, beyond or even without considering the language of interiority. In this vein, Brian Massumi differentiates between affects, situational drives that direct us toward or away from persons and things in the world, and emotions, in which such situations are perceived contextually. According to Massumi, emotions are subjective contents while affects can be regarded as unqualified intensities. Both “follow different logics and pertain to different orders” 8 and should therefore no longer be confused. Lauren Berlant, to cite another example, has used this approach to describe what she calls “cruel optimism.” 9 Optimism in this reading means that people are driven toward certain objects that embody the promise of happiness, the goal of the good life; such optimism is cruel if these objects are, in fact, harmful. In such an analysis, the ‘affect’ (in Massumi’s sense of the term) makes it possible to identify a complex social and political situation, the interplay of forces in body and mind, not just a subject’s feeling or state of mind. We have assembled the essays in this volume in order to explore what it might take and how it would be possible to rethink emotion beyond interiority, a critical position that Massumi takes for granted with his differentiation between affect and emotion. The working through of interiority and its underlying distinction, in our view, is a constitutive element – or even antecedent – of any attempt at theorizing something like an ‘affect’ beyond interiority. The development of a History of Emotions is closely connected with this effort, as for instance in the work of the German historian Ute Frevert (who has also taught at Yale University) and her American colleague William M. Reddy. Elaborating on examples such as female shame or male sense of honor, Frevert demonstrates the historicity of feelings and their expression. By tracing changes in social practices – the institution of the duel in Frevert’s case and sentimentalism in the era preceding the French revolution in Reddy’s – both authors show how certain emotions emerge and disappear in history, and in the history of words, names, and meanings in particular.10 With the essays assembled in the present 8 Massumi, Brian. “The Autonomy of Affect.” Cultural Critique 31 (1995), special issue The Politics of Systems and Environments II: 83–109, here 88. 9 Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. 10 See Frevert, Ute. Men of Honour: A Social and Cultural History of the Duel. Oxford: Polity Press, 1995, and Reddy, William M. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Other recent historical research in this vein includes: Rosenwein, Barbara H. Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages. New York: Cornell University Press, 2006; Newmark, Catherine. Passion – Affekt – Gefühl. Philosophische Theorien der Emotion zwischen Aristoteles und Kant. Hamburg: Meiner, 2008; Perler, Dominik. Transformationen der Gefühle. Philosophische Emotionstheorien 1270–1670.

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volume, we hope to contribute to such an enterprise and to address the question of how social practices and the identification and naming of emotions relate to each other in different circumstances. The distinction of interiority and exteriority fundamentally affects the ways in which naming and experiencing emotions, speaking with and about affect, social practice, and verbal discourse or visual depiction do or do not correlate. Processes of interiorization are thus important areas to explore when we ask what we can learn from a history of emotion. There have been, second, fundamental debates on perception and emotion over the last couple of decades among cognitive scientists and neuroscientists and those philosophers who draw on their approaches; and these debates often result in reformulating the structure of perception and emotion systematically.11 This trend, together with a return of sorts to phenomenology among the philosophers participating in the debate, is in fact something we see as a particular expression of the attempt to move beyond the dichotomy of interior and exterior. In particular, we hope that readers of this volume will recognize how this debate is currently restructuring the familiar understanding of emotion and pushing it beyond mere interiority. This is to say that, despite its affinity with Affect Theory and the History of Emotions in the humanities on the one hand and the cognitive science approach to emotion on the other, this volume suggests an approach of its own. In contrast both to sweeping historicizations of emotion and to its epistemic localization in the cognitive sciences, this volume proposes a third direction of inquiry. The essays collected here explore a central premise of the modern conversation about emotion: the inside/outside dichotomy. The thesis that lies at the heart of this book, a thesis all chapters reflect, is that meaningful and critical findings in the historical and in the cognitive study of emotion are made possible, first and foremost, by addressing the inside/outside dichotomy. This volume thus implies a combination of historical and systematic perspectives. Establishing interdisciplinary connections between literary critics and philosophers, between historians of art and media theorists as well as cognitive scientists is

Frankfurt: Fischer, 2011; Plamper, Jan. Geschichte der Gefühle. Grundlagen der Emotionsgeschichte. Munich: Siedler, 2012. 11 See, among others, Varela, Francisco J., et al. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991; Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt, 1999; Noë, Alva. Action in Perception. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004; Gallagher, Shaun. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005; Colombetti, Giovanna, and Evan Thompson. “The Feeling Body: Toward an Enactive Approach to Emotion.” Developmental Perspectives on Embodiment and Consciousness. Ed. Willis F. Overton et al. New York: Erlbaum, 2008. 45–68.

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essential to this undertaking. Chapters that argue from a historical and interpretive perspective and contributions from philosophers and cognitive theorists do not merely supplement one another. Our hypothesis is that these approaches must be combined if we want to move beyond interiority. We have to come to a better understanding of what interpreting emotion according to the inside/ outside distinction has meant – how it has operated and what its results have been –, but in order to move beyond interiority, we also have to develop new descriptions and other theoretical tools. Instead of repeating problems that arose from the dichotomy – such as, for instance, attempting to explain how “external” stimuli affect the “interior” of the mind or how “inner” feelings are expressed “externally” in the body – this volume intends, last but not least, to encourage new ways of conceptualizing emotion that succeed in transcending the opposition between interiority and exteriority. Two remarks on the terminological decisions that inform this introduction may be in order. Even if not every single chapter reflects these choices, they define the contributions’ shared goal. The first remark concerns “interiority,” the second “interiorization.” In this introduction, we speak of interiority wherever the distinction interior versus exterior is at issue. For example, articulating emotion by means of the distinction of interior versus exterior amounts to thinking of emotion in terms of interiority. The evident reason for this striking usage is an asymmetry of values within the distinction: where the distinction interior versus exterior is made, it is usually the interior that is seen as the primary, more important, essential, in a word, the more valuable side. Hence interiority – the one side of the distinction – can stand for the distinction between the interior and the exterior as a whole. To avoid confusion we use exterior and interior for the two sides of the distinction and, where no further specification is necessary, interiority for the distinction in its entirety. The term externality can then be used to designate not the opposite of interior within the distinction of interior versus exterior, but the absence of that distinction. With the term interiorization, we refer to strategies and modes of thought used to argue for, introduce, or establish the distinction between interior and exterior. Processes of interiorization – that is, the introduction of the distinction as such – can occur only when the distinction is not already accepted as a given. Interiorization thus occurs in situations that do not take place in a world of interiority. Importantly, processes of interiorization are themselves marked by externality (as we have just defined it). In other words, as far as emotions are concerned, processes and strategies of interiorization are invented and elaborated in continuous worlds of emotional actions and reactions; worlds that are not articulated by means of the distinction of inside and outside. Such worlds of externality are worlds in which the emotional realm

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consists of what might be called ‘scenes of emotions.’ Such, we assume, was the pre-modern world, the world of Aristotelian and most other ancient accounts of emotion, but also the world of medieval prayers and even of Descartes’s Passions of the Soul (which introduced the distinction of interior versus exterior). We also observe that many currents of post-Idealist philosophy – in particular Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Wittgenstein – view interiority (or the distinction between interior and exterior) critically and explore alternative descriptions. Most interestingly, perhaps, we find in the contemporary debate in cognitive studies and neuroscience renewed interest in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, which reactivates, among other things, the critique of interiority. Here lies the origin of this volume: it seems that the current debate is once more searching for an account of continuous worlds of emotions, a world beyond interiority. This leads to two related remarks to conclude this first, general part of the introduction. The first remark is that early on in the discussions between the editors and contributors, we made a simple but striking observation. We found that in a significant manner, ancient and pre-modern accounts of emotion share a characteristic trait with the tendencies in philosophy and cognitive science in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries described a moment ago. None of them grant the distinction between interior and exterior the foundational and quasi-self-evident role it had been assigned in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (especially in the German speaking world). We might go so far as to speak of a ‘return’ to a pre-modern – or, for that matter, pre-Romantic – approach to emotion, an approach beyond interiority. This is the perspective that connects the ‘historical’ contributions on pre-modern theories and descriptions of emotions in the first part of the volume with the philosophical, media-theoretical, and cognitive science-oriented contributions in the third, which reflects current debates. Second, we would like to point out that while it aspires to a comparative view of Western (European) developments, the present volume nonetheless has a deliberate German bias. This is due to the fact that the great dichotomy made its most significant impact in German thought and letters, an impact whose traces can be found in Pietism, Romanticism, and German Idealism and all the way to the formation of the Geisteswissenschaften in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is still virulent today in expressions such as Deutsche Innerlichkeit (“German interiority” or “German inwardness”). The literary critics who have contributed to the volume’s middle section therefore focus on aspects of this development in exemplary works (mainly, but not exclusively, German) from the long period of Romanticism. In their close readings of pre-Romantic, Romantic, or even Realist literary works, they set out to

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think beyond interiority by tracing and unpacking the problems and tensions that result from the interior/exterior distinction. Their critical ways of reading paintings or texts constitute yet another, third, mode of ‘moving beyond’ in addition to the reconstruction of pre-modern practices and theories on the one hand and the redescription of emotion in contemporary cognitive science and neo-phenomenological philosophy on the other. In our view, only the interconnection and interplay between the three modes of thinking and writing – an interconnection and interplay among the three sections of this volume but very often also among individual contributions – can attain the goal of moving beyond interiority.

Themes and contributions This volume seeks to establish a critical distance vis-à-vis a trope that, according to Paul de Man, has “never been seriously questioned” and yet has been of pivotal importance for and in literature, art, and the humanities in the Western tradition to this day. To this end, we have gathered contributions from several fields that analyze the interior/exterior distinction from three complementary angles. All three combine historical, critical, and systematic motifs. The first approach studies the formation of the new dichotomy from an historical perspective and systematically assesses its implications in comparison to previous (that is, pre-modern) understandings. The second approach consists in tracing the discursive consequences the trope has had since the eighteenth century and in detailing the recurrent conceptual problems that arise from the new dichotomy. Questions regarding the relationship between interiority and exteriority are not only a core problem of Romantic and transcendental philosophy, they also have far-reaching consequences in other disciplines such as art history. The third approach is vital to a systematic criticism of the dichotomy. At least since the days of Friedrich Nietzsche, such criticism has challenged the basis of the opposition from a theoretical perspective. By exploring the genealogy and the various manifestations of the opposition “interiority/ exteriority,” present-day investigations from the perspectives of phenomenology, media theory, art history, and the cognitive sciences seek to provoke a rethinking of the conditions of our own discussion of emotion. The volume presents paradigmatic work from these three perspectives. While each contribution stakes out a unique territory in terms of history and subject, the essays are arranged so as to critically explore the basic influence the interior/exterior dichotomy has had on the conception of emotions and passions in a larger field of study. Arranged in this way, each of the explora-

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tions speaks to and critiques a process that can be schematically described as the superimposition of the interior/exterior distinction onto the subject of the emotions and passions. *** A first hint at a basic form of interiority is Augustine’s famous distinction between the homo exterior and the homo interior, and in mystical rhetoric we find ideas of the “inner man,” the “inner castle” or the “inner encounter” with God. In German usage, the “internalized” use of the word “world” first appears in the writings of Meister Eckhart who, with reference to Augustine, distinguishes between an “inner” and an “outer” world. But these conceptions of interiority are for the most part limited by a certain schematism and, in keeping with Christian doctrine, primarily aim at dismissing the external, sensual world. In contrast, the conception of interiority as a site of subjective feeling and experience is a phenomenon that developed only gradually in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and came to a climax in Romantic literature. In ancient philosophy, the distinction between interior and exterior did not play a systematic role in the formation of either psychology or ethics, not even in works that specifically addressed the passions. Something that could be called “interiority” tout court did not arise until the late Enlightenment and the (German) Romantic periods that took up the distinction (that is, in its Augustinian or Christian mystical form) and made it a central component of psychology and the theory of emotion. The first section of this volume, Modes of Interiorization: Emotion before the Great Dichotomy, therefore focuses on the pre-modern tradition of noninterior conceptions, representations, and performances of affectivity. It demonstrates how, under these conditions, methods and modes of interiorization found expression in particular changes in theoretical assumptions and transformed the ways in which affects were represented. Each of the first three chapters concentrates on one central aspect of the pre-modern conception of emotion and on one related mode of possible interiorization. While Catherine Newmark explores the philosophical tradition (the theory of the soul) and Rüdiger Campe examines the rhetorical tradition (the doctrine of passion), Niklaus Largier focuses on spiritual and meditative exercises in medieval contemplative practices (the art of prayer). Newmark offers an historical account of the long and complicated process of interiorization in philosophical psychology. She describes the transition from an understanding of passions as external objects that tug at and push the soul around (Aristotle) via the idea of passions as impressions on the soul (Descartes) to the conception of pas-

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sions as a basic faculty of the individual subject (Kant). According to Newmark, these three models of explaining emotion in philosophical theories of the soul trace a gradual transformation in thinking about emotion from exterior to interior. In a chapter focusing on the doctrine of the passions in the rhetorical tradition, Campe juxtaposes the different ways Aristotle and Descartes present phenomenal or anecdotal appearance of the passions. Whereas in Aristotle, he suggests, the passions appear as scenes of interaction, Descartes offers a narrative behind such scenes of emotional performance that situates their origin in the ‘primal scene’ of self-preservation. In this case, interiorization means reducing the various scenes in which affects unfurl to the one “primal scene” that now appears as the motivational force behind them. Drawing on the art of prayer in the medieval monastic and, in particular, mystical experience, Largier offers an account of interiorization as an appeal to inner senses through reading and prayer. He demonstrates that meditative practices played an important and, thus far, largely overlooked role in the development of interiority. Such monastic practices emphasized the idea that God is to be sought less in the scholastic rules of the church than in the heart of the individual, and they thereby popularized new strategies of immersing oneself in personal interiority. Prayer is seen as an art destined to evoke and form, enliven and enrich the interior. Importantly, the potential of interiority is seen to emerge in an artistic – and even artificial – process. In her article chapter on the topology of fascination, Brigitte Weingart analyzes the transformations of the discourse on fascinatio, which evolves from magic ideas of vision and imagery in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to a new conception of visual enchantment in the aesthetic debates of the eighteenth century. While fascinatio has long been a category on the margins of any official thought or discipline, the precarious relation between exterior and interior as it is characteristic for fascination offers exemplary insights in the paradoxical construction of interiority. Weingart’s analysis shows that fascinatio both posits the differentiation and calls it into question. The formation of modern interior communication about and through emotion is the subject of Beate Söntgen’s study of eighteenth century French painting. Focusing on Jean Siméon Chardin, her contribution discusses the precarious nature of the interior/exterior distinction in terms of a paradigmatic “high art” solution. As Söntgen shows, the difficulties or even impossibility of representing interiority in painting prompt a rhetorical strategy of indirect communication. Chardin’s work thus creates a painterly mode of fascination that presupposes and brings into existence an experience of interiority developed in the interplay between painter, painting, and beholder. The importance of visual and media effects for understanding communication through emotion returns in section

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three in contributions on melodrama and cinema (Kappelhoff) and on physiognomy in painting (Freedberg). *** Conceiving of the dichotomy “interiority/exteriority” as a complex, interdependent relationship, the second section, Interiority/Exteriority: Thinking and Writing Emotion, examines modern conceptions of emotion after Descartes’s seminal separation of res cogitans and res extensa. Unlike most previous research, which – especially in the German tradition – often concentrates exclusively on the rise of modern (Romantic) interiority without paying attention to the underlying dichotomy, the focus here lies on the historical preconditions, the internal logic, and the possible shortcomings of the interiority discourse. This pertains in particular to the Romantic era’s modes of thought and representation, that is, to the processes of transference, mirroring, and embodiment as well as the criticism of these processes. In Romanticism, the new organization according to the interior/exterior distinction assumed a central role; the distinction’s problematic and highly paradoxical nature did nothing to diminish its popularity. The concepts of interior world and exterior world were central to the works of German writers such as Brentano, Novalis, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and especially Jean Paul, which continually rethought and distinguished the terms. Priority almost always was granted to the interior world, a tendency strikingly embodied in Novalis’s motto: “– the mysterious way leads inwards.” 12 The predominance in this middle section of examples from German Romanticism (Weber) and its later nineteenth century continuation into Realism (Nägele) – balanced, however, by Brodsky’s essay, which leads the reader all the way from Rousseau and Diderot to Proust – is justified by the pioneering and often defining role German Romanticism has played in establishing interiority qua Innerlichkeit in Western thinking and culture. The reason why we reserve so much space for essays that concentrate on literature, and often even on individual works, is the place occupied by these works of art made from language in the German variant of Romanticism and in the Geisteswissenschaften-type of the modern study of the humanities. In the analysis that introduces the second section, Bernhard Greiner reviews the German notion of Innerlichkeit, a crucial phenomenon of German Romanticism that can nonetheless also be understood in the broader context of the evolution of European

12 Novalis. “Miscellaneous Observations.” Novalis. Philosophical Writings. Ed. and trans. Margaret Mahony Stoljar. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. 23–46, here 25.

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literature since the late eighteenth century. The concept of the “inner man” quickly became a central metaphor that strongly appealed to contemporary thinkers and carried positive connotations such as “depth,” “truth,” and “experience.” At the same time, interiority became a primarily spatial concept, a new historic development that prompted the modern idea of “interior worlds” (Innenwelten). The Romantic understanding of the subject as creator of his own world expresses the triumph of the interior over the exterior. And yet interior worlds cannot be imagined without exterior worlds – there is always an ambivalence, if not a paradox that arises. Inner worlds motivate the exploration of an exterior world that had been introduced merely for the purpose of distinction. The description of interior worlds increasingly necessitates conceptions of the exterior world, and interior worlds are forced to keep renewing and repeating the distinction to preserve their own identity. This results in a complex field of historical definitions: While traditional pre-modern conceptions of affect and passion generally seem external when judged by Romantic standards, it is only through the Romantic idea of internal space that the distinction is established – and exteriority introduced. Not until Romanticism is the interior juxtaposed to an exterior, and it is only then that the interior can be described by referring to the exterior. In more pointed terms: the exteriority of the traditional conception of affect and passion cannot be identified until we reach the Romantic era. This constellation can serve as a frame of reference within which individual, even idiosyncratic, portrayals of interiority can emerge. In their exemplary analyses of ways of thinking and representing the dichotomy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Julia Weber and Rainer Nägele focus on tropes of mirroring, embodiment, or transference between interiority and exteriority in the “Romantic” writer E. T. A. Hoffmann and the “Realist” author Gottfried Keller. The critical rethinking of the interior/exterior distinction, which in the first and third sections is mostly a matter of theoretical debate, takes now place in the domain of reading and interpretation. Julia Weber reconstructs the relation between spatial descriptions and interiority in one of European Romanticism’s paradigmatic narratives about the interiority of experiencing music and love: E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Councillor Krespel (a source of inspiration for Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann). Hoffmann’s story mirrors the inside/out distinction on several textual levels. The dichotomy not only defines how the narrative presents its characters but also resurfaces in architecture and material objects, for example, in Krespel’s windowless house or in the violins he constructs and deconstructs. While the distinction between interior and exterior thus shapes the narrated material world, it also operates in the narrating process itself. As Weber demonstrates, Hoffmann develops a specific “psycho-narration” in which the narrative voice

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presents the character’s interiority. In his reading of Gottfried Keller’s short narrative The Three Righteous Combmakers, Nägele examines Keller’s satirical, or rather critical, dissection of such mirroring of psychological interiority in material objects. In Nägele’s reading, Keller, whom literary history usually counts among “realist” writers, appears as drawing the ultimate consequences from the Romantic paradox that produced exteriority by prioritizing interiority. Nägele even suggests that such exteriority is allegorical in nature, and he thereby demonstrates how the exteriority of allegory resurfaces precisely as a consequence of the Romantic text. This turn in Nägele’s reading of Keller’s narrative indeed suggests the apparition, as it were, of a pre-modern thinking and writing of the ‘real,’ of the allegory, within and against the RomanticRealist construction of ‘realism.’ Both Daniel Cuonz and Claudia Brodsky discuss critical turns against the dichotomy from a philosophical and theoretical perspective, considering such turns to originate in Romanticism in the broadest sense (that is, as extending from Rousseau via Nietzsche to Proust). In his reading of Nietzsche’s genealogy of the “internalized human being” in On the Genealogy of Morals, Cuonz questions the very possibility of a history of interiority. Nietzsche’s account can be understood as the blueprint for all theories that polemically turn against “Romantic” interiority, and as such, Cuonz shows, it is intimately linked to the very development of genealogy as a critical procedure. This is of particular importance because in the paradigmatic case of interiority at least, the possibility that genealogy, in any traditional sense, provides a historical account cannot be taken for granted. Brodsky, following Paul de Man’s observations on figurality in the era of Romanticism, engages in a rhetorical criticism of the notion of interiority in Rousseau, Diderot, and Proust. She demonstrates that interiority in any psychological sense of the word is – at least in the Romantic tradition – necessarily bound up with language and its inherent figurativeness. What we might call the “Romantic project,” its constellation of consciousness and language, in other words, already implies making the distinction between interiority and exteriority. Brodsky’s rhetorical analysis of language in Rousseau, Diderot, and Proust is thus also the counterpart to Cuonz’s findings on Nietzsche: for Romanticism, there is no “exterior” from which to analyze the distinction between interior and exterior. The critical dimension, as Weber and Nägele demonstrate in their close readings, in fact consists precisely in exploring the distinction by studying its “internal,” often paradoxical, consequences. ***

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As soon as the division between inside and outside becomes subject to theoretical inquiry, the question of the philosophical, aesthetical, or media-theoretical basis of such an opposition comes up. The third section, Thinking beyond Interiority: Reconceptualizing Emotion after the Great Dichotomy, challenges and critiques the dichotomy in a systematic way and discusses alternative descriptions and conceptions of emotion. The potentially paradoxical idea of an interiority that regards the exterior as its opposite points to a philosophical and systematic debate already reflected in Nietzsche and in various theories of consciousness and language from Rousseau to Proust. This debate, however, also refers us to the questions asked today in cognitive science. In particular, it seems that the debates of philosophical phenomenology – from Edmund Husserl via Martin Heidegger to Maurice Merleau-Ponty – have assumed an important role in some areas of cognitive science. At issue here may be less a “tradition” in the usual sense than the attempt of today’s theorists to find a new foundation for addressing the issues at stake. If it is indeed the case that contemporary media theorists and cognitive scientists often return to these authors, this may be explained by the fact that the phenomenological thinkers extended but also critically re-shaped the Romantic project. In their critical theories of consciousness and perception, language and meaning, the phenomenologists are the heirs and critics of Nietzsche and “Romantic rhetoric” from Rousseau to Proust, expanding and subverting the Romantic foundations. In a seminal contribution, Bernhard Waldenfels discusses the role of the body from a phenomenological perspective, which allows him to develop a non-representational, relational account of emotion beyond the interiority of consciousness. Drawing on the rich tradition from Husserl and Heidegger to Merleau-Ponty, Waldenfels’s programmatic essay develops a perspective from which the interior/exterior distinction is re-interpreted, called into question, and, finally, transcended in concepts such as the lived-body (Leib) or the embedding of emotional encounters in complex situations. It is this strand of phenomenological critique that has informed – or, at least, retroactively helped to articulate – a critical debate in today’s cognitive science and its engagement with ‘embodied’ or ‘enactive’ theories. Of particular importance is Waldenfels’s insistence on the fact that a phenomenological account of feeling and emotion implies the relation of the self to the other. Here, the phenomenological rethinking of emotion resonates with pre-modern accounts and opens a new field for critical positions in current cognitive research. Exemplary in another, yet analogous way is Hermann Kappelhoff’s study on the development of melodrama from Romantic theater (Rousseau) to classical Hollywood cinema (with Titanic as, perhaps, the last emblematic example). For Kappel-

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hoff, the melodramatic genre is characterized by a relationship between the audience and the theatrical or cinematic presentation. Melodrama appears as an essentially performative technique – or a technology of performance – that shapes the actor-spectator relationship through the representation on stage and on screen. The melodramatic relationship does not so much rely on emotion as it is emotion, emotion as an intersubjective event. This observation hearkens back to a line of exploration represented in this volume by Largier’s essay on the art of prayer and its multi-media aspects in the first section and Weingarten and Söntgen’s contributions on fascinatio and the development of a painterly representation of interiority in the second. While David Freedberg also focuses on emotion and visual representation in the history of art and painting, he gives the discussion a rather critical turn. By reviewing the largely pre-modern tradition of physiognomic theories that continues through Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals to current neuroscience, Freedberg challenges familiar attitudes toward the representation of emotion in art criticism. By insisting that the physiognomic reaction is irreducible, he questions the limits of culturalism in the contemporary understanding of emotion and interrogates the exclusively aesthetic conception of painterly representation that tends to leave no space for any pre-aesthetic elements in the beholder’s response to the image. Freedberg thus seeks to make room for certain moments of pre-aesthetic – and in this sense “exterior” – forms of emotional experience in visual art and painting. Philosophers and cognitive scientists Joel Krueger and Rebekka Hufendiek, finally, discuss and develop new accounts of externalized, embodied, or enactive emotion. In different ways, both argue that despite its focus on the brain, cognitive science requires that emotion be considered in an intersubjective space and time. Krueger draws on the debate in cognitive science in the context of Freedberg’s question about recognizing emotion. He, however, frames the debate in terms of the question of “other minds.” In a critical review of methods in cognitive science, Krueger insists on the manifold social and interactive ways of displaying feelings and emotions in the exterior observable world and argues for a rigorous limitation of the “unobservability principle” (the classical epistemological argument for interiority). Hufendiek develops her views on emotion within the framework of the embodied or situated approach. From this perspective, she not so much limits the interiority of emotion as she revises the underlying distinction between interior and exterior. Importantly, she transfers the results of “embodied,” “embedded,” and “enactive” theories from their primary field – perception – to our field of emotion. As she demonstrates, emotion on the one hand requires a rethinking of theories developed for understanding perception, and, on the other, emotion

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underlines the need and strengthens the evidence for such integrative accounts of mental processes beyond interiority. *** Many of the contributions collected in this volume were first discussed at an international Humboldt Conference held at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University in February 2010. We would like to thank the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Edward and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund, and Yale’s German Department for their generous support in funding the conference. The conversation continued after the conference, and with its results in mind we turned to other colleagues for discussing fields and topics that had emerged as critical and pivotal. We hope that the present collection contributes to an ongoing debate in the humanities and to several aspects of the relationship between the humanities and the sciences. We thank Florian Fuchs, Jason Kavett, Andrew Kirwin, and Rina Schmeller, as well as Anne Posten and Nils Schott for their help in editing the contributions of this volume. Last but not least, we would like to thank Manuela Gerlof at Walter de Gruyter who from the beginning has supported this book project with passion, diligence, and great patience.

Bibliography Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Colombetti, Giovanna, and Evan Thompson. “The Feeling Body: Toward an Enactive Approach to Emotion.” Developmental Perspectives on Embodiment and Consciousness. Ed. Willis F. Overton et al. New York: Erlbaum, 2008. 45–68. Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt, 1999. De Man, Paul. “Semiology and Rhetoric.” Paul de Man. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. 3–19. Dilthey, Wilhelm. Selected Works. Vol. 1: Introduction to the Human Sciences. Ed. Rudolf A. Makreel and Frithjof Rodi. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Frevert, Ute. Men of Honour: A Social and Cultural History of the Duel. Oxford: Polity Press, 1995. Gallagher, Shaun. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. “Epirrhema.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche. Part 1: Sämtliche Werke. Vol. 2: Gedichte 1800– 1832. Ed. Karl Eibl. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1988. 498. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. “Epirrhema.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Selected Poems. Trans. John Whaley. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998. 127.

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Heydebrand, Renate von. “Innerlichkeit.” Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Ed. Joachim Ritter. Basel: Schwabe, 1976. Vol. 4. 386–388. Luhmann, Niklas. Theory of Society. Trans. Rhodes Barrett. 2 vols. Stanford: University of California Press, 2013. Massumi, Brian. “The Autonomy of Affect.” Cultural Critique 31 (1995), special issue The Politics of Systems and Environments II: 83–109. Newmark, Catherine. Passion – Affekt – Gefühl. Philosophische Theorien der Emotion zwischen Aristoteles und Kant. Hamburg: Meiner, 2008. Noë, Alva. Action in Perception. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. Novalis. “Miscellaneous Observations.” Novalis. Philosophical Writings. Ed. and trans. Margaret Mahony Stoljar. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. 23–46. Perler, Dominik. Transformationen der Gefühle. Philosophische Emotionstheorien 1270–1670. Frankfurt: Fischer, 2011. Plamper, Jan. Geschichte der Gefühle. Grundlagen der Emotionsgeschichte. Munich: Siedler, 2012. Reddy, William M. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Rosenwein, Barbara H. Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages. New York: Cornell University Press, 2006. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Varela, Francisco J., et al. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.

I. Modes of Interiorization: Emotion before the Great Dichotomy

Catherine Newmark

From Moving the Soul to Moving into the Soul On Interiorization in the Philosophy of the Passions What are emotions – and concurrently: where are they? – are questions that have a long tradition in the occidental history of thought and still give rise to philosophical debate. Even today there are not only intense discussions about the nature of emotions, but also a number of different philosophical understandings of where exactly the essential part of said emotions takes place: from phenomenological notions of the body as the original space of feeling to ultra-cognitivist theories of emotions as judgments and thus phenomena of the mind. Most theories would however basically agree that emotions are in some way internal to the subject that is experiencing them. Historically one cannot take this for granted – the idea of internal emotions appears rather to be the result of a process of interiorization. This is made plausible by Norbert Elias’s well known thesis about the social history of early modern Europe as a process of civilization: In the course of an ever tightening web of civilization, initially exterior norms of conduct and modes of expressions gradually move into the inner self. This process of interiorization could be described psychoanalytically, but also in quite classical philosophical and sociological terms of habitualization.1 A second observation that supports the assumption of a movement of the emotions toward the inside is the rather alien understanding of emotions that we find in classical philosophy and literature: depictions of strangely detached relationships to one’s own emotions, which seem counterintuitive to the contemporary mind. Thus Homeric heroes seem to receive their passions from the outside, from the gods, as it were, or like a rod of lightning from the sky: fear or anger befall and move them to terrible or wonderful deeds. Similarly, love and desire tend to fall on heroes and heroines like an outward force or a strike of fate. These motives are taken up again in seventeenth century classical literature: Racine’s and Corneille’s plays are full of Greek heroes and heroines that are emotionally shaken by their fatum.2 This classical notion of the pas-

1 Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners, and State Formation and Civilization. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Oxford, Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994. 2 A good example is Phaidra’s unhappy love for her stepson Hyppolitos as described in Racine’s Phèdre (1677): it appears to have been thrust upon her much like a curse. Cf. Racine,

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sions as an independent outward agent that shakes and mauls its helpless victims has been wonderfully parodied in Offenbach’s operetta La belle Hélène, where a rather badly behaving Helena of Troy keeps making excuses by exclaiming: “Fatalité! Fatalité!” 3 Such a fatalist notion of passions as quasi external events that fall upon us hardly corresponds of course to our current understanding of emotions as somehow belonging to a person and developing inside this person. There must therefore have been a process of interiorization somewhere along the way. (A notable exception to the contemporary understanding of emotions as internal to people can be found in the work of the German phenomenologist Hermann Schmitz. He takes emotions to be “spatial” but “unlocated” atmospheres that are liable to “seize” us.4 Schmitz has also brought forward a very pointed and polemical critique of modern occidental philosophy as “introjectionist,” “reductionist,” and “psychologistic;” it is no coincidence that he likes to contrast the so-called occidental “inner-worlddogma” with pre-socratic philosophy and its happy exteriority.5 ) A third indication of interiorization can be found in the antagonism which emerges in the eighteenth century between artful and artificial, courtly and codified emotions, and the real and natural inner true feelings of the newly strong bourgeois subject. Sensibility (Empfindsamkeit) as well as Romantic discourses all claim interiority and authenticity of the emotions for themselves. Bourgeois modernity thus defines itself by an inward focused moral psychology, in explicit contrast to the external, superficial, and pernicious practices of the ancient regime.6 While history, sociology, and literary studies have described this process of interiorization extensively, the same is not true for philosophy, which has only just begun to take up the history of emotions and their conceptualizations.7 It is however possible to discern a conceptual development in philosophy that corresponds to the cultural-historical process

Jean. “Phaedra.” Jean Racine. Iphigenia. Phaedra. Athaliah. Trans. John Cairncross. London: Penguin, 2004. 148–214. 3 Offenbach, Jacques. La belle Hélène. Opéra bouffe en trois actes. Libretto Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy. Paris: Michel Lévy, 1868. 79. 4 Schmitz, Hermann. Der Leib, der Raum und die Gefühle. Ostfildern: Terium, 1998. 22, 63 (my translation). 5 Schmitz, Hermann. Leib und Gefühl. Materialien zu einer philosophischen Therapeutik. Ed. Hermann Gausebeck and Gerhard Risch. Paderborn: Junfermann, 1992. 23–25 (my translation). 6 See Beate Söntgen in this volume. For an extensive analysis of bourgeois emotions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see also Kessel, Martina. Langeweile. Zum Umgang mit Zeit und Gefühlen in Deutschland vom späten 18. bis zum frühen 20. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001. 7 One of the first and still most important studies is James, Susan. Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.

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of interiorization. In this paper, I would like to sketch the main points of this development and show what conceptual changes in philosophy correspond to the historical shift in the understanding of emotions. To this end, I will try to broadly sketch how emotions are conceived prototypically, to identify, as it were, their philosophical ideal types. I will try to show that in classical passion theories from antiquity to the eighteenth century one can distinguish roughly between three different models for explaining the emotions that can be seen as three distinct steps in the gradual process of interiorization of the emotions: first what I call an appetitive model, then an impressive model, and finally the conception of feeling as a faculty.8 The first model derives from Aristotle but is used until the eighteenth century. I will attribute the second to Descartes, even though one can probably also find instances of it much earlier, possibly in classical Stoic philosophy, a point I will not pursue here. The third is a development of the mid-to-late eighteenth century and constitutes an entirely new point of view, one conceptualized comprehensively by Kant. It is the basis for the understanding of feelings or emotions as authentic, essential expressions of human beings and it is still dominant in our day, leading our culture to a strangely essentialist understanding of emotions. Much of this is, incidentally, quite at odds with a thriving commercial usage of emotions as well as with a wide-spread therapeutic discourse on emotion management in contemporary culture. To sum up these models in relation to one another, the classical appetitive model sees emotions as somehow external to a somewhat less individualized and personalized soul, whereas the impressive model can be seen as an intermediate step in the process of interiorization that leads to the conceptualization of feelings as a faculty, an inner ability of each individual soul.

Passions as sensitive appetite Aristotle coins the term passion of the soul (páthos tês psychês / passio animae) in his psychological and ethical works – On the Soul (De anima), the Rhetoric, and the Nicomachean Ethics – and establishes a psychological model that will be used for centuries to come. The Aristotelian model is taken up by Saint Augustine and appears in various early medieval sources, but is canonized

8 For this purpose, I use emotion as a general term, while passion and affect refer to premodern theories of emotion; feeling (Gefühl) is a new term and concept introduced in the eighteenth century.

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by Saint Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. Henceforth it dominates scholastic philosophy well into the seventeenth and even eighteenth century.9 In this model, the passions of the soul are understood to belong to the sensitive part of the appetitus (órexis), the appetitive or striving faculty, one of five (or six) parts or faculties of the soul that Aristotle describes.10 In the influential and far more systematic, scholastic version of Aristotelianism that Thomas Aquinas offers, these are the following: the vegetative, sensitive, intellectual, appetitive, and motive faculty.11 The Aristotelian and Thomistic soul thus has a much broader function than later conceptions which take their cue from Descartes. It is the life-principle of the body and, far from being concerned merely with thinking and willing, as Descartes would have it, it is also responsible for nutrition, growth, reproduction, motion. The lower faculties of the soul, especially the vegetative powers, cannot by any stretch of the imagination be considered conscious faculties and there is thus no question of the soul being in any way defined by its consciousness, as rationalist philosophers will later propose. Among these five faculties of the soul, the faculty of movement is a compound faculty, a combination of appetite and cognition. We use our intellectual or sensitive cognition to determine whether something is good or bad, pleasurable or painful and our appetite or striving faculty is subsequently drawn to it or repulsed by it, depending on whether we have judged it to be good or bad.12 Aristotle thus describes animal movement as a causal chain of active and passive elements, of actions and passions: the perceived good or pleasurable thing moves the appetite and the appetite, thus moved, subsequently moves the being as a whole.13 This description is based on Aristotle’s general theory of movement as a causal concatenation of actions and passions, developed extensively in his natural philosophy and his physical works.14 In this model, the appetite as a faculty of the soul is always active as 9 For this, see Newmark, Catherine. Passion – Affekt – Gefühl. Philosophische Theorien der Emotionen zwischen Aristoteles und Kant. Hamburg: Meiner, 2008. 10 Aristotle. “On the Soul.” Aristotle. On the Soul. Parva Naturalia. On Breath. Trans. Walter Stanley Hett. Bilingual edition. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 1957. 8–203. II and III. 11 Aquinas, Thomas. Summa theologiae. Ed. Thomas Gilby. Bilingual edition. 61 vols. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Vol. 11. Ia, q. 78, a. 1. 12 Aristotle, “On the Soul,” III, 9, 432 b 26–433 b 27; Aquinas, Summa theologiae, vol. 11, Ia, q. 78, a. 1. 13 Aristotle, “On the Soul,” III, 11, 433 b 10–19, and III, 11, 433 b 31–434 a 7. 14 Aristotle. “On Coming-To-Be and Passing-Away.” Trans. Edward Seymour Forster. Aristotle. On Sophistical Refutations. On Coming-To-Be and Passing-Away. On the Cosmos. Bilingual edition. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 1955. 162–329. I, 6–7; Aristotle. The Physics. Books V–VIII. Trans. Philip H. Wicksteed and Francis M. Cornford. Bilingual edition. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 2006. VIII.

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well as passive: first passive, when it is moved by the perceived good or evil; then active, when it passes this movement on to the body. Thomas Aquinas consequently describes the appetite as “movens motum,” as both moving and moved.15 Considering this theory of movement as a chain of actions and passions, it makes as much sense to call the being moved of the soul and its subsequent moving of the body passion 16 as it does to call it action, the term Aristotle reserves for the will. In effect, Aristotle applies the same model to the intellectual appetite or will; the difference between passion and will, between lower and upper appetitive faculty, is that passions are triggered by sense perception and the accompanying pleasure and pain, whereas the will takes its cue from the intellectual cognition of good and evil. Both the passions and the will, or in Thomistic terminology, the sensitive and the intellectual appetite, have the purpose of moving the body. They constitute motivational drives in reaction to perceived pleasure and pain, good and evil. The passion of fear, for example, can be accounted for in the following way: I perceive something frightening, such as a lion, and this perception is either directly painful or harmful or is judged by me to be bad or nefarious in my sensitive or intellectual judgment. I am thus moved to flee, resist or pursue any of the other options that might present themselves to me. The important point is that the passion is conceptually taken to be a motivational drive, parallel to the will. Passions or sensitive appetites are, so to say, the junior partners of the will or rational appetite, with whom they share the general task of the facultas appetitiva to initiate bodily movements. Without passions we would not move or act – they are thus essential to human life. In this model, the soul is passive toward outward objects, being pulled and pushed around by good and bad things: Our response to good things is to strive toward them and we are repulsed by bad things. Consequently, the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition does not distinguish in any precise way between emotions and instincts: most of the time, a wide variety of phenomena, from instinctive reactions triggered by sudden fright, right up to extremely complex emotions such as remorse or courtly love, are subsumed under the concept of passion.17 15 Aquinas, Summa theologiae, vol. 11, Ia, q. 80, a. 2. 16 Or Greek páthos tês psychês, the Aristotelian term for emotions such as “desire, anger, fear, courage, envy, joy, love, hate, longing, zeal, compassion.” Cf. Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Harris Rackham. Bilingual edition. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 1934. II, 4, 1105 b 21–24. 17 Or, synonymously, affects. There is no systematic difference between passions and affects before Spinoza. In the monumental passion theory developed in his Ethics he takes passion to be a specific type of affect, which he uses as the more general term. Cf. Spinoza, Baruch de. Ethics. Trans. George H. R. Parkinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

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What is usually not well described in this tradition, but rather implicitly taken for granted, is the fact that sense perception is always accompanied by pleasure and pain. The basic philosophical assumption seems to be that sense perception is, with a few possible exceptions such as pure surprise, always either pleasurable or painful; sense perception and pleasure/pain are co-extensive.18 If in our passions we are thought to be passive vis-à-vis an activum, an agent, one that causes us pleasure or pain and thus pushes and pulls around our soul, the question is, what constitutes this activum? Whereas medieval Christian Aristotelians such as Thomas Aquinas seem to presuppose a theological universe in which the soul is automatically drawn toward the good and repulsed by the bad, seventeenth century philosophers such as Hobbes and Spinoza, whose elaborate passion theories can still be said to share the basic concept of the passion as sensitive appetite or striving, agree that what makes the body – and the mind – react positively to pleasure and negatively to pain is the basic fact of our self-preserving (or self-agrandizing) instinct, the conatus. While for Spinoza the conatus is the metaphysically essential appetitive, motive, desiring character of the human soul, Hobbes describes the conatus as the spontaneous bodily reaction to the pain and pleasure that accompany sense perceptions, intended to protect the vital motion of the human body, that is, its basic functions.19 If Aristotle and his successors think of the soul as being more or less pulled and pushed around by good and evil, pleasurable and painful things, they do not however assume that the soul is supposed to remain passive throughout this process. Tragic heroes may be helplessly preyed upon by their passions, but this is not the case of philosophers. The theories make abundantly clear that our better and more rational part is of course not merely a passive victim of passions, but rather capable and called upon to take an active moral stance toward them. Both Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics and Thomas Aquinas in his Summa theologiae propagate a moral of moderation and hold the passions to be controllable by the “higher part,” that is, the will.20 This tradition is clearly not particularly concerned about the question: how do emotions feel. The inner and individual experience of an emotion does not here come into question. Emotions are mainly considered by way of their 18 Modern philosophy no longer holds this assumption; an interesting illustration is provided by modern medicine and the technological possibility of spinal anaesthesia, where the patient feels touch and movement, but not pain, in his or her lower body. 19 Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Ed. Crawford B. Macpherson. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. Ch. 6; Spinoza, Ethics, III, prop. 6. 20 Aquinas, Summa theologiae, vol. 11, Ia, q. 81, a. 3.

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motivational, motive function and with regard to their external causes. They are mainly external rather than internal events. They move the soul and that can be naturally useful, which is why God or nature gave us passions and instincts; often, however, they tend to be harmful. But we can always find ways and means of dealing with that harmfulness and put these sensitive motive functions to good and reasonable use. Passions are thus natural occurrences which nonetheless constitute a moral challenge to the self.

Emotions as impressions on the soul The second model of thought on the emotions, as here discussed, I would like to call the impressive model. What is emphasized in this model is not so much the idea of the outside object – the good and the bad – pulling and pushing the soul around by acting on its appetitive faculty, but rather the question of what happens to the soul itself, what changes occur in it, when these outward objects act upon it. It is thus more about the impressions that are left in the soul than about the appetites unleashed therein and thus constitutes an important step toward the interiorization of the emotions. This model does not necessarily have one long and continuous line of conceptualization as does the Aristotelian appetitus-model. Strictly speaking, it does not necessarily even imply a change in the conception of the passion, since Aristotelian and nonAristotelian philosophies alike agree that appetite cannot be had without sense perception, without an impression on the soul. Sense perception is after all what triggers appetite, at least the sensitive appetite of the passions. In this sense, one could also argue that the shift from the appetitive to the impressive model might well be just a shift of theoretical focus rather than one of conceptualization. The first major modern thinker who can be clearly identified with this model, Descartes, also clearly and explicitly takes his leave from Aristotelian appetitive theory. His treatise on the passions of the soul, Les passions de l’âme, begins by announcing the necessity of a complete philosophical renewal of passion theory: The defectiveness of the sciences we inherit from the ancients is nowhere more apparent than in what they wrote about the Passions. […] For this reason I shall be obliged to write here as though I were treating a topic which no one before me had ever described.21

21 Descartes, René. The Passions of the Soul. Trans. Stephen Voss. Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett, 1989. A. 1.

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Descartes no longer shares the Aristotelian, scholastic concept of the soul. He neither sees in it the shape or form of the body, that which gives the living being its life, nor does he divide it into the parts described above. For Descartes, rather, the soul is defined by its thought and its will, and it is not responsible for the body’s life. The body has a life-principle of its own, namely the heart, which Descartes describes as “a species of fire.” 22 Body and soul are two distinct substances and their evident relationship to each other in the living human being is philosophically difficult to explain for Descartes – a problem that occupies him considerably in his late work and particularly in his treatise on the passions. Briefly, in Descartes’s definition of the passions they are no longer conceived as appetites, that is, as a reaction to sense perception, but instead as a type of sense perception itself: a type which is felt in a particular way inside the soul and whose outside object is often not readily identified. Thus one of the most clear-cut definitions of the passions in the treatise is the following: The perceptions that are referred to the soul alone are those whose effects are felt as in the soul itself, and of which no proximate cause to which they may be referred is commonly known. Such are the sensations of joy, anger, and others like them, which are sometimes excited in us by objects that move our nerves and sometimes also by other causes.23

This definition shows the conceptual shift very clearly: Passions are a type of sense perception whose defining quality is that they leave a particular feeling or impression on the soul itself. Of course this type of sense perception ultimately has some exterior agent that causes it, but as Descartes points out, we remain mostly unaware of it. We do not know the “proximate cause” of the passions, the concrete object that is acting on the soul. Descartes thus firmly shifts the focus from whatever exterior thing is moving our soul to what happens inside the soul, what type of impact this has on our soul, what imprint it leaves. Certainly Descartes’s passion theory has many problems, the major one being, as already mentioned, the inexplicability of the commercium mentis et corporis, the interaction between anything physical and the soul as a totally separate thinking substance. Action and passion in the Aristotelian sense thus become a contradiction in terms: There is no theoretically sound way in which to describe anything physical acting on the soul – at the very best Descartes can describe the physiological process from body to brain, but not beyond that.

22 Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, a. 8. 23 Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, a. 25 (my emphasis).

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Nevertheless, Descartes begins his theory of the passions by defining the passion of the soul as correlating to a bodily action. He argues that, since action and passion are two aspects of the selfsame movement, there must always be an action belonging to the passio animae. And what agent could be closer to the soul than its own body? […] whatever is done or happens afresh is generally called by the Philosophers a Passion with respect to the subject it happens to, and an Action with respect to what makes it happen. Thus, even though the agent and the patient are often quite different, the Action and the Passion are always a single thing […].24

And one paragraph later: Then I also take into consideration that we notice no subject that acts more immediately upon our soul than the body it is joined to, and that consequently we ought to think that what is a Passion in the former is commonly an Action in the latter.25

These passages are particularly interesting, inasmuch as they explicitly refer to “the Philosophers,” which in Descartes’s time means scholastic, that is, Thomistic school-philosophy, indeed Aristotelianism. They seem moreover to be adopting classical scholastic or Aristotelian movement theory – movement is composed of an action and of a passion, the passion of the soul is the result of an external action – while actually completely reinterpreting this movement theory. While in the Aristotelian passion the soul is moved by the good, Descartes’s soul is moved immediately by its own body. We are no longer dealing with a teleological chain of causality, pulling the soul toward the universal good, but rather with an efficient, mechanical one, where the soul reacts directly to the body hitting it, as it were. Descartes goes on to describe the passions as a type of sense perception that not only impacts the body but also causes it to react independently, leaving the soul relatively untouched. Descartes’s efforts to explain the passion of the soul in purely physiological terms are of course due to his dualism and his interest in depicting the soul of his rational subject as independent from outer influences. At most the soul can be said to feel the impressions of sense perceptions and passions, but Descartes does not want to describe the soul as being pulled and pushed around by external objects. This is of course all theoretically quite aporetic, but I will not go into the details of the Cartesian dualism. Here it must suffice to note that Descartes avoids as much as possible attributing any sense-based striving to the soul, which would imply a depend24 Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, a. 1. 25 Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, a. 2.

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ence of our actions on external influences; instead, he emphasizes the fact that the soul receives impressions from the outside. The Cartesian soul thus has much more of an inside than the Aristotelian one does, and passions – where they are not relegated entirely to the body – are considered in view of the impressions they leave on the soul, and not in view of the movements they induce in it. There are a number of other early modern thinkers who follow Descartes in accentuating the impressive part of the passions and conceptualizing them as sense perceptions, even though most of his contemporaries and most postCartesian thinkers go back to some sort of Aristotelian model and describe passions as appetites. The English philosopher John Locke, father of modern empiricism, is an interesting case: He does employ a vaguely Aristotelian appetite-model, but he also insists very strongly on the definition of passions as sense perceptions. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, he treats passions as modes of pleasure and pain and as a part of his general theory of knowledge.26 Passions for Locke are simple ideas and thus something in the cognitive realm.27 Pleasure and pain incite us to actions and are thus motive or appetitive in nature – but they are themselves mainly described as impressions on the soul.

Emotion as a faculty Finally, I would like to briefly discuss a third model of what and where emotions can be thought to be, the most completely interiorized conception, namely the idea of them being a faculty of the soul itself, a basic power and ability within us. This is what we find precisely conceptualized in Kant’s work and also but less completely with many thinkers and writers from the end of the eighteenth century onward. I would also argue that it is this same model that still underlies many contemporary understandings of what feelings or emotions are. This model is based on a new partition of the soul. Most early modern philosophers take the soul to have two principal faculties, namely cognition (intellectual and sensitive) and appetite (intellectual and sensitive, that is, will and emotions); the lower Aristotelian powers such as vegetative and motive faculty having never quite recovered from the blow Descartes dealt them. Kant 26 Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Peter H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. II, ch. 20. 27 Locke, An Essay, II, ch. 1, § 3–4.

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introduces a tripartition of the soul and a new faculty, the feeling of pleasure and pain (das Gefühl der Lust und Unlust), as an intermediate faculty between cognition (Erkenntnisvermögen) and appetition (Begehrungsvermögen).28 This new faculty marks precisely the point that was a bit fuzzy in older emotion theories: the assumption that sense perception is always accompanied by pleasure and pain. This implies that sense perception has an evaluative character. On a basic or instinctive level this evaluative character of sense perception is useful for survival; it helps human beings as well as other animals to instinctively and appropriately react to whatever befalls them, to seek pleasure and to avoid pain. It is an idea that is proffered in most classical passion theories throughout the ages and illustrated not only by the example of instincts but also by such reactive passions as fear or fright. Taken on a somewhat higher level, this can be understood not just as a survival instrument but as a sort of sensual morality, a sense-based knowledge of good and evil – an idea that underlies the whole English moral sense philosophy from Shaftesbury and Hutcheson to Hume.29 Kant’s feeling of pleasure and pain draws on this tradition as well as deriving from continental rationalism, where we find a gradual merging of sense perception and passion (or appetite) from the seventeenth century onwards. Spinoza conceptualizes both sense perceptions and passions as ideae confusae; 30 Leibniz and Wolff distinguish between perceptio and passio (or rather its underlying faculty appetitus or conatus), but link them inseparably together by considering the appetitus as inherent in every perception: “In each present perception there is present a drive/appetite/striving to change the perception.” 31 Wolff and his follower Baumgarten, on whose works Kant draws extensively, call passions or affects “marked degrees of pleasure or pain.” 32 Kant’s feeling of pleasure and pain has quite recognizable affinities with these conceptions and in some ways still corresponds to an impressive model, with the passions as sense perceptions of pleasure and pain. But for Kant, 28 Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Ed. Paul Guyer. Trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. “Introduction,” 59–83. 29 Oksenberg Rorty, Amélie. “From Passions to Emotions and Sentiments.” Philosophy. The Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy 57.220 (1982): 159–172; Schrader, Wolfgang H. Ethik und Anthropologie in der englischen Aufklärung. Der Wandel der moral-sense-Theorie von Shaftesbury bis Hume. Hamburg: Meiner, 1984. 30 Spinoza, Ethics, III, “General Definition of the Emotions.” 31 Wolff, Christian. Psychologia rationalis. Ed. Jean École. Hildesheim: Olms, 1994. § 480 (my translation). 32 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb. Reflections on Poetry. / Mediationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema petinentibus. Trans. Karl Aschenbrenner and William B. Holther. Bilingual edition. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1954. § 25 (my emphasis).

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unlike his rationalist predecessors, pleasure and pain are not ideas but rather feelings – a new term coined to describe this third thing that is neither exactly an impression or sense perception nor an appetite. Now obviously Kant’s feeling of pleasure and pain and the faculty of judgment (Urteilskraft) that is attached to it are larger theoretical entities and not exclusively concerned with emotions in the narrow sense; they are, however, also the basic concept for emotions. Kant is of course not exactly a passionate passion theorist, and emotions as such are hardly a major concern in his transcendental philosophy that defines itself precisely by not dealing with empirical phenomena. Kant does however treat empirical psychology at least in his minor works, such as the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. In this work, Kant actually gives an account not only of the faculty of feeling in an empirical sense, but also elaborates an emotion theory. He distinguishes between affects, belonging to the faculty of feeling, and passions, belonging to the appetitive faculty (Begehrungsvermögen).33 The latter are morally problematic inclinations, engrained in the subject and resisting reason. Kant names love, hate, desire for vengeance, ambition, thirst for domination, and sexual desire, among others.34 He considers them highly problematic because they usurp the place of the rational will – just like the classical passions, the lower appetitive faculty that is always in danger of usurping the place of the higher, the will. However, all other emotions are counted as affects and thus as instances of feeling, of the basic sensual evaluative faculty of the soul. Now for Kant, just as for his rationalist predecessors, intellectual things are better than sensual things, but a major point of his philosophy is the acceptance of both the sensual and the intellectual as equally necessary. Joy, sadness, hope, fear, and many other emotions which Kant considers to be affects thus become expressions of a basic sensitive ability, the ability to feel.35 Moreover, with feeling as a faculty of the soul, affects or emotions do not only exist as sporadic occurrences, but are omnipresent. Kant’s new third power of the soul encompasses not only the actual feeling of emotions, but also the potential to feel things.

33 Kant, Immanuel. “Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View.” Trans. Robert B. Louden. Immanuel Kant. Anthropology, History, and Education. Ed. Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 227–429, here 251 (§ 73); Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 272 (§ 29); Kant, Immanuel. The Metaphysics of Morals. Ed. and trans. Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. “Introduction to the Doctrine of Virtue,” XVI. 34 Kant, “Anthropology,” 266–274 (§§ 80–85). 35 Kant, “Anthropology,” 254–261 (§§ 76–79).

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Emotions or feelings understood this way become a much more essential part of a person’s inner life. They are no longer mainly considered in view of the outward active agent producing them and in light of their motivational function and consequent moral dangerousness, nor are they merely the byproduct of sense perception that leaves an impression in us with hopefully no further consequences for the morality of our rational soul. Rather, they become one of the fundaments of how we encounter the world – movements such as the sensibility (Empfindsamkeit) of the latter eighteenth century rely exactly on this sort of basic emotionality of the human being. The shift in emotion theory toward inwardness implies a shift from a concern for action theory and morals to an interest in what things feel like. Post-Kantian theories of feeling, where feeling is a subjective faculty, tend to take emotions as authentic expressions of the self and not as moral problems. Kant himself only sees a small class of emotions – the passions or Leidenschaften – as morally condemnable; similarly, contemporary thinking on emotions takes them by and large to be expressions of personality, and only a small number of them, such as aggression or uncontrolled anger, are considered morally problematic. *** In conclusion, the schematic picture of the conceptual developments toward interiorization in emotion theory that I have drawn here is certainly open to criticism. One could argue that between the three models that I have analytically distinguished – from external objects pulling and pushing the soul around to the idea of passions as impressions on the soul to, finally, a model of feelings as a basic subjective faculty of the soul – there are, at the most, differences of focus, since the phenomenon described – emotion – remains the same. Aristotle’s appetite also presupposes impressions on the soul; Descartes’s impressions also are related to reactions and thus to motivational drives, and Kant’s faculty of feeling includes both appetitive and impressive elements. While I would not deny that this is the case, in my rough sketch of these three models I take the shifts in the focus of emotion theory to be relevant to the understanding of what emotions are. The different ways of accounting for the relationship between elements external and internal to the soul can be seen as different ways of dealing with the age old puzzle of how emotions are always felt to be very intimate, personal, and inner states and at the same time are quite obviously dependent on things external to and independent from us. The question that this raises, namely, how to deal with the interface between self and world, has occupied philosophers for millennia and remains today as much as ever a moral problem in the classical sense of the word: a problem of self-care or ethics of the self.

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Bibliography Aquinas, Thomas. Summa theologiae. Ed. Thomas Gilby. Bilingual edition. 61 vols. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Harris Rackham. Bilingual edition. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 1934. Aristotle. “On Coming-To-Be and Passing-Away.” Trans. Edward Seymour Forster. Aristotle. On Sophistical Refutations. On Coming-To-Be and Passing-Away. On the Cosmos. Bilingual edition. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 1955. 162–329. Aristotle. “On the Soul.” Aristotle. On the Soul. Parva Naturalia. On Breath. Trans. Walter Stanley Hett. Bilingual edition. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 1957. 8–203. Aristotle. The Physics. Books V–VIII. Trans. Philip H. Wicksteed and Francis M. Cornford. Bilingual edition. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 2006. Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb. Reflections on Poetry. / Mediationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema petinentibus. Trans. Karl Aschenbrenner and William B. Holther. Bilingual edition. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1954. Descartes, René. The Passions of the Soul. Trans. Stephen Voss. Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett, 1989. Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners, and State Formation and Civilization. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Oxford, Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Ed. Crawford B. Macpherson. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. James, Susan. Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Kant, Immanuel. The Metaphysics of Morals. Ed. and trans. Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Ed. Paul Guyer. Trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kant, Immanuel. “Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View.” Trans. Robert B. Louden. Immanuel Kant. Anthropology, History, and Education. Ed. Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 227–429. Kessel, Martina. Langeweile. Zum Umgang mit Zeit und Gefühlen in Deutschland vom späten 18. bis zum frühen 20. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Peter H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Newmark, Catherine. Passion – Affekt – Gefühl. Philosophische Theorien der Emotionen zwischen Aristoteles und Kant. Hamburg: Meiner, 2008. Offenbach, Jacques. La belle Hélène. Opéra bouffe en trois actes. Libretto Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy. Paris: Michel Lévy, 1868. Oksenberg Rorty, Amélie. “From Passions to Emotions and Sentiments.” Philosophy. The Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy 57.220 (1982): 159–172. Racine, Jean. “Phaedra.” Jean Racine. Iphigenia. Phaedra. Athaliah. Trans. John Cairncross. London: Penguin, 2004. 148–214. Schmitz, Hermann. Leib und Gefühl. Materialien zu einer philosophischen Therapeutik. Ed. Hermann Gausebeck and Gerhard Risch. Paderborn: Junfermann, 1992. Schmitz, Hermann. Der Leib, der Raum und die Gefühle. Ostfildern: Terium, 1998. Schrader, Wolfgang H. Ethik und Anthropologie in der englischen Aufklärung. Der Wandel der moral-sense-Theorie von Shaftesbury bis Hume. Hamburg: Meiner, 1984.

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Spinoza, Baruch de. Ethics. Trans. George H. R. Parkinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Wolff, Christian. Psychologia rationalis. Ed. Jean École. Hildesheim: Olms, 1994.

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Presenting the Affect The Scene of Pathos in Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Its Revision in Descartes’s Passions of the Soul

From the continuous world of affects to the genesis of passion It is not an accident that the earliest systematic interpretation of affects that has come down to us is not treated in the framework of ‘psychology.’ Aristotle investigates the pathe (affects) in the second book of his Rhetoric. Contrary to the traditional orientation, according to which rhetoric is conceived as the kind of thing we ‘learn in school,’ this work of Aristotle must be taken as the first systematic hermeneutic of the everydayness of Being with one another.1

With this passage, Heidegger introduces his momentous remarks on the affects and his own counter-concept of mood (Stimmung) in Being and Time. The reference to pathe is the only witness left in Being and Time of the intense preoccupation with Rhetoric in Heidegger’s course on Aristotle’s ‘basic concepts,’ a course that precedes and prepares the way for Being and Time in many important ways.2 In his lectures, Heidegger concentrates precisely on concepts characteristic of rhetoric such as doxa (opinion), hexis (habit), and persuasion. All of these rhetorical themes disappeared, however, from the surface of Being and Time and the fundamental hermeneutics of being-with-others worked out in the book.3 From the Aristotelian Rhetoric, only the pathe or affects, or so it seems, lend themselves to reinterpretation in fundamental hermeneutics. This may be so precisely because the section on pathe discusses a problem of psychology outside of the psychological discourse; and, at the same time, it seems to remind the reader less than anything else in Rhetoric of the lessons ‘we learn at school.’ From Heidegger’s perspective, Aristotle’s discussion of pathe

1 Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper Collins, 1962. I, ch. 5, 178. 2 Heidegger, Martin. Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy. Trans. Robert D. Metcalf and Mark B. Tanzer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. I, ch. 3, 71–179. 3 Kisiel, Theodore J. The Genesis of Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time.’ Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. 286–308; Gross, Daniel M. “Introduction: The Pathos of Heidegger’s Rhetorical Ontology.” Heidegger and Rhetoric. Ed. Daniel M. Gross and Ansgar Kemmann. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. 1–45.

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in his Rhetoric is rhetorical beyond the old fashioned didactics of the school and the artes of the trivium; and it is psychological before the advent of modern, scientific, psychology. What is the potential of the discourse on affects in Rhetoric that qualifies it to be more fundamental than traditional – metaphysical – philosophy in the guise of a doctrine for school children? The approach employed in this contribution is motivated by the same particularities of tradition Heidegger was puzzling over. But it takes another route to grasp the specificity of the discourse on pathe. Not only the earliest existent interpretation of affects, book II of ‘the Philosopher’s’ Rhetoric was also to be authoritative for centuries to come. In it, Aristotle teaches students of oratory the lesson of the emotions which the orator is to rouse in the judges or the audience in general. Nothing comparable is developed in De anima, Aristotle’s psychological treatise, or in his writings on ethics. In the latter contexts the reader encounters only short general notes: how do affects differ from sensation and thinking; and how do virtues rein them in, whereas unrestraint lets them have their ways? 4 Only in book II of Rhetoric does Aristotle present pathe in all of their differences and specificities. Only here we learn about the unfurling of pathos in space and time and about the many differences between its various forms. It is, admittedly, not entirely clear what purpose this is meant to serve: does the section on pathe in Rhetoric deal with the topoi, that is, forms of argumentation or even structures of verbal phrases, by which the orator would rouse those emotions? Or does Aristotle speak in this lecture rather as a systematic philosopher, establishing the grounds for rhetoric in the human psyche in the first place? We certainly hear Aristotle specifying who loves whom for a number of reasons or what kind of people hate each other under which sorts of circumstances; in short, we follow the definition of emotions and the listing of their species from anger to calmness and many other pairs of contrarious affects up to envy and emulation. And yet, it remains an open question whether all these definitions and explications are schemata the orator would use for persuasion, or whether this is what Aristotle has to say about the nature of man. And is there even a difference between the two possible readings, or is it intrinsic to the nature of affects that they are what people feel they are? Heidegger, it seems, argues implicitly 4 In De anima, affects are mentioned in the broader context of the theory of movement and in contradistinction to intellection and sensation (Aristotle. De anima. Ed. and trans. Robert D. Hicks. Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1965. I, 1, 403 a 5–7, or I, 4, 408 b 1–4). In Nicomachean Ethics, pathe are at issue in the context of virtue and restraint of pathe (Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Harris Rackham. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 1934. II, 5, 1105 b 20– 26).

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for the latter option. Only under this assumption is the section on affects in Rhetoric as detached from psychology and ethics – the objectifying, ‘scientific,’ and ‘practical’ forms of discussion – as Heidegger silently presupposes when singling out book II of Rhetoric on the pathe. Even if we do not follow Heidegger’s intention of reading pathe in the Rhetoric as preparing his own notion of Stimmung, the specificity of the discourse on the affects in Aristotle’s work on rhetoric stands out. It is helpful to recall here the famous essays by Wilhelm Dilthey on the origin of ‘anthropology’ or a systematic thinking of man’s nature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, essays which certainly helped inform Heidegger’s reading of Rhetoric in Being and Time.5 In these writings, Dilthey – Heidegger’s precursor in hermeneutics, although a hermeneutics of ‘life’ instead of the ‘everyday’ – shows that all the wealth and, indeed, the outpouring of writings on the anima humana or mores hominum and the commentaries on the soul from Melanchthon and Vives to Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza was nothing but the unfurling and amplification of Aristotle’s section on the affects in Rhetoric.6 Thereby, as Dilthey would have it, the various rereadings of book II of Rhetoric since the Renaissance were the first manifestation of an extensive, detailed knowledge of man in the empirical forms of his life – a field which, between Dilthey and Heidegger, would be called ‘philosophical anthropology.’ In other words, the relevance of book II of Aristotle’s Rhetoric and its further impact particularly since the Renaissance treatises on ‘human passions’ lies first of all in the phenomenality of the material (what is anger? what is calmness? what is love?); it is much less bound up with the theories, psychological or ethical, that underpin and explicate such phenomena of emotion.7

5 Dilthey, Wilhelm. “Die Funktion der Anthropologie in der Kultur des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts.” Wilhelm Dilthey. Weltanschauung und Analyse des Menschen seit Renaissance und Reformation. Gesammelte Schriften. Stuttgart, Göttingen: Teubner, 1960. Vol. 2. 416–492. 6 Melanchthon, Philipp. “De anima.” Philipp Melanchthon. Corpus reformatorum. Ed. Carl Gottlieb Bretschneider. Halle: Schwetschke, 1846. Vol. 13. 5–178; Vives, Juan Luis. The Passions of the Soul: The Third Book of ‘De anima et vita.’ Trans. Carlos G. Noreña. Lewiston, Queenston: Edwin Mellon Press, 1990; Descartes, René. The Passions of the Soul. Trans. Stephen Voss. Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett, 1989; Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Ed. Richard E. Flatham and David Johnston. New York, London: Norton, 1997; Spinoza, Baruch de. Ethics. Trans. George H. R. Parkinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. III. 7 The treatise on emotions in Aquinas’s Summa theologiae precedes the Renaissance tracts, and in particular Descartes’s Passions of the Soul, importantly in combining the phenomenological and narrative presentation of individual affects from the rhetorical tradition with the philosophical theory of pathe: Aquinas, Thomas. Summa theologiae. Ed. Thomas Gilby. Bilingual edition. 61 vols. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Vols. 19–21. Ia.2ae, qq. 22–48. Cf. Newmark, Catherine. Passion – Affekt – Gefühl. Philosophische Theorien

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The at least partial autonomy of the phenomena of affects in their singular occurrence – an autonomy vis-à-vis models of explanation and psychological or ethical teachings – is intimately connected with the mode in which the affects are presented in Aristotle’s Rhetoric. As will be demonstrated in the second section of this paper in more detail, in Aristotle affects are identified in scenes of interaction taking place in specific situations. Anger or calmness, love or hate are circumscribed through scenes of action and reaction, which occur under particular circumstances. Whatever such presentation has been meant to provide in Aristotle and his successors in rhetoric and poetics – schemata of persuasive argumentation to be used by the orators or views shared by orator and audience about what underlies the process of persuasion or both –, the description in Aristotle shows affects in a continuous world of action and reaction instead of a world marked by interior mental or psychic experience and exterior forms of expression. If this interpretation holds, then the turn to a modern experience of affectivity, and that means to an experience of affects characterized by the dichotomy of interior and exterior, occurs again not so much on the level of psychological or ethical theory but through a new mode of presenting affectivity. The example for this discussion in the present paper is Descartes’s Passions of the Soul. A treatise that clearly inherits and continues the tradition of the pathe in the vein of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Descartes’s Passions of the Soul – this is the argument offered in the third section of this contribution – revises the traditional presentation through a narrative account of passion’s genesis. With Descartes, the true identity of the passion is no longer the phenomenality of a scene of action and reaction but a story told about a hidden motive underlying such an external scene. Interiority in the psychological sense is then only a result of the fact that the way in which the passion unfolds is the external phenomenality of something interior whose manifestation passion is. This change on the level of presentation – from the scene in a continuous world of action and reaction to the story about the genesis of passion – is connected to contemporary physiological theories and new models for soul and body and their mutual intercourse. But the more fundamental change highlighted here lies, again, in the presentation of passions rather than in any theoretical models explaining them. As compared with the one, continuous, world in which scenes of affects unfold, a fundamental change intervenes in Descartes’s exemplary story of the genesis of passion. In the Cartesian story, the unfolding of the passion proper is doubled by the account of its hidden origin.

der Emotionen zwischen Aristoteles und Kant. Hamburg: Meiner, 2008. 85; Levi, Anthony. French Moralists: The Theory of the Passions, 1585–1649. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964. 21–35.

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When concentrating on book II from Aristotle’s Rhetoric, as rhetoric beyond rhetoric and psychology before psychology, Heidegger, too, did not polemicize against specific psychological theories but rather against a basic mode of framing affectivity, a mode which since Edmund Husserl’s critique of Wilhelm Wundt has been called ‘psychologization.’ And he turns to Rhetoric for help not as to some particular theoretical view on affectivity but rather an attitude of questioning for the world of affectivity. What in this paper is studied as two paradigmatic forms of presenting affectivity takes as its point of departure the same concentration on the material appearance of affects that informs Heidegger. Obviously, the argument presented here follows different routes of questioning, and it employs another strategy of investigation. In doing so, an attempt is nonetheless made to study the development on the structural level indicated by Heidegger. As he writes in Being and Time, Publicness, as the kind of Being which belongs to the “they” […], not only has in general its own way of having a mood, but needs moods and ‘makes’ them for itself. It is into such a mood and out of such a mood that the orator speaks. He must understand the possibilities of moods in order to rouse them and guide them aright.8

The everyday, in other words, is the sender and the addressee of emotion as mood; it is both what needs mood and what ‘makes’ it. Mood (Stimmung, which in German also means ‘tuning’) is what attunes sender to addressee, or the making of affection in myself to the way it communicates with others. The sphere of such tuning is, to use Heidegger’s word, everyday’s ‘publicness.’ This may, but does not need to, mean ‘public’ in the social sense of the public sphere. More importantly, it means being public (öffentlich) as opened up (offen, geöffnet) through the sender and addressee’s tuning to-the-other or, even more radically, a tuning-to-the-other that precedes and grounds the roles of sender and receiver. In this sense, both the scenes of the unfurling of affects in the world and, to the same degree, the story of the genesis of passion in the individual define modes of attunement or ‘publicness.’ But they do so in different, even contradictory ways: in the continuous world of the scenes of affects, access is granted to the construction site of such ‘publicness,’ whereas the story of the genesis of passions precisely forecloses it. This ultimately means that studying the modes of speaking about and displaying the phenomena of affectivity is meant to develop a more structural understanding of what has been termed ‘interiorization.’ In the volume Politics and the Passions, 1500–1800, the editors Victoria Kahn et al. point toward a certain interiorization of emotion that, according to them, occurred through 8 Heidegger, Being and Time, 178.

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political and social changes in early modern culture.9 With Norbert Elias, they insist that late medieval and early modern court culture introduced an intensified sublimation of emotion. With Albert Hirschman, they argue that emotionality at large was redefined in terms of individual, economic interest beginning in the seventeenth century. Finally, citing Max Horkheimer they make the point that the bourgeois’s interest in self-preservation centered on emotion within the individual. None of these arguments seems at first sight to have a bearing on Heidegger’s ‘publicness’ of affects. With regard to Elias’s process of civilization, it may however be suggested that the culture of sublimation intensifies individuals’ attuning to each other by radically changing the method. Instead of maintaining a continuous sphere of attunement in which people can be observed to act, monadic entities are constructed in such a way as to be attuned to each other as if in pre-established harmony. Hirschman’s argument about the reorganization of emotion through economic interest points in both directions: again a process of even stronger attuning of individuals with each other, interest can also be seen as an attitude that has individuals return to themselves. Horkheimer’s self-preservation finally seems the strongest point: if we understand self-preservation not only as another (economically and politically defined) source of emotion, but as another economy and politics of shaping emotion, then we may here have an effective force operating on the level of Heidegger’s publicness of affect. In any case, however, any such argument leads back to asking how attunement has been conceptualized in Aristotle and revised, for example, by Descartes in the first place. Without answers to these questions, any conceptualization of an interiorization of emotion can only be metaphorical.10

9 Kahn, Victoria, and Neil Saccamano. “Introduction.” Politics and the Passions, 1500–1800. Ed. Victoria Kahn et al. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 1–5. 10 For recent historical accounts on the history of passion and affects, see in particular: Reddy, William M. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001; Gross, Daniel M. Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle to Modern Brain Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007; Newmark, Passion – Affekt – Gefühl; Perler, Dominik. Transformationen der Gefühle: Philosophische Emotionstheorien 1270–1670. Frankfurt: Fischer, 2011.

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Three dimensional scenes: affects in Aristotle’s Rhetoric This is how Aristotle presents anger (orge), the first from his list of pathe:11 Let us […] define anger as a longing, accompanied by pain, for a real or apparent revenge for a real or apparent slight, affecting a man himself or one of his friends, when such a slight is undeserved. If this definition is correct, the angry man must always be angry with a particular individual (for instance, with Cleon, but not with men generally), and because this individual has done, or was on the point of doing, something against him or one of his friends; and lastly, anger is always accompanied by a certain pleasure, due to the hope of revenge to come. For it is pleasant to think that one will obtain what one aims at; now, no one aims at what is obviously impossible of attainment by him, and the angry man aims at what is possible for himself. Wherefore it has been said well of anger, that ‘Far sweeter than dripping honey down the throat it spreads in men’s hearts.’ [Iliad, 18, 109] for it is accompanied by a certain pleasure, for this reason first, and also because men dwell upon the thought of revenge, and the vision that rises before us produces the same pleasure as one seen in dreams.12

From this, the response to the question ti estin (what is it?) regarding anger develops into two further passages, each of them just as long as the beginning one. The first of these following passages gives a detailed account about the ti estin of oliguria (slighting). Anger, Aristotle explains, is a longing for or an anticipation of revenge, and revenge, for its part, is directed toward acts of slighting, real or imaginary. In this context, the philosopher deals with various species of insults, such as disdain, spitefulness, and slander, and their specific circumstances. The third and last passage devoted to anger then goes on to characterize those who are in the position to slight others: what is their rank and place in life and what is their relation to those they can affect with insult? 13 Certainly, anger is the first passion discussed. And yet, the definition responding to the question ‘what is it?’ is only slightly more extensive than the definitions of the following passions but not more convoluted or more loosely structured. In the way it engenders material and arranges it in ever larger circles around the nucleus of anger, orge is rather typical of what is to

11 Fortenbaugh, William W. Aristotle on Emotion: A Contribution to Philosophical Psychology, Rhetoric, Poetics, Politics and Ethics. London: Duckworth, 1975; Sokolon, Marlene K. Political Emotions: Aristotle and the Symphony of Reason and Emotion. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006. 12 Aristotle. The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric. Trans. John Henry Freese. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 2006. II, 2, 1378 a 31–b 9. 13 Aristotle, Rhetoric, II, 2, 1378 a 31–1380 a 4.

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follow. First, anger unfolds into further nested affects, such as longing with pain and anticipation characterized by the pleasure of revenge to come. While anger’s components, longing and anticipation, produce veritable clusters of imaginative ideas – ideas represented in a dream and illustrated by a line from the Iliad – the kernel of this imaginary of anger is revenge. Revenge, for its part, is based on what the vengeance must requite: the insult. And from the description of the insult, finally, there ramifies a whole array of social relations; a world of differences in rank and power emerges that defines conditions of superiority or humiliation. The insult, as the final moment of crystallization for the imaginary of anger, constructs the social as a fabric of higher and lower positions, more and less power, pride and shame, hubris and humiliation. “[S]pitefulness,” Aristotle for instance writes, “consists in placing obstacles in the way of another’s wishes, not in order that any advantage may accrue to him who spites, but to prevent any accruing to the other.” 14 Or he notes, “The cause of the pleasure felt by those who insult is the idea that, in ill-treating others, they are more fully showing superiority. That is why the young and the wealthy are given to insults.” 15 While reading such formulations concerning the pathe, with their delicate fabric of imagination and dreamlike fantasy on the one hand and the intricacies of distinction in rank and power on the other, it is hard not to feel transported into a world like the one in Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (maybe jealousy would have to be substituted for the pleasures of insult). What seems to be a dry listing and abstract enumeration at first sight – the work of the ti estin, of defining the nature of emotions – constitutes, read in a slightly different and closer manner, the schema for a Proustian novel about the Greek polis. The result is an ‘everyday,’ to speak with Heidegger, of social values and positions, the superior or inferior of power and rank, and the joy or the suffering of experiencing distinction in a competitive or even agonistic world. This proliferating nature of difference engendering ever further differences is the first and most intuitive mark of what is here proposed to be called ‘scenes of emotions.’ How is this continuous world of scenes, the distinctions they are derived from and the distinctions they produce, brought about? Aristotle offers two definitions of pathos. The first concerns its nature in general and how pathos is related to distinction. “The emotions are all those affections which cause men to undergo change and to differ with regard to their judgments, and which are accompanied by pleasure and pain.” 16 The changes undergone and 14 Aristotle, Rhetoric, II, 2, 1378 b 16–18. 15 Aristotle, Rhetoric, II, 2, 1378 b 27–28. 16 Aristotle, Rhetoric, II, 1, 1378 a 20–22.

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the pleasure or pain experienced constitute the physical and mental sides of the process which is the affect; the process of changes in the humoral composition of the body and the process of changes felt in the anima sensitiva. Affects are characterized by distinction and difference in the core of their phenomenal nature. The point of view is, however, not so much the distinction between this or that affect but rather how being affected is related to difference. Emotions are in fact characterized by distinction and difference in the core of their phenomenality, with respect to judgment (diaferusi pros tas kriseis: they differ with respect to judgments). Pathe do not so much bring about different judgments; rather, they make themselves felt in the way ‘men are different or distinct from each other with regard to judgment.’ This general point about difference in judgment can be understood more precisely by returning to the beginning of book I of Rhetoric. In the introduction to his Rhetoric, Aristotle explains that, ideally, judges would make their judgments solely on the basis of the law. Laws would thus apply to singular cases by the sole intermediary of the judges. But judges act, significantly, under non-ideal circumstances. They lack time; they are under pressure; and they do not have all the necessary information at hand.17 Emotion, in this light, is the name for a judgment that occurs too hastily and under conditions of deficiency in preparation, information, and deliberation. This is why Aristotle calls emotion ‘another judgment.’ Not only does one judge make different judgments from the other. But that is so because, on a deeper level, the act of judgment differs from what would be the result of the self-applying law. Emotions are thus categorically judges’ judgments, that is, they are acts that are fundamentally prone to difference. Since the emotions to be stirred up by the orator in book II are paradigmatically those of judges, it seems justifiable and even advisable to read Aristotle’s definition of pathos in book II (diaferusi pros tas kriseis) in light of the general introduction to book I. But how is it, then, that the intrinsic difference in judgment that is emotion manifests itself in the fact that there are different emotions that can be enumerated in a list? How does the difference in the judgment, which is affect, relate to the listing of different pathe, which constitute the traditional knowledge about the phenomenology of man since Aristotle’s Rhetoric? In this context, Aristotle uses a second formula for defining the affect. After having given some examples for the ‘differences with regard to judgment,’ such as “anger, pity, fear, and all similar emotions,” he continues: “And

17 Niehues-Pröbsting, Heinrich. Überredung zur Einsicht. Der Zusammenhang von Philosophie und Rhetorik bei Platon und in der Phänomenologie. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1987.

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each of them must be divided under three heads: for instance, in regard to anger, the disposition of mind which makes men angry, the persons with whom they are usually angry, and the occasions that give rise to anger.” 18 This tripartite formula is to develop the different judgment or emotion into the enumeration of the single different emotions. They manifest their difference from each other and their identity in themselves by answering to these three questions: what is the state of mind of the one who is angry (pôs diakeimenos); who are those he is angry with (tisi); and, finally, what is the context, the situation, and the circumstance in which one is angry with such others (epi poiois). This formula exhibits that understanding the difference and, hence, the identity of emotion obviously implies a certain theatricality. In contradistinction to our modern views, the ‘state of mind’ of the one who, for example, is angry is only an element within the complex structure that is the affect. The soul (or, in modern terms, the ‘consciousness’) of the one who is affected is neither where the identity of the affect is formed nor where the process of affection takes place in its entirety. The affect is rather the relation between one person’s position in a complex situation and others who are the objects of an action intended (the revenge) or, respectively, of another action preceding the action intended (the slighting). The Aristotelian pathos is identified, finally, only on the level of the circumstances or the situation that define the relation between various actors (for instance, the relation between the superior and the less powerful, the more and the less wealthy man, etc.). According to this description, affect is not a matter of ‘consciousness’ but a scene to perform or a situation to narrate. It is the schema for unfolding a continuous world of perceived differences and distinctions, the imaginary world of the social as has become apparent with the definition of anger. The result so far can well be redescribed in terms of Heidegger’s notion of mood – Stimmung (mood proper) – and attunement: pathos, we may say, is the tuning or attunement of the one with the other; the Stimmung (tuning) which precedes my mood and your mood (meine or deine Stimmung) or, in other words, the Stimmung of Stimmung (the mutual tuning of individual states of mood). The question remains how this second definition of pathos (the nature of affects as scenes marked off in their difference from other scenes by the tripartite formula ‘who loves whom for what reason’) might be linked to the first definition (the affect being difference in judgment). Only in that case would both definitions fully join the first description of pathoi as scenes (the proliferation of phenomenal material of affectivity producing a social world based on differences in rank and power). In other words, the question that poses itself 18 Aristotle, Rhetoric, II, 1, 1378 a 22–26.

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is this: where is the tripartite formula derived from, and why is it that it can function as opening up the structure of the everyday and its many scenes and situations? Here, the current investigation definitely departs from Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle’s Rhetoric and his concept of Stimmung. At issue is an observation with regard to Aristotle’s treatise that has not yet particularly preoccupied readers’ attention: in fact, the tripartite formula of the scene of emotion already appeared before the one in the exposition of the pathe in book II. This first appearance of the formula comes in book I, chapters 10 and 11. In these chapters, Aristotle discusses the syllogisms – the deductive conclusions – of accusation at court; in other words, he deals with the logical forms of arguing for wrongdoers’ guilt and their acting unjustly (adikein). We have next to speak of the number and quality of the propositions of which those syllogisms are constructed which have for their object accusation and defence. Three things have to be considered; first, the nature and the number of the motives which lead men to act unjustly [tinôn kai posôn heneka: a formula corresponding to epi poiois, under which circumstance, because of what in the definition of pathos]; secondly, what is the state of mind of those who so act [pôs diakeimenoi: this is exactly the same wording as in the formula concerning emotions]; thirdly the character and disposition of those who are exposed to injustice [a somewhat extended rendering of the position of the others toward whom the action is directed].19

The grammar of emotion – the tripartite formula of who is angry with whom because of what – is modeled after the accusation of adikein, acting in a way that can be qualified as unjust. The argumentation about a certain deed that renders it a possible wrongdoing and constitutes a case for the law prepares the structure for the emotion the orator is to rouse with those who are judging over such deeds. The tripartite structure that opens up the differences between the scenes of affects (which play out at court between orator and judges) is shaped by the same tripartite structure which is introduced in transforming the world of actions occurring between people into cases that can be brought before the court (thereby becoming an object for a judge’s judgment). Preparing the account of the wrongdoing for the judgment of the law thus corresponds to the different scenes of emotion that come into play at court. It is the moment of accusation that opens up the everyday where scenes of emotions can take place. This is not to say that the section on the arguments about adikein, the accusation of committing criminal deeds, proceeds in the same manner as book II does with regard to emotions. On the contrary, both passages follow opposed strategies. Whereas the passage on emotions uses the tripartite for19 Aristotle, Rhetoric, I, 10, 1368 b 1–6.

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mula for structuring scenes (scenes of anger, pity, fear, and love), the passage on the argument over wrongdoing and accusation instead uses the formula in order to generate scenes (scenes, in this case, of committing an act of injustice for the sake of advancing one’s own pleasure). But in a surprising turn, both types of scenes seem to converge at one point. This is the case of revenge. The passage about revenge as the circumstance or the ‘because of what’ of wrongdoing (book I) is almost already about revenge in the definition of the emotion of anger (book II): And revenge is pleasant; for if it is painful to be unsuccessful, it is pleasant to succeed. Now, those who are resentful are pained beyond measure when they fail to secure revenge, while the hope of it delights them. Victory is pleasant, not only to those who love to conquer, but to all; for there is produced an idea of superiority, which all with more or less eagerness desire. And since victory is pleasant, competitive and disputatious amusements must be so too, for victories are often gained in them.20

And indeed, after games and sports are discussed as manifestations of the quest for revenge and the desire for superiority, finally, the last example is the trial, the pursuit of criminal wrongdoing and the rousing of the judges’ emotions: “It follows from this that practice in the law courts and disputation are pleasant to those who are familiar with them and well qualified.” 21 It is as if the scene which is construed through accusation here finally turns out to be a scene of pathos as well, a scene, that is, in which judgment is bound to occur differently.

A story of survival: the genesis of passion according to Descartes For highlighting the contrast with a modern approach to affectivity, the discussion of the scenes of affects can be resumed at a much later point in history and in an altogether different social and conceptual context. It may, however, be argued that the very project and title of René Descartes’s Passions of the Soul, a late work of the French philosopher published in 1649,22 is conceivable only in the tradition of copying, editing, and commenting book II of Aristotle’s 20 Aristotle, Rhetoric, I, 11, 1370 b 29–1371 b 2. 21 Aristotle, Rhetoric, I, 11.13, 1371 b 5–7. 22 Kambouchner, Denis. L’homme des passions. Commentaires sur Descartes. 2 vols. Paris: Albin Michel, 1995; Brown, Deborah J. Descartes and the Passionate Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

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Rhetoric. The tradition of treating the section on affects on its own and of severing it from the body of the Aristotelian lecture notes on rhetoric was in existence throughout the reception of his Rhetoric. This stream of erudite works can be seen as the factual pendant to Heidegger’s argument concerning the section on pathe as being beyond rhetoric proper but before the advent of scientific psychology. The tradition of commentaries was particularly vital during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the period in which Dilthey locates the emergence of the phenomenology of man, his soul, and his individual existence.23 Descartes’s Passions of the Soul can be read to a significant extent as the last of those humanist commentaries on Aristotle’s rhetorical treatise; or, in Heideggerian terms, as the last step in preparation for psychology. In the second and third parts of his Passions of the Soul, Descartes continues the Aristotelian tradition of dissecting and describing scenes of affects, even if other emotions sometimes take center stage and the mode of description comes in a decidedly different style. In an Augustinian tradition, love thus becomes an important object of discussion. “Love is an excitation of the soul, caused by the motion of the spirits, which incites it to join itself in volition to the objects that appear to be suitable to it.” 24 Or, in a more detailed rendering: It seems that distinctions within love may […] be made in terms of our esteem for what we love in comparison with ourselves. For when we esteem the object of our Love less than ourselves, we have only a simple Affection for it; when we esteem it equally with ourselves, this is named Friendship; and when we esteem it more, the passion we have may be named Devotion. So we may have affection for a flower, a bird, a horse; but, unless our mind is extremely disordered, we can have Friendship only with men. They are the object of this passion, in such a way that there is no man so imperfect that we cannot have a quite perfect friendship for him when we think ourselves loved by him,

23 For a selection of humanist works which either concentrate on the passions from Aristotle’s Rhetoric, or, following Thomas Aquinas in the Summa theologiae, combine their discussion with lessons from De anima, and which are commentaries in the narrower sense or based on the rhetorical (and psychological) tradition more broadly, see: Vives, De anima et vita [1538]; Melanchthon, De anima [1540/1553]; Chytraeus, Nathan. Ethe kai Pathe, seu de affectibus movendis. Aristotelis ex II. Rhetoricorum doctrina, accurate et perspicue explicata. Herborn: Christoph Corvinus, 1586; Junius, Melchior. Animorum conciliandorum et movendorum ratio. Montbéliard: Lazarus Zetzner, 1596; Pellegrini, Lelio. De noscendis et emendandis animi affectibus liber singularis. Rom: Vincencius Palagallus, 1598; Coëffeteau, Nicolas. Tableau des passions humaines, de leurs causes et de leurs effets. Paris: Sébastien Cramoisy, 1620; Gutberleth, Hendrik. Pathologia; hoc est doctrina de humanis affectibus physice et ethice tractata. Herborn: Christoph Corvinus, 1615; Mascardi, Agostino. Romanae dissertationes de affectibus, sive perturbationes animi, earumque characteribus. Paris: Sébastien Cramoisy, 1639; Thilo, Valentin. Pathologia oratoria, seu affectuum movendorum ratio. Königsberg: Hallervord, 1647. 24 Descartes, Passions of the Soul, a. 79.

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and have a truly noble and generous soul […]. As for Devotion, its principal object is without doubt the supreme divinity, to which we cannot fail to be devoted when we know it as we should. But we may also have devotion for our Prince, our country, our city […].25

No doubt, the material of the Cartesian scenes of emotions appears to be importantly reduced and newly structured when compared to their meandering unfurling in the world of differences in Aristotle. Esteem (estime) plays the part revenge and insult held in the agonistic world of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Through the mediation of estime the soul’s longing for incorporation and union is related to the variety and differences of objects of such longing. In Descartes’s world, these objects represent the well-ordered realm of objects of beauty, the others who can love me as I love them – the others tout court – and, finally, the political theology of the Other with the capital O – God, the sovereign, and one’s own homeland. The sparseness of details in this scenario for love is compensated for by two additional layers of definition of emotions that had not existed in Aristotle. These two layers precede and follow the emergence of affect as a scene of action between the soul and its objects in the case of love as in all other cases. In a preceding series of determinations in the definition of a given passion that Descartes appends, he explores the invisible processes within the body, such as processes in the brain, the muscles, and the nerves. In an ensuing third sequence of pieces of definition for the same passion, he then describes in great detail what manifests itself in full visibility, but visibility only.26 Such are the expressions of the face, the gesticulation of hands, arms, and head, in short the movement of the whole body in passion. With these added first and third parts in defining each single passion, Descartes in fact implements the differentiation of interior and exterior. And yet, the interior and the exterior communicate with each other only through the second part of defining what a passion is. This part corresponds to the old Aristotelian tradition and it is not analyzable according to the divide between interior and exterior. Between what is invisible and analytic (within body and soul) and what is visible but nonanalytic (on the body’s surface), the display of the emerging passions, that is to say, the scenes that play out between the soul and its objects, remain indispensable. They maintain their traditional presence in a continuous world of the affects’ unfurling, the kind of presence they had since Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Love, the Augustinian passion, develops the traditional centerpiece in the affect’s presentation in a particular way. Mediated by estime, love articulates itself into its three specifications: affection, love proper, and devotion. It does 25 Descartes, Passions of the Soul, a. 83. 26 For the first part, see articles 1–16; for the second, see articles 112–135.

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so by differentiating the quality of its objects. The object differentiation by means of estimation proceeds in a reflective manner on two levels: first, the soul compares itself to its objects and, thereby, determines their relative rank and value; secondly, it is through this act of an indirect reflection on itself that the world of different ranks and value – which is the world of affects – comes into view for the soul as such. This double circumstance makes love the operative center, in Descartes, of the presentation of passions, the presentation of a world of well-ordered differences. The physiological first part of the presentation of the passions and the third part which deals with their exterior signs offer the blueprint for what will become the modern divide of interior and exterior that has shaped the way affects are given to us since early modern times. And yet, the ‘interiorization’ – or, in other words, the introduction of the dichotomy of interior and exterior – does not come about through the juxtaposition of an analysis of physiology on the one hand and the study of an expressive semiotics on the other. Separating an interior physiology of the passion from the exteriority of expressive signs and reactions is, in Descartes’s model, not the crucial process of ‘interiorization’ itself but rather its consequence. The pivotal moment of ‘interiorization’ lies rather in the analytic reduction of the remaining centerpiece of Cartesian emotions, which is the affective relation of the soul toward its objects. In Passions of the Soul, the first step of this process lies in the double reflexivity of love and its constitutive analysis of the world of differences into distinct values of objects which are reconstructed according to the loving soul’s position toward them. The second and even more critical step, however, reveals itself in the fundamental transformation of the scene of passion into a narrative behind or within it; a narrative that originates in the still life of an intensive and seemingly absorbed gaze. According to this understanding, interiorization requires a certain narrative continuation of the scene of passion; a continuation, however, that takes a turn into an image of its origin. This happens in articles 35 and 36 of part I of Passions of the Soul.27 In part I, Descartes discusses passion in general before turning to the list of differ-

27 The following discussion of articles 35–36 concentrates on the narrative phenomenality of passions. The doctrinal difference with the Aristotelian (and Thomasian) tradition that emerges at this moment would have to take article 25 into account. It would have to give an interpretation of its definition of passions as perceptions or sensations which are (erroneously) referred to the soul (rather than to their objects). This then would require further explication with regard to Descartes’s “third concept,” the concept that coincides neither with body nor mind (or soul) but constitutes the merger of body and mind as a conceptual realm of its own. Although no explicit linkage is provided by Descartes between this metaphysical problem and the turn of articles 35 and 36, it seems that this is the best place we have to look for the

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ent, single passions. Articles 35 and 36 offer what might be called Urszenen, first of seeing and then of passion. The title of article 35 reads “Example of the way impressions of objects unite in the gland in the middle of the brain.” 28 It is not easy to grasp why, while discussing the gland as the organic instrument of soul or mind, Descartes would draw on the physiological mechanism of seeing at this point to begin with. At first sight, the formation of the two images in the brain and their unification in the gland are explained here just as a convenient example for the functioning of the gland at large which then will play its role in passion, too. This is how the main body of the article can be understood as detailing the optical process of bipolar seeing according to the Dioptrique. There is, however, an expression in the example for illustrating the physiology of seeing that remains outside of the focus on bipolarity proper. This detail comes to the fore when we compare the first and the last phrases of the article. The first sentence begins, “So, for example, if we see some animal coming toward us, the light reflected from its body casts two images of it […].” The concluding sentence reads, “By this means the two images in the brain compose only a single [image] of it [the animal] on the gland, which, acting immediately on the soul, makes it see the animal’s shape.” 29 As can easily be seen, a small detail has been lost or rather converted in the process of the unification of the two images into the one formed on the gland: the animal that we see “coming toward us” has been consolidated into the “animal’s shape.” Where, within the unified image, has the movement gone? And what became of the threatening implication of the ‘coming toward us,’ once the double images were re-reflected to one and the same spot on the gland? And where, on the other hand, is the animal’s shape coming from? The answer can be concluded from the following article. Article 36, “Example of the way the Passions are excited in the soul,” begins with the following passage: Furthermore, if that shape is very unusual and very frightful, that is, if it bears a close resemblance to things that have previously been harmful to the body, this excites the passion of apprehension in the soul, and thereupon that of boldness or that of fear and terror according to the different temperament of the body or the strength of the soul, and according to whether one has previously secured oneself by defense or by flight against the harmful things to which the present impression bears a resemblance.30

missing link in his theory of the passions. Cf. Newmark, Passion – Affekt – Gefühl, 131–132; Perler, Transformationen der Gefühle, 305–324. 28 Descartes, Passions of the Soul, a. 35. 29 Descartes, Passions of the Soul, a. 35. 30 Descartes, Passions of the Soul, a. 36.

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Although this time it is not self-evident why exciting the passions has any intrinsic connection with bipolar seeing, article 36 emphasizes on the level of the example – the story told – that what it has to say constitutes a continuation of the previous article on the united image: “Furthermore, if that shape is very unusual and very frightful” (my emphasis). What is continuing here is the displacement from the moving animal that is coming toward us into the animal’s shape. But whereas, at the end of article 35 on the united image, shape has replaced movement as such, now, in article 36, a frightening and unusual appearance of that shape is mentioned. The transition from article 35 to article 36 engenders a reading according to which the emotional and aesthetic qualities emerge as an equivalent for the omission of the movement (a movement and action from a former scene of affect).31 The movement from article 35 turns, through the intermediary step of the animal’s shape, into the still of an image of its figure being unusual and frightening. Thus, the relation of the soul toward its moving object turns into a situation of rest and standstill, even if the object which has come to a halt appears now in colors it did not have before. And indeed, Descartes mentions the emotional or aesthetic quality of the shape only in order to again attach the association of a movement to it. It is even a double movement that comes into play here: the scene of an attacking beast and the flight of a human subject; in short, the scene of primordial self-preservation. Furthermore, if that shape is very unusual and very frightful, that is, if it bears a close resemblance to things that have previously been harmful to the body, this excites the passion of apprehension in the soul […] according to whether one has previously secured oneself by defense or by flight against the harmful things to which the present impression bears a resemblance.32

Apprehension, the passion of the soul, is no longer a scene playing out in time and space and characterized by action and movement, but rather an image

31 More precisely, two ways of reading articles 35 and 36 in context are possible: either furthermore introduces a new element with the “very unusual and very frightful” shape; and thus launches another, even if related, example. In that case, the bipolar seeing and the passion of apprehension are two different examples. Or furthermore develops an element already implicit in the previous article. In that case, the quality of the shape’s being “very unusual and very frightful” only explicates something inherent in the image of an animal moving toward us, and we would deal with only one and the same example. For the sake of the present argument, no decision has to be made. Either we have two related examples for one argument; or one example that, through making the argument it is designed for, reveals a second layer. 32 Descartes, Passions of the Soul, a. 36 (my emphasis).

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whose quality leads – and leads back – to such a scene. That scene is however not the scene of this or that passion of the soul but of the one and specific scene of the body’s self-preservation. Self-preservation remembered becomes the primal scene, Urszene, of affects; of those affects, that means, which otherwise appear as images. This is the moment in Descartes’s argumentation when he turns the theatricality of the scenes of affects into the interiority not so much of the brain or the soul but rather the hidden scene of an otherwise detheatricalized passion, an image-passion. Passion in Descartes is, paradigmatically, an image with an invisible but active interior of movements encapsulated within it – movements of attackers and those fleeing from them or defending themselves against them. Self-preservation, one may say, is the monotonous subtext in every passion of the soul, according to Descartes. This primal scene absorbs, as it were, all features of theatricality, action, and movement. The Urszene of self-preservation derives those features from the passions which, thereby, turn into moments of a pure gaze which beholds the shapes of various emotional colors and aesthetic qualities. There is in fact one passion of the soul in Descartes that is nothing but this pure gaze staring at shapes and figures that are unusual and doing nothing besides that. This passion, the very first in the list which shares the intensity and attention of the gaze with cognition, is admiration. Admiration in Descartes is the empty gaze into the unusualness of the shape before the story of self-preservation can even touch and re-interpret it. It is the counterpart to epistemological knowledge: a pure and attentive gaze that sees everything and recognizes nothing.33 At this point of the suggested reading, it becomes clear why it is an important, even decisive move in these two articles to bring the exemplary case of bipolar seeing together with the exemplary case for the origin of passion. The association of the image of the unusual shape with the scene of self-preservation is a superimposition not in the same but in an analogous way as the image conveyed by the gland stems from the unification of two superimposed images produced by the two eyes. Admittedly, Descartes never returns to these two articles on the exemplary case (or cases) of producing the image on the gland and the passion in the

33 For admiration in the context of the broader history of ideas, see Matuschek, Stefan. Über das Staunen. Eine ideengeschichtliche Analyse. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1991; for the history of science, see Daston, Lorraine, and Kathleen Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750. New York: Zone Books, 1998; for the theory of passions, see Campe, Rüdiger. “Die Einstellung des Zuschauers. ‘Admiratio’ in den Gärten von Versailles und in der Royal Society zwischen 1660 und 1690.” Theatralität und die Krisen der Repräsentation. Ed. Erika Fischer-Lichte. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 2001. 337–354.

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soul. But only the example of the origin of passion in the scene of self-preservation gives a model for what in the later exposition of the many, single passions is taken for granted. Only the narrative of the origin of passion in a moment of self-preservation can explain how the physiological process in the nerves and the organs of sensation (the interior) can be assumed to be linked to a semiotics of bodily reactions, forms of expression, gesticulation, and movements of hands and legs (the exterior). No attempt is made to reduce the variety of traditional affects piece by piece to this model for a story which links processes of sensation and perception to corporeal reactions in space and time. And yet, precisely because the story of the origin of apprehension in self-preservation is the only one told – told as a story which is as exemplary as the unification of the bipolar image in the brain is exemplary –, this story is the narrative of passion’s Urszene in principle. It is this example story which analyzes the centerpiece in presenting the affect in such a way as to give an explanation for how the separation of and the interplay between the interior and the exterior in emotion is possible. By doing this, Descartes’s story of the genesis of apprehension in self-preservation points to the Urszene of other, later, primal scenes – Darwin’s reduction of emotional expression to scenes in the fight for life in a more direct way and Freud’s reconstruction of symptomatic reaction in scenes of a traumatic wound in a broader sense.34 *** If we agree with Max Horkheimer and the editors of the volume Politics and the Passions, 1500–1800 and maintain that seventeenth century self-preservation marks the interiorization of passion, this may be so not necessarily for the reasons adduced by Horkheimer. The salient point is perhaps not that a bourgeois subject turns in and on itself, fixating itself in reprehensible egotism. That may or may not be the case. Passion has rather been dismembered as it were into two halves: on the one hand, we find the admiring gaze that comes as close as possible to what passion is not, the cognition of the theoretical attitude in seeing; on the other, all the other bodies moving through time and

34 Darwin, Charles. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animal. Ed. Paul Ekman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998; Freud, Sigmund, and Josef Breuer. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 2: Studies on Hysteria (1893–1895). Ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1955; Freud, Sigmund. “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 17: An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works (1917–1919). Ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. 7–122.

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space, threatening or longing for each other, appear to be encapsulated in the one and only moment of self-preservation. These accounts split the phenomenality of scenes of affects in a continuous world into two separate parts and link them again, after the fact, by the story of the genesis of affect in selfpreservation. This development has changed how affects can be presented, and thus are given to us, in a fundamental way. Passion is no longer ‘another’ judgment, or the tuning of mine and your mood to one another in the everyday. It is rather the association of two radically different accounts: on the one hand, the pure gaze of admiration, which almost borders on the theoretical attitude (and thus transcends passion into cognition), and, on the other, the wilderness of self-defense and preservation with all its corporeal realism (which, for its part, borders on the automatism of reflexive reaction). By means of such a split and such a story, passions are given to us as interior feelings and experiences on the one hand and exterior expressive manifestations on the other. Only by turning to what Alva Noë has termed an ‘enactive approach’ to consciousness and perception might it be possible to gain fruitful access to a renewed understanding of what emotions have been for people before the great dichotomy.35 With the formula ‘enacted approach,’ Noë has called on the cognitive science community to rethink basic assumptions which seem to be built into the very method and experimental technology of current brain studies.36 Once the brain has become the object of experimental observation, it seems that the step taken by Descartes in articles 35 and 36 of Passions of the Soul in theory has become part of the technological configuration of research in experimental cognitive studies. The attempt made in this contribution has been to retrace the presentation and, hence, the primary – phenomenological – givenness of affects in Aristotle and the pre-modern tradition and its revision in Descartes. Such a differential study can help with rethinking basic categories in hermeneutics and scholarly work of the humanities in a way similar to what calling for an ‘enacted approach’ (Noë) – or other, similar, conceptual initiatives – means for the cognitive science studies in today’s laboratories. The striking finding is that the tradition in the humanities and the present day technology in experimental brain studies share basic assumptions, sets of problems, and the interest of reaching beyond. 35 See Perler’s remark on Thomas Aquinas and, by implication, Aristotle. According to Perler, the Aristotelian-scholastic notion of the soul and its various faculties by whose interaction emotions emerge prevent the dichotomy of inner and outer and the interior experience of emotion to be conceptually prominent in this premodern tradition: Perler, Transformationen der Gefühle, 69, 75. 36 Noë, Alva. Action in Perception. Cambridge, London: MIT Press, 2004.

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Bibliography Aquinas, Thomas. Summa theologiae. Ed. Thomas Gilby. Bilingual edition. 61 vols. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Harris Rackham. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 1934. Aristotle. De anima. Ed. and trans. Robert D. Hicks. Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1965. Aristotle. The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric. Trans. John Henry Freese. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 2006. Brown, Deborah J. Descartes and the Passionate Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Campe, Rüdiger. “Die Einstellung des Zuschauers. ‘Admiratio’ in den Gärten von Versailles und in der Royal Society zwischen 1660 und 1690.” Theatralität und die Krisen der Repräsentation. Ed. Erika Fischer-Lichte. Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 2001. 337–354. Chytraeus, Nathan. Ethe kai Pathe, seu de affectibus movendis. Aristotelis ex II. Rhetoricorum doctrina, accurate et perspicue explicata. Herborn: Christoph Corvinus, 1586. Coëffeteau, Nicolas. Tableau des passions humaines, de leurs causes et de leurs effets. Paris: Sébastien Cramoisy, 1620. Darwin, Charles. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animal. Ed. Paul Ekman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Daston, Lorraine, and Kathleen Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750. New York: Zone Books, 1998. Descartes, René. The Passions of the Soul. Trans. Stephen Voss. Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett, 1989. Dilthey, Wilhelm. “Die Funktion der Anthropologie in der Kultur des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts.” Wilhelm Dilthey. Weltanschauung und Analyse des Menschen seit Renaissance und Reformation. Gesammelte Schriften. Stuttgart, Göttingen: Teubner, 1960. Vol. 2. 416–492. Fortenbaugh, William W. Aristotle on Emotion: A Contribution to Philosophical Psychology, Rhetoric, Poetics, Politics and Ethics. London: Duckworth, 1975. Freud, Sigmund, and Josef Breuer. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 2: Studies on Hysteria (1893–1895). Ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. Freud, Sigmund. “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 17: An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works (1917–1919). Ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. 7–122. Gross, Daniel M. “Introduction: The Pathos of Heidegger’s Rhetorical Ontology.” Heidegger and Rhetoric. Ed. Daniel M. Gross and Ansgar Kemmann. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. 1–45. Gross, Daniel M. Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle to Modern Brain Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Gutberleth, Hendrik. Pathologia; hoc est doctrina de humanis affectibus physice et ethice tractata. Herborn: Christoph Corvinus, 1615. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper Collins, 1962. Heidegger, Martin. Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy. Trans. Robert D. Metcalf and Mark B. Tanzer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009.

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Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Ed. Richard E. Flatham and David Johnston. New York, London: Norton, 1997. Junius, Melchior. Animorum conciliandorum et movendorum ratio. Montbéliard: Lazarus Zetzner, 1596. Kahn, Victoria, and Neil Saccamano. “Introduction.” Politics and the Passions, 1500–1800. Ed. Victoria Kahn et al. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 1–5. Kambouchner, Denis. L’homme des passions. Commentaires sur Descartes. 2 vols. Paris: Albin Michel, 1995. Kisiel, Theodore J. The Genesis of Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time.’ Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Levi, Anthony. French Moralists: The Theory of the Passions, 1585–1649. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964. Mascardi, Agostino. Romanae dissertationes de affectibus, sive perturbationes animi, earumque characteribus. Paris: Sébastien Cramoisy, 1639. Matuschek, Stefan. Über das Staunen. Eine ideengeschichtliche Analyse. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1991. Melanchthon, Philipp. “De anima.” Philipp Melanchthon. Corpus reformatorum. Ed. Carl Gottlieb Bretschneider. Halle: Schwetschke, 1846. Vol. 13. 5–178. Newmark, Catherine. Passion – Affekt – Gefühl. Philosophische Theorien der Emotionen zwischen Aristoteles und Kant. Hamburg: Meiner, 2008. Niehues-Pröbsting, Heinrich. Überredung zur Einsicht. Der Zusammenhang von Philosophie und Rhetorik bei Platon und in der Phänomenologie. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1987. Noë, Alva. Action in Perception. Cambridge, London: MIT Press, 2004. Pellegrini, Lelio. De noscendis et emendandis animi affectibus liber singularis. Rom: Vincencius Palagallus, 1598. Perler, Dominik. Transformationen der Gefühle: Philosophische Emotionstheorien 1270–1670. Frankfurt: Fischer, 2011. Reddy, William M. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Sokolon, Marlene K. Political Emotions: Aristotle and the Symphony of Reason and Emotion. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006. Spinoza, Baruch de. Ethics. Trans. George H. R. Parkinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Thilo, Valentin. Pathologia oratoria, seu affectuum movendorum ratio. Königsberg: Hallervord, 1647. Vives, Juan Luis. The Passions of the Soul: The Third Book of ‘De anima et vita.’ Trans. Carlos G. Noreña. Lewiston, Queenston: Edwin Mellon Press, 1990.

Niklaus Largier

The Art of Prayer Conversions of Interiority and Exteriority in Medieval Contemplative Practice A large number of medieval religious and philosophical texts seem to draw a strict – albeit philosophically nuanced – line between “inner man” and “outer man,” homo interior and homo exterior. Thus they suggest that a clear distinction should be made between the ‘interior’ and ‘spiritual’ on the one hand, and the ‘exterior,’ ‘material,’ and ‘sensual’ on the other hand.1 In the words of Isidor of Sevilla’s Etymologies: “Human beings have two aspects: the interior and the exterior. The interior human is the soul [and] the exterior is the body.” 2 While this distinction is valid and often constitutive for religious anthropology in many theoretical contexts throughout the Middle Ages, it is less stable in the realm of medieval practices of prayer and meditation. Where theories of religious anthropology seem to propose an opposition between interior and exterior in post-lapsarian human existence, practices of prayer formulate a dynamic relationship where ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ turn into aspects of a process of communication, conversion, and transformation. In this process, ‘inner’ feelings and sensations are not only induced through ‘outer’ means. Instead, the ‘inner’ turns into a form of mediation of the ‘outer’ and the ‘outer’ into a form of mediation of the ‘inner,’ making both part of the production of experiential events in spiritual practice. Such experiential events are produced with the help of rhetorical stimuli and artifacts, transforming sets and arrangements of stimuli in turn into spaces and places of aesthetic pleasure3 with a 1 Lombardus, Petrus. Sententiae in IV libris distinctae. Grottaferrata: Ed. Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 1971. II, dist. XXIV, cap. 5; O’Callaghan, John P. “Imago Dei: A Test Case for St. Thomas’s Augustinianism.” Thomas the Augustinian. Ed. Michael Daupinais. Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2007. 100–144. For a historical overview, see also Schnell, Rüdiger. “Wer sieht das Unsichtbare? Homo exterior und homo interior in monastischen und laikalen Erziehungsschriften.” Anima und sêle. Darstellungen und Systematisierungen von Seele im Mittelalter. Ed. Katharina Philipowski and Anne Prior. Berlin: Schmidt, 2006. 83–112 (with a large body of references). 2 Seville, Isidore of. The ‘Etymologies’ of Isidore of Seville. Ed. and trans. Stephen A. Barney et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. XI, 231. 3 I am building in this essay on a couple of earlier publications, drawing on materials that I have presented and analyzed more comprehensively before: “Inner Senses – Outer Senses: The Practice of Emotions in Medieval Mysticism.” Codierung von Emotionen im Mittelalter. / Emotions and Sensibilities in the Middle Ages. Ed. Stephen C. Jaeger and Ingrid Kasten. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2003. 3–15; “Die Applikation der Sinne. Mittelalterliche Ästhetik als

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dense texture of emotional and sensual intensity.4 Thus, interior and exterior worlds take shape together and converge in forms of religious and aesthetic experience within specific spatial configurations – including theaters of memory, the space of the church, the cell, and a broad range of other spaces. The Visions of the thirteenth century beguine Hadewijch of Antwerp – to name just one example among many others that could be introduced here – illustrate this in an exemplary way.5 Drawing on the practices of prayer I will discuss in the following pages, Hadewijch presents us with texts that situate her visionary experience in complex settings of liturgy, song, and place.6 These visions, I am arguing here, are neither ‘outer’ nor ‘inner.’ Instead, they are experiential events that take place in specific material locations where ‘inner’ experience and ‘external’ stimulation converge in a form that is both material and spiritual and that conflates the distinction of ‘inner’ and ‘outer.’ Thus, the visions fill both the space of the church and of Hadewijch’s imagination: On a certain Pentecost Sunday I had a vision at dawn. Matins were being sung in the church, and I was present. My heart and my veins and all my limbs trembled and quivered with eager desire and, as often occurred with me, such madness and fear beset my mind that it seemed to me I did not contend my Beloved, and that my Beloved did not fulfill my desire, so that dying I must go mad, and going mad I must die. On that day my mind was beset so fearfully and so painfully by desirous love that all my separate veins were in travail. The longing in which I then was cannot be expressed by any lan-

Phänomenologie rhetorischer Effekte.” Das fremde Schöne. Dimensionen des Ästhetischen in der Literatur des Mittelalters. Ed. Manuel Braun and Christopher Young. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2007. 43–60; “Medieval Christian Mysticism.” The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion. Ed. John Corrigan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 364–379; “Praying by Numbers: An Essay on Medieval Aesthetics.” Representations 104 (2008), special issue On Form: 73–92. 4 One of the backgrounds of these constructions of spatial arrangements is to be found in the traditions and practices of mnemotechnics. Cf. Carruthers, Mary. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990; Carruthers, Mary. The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 5 Hadewijch. “Visions.” Hadewijch. The Complete Works. Trans. Columba Hart. New York: Paulist Press, 1980. 259–305. 6 Compare the observation of Cipriano Vagaggini about Gertrude of Helfta’s works (which I will discuss below): “The Legatus and the Exercises are, even in their composition and literary expression, entirely imbued with the liturgy by reason of their being strewn throughout with passages liturgical in their reminiscences. This is so much the case that, especially in some parts of the Exercises, the work takes on the appearance of a cento made up from liturgy and from Scripture, and the latter itself often enough coming to it by way of the liturgy.” (Vagaggini, Cipriano. Theological Dimensions of the Liturgy. Trans. Leonard J. Doyle. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1976. 742.)

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guage or any person I know; and everything I could say about it would be unheard-of to all those who never apprehended Love as something to work for with desire, and whom Love had never acknowledged as hers. I can say this about it: I desired to have full fruition of my Beloved, and to understand and taste him to the full. I desired that his Humanity should to the fullest extent be one in fruition with my humanity, and that mine then should hold its stand and be strong enough to enter into perfection until I content him, who is perfection in itself, by purity and unity, and in all things to content him fully in every virtue.7

What follows is a visionary, however deeply corporeal and sensual encounter with the desired “Beloved” in the church during mass. It is an encounter where interiority and exteriority – Christ’s human and divine nature, Hadewijch’s human and spiritual nature – converge in a series of sensual and affective experiential events. These events mirror an experience where rhetorical stimuli – words of the liturgy, words from the scriptures, images from the Song of Songs, echoes of chants, reflections of the space of the church – unfold into an evocation of a broad range of sensual and emotional qualities. As Hadewijch’s introductory words show, it would be wrong to read this experience in terms of an ‘outer’ sphere that mirrors an ‘inner’ experience – as it would be wrong to read it in terms of an ‘inner’ sphere mirroring an ‘outer’ one. Instead, we might want to speak of experiential events and of processes of translation, or, more precisely, of translations of scriptural memory into liturgical and spatial arrangements and into an experiential state of communication with the divine in space and time – and thus in a realm where a distinction of interiority and exteriority becomes meaningless. Or, in Hadewijch’s description of what she experienced at church during mass: […] looking like a Human Being and a Man, wonderful, and beautiful, and with glorious face, he came to me as humbly as anyone who wholly belongs to another. Then he gave himself to me in the shape of the Sacrament, in its outward form, as the custom is; and then he gave me to drink from the chalice, in form and taste, as the custom is. After that he came himself to me, took me entirely in his arms, and pressed me to him; and all my members felt his in full felicity, in accordance with the desire of my heart and humanity. So I was outwardly satisfied and fully transported. Also then, for a short while, I had the strength to bear this; but soon, after a short time, I lost that manly beauty outwardly in the sight of his form. I saw him completely come to naught and so fade and all at once dissolve that I could no longer distinguish him within me. Then it was to me as if we were one without difference. It was thus: outwardly, to see, taste, and feel, as one can outwardly taste, see, and feel in the reception of the outward Sacrament. So can the Beloved, with the loved one, each wholly receive the other in all full satisfaction of the sight, the hearing, and the passing away of the one in the other.8

7 Hadewijch, “Visions,” 280. 8 Hadewijch, “Visions,” 281–282.

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As I will show, we deal here not with what the moderns – after Feuerbach and Freud – call ‘projections’ but with forms of experience that are consciously produced by artifacts, by texts, images, and music in close correspondence with the liturgy and the space of the church. These forms of experience are qualified in terms not primarily of intellectual cognition and they are articulated on the basis of a strong incarnational theology that informs the process of perception. They are, however, acknowledged and lived – beyond conceptual language – in forms of aisthesis or cognitio experimentalis,9 experiential cognition, experience of sensation and emotion, sensual or emotional pleasure or disturbance. ‘Sweet’ or ‘bitter,’ to give a rough idea, are the most obvious qualifiers that are used in this context, both in the case of emotion and sensation; and both – ‘sweet’ as well as ‘bitter’ – are drawn from the scriptures and the memory of the scriptures. These terms, though, are not used in the form of a metaphorical description of ‘inner’ spiritual experience. They are not to be read as allegories of an ‘inner’ life. Instead, they are deployed as figures that are drawn from a scriptural archive and that serve a phenomenology of rhetorical effects where the experience of sweetness is as much ‘outside’ as it is ‘inside.’ Such figures become part of strategies of rhetorical amplification that take place in a concrete space and time where ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ converge and where the experience that emerges no longer allows for a distinction between the two. Instead, the ‘outer’ turns into a medium of the ‘inner,’ allowing for its very construction as a space of experience, and the ‘inner’ turns into a medium of the ‘outer,’ allowing for the deployment of the rhetorical effects in form of a phenomenology of affects and sensation.

The rhetoric of prayer, sensation, and affect In the first chapter of the thirteenth century The Herald of Divine Love (Legatus divinae pietatis), we read the following characterization of the Cistercian nun Gertrude of Helfta: She spoke so sweetly and with such penetrating intelligence, using such eloquent language; her words were so persuasive, effective, and gracious that many who heard her, feeling the marvelous way in which their hearts were moved and their wills changed, bore witness that it was in truth the Spirit of God who spoke in her; for it was the living efficacious word, more penetrating than any two-edged sword, reaching the very division between soul and spirit (Heb. 4:12) which dwelt in her and worked all this.10

9 See Largier, “Inner Senses – Outer Senses.” 10 Helfta, Gertrude of. The Herald of Divine Love. Ed. and trans. Margaret Winkworth. New York, Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1993. 54.

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This very ability to speak eloquently and persuasively is based on a specific form of rhetoric and experiential learning that the text explains with a reference to “Master Hugh’s” (Hugh of Saint Victor’s) – in fact Richard of Saint Victor’s – teachings: But, as invisible and spiritual things cannot be understood by the human intellect except in visible and corporeal images, it is necessary to clothe them in human and bodily forms. This is what Master Hugh demonstrates in the sixteenth chapter of his discourse on “The Inner Man”: “In order to refer to things familiar to this lower world and to come down to the level of human weakness, Holy Scripture describes things by means of visible forms, and this impresses on our imagination spiritual ideas by means of beautiful images which excite our desires. Thus they speak now of a land flowing with milk and honey, now of flowers and of perfumes, now of the songs of men and of the chorus of the birds, and in this way the joys and harmonies of heaven are designated. Read the Apocalypse of St. John and you will find Jerusalem ornamented with gold and silver and pearls and other kinds of gems. Now we know that there is nothing of this sort in heaven where, however, nothing is lacking. But if none of these things is to be found there materially, all are there spiritually.” 11

With these words, Gertrude of Helfta follows Richard of Saint Victor’s teachings about the relationship between interior and exterior, his observation “that the culture of interiority depends on a form of exteriority,” and that “affect provides the bridge between body and soul, the world of nature and the interior realm where soul joins with its Creator.” 12 Thus, imagination, affect, and sensation are not seen as “obstacles to transcendent experience” but as “indispensable instruments of spiritual elevation.” 13 A short treatise on prayer by Hugh of Saint Victor, On the Power of Prayer (De virtute orandi), explains the nature of the practice of prayer that emerges on the basis of these observations. As Hugh also demonstrates in his treatise, this practice of prayer is highly informed by rhetorical tradition and training, reflecting the force of persuasion that the text quoted above ascribes to Gertrude’s words as well. Prayer, meant to lead into a state of excitatio and inflammatio – ultimately of an overwhelming, intense, and absorbing love that is akin to the one Hadewijch is talking about in her vision – is first and foremost an art of

11 Helfta, The Herald of Divine Love, 54–55. Jeffrey Hamburger identifies Gertrude’s source in chapter 15 of Richard of Saint Victor’s Benjamin minor. Cf. Hamburger, Jeffrey. “Idol Curiosity.” Curiositas. Welterfahrung und ästhetische Neugierde in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit. Ed. Klaus Krüger. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002. 19–58, here 38–42. 12 Hamburger, “Idol Curiosity,” 40–41. 13 Hamburger, “Idol Curiosity,” 41.

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arousing affects and emotions: “Pure prayer is when from an abundance of devotion the mind is so enkindled that when it turns to ask something of God it forgets even its petition because of the greatness of His love.” 14 Pure prayer is prayer that forgets its own intention. It does so when it turns into a spiritual exercise that moves from reading to meditation, from the deployment of meaning in forms of unexcited reading and understanding to affective and sensual intensity in meditation. In order to produce this effect, in order to produce affective excitatio, Hugh writes, the reader of the scriptures and the person who prays has to engage in “frequens cogitatio,” in repeated mental re-evocation of the words he wants to concentrate on. He or she does so in a kind of rumination and mastication of these words that brings forth the possibilities of their emotional and sensual impact. Rhetorical practices of figuration and amplification comprise the very basis of this meditative exercise. At first the process simply consists in invention and enumeration, in the search for figures, the construction of lists, the use of repetition and rhetorical questions, and the configuration of tropes drawn from the scriptures, from life experience, from lives of saints and martyrs, from memory, and from other available sources. The very construction of such lists presents the soul with a picture, with a series of figures that all have a specific effect on perception, on affect and sensation. These effects have to be further amplified through repetition, rhetorical questions, and elements of narration and narrative scripts that help to unfold the power of the figures. Thus, for example, a list of pains and the enumeration of all possible evils asks for an imaginative exercise in which such figures are produced on a stage that allows for the deployment of their affective force.15 This stage can be purely mental but it can also include images and objects. In both cases its construction implies a moment of exteriorization and spatial arrangement that allows for the effects to unfold. The more impressive and comprehensive the list, the more the soul will sigh, groan, and suffer in this act of animation that produces a space of affective intensity. Other lists and figural compositions – often in combination with narrative scripts, for example the Song of Songs or the passion of Christ – allow for the production of different affects: admiration and pleasure, humility and humiliation, terror and fear, devotion, dedication, and hope. In other words, the exercise of meditation presupposes complex practices of figuration and rhetorical amplification, which allow for the production of a 14 Saint Victor, Hugh of. “On the Power of Prayer.” Trans. Hugh Feiss. Writings on the Spiritual Life: A Selection of Works of Hugh, Adam, Achard, Richard, Walter, and Godfrey of St. Victor. Ed. Christopher P. Evans. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. 331–347, here 334 (7.4). 15 Hugh, “On the Power of Prayer,” 331–332 (2–3).

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broad range of affects. These practices of figuration are based on archives including the scriptures, lives of saints, and other material. In their deployment, however, they transcend the limiting scope of the archive and the meaning they have therein. Consequently, Hugh emphasizes strategies that strip the figures from the concrete literal meaning within the archive and from the intention-bound nature of prayer. Extracted from the archive, liberated from their immediate context and from intentions, the deployment of the figures and tropes serves nothing else than the production of an affective and sensual space that is open to divine love and that thus constitutes an affective texture of scriptural tropes, actual experience, and praegustatio, an eschatological foretaste of things to come. The process of the production of this sphere of religious and aesthetic experience must first be described in terms of externalization. As Hadewijch, Gertrude, and Hugh write – in accordance with traditions of negative theology –, god and his realm are beyond language and concepts. In order to communicate with god, affective and sensual forms of meditative prayer focus on a use of tropes that treats them not only as images provided by the biblical text but as artifacts that can be used in specific ways not in order to represent the divine but in order to produce the absorption in the affect. Thus, words and tropes drawn from the scriptures turn into sets of rhetorical stimuli that can be deployed in the form of material figures, for example, words, images, and song. This externalization implies a non-hermeneutical approach to the tropes, an approach that in the very act of prayer strips the words of their representational and intentional nature and that liberates them in view of their affective and sensual effects.16 Thus, they turn into staged external actors and help to produce a sphere of experience in between the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer,’ where the soul transcends itself and its interiority in the act of being absorbed into the overwhelming love that all the practices of figuration in prayer intend to produce. With the help of the externalized figures, the soul alienates itself from its mundanely-defined and ‘old’ identity and interiority, choosing a state of exile that allows for the creation of a ‘new’ state beyond the distinction of ‘inner’ and ‘outer.’ It is this state that the rhetorical figures are meant to produce and explore.

16 Hugh, “On the Power of Prayer,” 335 (7.5): “That form of supplication which occurs only through nouns is as full of an inner abundance of love as it is imperfect in external expression. For feeling has this property: the greater and more fervent it is within, the less it can be displayed outwardly in words.”

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Experimental figuration and the phenomenology of rhetorical effects As Hugh points out in his treatise on prayer, “there are countless feelings” and it is not possible to “list them all.” 17 The same could be said about the experience of sensation in spiritual practice. Introduced in Origen’s and Gregory of Nyssa’s exegesis of the Song of Songs, the connection of contemplative reading and sensation has played a key role in the history of medieval spiritual practices.18 It is in this context that we encounter the most elaborate thoughts about the “five inner senses.” These ‘inner’ senses, however, are not just opposed to the ‘outer’ senses in a kind of spatial correlation. Instead, the distinction between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ has to be understood in terms of a phenomenology of sensation. This phenomenology operates with the two terms in order not to indicate two different realms of sensation but two different kinds of sensation. The ‘outer’ kind is seen as unfree and empirically determined insofar as it is caught up in the world of fallen nature and objects of desire. The ‘inner’ kind is seen as a path of liberation in view of a stimulation of senses and affects that originates in the hidden meaning of the scriptures, that is enacted in the rhetoric of prayer, and that allows for an anticipation and the restitution of free sensation at the end of time. In the Late Middle Ages, Peter of Ailly expresses this anticipation in the following way: “to reach already in this life the pleasures of the eternal rewards in an experiential way, and to taste their sweetness with delight.” 19 Rudolf of Biberach, in a treatise entitled The Seven Paths of Eternity (De septem itineribus aeternitatis), uses the following words, largely inspired by Alcher and Bernhard of Clairvaux’s, Hugh of Saint Victor’s, and Saint Bonaventure’s treatment of the inner senses: “reaching the inner sense of taste, it opens it up toward the tasting of eternal sweetness.” 20 In other words, the “inner senses” are the senses insofar as they are receptive to a manipulation in the practices of reading and prayer. This manipulation liberates sensation from its empirical bounds, replaces natural stimuli with rhetorical ones, and leads to an absorption in divine taste and touch that

17 Hugh, “On the Power of Prayer,” 340–341 (14.1). 18 See Largier, “Inner Senses – Outer Senses” (with references). 19 Ailly, Peter of. “Compendium contemplationis.” Peter of Ailly. Opuscula spiritualia. Douai, 1634. III, 11, 134 (my translation). 20 Biberach, Rudolf of. De septem itineribus aeternitatis. Ed. Margot Schmidt. Stuttgart, Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1985. “De sexto itinere,” dist. V (my translation).

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is neither ‘inner’ nor ‘outer.’ 21 As the affects can be aroused, shaped, and modified with the help of rhetorical stimuli and artifacts, so can sensation – touching, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting – be aroused, shaped, and modified by rhetorical stimuli. Thus, Origen’s and Gregory of Nyssa’s theories of the inner senses, developed in the context of questions of reading and hermeneutics, form the framework for a phenomenological understanding of sensation in the Middle Ages. This phenomenological understanding, however, focuses not on a primary level of experiential qualities and events but on the experiential qualities that are induced by the scriptures, by scriptural tropes, and – as in the case of Gertrude and Hadewijch – by the liturgy. This is the reason why I am speaking of a phenomenology of rhetorical effects. What Hugh’s theory of prayer and Gertrude’s and Hadewijch’s visions present us with are ways in which scriptural tropes are being deployed in order to excite affects and sensation. They also present us with a phenomenological description of the ways in which the deployment of these tropes produce specific spheres and events of experience in an application of the senses. It is the Song of Songs that is often used as a blueprint for the application of the senses. It provides us with something we could call a dramatic script, and medieval authors draw on this script both in view of quotes that serve to evoke specific moments of sensation and affect, and in view of a paradigmatic model that allows for a dramatization of memory, of sense experience, and of concomitant emotional states. We know from the re-writing of the Song of Songs and from complex prayer texts, for example in Mechthild’s Flowing Light of the Godhead, and from the use Mechthild makes of it as a blueprint for the staging of the life of her soul, that her rumination on this text not only produces sweetness and delight, but also bitterness and desolation. In other words, her practice of prayer and the aisthesis she produces include more than an evocation of feelings of divine sweetness. Instead, she deploys the tropes in a dramatic way, following certain scripts and evoking a diverse range of possible experience. Thus, prayer serves as a means to explore the realm of possible sensual experience and to intensify or amplify it. Mechthild uses the Song of Songs as a dramatic script that can be amplified and rewritten and that allows for a rich staging of moments of sensation and emotional arousal. In doing this, some writers, above all Mechthild of Magdeburg and Hadewijch of Ant21 Nyssa, Gregory of. In canticum canticorum. Ed. Hermannus Langerbeck. Leiden: Nrill, 1960. 425–426; Herp, Hendrik. Directorium aureum contemplativorum. / Directorio de contemplativos. Ed. Juan Martín Kelly. Madrid: Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, Fundación Universitaria Española, 1974. II, 54, 647–649; Herp, Hendrik. Theologia mystica. Farnborough: Gregg, 1965. II, 54, 169. See also: Largier, Niklaus. “Tactus. Le sens du toucher et la volupté au Moyen Age.” Micrologus 13 (2004): 233–249, esp. 211–215.

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werp, combine the text of the Song of Songs with elements taken from contemporary love poetry in audacious ways, amplifying further the impact of the text and playing with the aesthetics of sweetness in minnesong and in a religious context. In exploring a broad range of possible affects and sensations, they move from the experiential practice that Hugh depicts to a more experimental practice that allows for multiple forms of play with rhetorical stimuli. Two other scripts have played a major role in monastic contemplation and served as blueprints for specific forms of the application of the senses. The first is the creation narrative, the Hexameron. The second one is the legend of the temptation of Saint Anthony. Two twelfth century texts, On the Fourfold Exercise of the Cell (De quadripertito exercitio cellae) by Adam of Dryburgh (Adam Scotus) 22 and Balduin of Canterbury’s On the Twofold Resurrection (De duplici resurrectione) 23 can illustrate this in exemplary ways. Both texts emphasize again – as does Hugh of Saint Victor – that prayer in the cell cannot be a form of prayer that asks for something or prayer that could be seen as a gesture of petitioning. Rather, they both point out that prayer has to be understood as a technique that puts the soul in a position in which it can be touched by the text and artifacts, that is, a technique that makes the soul receptive to the rhetorical effects of emotional and sensual arousal. Balduin’s notion of a twofold resurrection refers to the fact that “ordinary people” can be content with the resurrection and the experience of the paradise at the end of time. Monks however, he writes, are familiar with the practice of evoking this experience as an actual state of emotional and sensual perception.24 In this context, he invokes musical imagery, imagining the soul as a musical instrument that resonates (a psaltherium or cithara) and the senses as the cords that are put in movement through the use that is made of the biblical text in prayer and contemplation. Thus, specific quotes from the creation narrative are used to stimulate the senses, to produce moments of sensation which must be qualified as aesthetic since they are in fact nothing other than the sense experience of the world in light of redemption. The words Adam and Balduin use are stupor and admiratio, expressing the translation of the creation narrative into phenomena of overwhelming sensual and affective experience. Paradoxically, we might want to add, all this happens in the solitude of the cell where the direct empirical experience of the world is being replaced by this art of aes22 Dryburgh, Adam of. “De quadripertito exercitio cellae.” Patrologia Latina. Ed. JacquesPaul Migne. Paris: Migne, 1854. Vol. 153. 799–884. 23 Canterbury, Balduin of. “De duplici resurrectione.” Patrologia Latina. Ed. Jacques-Paul Migne. Paris: Migne, 1855. Vol. 204. 429–442. 24 Canterbury, “De duplici resurrectione,” 429: “Simple mortals are satisfied with one resurrection. We, however, are not satisfied with one resurrection.” (My translation.)

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thetic animation and by the artificial reconfiguration of an original beauty of nature. However, as all monks since the desert fathers knew, this intense experience is not unproblematic. There is no pure sweetness even in the life of the cell, and wherever pure sweetness appears there has to be the suspicion that it has its origin not in the divine but in the demon who disguises himself. This tension is in most cases evoked through the third script I mentioned, namely the model of the life of Saint Anthony, especially the scenes of his temptation. This model, too, serves as a blueprint, on the one hand for a dramatization of the sensation that is produced, on the other hand for a never-ending process of purification in light of a discernment of the spirits.25 Each moment of sensation and emotional intensity has to be evaluated and justified, that is, each moment of sensation is in itself the place of a drama where the good has to confront the evil and where the exemplary scenario of discernment, the life of Saint Anthony, has to be enacted. In other words – and this is maybe the most important aspect of the significance of the life of Saint Anthony in medieval monastic life – each moment of sensation has to be confronted by its demonic other, which has to be actively evoked as well. Each moment of meditation turns thus into a scene of martyrdom, evoking not only the sensation of consolation, but also of the demons in disguise. Thus, the model of aisthesis that we encounter here not only produces a world of sweetness in the cell, but also a world of terror and an aesthetics of terror and disfiguration. It is the aesthetics of terror that we will encounter not only in the texts, but also in the paintings of late medieval and early modern artists who deal with the topic of the temptation of Saint Anthony. The drama that we encounter in these texts and images is not just an allegory of temptation, but the drama that unfolds necessarily in the logic of the application and the rhetorical stimulation of the senses as it was introduced by Origen and others.

Convergences of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ As I am arguing here, medieval practices of meditation and contemplation confuse models of religious anthropology that operate with a clear distinction of inner and outer, internal and external, spiritual and material man. As David of Augsburg puts it in his treatise The Seven Steps of Prayer, prayer is the 25 I am drawing here on more comprehensive interpretations of the scenario of Saint Anthony in Largier, “Praying by Numbers,” and Largier, Niklaus. Die Kunst des Begehrens: Dekadenz, Sinnlichkeit und Askese. Munich: Beck, 2007.

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very “knocking” on heaven’s doors (quoting the “knocking at the door” from Matthew 7:7 and Luke 11:9): When he tells us to pray, God does not mean that we should tell him with our words what we wish, since he anyway already knows what we need before we ask him for it. He rather means that we should knock. Through knocking we experience how sweet and good he is and thus we love him and join him in love and become one spirit with him.26

This is David’s explanation of the act of “rumination,” the practice that not only remembers the scriptures but translates the very act of remembering into an act of intense affective and sensual experientia, or, in other words, the very act that deploys the rhetorical effects of the words in order to animate the scriptures in a convergence of inner and outer worlds. As I have shown, these inner and outer worlds stand not in opposition to each other but in a complex relation of mediation. In order to evoke both the inner or spiritual sense of the scriptures and the inner or spiritual experiential possibilities of man, all the ‘inner’ (that which does not yet exist as a matter of experience) has to be turned into the ‘outer.’ It has to take shape in the form of material figurations – words, images, artifacts – that are able to produce their effects beyond conceptual language and understanding. Thus, they constitute a world of experience – a world of experience that takes shape, as Hadewijch shows, not in the form of an ‘inner’ experience but rather in the form of an experience that is both internal and external at the same time. In the absorbing power of the experiential event, it is liberated from the constrictions of both the internal and the external, and it constitutes a world of intensity that is equally material and spiritual, corporeal and free. In Hadewijch’s description of this experience, the material, informed by the scriptural tropes and scripts she enacts, turns spiritual and the spiritual, drawn into the material form of its liturgical enactment, turns material. In other words, her art of prayer infects the world she sees as well as the stable distinctions of inner and outer, and makes this very distinction collapse in a moment of overwhelming absorption. In doing so, however, she develops – together with a range of other medieval authors – a technique of sensual and emotional stimulation that evokes and creates a world of emotions and sensations that is full of possibilities. They emerge in the practice of prayer, a practice that makes the external into the medium for the evocation and production of the internal, and the internal into a medium for the experiential intensity of the external.

26 Augsburg, David of. “Septem gradus orationis.” Published in: Heerinckx, Jacques. “Le Septem gradus orationis de David d’Augsbourg.” Revue d’ascétique et de mystique 14 (1933): 146–170, here 161 (my translation).

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And as a practice of prayer it is always in suspense, in a state of exploration, and on the move in between the internal and the external, creating ever new states of experience in via without ever reaching an end.

Bibliography Ailly, Peter of. “Compendium contemplationis.” Peter of Ailly. Opuscula spiritualia. Douai, 1634. Augsburg, David of. “Septem gradus orationis.” Published in: Heerinckx, Jacques. “Le Septem gradus orationis de David d’Augsbourg.” Revue d’ascétique et de mystique 14 (1933): 146–170. Biberach, Rudolf of. De septem itineribus aeternitatis. Ed. Margot Schmidt. Stuttgart, Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1985. Canterbury, Balduin of. “De duplici resurrectione.” Patrologia Latina. Ed. Jacques-Paul Migne. Paris: Migne, 1855. Vol. 204. 429–442. Carruthers, Mary. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Carruthers, Mary. The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Dryburgh, Adam of. “De quadripertito exercitio cellae.” Patrologia Latina. Ed. Jacques-Paul Migne. Paris: Migne, 1854. Vol. 153. 799–884. Hadewijch. “Visions.” Hadewijch. The Complete Works. Trans. Columba Hart. New York: Paulist Press, 1980. 259–305. Hamburger, Jeffrey. “Idol Curiosity.” Curiositas. Welterfahrung und ästhetische Neugierde in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit. Ed. Klaus Krüger. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002. 19–58. Helfta, Gertrude of. The Herald of Divine Love. Ed. and trans. Margaret Winkworth. New York, Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1993. Herp, Hendrik. Theologia mystica. Farnborough: Gregg, 1965. Herp, Hendrik. Directorium aureum contemplativorum. / Directorio de contemplativos. Ed. Juan Martín Kelly. Madrid: Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, Fundación Universitaria Española, 1974. Largier, Niklaus. “Inner Senses – Outer Senses: The Practice of Emotions in Medieval Mysticism.” Codierung von Emotionen im Mittelalter. / Emotions and Sensibilities in the Middle Ages. Ed. Stephen C. Jaeger and Ingrid Kasten. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2003. 3–15. Largier, Niklaus. “Tactus. Le sens du toucher et la volupté au Moyen Age.” Micrologus 13 (2004): 233–249. Largier, Niklaus. “Die Applikation der Sinne. Mittelalterliche Ästhetik als Phänomenologie rhetorischer Effekte.” Das fremde Schöne. Dimensionen des Ästhetischen in der Literatur des Mittelalters. Ed. Manuel Braun and Christopher Young. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2007. 43–60. Largier, Niklaus. Die Kunst des Begehrens: Dekadenz, Sinnlichkeit und Askese. Munich: Beck, 2007. Largier, Niklaus. “Medieval Christian Mysticism.” The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion. Ed. John Corrigan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 364–379.

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Largier, Niklaus. “Praying by Numbers: An Essay on Medieval Aesthetics.” Representations 104 (2008), special issue On Form: 73–92. Lombardus, Petrus. Sententiae in IV libris distinctae. Grottaferrata: Ed. Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 1971. Nyssa, Gregory of. In canticum canticorum. Ed. Hermannus Langerbeck. Leiden: Nrill, 1960. O’Callaghan, John P. “Imago Dei: A Test Case for St. Thomas’s Augustinianism.” Thomas the Augustinian. Ed. Michael Daupinais. Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2007. 100–144. Saint Victor, Hugh of. “On the Power of Prayer.” Trans. Hugh Feiss. Writings on the Spiritual Life: A Selection of Works of Hugh, Adam, Achard, Richard, Walter, and Godfrey of St. Victor. Ed. Christopher P. Evans. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. 331–347. Schnell, Rüdiger. “Wer sieht das Unsichtbare? Homo exterior und homo interior in monastischen und laikalen Erziehungsschriften.” Anima und sêle. Darstellungen und Systematisierungen von Seele im Mittelalter. Ed. Katharina Philipowski and Anne Prior. Berlin: Schmidt, 2006. 83–112. Seville, Isidore of. The ‘Etymologies’ of Isidore of Seville. Ed. and trans. Stephen A. Barney et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Vagaggini, Cipriano. Theological Dimensions of the Liturgy. Trans. Leonard J. Doyle. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1976.

Brigitte Weingart

Contact at a Distance The Topology of Fascination

Expectations Thinking about fascination and “rethinking” the historical semantics of this notion, I must admit that I wonder whether it actually refers to an emotion at all, as its contemporary uses seem to suggest.1 At least with regard to the future (which in this case takes the form of science fiction), it might be no coincidence that “fascinating” happens to be the favorite word of Star Trek’s mastermind Mr. Spock: not exactly the emotional type. He mainly uses it to comment on phenomena that affect his earthly colleagues emotionally, but leave the hyperrational half-Vulcan’s green blood cold. According to Spock’s own explanation, what the word does account for is a challenge to preconceived knowledge. Facing one of the many curiosities that intergalactic travel involves, he is asked: “Does your logic find this fascinating, Mr. Spock?” Mr. Spock answers: “‘Fascinating’ is a word I use for the unexpected. In this case, I should think ‘interesting’ would suffice.” 2 Luckily, and somewhat unexpectedly, this rather laconic comment provides me with the opportunity to actually re-connect ‘fascination’ – at least in its future and Vulcan iteration – to the history of passions. As a reaction to the unexpected, it is this moment of epistemic crisis that fascination shares with the long-established concept of admiratio. As late as the eighteenth century, admiratio (which of course contains the Latin noun mirum for ‘miracle’ and ‘marvel’) referred not only to admiration (Be-wunderung), but also to amazement, surprise, and wonder (Ver-wunderung) – and thus to the whole range of emotional reactions to that which appeared to be “miraculous” (das Wunderbare).3 When Descartes in his canonical Passions de l’âme (1649), for example, decribes “admiration” as a reaction to something new, unexpected, 1 This essay originated in the context of my work on a book-length study on the genealogy, poetics, and media aesthetics of fascination, in which the argument that remains only sketched out here is further substantiated. 2 Mr. Spock in Starship Enterprise – The Squire of Gothos, season 1, episode 17 (original air date: 1967). 3 Barck, Karlheinz. “Wunderbar.” Ästhetische Grundbegriffe. Ed. Karlheinz Barck et al. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2005. Vol. 6. 730–773; see also Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750. New York: Zone Books, 2001.

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and/or extraordinary, his emphasis is on surprise: “Admiration is a sudden surprise of the soul which brings it to consider with attention the objects that seem to it unusual and extraordinary.” 4 In the moment of admiration – and it can only ever be an extended moment – the decision as to whether the object is “convenient” (convenable) or not is suspended in favor of this intensified, yet ‘neutral’ attention. Accordingly, admiration for Descartes not only seems to be the first of the passions: “Since all this may happen before we know whether or not the object is beneficial to us, I regard admiration as the first of all the passions.” 5 It is also the only one he locates in the brain, where the formerly non-conceptualized object of perception is said to leave a particular impression. And since this impression is considered to be a rarity, it is “strengthen[ed] and preserve[d]” by “the spirits” (les esprits) which interact with the sense organs, and kept in its special place.6 A productive reaction to the unknown which, due to its location in the brain, affects neither heart nor blood: Cartesian admiration indeed seems like the kind of ‘cold’ intellectual passion to which even Vulcans may be prone. Now, even among earthlings, historical or contemporary, the notion of fascination certainly connotes a moment of epistemic rupture or delay as well, which even resonates in its use as a mere stock phrase (as in ‘a fascinating talk,’ for example). But unlike surprise and wonder, in its long discursive history fascination is hardly ever credited with initiating the advancement of knowledge, not to mention with the dignity of being a catalyst of philosophy – and this is not the only difference from Cartesian admiration. If anything, fascination shares the paralyzing effects that Descartes ascribes to the “excess[es]” of admiration, the “astonishment” (étonnement), which turns the body into an immobile statue while all the spirits are busy keeping the impression of the astonishing object in its place and stop communicating with the other organs or even moving within the brain. As it happens, motionlessness is also a commonplace in descriptions of being fascinated. The close association of such stupor with stupidity is implicitly affirmed by Descartes when he relates the state of astonishment to a somewhat unreasonable use of perception due to the preoccupation of the spirits: As a result the whole body remains as immobile as a statue, making it possible for only the side of the object originally presented to be perceived, and hence impossible for a

4 Descartes, René. “The Passions of the Soul.” The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Trans. John Cottingham et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. 325–404. A. 70 (translation modified throughout for terminological consistency). 5 Descartes, “The Passions of the Soul,” a. 53. 6 Descartes, “The Passions of the Soul,” a. 70.

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more detailed knowledge of the object to be acquired. This is what we commonly call ‘being astonished.’ Astonishment is an excess of admiration, and it can never be other than bad.7

Again, this tendency to get stuck perceptually – in this case, visually – at the mere surface of the object, thereby turning it into an image, is a recurrent theme in scenarios of fascination (although, as we shall see, fascination of the subject may also be characterized as a snapshot-like state). It is due to this lack of epistemic productivity that, in Cartesian terms, fascination would be closer to astonishment than to admiration. Its rather complicated relationship with reason is already inscribed in the etymology of the term: the Latin verb fascinare, which goes back to Greek baskanía, means ‘to bewitch, to enchant, to dazzle,’ and thus locates the notion within the history of magic (or, depending upon your perspective, superstition). No wonder that in the longstanding tradition of trying to apprehend fascinatio as enchantment, its instantiations are often themselves considered to be mirabilia. If in what follows, I want to take a closer look at the topology of fascination, I am particularly interested in this resistance to being fully integrated into the history of ‘reasonable ideas,’ including the rational re-thinking of emotions exemplified by Descartes’s treatise on the passions of the soul, which makes no explicit mention of the subject.8 What’s more, although this topology does indeed rely on the opposition of interiority and exteriority to which this volume is dedicated, the emotions involved in historical accounts of fascination cannot be said to simply confirm the common historical diagnosis of a gradual interiorization of passions.9 Even if fascination may indeed refer to something like a feeling in itself – and in our selves –, the notion still implies a strong reference to the transmission of emotions, and more specifically: to a process which connects the subject to an exterior agency that cannot be fully appropriated. As we shall see, the exteriorizing effects of this connection constitute a major part of the notion’s archaic heritage. When I emphasize fascination’s ‘incomplete’ integration into the familiar historical narratives of emotional interiorization, it is not in order to romanticize the phenomenon as completely alien – or extraterrestrial – to Western rationality; there will be mention of many reasonable explanations which aim

7 Descartes, “The Passions of the Soul,” a. 73. 8 For reasons that should become clearer in the course of my argument, fascination is not mentioned in classical accounts of passions and emotions. 9 For a very prominent version of this diagnosis, see Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners, and State Formation and Civilization. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Oxford, Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994. 475–498.

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at the disenchantment of fascination in this essay. But if, as I would like to show, fascination refers to a spatial relationship between subject and object that is characterized by the paradox of contact at a distance, we can expect the notion to keep challenging the distinction between interiority and exteriority. By the end of my genealogical sketch, it should therefore come as no surprise that in modern attempts to radically question the inside/outside dichotomy with regard to our conceptions of subjectivity as interiority, the topology of fascination established in pre-modern discourses on enchantment is reactivated – in favor, for example, of a “thought of the outside,” to use Michel Foucault’s description of the works of Maurice Blanchot.10

Subject/object, actio/passio Although my outline thus far seems to announce a rather a-historical approach, it is actually against the background of the notion’s changing semantics and epistemological contexts that the recurrent features of a topology of fascination take shape. Firstly, and as an initial hint to the central idea of an exterior agency, let me remind you that nowadays, the noun ‘fascination’ can refer both to the act or activity of casting a spell on somebody (as in: the fascination of a certain celebrity) and to the rather passive state of being fascinated (as in: my fascination with or for a certain celebrity, or a certain object). The latter is a rather modern, although by now much more common use of the word; this is the reason why nowadays, in order to effectuate an oscillation between a genitive of the subject and a genitive of the object, the person involved needs to bear some numinous, if dubious, qualities – as in, say: “Hitler’s fascination,” while “Joe Average’s fascination” clearly suggests that it is Joe Average who is spellbound. Symptomatically, the semantic shift from fascination as an activity to fascination as a disposition goes along with a process of metaphorization that occurs in the course of enlightenment. As a result, fascination loses most of its literally magic qualities of enchantment. According to the OED (which also delivers the final confirmation that we are indeed dealing with emotions), the word is now mainly used to describe “an irresistible feeling of attraction.” 11 Even in this miniature version, historical semantics seem to indicate a chiasm that connects the debasement of magic, 10 Foucault, Michel. “The Thought of the Outside.” Trans. Brian Massumi and Robert Hurley. Essential Works of Foucault. Vol. 2: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. Ed. James D. Faubion. London: New Press, 2000. 147–169. 11 “Fascination.” Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Ed. Angus Stevenson. 6th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Vol. 1. 932.

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on the one hand, to the establishment of fascination as an interior emotion, on the other. And yet, although we seem to have long ago left the realm of magic in favor of a discourse on ‘feelings,’ the mention of an ‘irresistibility’ which deprives the fascinated subject of any self-determined interiority indicates that it is (still) under the remote control of something exterior. The feeling of being drawn somewhere in a manner which one cannot resist can hardly be considered to be completely ‘interiorized;’ it is rather something that works upon the subject, thereby turning it into an object. Even as a form of attraction (as it happens another term with occult connotations: just think of magnetism), fascination is not beyond fatality. Its more positive appeal in the discourse of galanterie could not deceive the sober judgment of Sigmund Freud, who used the term exclusively for an extreme form of love that borders on pathology. Due to the paralysis of the critical faculties, fascination as a state of amorous “bondage” (verliebte Hörigkeit) is comparable to being hypnotized.12 This analogy echoes the use of the term as a synonym for hypnosis at the time, as

Fig. 1a

Fig. 1b

Les yeux qui fascinent. Episode from the silent film serial Les Vampires. Dir. Louis Feuillade. Gaumont, 1915/1916.

12 Freud, Sigmund. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Trans. James Strachey. London: International Psychoanalytic Press, 1959. 57.

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illustrated by an episode entitled “Les yeux qui fascinent” of Louis Feuillade’s silent film serial Les Vampires (1915/1916), featuring a hypnotizer who brings the lady vampire Irm la Vep under his power (see figs. 1a and 1b which also provide an example of how to compensate for the crucial lack of visibility in visual representations of occult forces). Moreover, Freud’s remarks resonate with the notion’s much longer tradition in discourses of witchcraft as “ligation”: a powerful binding, albeit by invisible bonds. Attraction, irresistibility, bondage, immobility: so far it seems that if I am fascinated, I do not have much of a choice, but I am rather in the situation of being chosen by somebody or something. This state exceeds the kind of passivity that is inscribed in the concept of passion as its condition and implies a more fundamental powerlessness. With regard to the distribution of power, the relationship established by fascination is characterized by an irreducible onesidedness: to be fascinated is to be subjected to the agency of an impalpable power. Not only is this asymmetry of power a common denominator in the discursive history of fascination; it is also inscribed in the notion’s genealogy as a clear role distribution of actio and passio among the subjects and objects involved.

Cause and affect: contact as contagion In pre-modern discourse, roughly speaking, fascination and its Latin antecedent fascinatio refer to a particular kind of action: namely, to certain phenomena of actio in distans, and most prominently to ‘bewitchment’ via eye-contact, as assumed in the widespread belief in the “evil eye.” Although enchanting words, sounds, and touch also sometimes feature as means of transmission, the primary case of debate here is the power of the look: “fascination is ever by the eye,” as Francis Bacon put it in 1627 in his Natural History – with explicit mention that “the opinion […] is ancient.” 13 The asymmetry of the supposed power relation is more than evident in the idea of the evil eye, which basically implies that a human being or an animal can be harmed and made sick by another by means of a mere malevolent look. Yet these fatal consequences only emphasize the underlying problem of causation: if mere affects can have psychological and even physical effects on somebody else, we are apparently confronted with some sort of transmission without contact. Curiously enough, up to the late seventeenth century hardly any contribution to 13 Bacon, Francis. The Works of Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England. Vol. 4: Sylva Sylvarum: Or, A Natural History in Ten Centuries. Ed. Basil Montagu. London: Pickering, 1826. “Century X,” 944.

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the topic in Western philosophical or scholarly discourse ever denies the possibility of such visual enchantment – the main question remains how exactly it is possible. The list of thinkers who dealt with the question is quite impressive. It includes several of the patrists, scholastics such as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, who picked up ideas from Islamic thought on the issue through the works of Avicenna, natural philosophers, and Renaissance magi such as Ficino, Agrippa von Nettesheim, and Della Porta – and last but not least the many authors of demonological tracts that participate in the ideological underpinning of the persecution of witchcraft in the late middle ages, including the authors of the infamous Malleus maleficarum (Hammer of Witches) and other well-known authorities such as Martín Del Rio or Jean Bodin. Moreover, the conditions of fascinatio as an “occult disease” were discussed by medical authorities such as Jean François Fernel or Daniel Sennert up until the seventeenth century. As one might expect, there are not many among these philosophers or scholars who easily subscribe to the idea of magic, at least if we take ‘magic’ to be an antonym to ‘in accordance with the order of nature.’ In fact, as a mysterious instance of action at a distance or transmission without contact, fascination became the object of numerous attempts at reasonable explanation, and more specifically: at a reconciliation with the Aristotelian principle of causality according to which causation presupposes contact, since everything that moves has to be moved by something (Physics, book VII). Indeed, the main historical approach to demystifying fascination has been to explain it as the effect of a literal eye-contact, and moreover: of contagion. Although the constitution of the supposed “streams,” “beams,” “emanations,” or “effluvia” varies according to the states of optical, psychological, and medical knowledge, the common epistemic function of these means of transmission is to turn fascination via eye-contact or face-to-face interaction into an extraordinary, but natural process. The locus classicus to which many of the later authors refer is Plutarch, whose contribution also points to the crucial role of emotions and of the look as a medium of affects. His Table-Talks include a discussion about “those who are said to cast an evil eye,” a rumor which is not refuted but rationalized by means of a theory of eye-contact as contagion. According to Plutarch’s main speaker, looking implies the emission of a “stream of emanations” from the eye, which is transmitted to the eye of the person being looked at, through which it enters their body and soul.14 Most importantly, this physiological pro14 Plutarch. Plutarch’s Moralia in Sixteen Volumes. Trans. Paul A. Clement and Herbert B. Hoffleit. Bilingual edition. London, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969. Vol. 8. “TableTalk,” V. 7, 681.

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cess of transmission is prompted by and infused with emotions. As a result of this saturation, looking is said to imply an irreducible susceptibility to the appeal of the object of vision: “He [man] is possessed and governed by either pleasure or displeasure exactly in proportion to what he sees.” 15 When asked about the “casting of spells” and “how precisely […] harm [can] spread to others by a mere glance of the eye,” 16 Plutarch’s speaker predictably turns to envy, since this is the passion that, according to the ancients, causes the evil eye, and whose intrinsic connection to sight is already inscribed in its Latin name invidia. See how Plutarch’s speaker, who has just asserted the psychosomatic effects of the mind on one’s own body, describes the look of envy – and thereby the transitive effects of an affect: Envy, which naturally roots itself more deeply in the mind than any other passion, contaminates the body too with evil. […] When those possessed by envy to this degree let their glance fall upon a person, their eyes, which are closed to the mind and draw from it the evil influence of the passion, then assail that person as if with poisoned arrows; hence, I conclude, it is not paradoxical or incredible that they should have an effect on the persons who encounter their gaze.17

Contamination, possession, assailment: note that it is only with the supplement “as if with poisoned arrows” that Plutarch turns to metaphor here. The fact that he considers emotionally charged eye-contact to be a literal contagion is emphasized when he compares it with eye-diseases, which “are more contagious to those exposed and more instantaneously so than other diseases, so penetrating and swift is the power of the eye to admit or communicate disease.” 18 The aforementioned “arrow” is not only a symbol for plague, but of course also resembles the one with which Eros likes to initiate love. As passions allegedly initiated by sight, Plutarch treats love and envy as structurally analogous. In fact, his model of contagion and actual “injury” is primarily established by the example of the loving gaze before it is applied to the look of the envious.19 An equally literal use of what became the topos of love as 15 Plutarch, Moralia, “Table-Talk,” V. 7, 681. This fusion of seeing and affect can also be considered a visual equivalent to the assumption that sense perception in general goes along with pleasure or pain. For a more detailed account of this connection in Artistotelian (including scholastic) theories of emotions and of its reformulation in Kant’s work, see Catherine Newmark’s contribution to this volume. 16 Plutarch, Moralia, “Table-Talk,” V. 7, 681. 17 Plutarch, Moralia, “Table-Talk,” V. 7, 681. 18 Plutarch, Moralia, “Table-Talk,” V. 7, 681. 19 Plutarch, Moralia, “Table-Talk,” V. 7, 682. – Plutarch’s physiology of the loving gaze is clearly indebted to Plato’s Phaedrus, where it is related to the recognition of heavenly, ideal beauty as retrieved in the look of its earthly equivalent; there is no mention, however, of the evil eye in Plato’s dialogue.

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infection and exchange of body fluids can be observed in the philosophical poem De rerum natura by Plutarch’s slightly older colleague Lucretius. Thanks to his sober-minded, quasi-medical approach, Plutarch’s orator even manages to rescue the use of amulets against the evil eye from its bad reputation as mere superstition. Instead, they are said to simply attract the look onto themselves and thereby protect against eye-contact. What Plutarch does not mention, though, is the design of a certain amulet which was particularly popular in Roman antiquity (and possibly beyond) for protecting children, cows, and Imperial chariots from envious looks: the so called fascinum, a piece of metal in the shape of a penis.20 Although the phallic fascinum is somewhat out of fashion by now, in contemporary Italy, where the belief in the evil eye is still prevalent in everyday culture, the phallic form reappears in the numerous practices to avert the mal’occhio or the jettatura, as it is called in Southern Italy. Evil eye charms commonly feature horns (or corna) or the mano cornuta, one of the two most customary gestures used in defence when a jettatore tries to cast a spell on you. The other gesture, the mano fica (fig hand), also clearly bears obscene connotations, especially if combined with the phallic element. Nevertheless, the combination of phallus and fig hand is said to be “the most common form” of ancient protection against the evil eye

Fig. 2: Fascinum with mano fica. Source: Jahn, Otto. “Über den Aberglauben des bösen Blicks bei den Alten.” Berichte über die Verhandlungen der Königlich-Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, Philologisch-Historische Klasse 7 (1855): 28–110, here 81.

20 For a somewhat scandalized account of this custom, see “Fascinum.” Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexikon. Ed. Johann Heinrich Zedler. Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1961 [reprint: Halle-Leipzig, 1735]. Vol. 9. 289.

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by the nineteenth century classicist Otto Jahn, who permitted himself to add an illustration of such an object in the service of science (fig. 2).21 The apotropaic custom of the amulet obviously involves a particular kind of affect management. Not only does it involve a shift of perspective from the fascinator to the fear of and care for the possible victim of the evil eye – in fact, the whole notion of the evil eye hints at both the potential violence of the look and the fundamental vulnerability implied in being looked at. Moreover, with regard to the topology of fascination, it is crucial to emphasize that the logic of the amulet relies on the idea of counter-fascination: it is not by coincidence that “fascinum” refers to both the act of visual enchantment and to the means of protection against it.22 (The same applies nowadays to the word charm.) So, fascination here explicitly turns out to be the quality of an object. Moreover, its efficacy extends into a dynamics of reflection, by means of which the space between subject and object becomes a field of bouncing forces. Accordingly, the function of the amulet can also be fulfilled by a mirror, as demonstrated by Perseus, the mythical antagonist of the proto-witch Medusa. Faced with the risk of being petrified by Medusa’s looks and turning himself into a picture – that is to say: a statue –, Perseus used his reflective shield to avoid eye-contact. Thanks to this act of counter-magic, Perseus is not only able to cut off the Gorgon’s head; from then on, he uses it himself as a fascinum.23 This is but one instance which indicates that the asymmetrical power relation at the core of fascination may switch, but may not be sublated. If the one-sided agency may be countered by reflection, this does not imply any emphatic form of reciprocity. Since Plutarch’s orator is tackling the topic as a preventable disease rather than as a matter of belief, such mythical and irrational undercurrents as appear in the psychologics of the amulet are of no concern for him, and do not have to be: It is not surprising that the guests at the table seem to be convinced by his reasonable explication for the supposed enchantment by the evil eye and its effective counter-charms, since the general idea of eyesight as an extramissive process, and of the active eye sending out particles of some kind, is not unusual in ancient thinking. In Plutarch’s explanation, as well as in similar attempts to ‘naturalize’ the bodily effects of eye-contact as contagion, fascination proves to be a concept in which vision converges with emo21 Jahn, “Über den Aberglauben,” 80 (my translation). 22 “Faszination.” Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens. Ed. Eduard Hoffmann-Krayer and Hanns Bächtold-Stäubli. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 1987 [reprint: Berlin, Leipzig, 1927]. Vol. 2. 1263–1266. 23 With regard to Medusa, this has been pointed out in Siebers, Tobin. The Mirror of Medusa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. 3.

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tion: with a telling neglect of distinction, Plutarch refers to the consistency of the “stream of influence” from lovers’ eyes “whether it be light or a current of particles.” 24 The eye is considered not only an organ of seeing, but also viewed as an opening of the body where vision is superimposed onto a psychophysical transmission.

Mediating spirits With respect to the relation of interiority and exteriority in this process, it stands out that Plutarch describes envy as something that is “root[ed] […] in the mind” and first ‘contaminates’ the subject’s own body, out of which the “evil influence” then exits through the eyes (“which are close to the mind”), to infect the envied object.25 Thanks to this so to speak two-step approach to a very specific kind of exteriorization of emotion, Plutarch implicitly offers a solution to another tricky problem raised in Aristotle’s De anima: whether and how the soul can affect corporeal matter. This question can be broken into two parts: how does my soul affect my own body? And: can it affect other bodies, and how? At this point, discourses on fascination overlap with those on the power, and more precisely with those on the scope of imagination, the conventional view being that strong imaginations (as well as strong emotions) do influence one’s own body, but can only reach over to other bodies by means of quasi-material mediation – for example, contagion. In pre-modern debates about fascination as a particular transmission of emotions, what I called Plutarch’s two-step approach grosso modo proves to be valid as long as the prevailing medical and psychological models, based on the theory of humors, allow for the assumption of some kind of mediating spiritus or pneuma, that is, “[s]omething midway between the material and the spiritual,” to cite a particularly laconic expert in that matter.26 Due to this particular consistency, they function as an instrument for the immaterial soul to interact with corporeal substance – thereby allowing for a mode of interaction which neither Aristotelian nor Platonic thought could conceive of as immediate. We already came across the notion of spirits in Descartes’s description of admiration, where they appeared in their typical function as mediators, although there they operate within the body. In pre-modern debates on fascina24 Plutarch, Moralia, “Table-Talk,” V. 7, 681. 25 Plutarch, Moralia, “Table-Talk,” V. 7, 681. 26 Parke, Herbert William, and Donald Ernest Wormell. The Delphic Oracle. i, 23; as quoted by the editor in Plutarch, Moralia, “Table-Talk,” V. 7, 681 (note on page 421).

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tio as a malicious power of the look, the spiritus are often also held responsible for the transitive effects of affects on other bodies. Thanks to their versatility as a mediating substance and to the assumption that the eyes are their privileged exit, the two-step model of emotional eye-contact as contagion outlived the rejection of the extramission theory of vision. This paradigm shift officially happened as early as 1021, when Ibn al-Haytham (also known as Alhazen or ‘the father of modern optics’) demonstrated in his Book of Optics that vision is based on rays of light that come from the object and are received by the eye. Nevertheless, extramission theories do not disappear until the seventeenth century in discourses on fascination, and even the most cutting-edge approaches to optics (for instance, the influential “species” theory which is based on the idea that spiritual images of the object are continuously multiplied on the way to the observer) allowed for a conceptualization of vision as contact in the Middle Ages.27 In any case, within the framework of humoral medicine as stipulated by Galen, which was prevalent up to the seventeenth century, the contagion model of emotional transmission by means of the gaze can always rely on the idea of spirits, since they are alleged to carry the infectious substance. Let me illustrate this by quoting – out of numerous other examples – Thomas Aquinas, who not by coincidence discusses the evil eye as part of the question “whether man by the power of his soul can change corporeal matter?” (an assumption he predictably denies, at least in the case of humans). It is no coincidence that he explicitly distances himself from Avicenna in this regard, since the Persian polymath is one of the rare figures in the Problemgeschichte of fascination whose explanation of the evil eye does not claim to be compatible with the Aristotelian principle of causality, but relies on “strong imagination” alone.28 Yet in the general view, which is shared by Christian scholastics as much as by Neoplatonic thinkers, the vis imaginativa – as a faculty of the soul that deals with sensual images which, within the ventricle model, is usually located in proximity to the eyes – itself relies on the mediation of spirits. This fine, but crucial distinction is palpable in Thomas Aquinas’s correction

27 A particularly telling example for this argument is to be found in Roger Bacon’s approach to fascination, which shortcuts the transmission of species with the emanation of spirits, with the latter being dependent on a person’s complexion. Cf. Bacon, Roger. The Opus Majus of Roger Bacon. Trans. Robert Belle Burke. 2 vols. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1928. Vol. 1. 413. 28 Avicenna’s position is discussed by Hasse, Dag Nikolaus. Avicenna’s ‘De anima’ in the Latin West: The Formation of a Peripatetic Philosophy of the Soul, 1160–1300. London: Warburg Institute, 2000. 114.

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of Avicenna’s view on fascinatio. While reading Thomas’s argument, bear in mind that he does not doubt the phenomenon as such: But it has been shown above (Q. CX., A. 2) that corporeal matter does not obey spiritual substances at will, but the Creator alone. Therefore it is better to say, that by a strong imagination the (corporeal) spirits of the body united to that soul are changed, which change in the spirits takes place especially in the eyes, to which the more subtle spirits can reach. And the eyes infect the air which is in contact with them to a certain distance [my emphasis]: in the same way as a new and clear mirror contracts a tarnish from the look of a menstruata, as Aristotle says (De Somn. et Vigil. [De insomniis ii]).29

This “menstruata” is also a recurrent figure in pre-modern discourses on fascinatio, which of course strengthens the connection between femininity and – since we are speaking of the evil eye – witchcraft, which is spelled out as follows: Hence then when a soul is vehemently moved to wickedness, as occurs mostly in little old women, according to the above explanation, the countenance becomes venomous and hurtful, especially to children, who have a tender and most impressionable body. It is also possible that by God’s permission, or from some hidden deed, the spiteful demons co-operate in this, as the witches may have some compact with them.30

“[T]he countenance becomes venomous and hurtful.” With this, we are back to Plutarch’s poisoned arrows and the wounds caused by emotionally charged eye-contact. The implications of this statement by a canonical author for subsequent demonologies can hardly be underestimated; besides many other references to this paragraph, it is quoted in the Malleus maleficarum which, due to its enormous circulation, is held responsible for numerous witchcraft trials.31 With regard to the topology of fascination as contact at a distance and its historical persistence, it is worth mentioning that even in theological arguments that claim a necessary interaction of demons in this otherwise inexplicable process, this predication is linked to a meticulous provision of evidence on the nature of eye-contact. This apparent contradiction is due to Satan’s inability to perform real ‘miracles’ (a privilege of God): since his power is restricted to the realm of nature, his tricks may be extraordinary at best, but

29 Aquinas, Thomas. The ‘Summa theologica’ of St. Thomas Aquinas. Literally translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Vol. 1.5: QQ. CIII–CXIX. London: Oates & Washbourne, 1922. Ia, q. 117, a. 3. 30 Aquinas, Summa theologica, Ia, q. 117, a. 3. 31 Kramer, Heinrich, and James Sprenger. The ‘Malleus maleficarum.’ Trans. Montague Summers. New York: Dover, 2007. 17. (Recent scholarship claims Kramer, aka “Institoris,” to be the author of the Hammer of Witches.)

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never exceed the limits of ‘natural’ magic. As a result, one discovers in medieval and early modern discourses on fascinatio striking similarities between the explanations of, for example, Christian theologists on the one hand and, on the other, natural philosophers or Neoplatonic Renaissance magi who often became suspect of heresy themselves – not to mention skeptics like Reginald Scot who discredits the witchcraft belief as “Papist” frenzy, yet accepts fascination as a possible, since natural phenomenon.32 By 1600, the contagion model was so widespread that the Jesuit and polymath Martín Del Rio, in his Disquisitiones magicae (Investigations into Magic), lamented the misuse of “fascination” as a mere metaphor for “contagion,” which suggests a purely physical act. He vehemently claimed that the use of the word should be restricted to its literal meaning – namely: “if someone attacks or damages somebody else by looking at him, without being bodily connected to him, and without acting against him.” 33 As expected, Del Rio refers to the interference of the devil when he tries to qualify literal fascination as ‘real’ magic (and not ‘just’ contagion). However, the possible operators in the service of God’s antagonist have to be of a truly exceptional kind, since they are neither identified as humoral spiritus, nor are any other media strategies revealed to the reader – for once, the mere mention of demonic interaction has to suffice for the paradox of action at a distance to appear resolved.

From spirit(s) to spirit: curiosities The epistemic advantages of conceiving of contagion as a “missing link” in actions at a distance are obvious, since it provides a plausible chain of cause and effect, based on the mediation of spirits and forces (even if occult).34 As 32 Scot, Reginald. The Discoverie of Witchcraft. With an Introduction by the Rev. Montague Summers. New York: Dover, 1989. 281. 33 Del Rio, Martín. Disquisitionum magicarum libri sex: quibus continetur accurata curiosarum artium, & variarum superstitionum confutatio, utilis theologis, jurisconsultis, medicis, philologis. Lugduni, 1602. 169 (my translation). I have not been able to retrieve this quote in Alonso Tostado’s rather extensive work, which prompted the use of the bishop’s name as a synonym for prolific productivity (to which Miguel de Cervantes refers in his Don Quijote (1605/1615), book II, chapter 3). – Extracts of the section “De fascinatione” can be found in the abbreviated English version of Martín Del Rio’s Investigations into Magic. Ed. and trans. P. G. MaxwellStuart. Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press, 2000. 122–125. 34 The notion of the “missing link” is crucial in the anthropologist Edward E. Evans-Pritchard’s conceptualization of magic as an alternative theory of causation, which he derived from witchcraft practices of the African Zande. Cf. Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. 69.

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contagion, the notion of contact at a distance loses its paradoxical quality – after all, it is a form of mediation that stabilizes the dichotomy of inside and outside rather than challenging it. One might expect that with the scientific disqualification of the notion of spirits, vapors, and other effluvia still so dear to thinkers of the seventeenth century, the reduction of fascination to contagion would cease. But it looks as though the idea of contagion is here to stay, as it has survived even the modern re-conceptualizations and replacements of the supposed spirits involved – albeit (somewhat ironically, with regard to Del Rio’s attempts to stick to the literal) as metaphor. These changes correspond to certain tendencies toward a conflation of the immaterial soul with the spirits on whose mediating functions it relies, a process of ‘spiritualization’ that may go along with a further dematerialization of both entities involved.35 From the perspective of these rather complicated developments, it is not always obvious whether the polysemantics of the English “spirit” as well as the German Geist – words that can refer to pneumatic substances, to demons or ghosts, or to the mind – are the reason for or the result of certain conceptual confusions. Concerning this matter, Francis Bacon’s attempt to systematize the possible media involved in action at a distance in general and in the power of imagination and affects in particular is an exemplary case. In addition, his investigations into the subject matter are revealing with regard to the attitude of a skeptic who seems likely to change his mind and give in to the belief in phenomena located in the realm of magic and the miraculous, if only there were a way of proving their agreement with the laws of nature. While this perspective is characteristic for all of his comments on the topic, one may observe certain shifts in Bacon’s approach, which partly reflect the competing views at the time. In his late essay Of Envy (1625), Bacon takes up the familiar ancient view and describes fascination as a visual enchantment triggered by love and envy. Both of these “affectations” are said to have vehement wishes; They frame themselves readily into Imaginations, and Suggestions; And they come easily into the Eye; especially upon the presence of the Objects; which are the Points, that conduce to Fascination, if any such Thing there be.36

Bacon had already dealt with “these Curiosities, (though not unworthy, to be thought on, in fit place)”: twenty years earlier, he had considered the section

35 Sonntag, Michael. “‘Gefährte der Seele, Träger des Lebens.’ Die medizinischen Spiritus im 16. Jahrhundert.” Die Seele. Ihre Geschichte im Abendland. Ed. Gerd Jüttemann et al. Weinheim: Psychologie-Verlag-Union, 1991. 165–179. 36 Bacon, Francis. “Of Envy.” The Oxford Francis Bacon. Vol. 15: The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall. Ed. Michael Kiernan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 27–31, here 27.

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on “the substance, or nature of the soule or mind” in his Advancement of Learning (published in 1605) such a fit place, and while it was consistent with his skeptical attitude, the text featured the “Imaginations” as the main factor in this process. In The Advancement of Learning, fascination is defined exclusively as “the power and act of Imagination, intensive upon other bodies, than the bodie of the Imaginant” – no mention of evil or loving eyes.37 When Bacon gets back to this topic in extenso in his posthumously published Sylva Sylvarum (thereby revealing his lifelong curiosity about it), the term “fascination” again refers to visual transmission, which by now features as but one major instance of the power of imagination. Of course it is the extension to other bodies which provokes the objections of a thinker known for his claims concerning scientific standards, but at this point he obviously feels the need to enter a discussion on phenomena “which as they have ben [sic] handled, have rather vapoured foorth fables, than kindled truth.” 38 His examinations are formulated in a conditional mode – ‘if one was to believe in the power of imagination upon other bodies …’ – although it seems that not only the reader, but also the author himself is at risk of forgetting this condition. In any case, if Bacon was to believe in fascination, it had to be explained as the result of mediation; in contrast, “the Schoole of Paracelsus, and the Disciples of pretended Naturall Magicke” are dismissed as “intemperate, as they have exalted the power of imagination, to be much one with the power of Miracle-working faith” 39 (which is definitely an exaltation itself with regard to most representatives of natural magic, and even Paracelsus, who inherits Avicenna’s role as a counter-figure in this debate, does actually bother with questions of mediation). “[O]thers that drawe neerer to Probabilitie,” Bacon acknowledges, calling to their view the secret passages of things, and specially of the Contagion that passeth from bodie to bodie, do conceive it should likewise be agreeable to Nature, that

37 Bacon, Francis. The Oxford Francis Bacon. Vol. 4: The Advancement of Learning. Ed. Michael Kiernan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 105. 38 Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, 104 (besides fascination, Bacon mentions divination as a topic of the same kind). See also the conclusion of the paragraph on fascination: “Deficiences in these knowledges, I wil [sic] report none, other than the generall deficience, that is not knowne, how much of them is veritie, and how much vanitie.” (Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, 105.) 39 Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, 105 (emphasis in the original). In Sylva Sylvarum, where much of this paragraph is reused, this rejection is expressed more strongly: “for Paracelsus, and some darksome authors of magic, do ascribe to imagination exalted, the power of miracle-working faith. With these vast and bottomless follies men have been in part entertained.” (Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, “Century X,” Introduction.)

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there should be some transmissions and operations from spirit to spirit, without the mediation of the sences, whence the conceits have grown, (now almost made civile) of the Maistring Spirite, & the force of confidence, and the like.40

So while contagion may be an explanation worthy of consideration, the immediate communication between spirits remains a matter of mere belief. As to the latter idea, Bacon’s formulation only makes sense if “spirit” does not refer to the spiritus as mediating substance, but to “the soule or mind” with whose nature the paragraph is dealing. This inclination in the meaning of “spirit” toward ‘mind’ also resonates in the notions of the ‘mastering spirit’ and the ‘force of confidence,’ which usually refer to Avicenna’s eccentric position in this discourse. Of course, all of the related ideas are explicitly doubted. And still, when Bacon goes on to denounce the assumed fortification of the imagination by means of “Ceremoniall Magicke” – that is, by the (as we might call it: suggestive) use of “Ceremonies, Characters, and Charmes” which he also recognizes in the Catholic Church’s imagery – his criticism is less based on its impossibility than on moral grounds: as a short-cut to higher powers, such practice strikes him as being too easy.41 So far, Bacon’s approach to fascination and imagination may not seem to be quite as systematic as promised. But it is in a section on the power of imagination in Sylva Sylvarum that he dedicates himself to the “labour of Hercules, in purging the stable of Augeas,” in order to separate “any thing that is clean and pure natural” from superstition and magic.42 This endeavor is based on the premise that “[a]ll operations by transmission of spirits and imagination, have this; that they work at distance, and not at touch;” 43 what follows is a list of eight different explanations for such transmission, ranging from the “most corporeal” emissions at work in infection to “energies merely” and other “immateriate virtues,” including the ones supposedly at work between things which have at some point been in contact. Symptomatically, “spirits” figures both as a generic term for and an item in this list, where it reappears in a crucial role with regard to the transitive power of imagination: The fifth is, the emission of spirits; and this is the principal in our intention to handle now in this place; namely, the operation of the spirits of the mind of man upon other spirits: and this is of a double nature, the operations of the affections, if they be vehement, and the operation of the imagination, if it be strong. But these two are so coupled,

40 41 42 43

Bacon, Bacon, Bacon, Bacon,

The Advancement of Learning, 105 (my emphasis). The Advancement of Learning, 105 (emphasis in the original). Sylva Sylvarum, “Century X,” Introduction. Sylva Sylvarum, “Century X,” 903 (my emphasis).

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as we shall handle them together: for when an envious or amorous aspect doth infect the spirits of another, there is joined both affection and imagination.44

Firstly, Bacon’s claim of dealing with an operation between spirits – in the plural – brings the phenomenon at stake back to the familiar ground of an epistemologically plausible mediation (formerly called contagion). Secondly, and less familiarly, the “double nature” of this operation refers to a ‘coupling’ of imagination that is easily recognizable as fascination45 – a reunion which implies a prior separation – of which there was no mention in his former comments. In order to understand this move, one has to know that by the time he writes on the power of imagination in Sylva Sylvarum, his focus has actually shifted toward the equally mysterious phenomenon of telepathy: by now, imagination is understood to be “the representation of an individual thought.” 46 As it turns out, he uses the longstanding tradition of explaining the transmission of affects by means of spirits in order to demystify the transmission of thoughts – a line of argument that definitely benefits from this alleged joint venture. Accordingly, Bacon’s attempts to credit the quasi-mechanical (avant la lettre, if one thinks of the mechanist thinking advanced by Hobbes, Descartes, and others later in the seventeenth century), touch-like efficiency of these united forces is remarkable. This mechanistic appeal is amplified by the repeated emphasis on the ‘vehemency’ of the affections and the ‘strength’ of the imagination, by mention of the limited distances at which they can operate, and by the bodily and mental ‘weaknesses’ presupposed on the part of the targeted person or object: If there be any power in imagination, it is less credible that it should be so incorporeal, and immateriate a virtue, as to work at great distances, or through all mediums, or upon all bodies: but that the distance must be competent, the medium not adverse, and the body apt and proportionate.47

If no such mediating connection can be conceived of, as in the magic belief that imagination works upon a thing which was previously in contact with a person before (think of a witches’ manipulation of somebody’s hair), Bacon –

44 Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, “Century X,” 908. 45 Later in this same text, fascination is described as the mainly, yet not exclusively visual transmission of affects, namely love and envy: “if there be any such infection from spirit to spirit, there is no doubt but that it worketh by presence, and not by the eye alone; yet most forcibly by the eye.” (Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, “Century X,” 944.) 46 Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, “Century X,” 945. 47 Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, “Century X,” 950.

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like many of his contemporaries – still resorts to the “working of evil spirits,” also known as demons.48 But at least this can be said to be an explanation that does not come easily. Instead, and despite his own alleged distrust of the transitive power of imagination, early on in his examinations of the topic in Sylva Sylvarum, he admonishes the reader not to “withdraw credit from the operations by transmission of spirits, and force of imagination, because the effects fail sometimes” and to take into account that even “contagion from body to body, as the plague, and the like” is not always successful with a strong body – and how much more resistance is to be overcome by “impressions from mind to mind, or from spirit to spirit.” 49 The reader is not exactly discouraged by comments like this from believing in imagination’s power to act at a distance. Moreover, “mind” and “spirit” again tend to be equated. The overall effect produced by Bacon’s zigzagging line of argument and his shifting use of the notions of “spirits,” “spirit,” and “mind” is that, against all odds, immediate communication from mind to mind actually seems by no means inconceivable. This impression is supported by the fact that most of his examples refer to the “binding of thoughts” (as in the classical conjurer’s trick of guessing a chosen card, which Bacon claims to have witnessed himself).50 What is more, despite Bacon’s insistence, the specific nature of transmission appears secondary; his suggestion that there are indeed many ways to make it happen conveys a general epistemic plausibility to the phenomena at stake. In his discussion of a wide range of supposed operations that “work at distance, and not at touch,” he enters rather deeply into the field of adversary thought. As an – albeit unwilled – result, his elaborations combine to make all kinds of ‘spiritual’ communication acceptable, including the kind that operates without the mediation of the senses – “(now almost made civile).”

“Communication of the will” It should be mentioned that Bacon makes a serious effort to support his ultimate resistance to the idea of the transitive power of imagination by insisting on a lack of experimental proof: since all of the test scenarios presuppose a belief in such a power, he – as an official non-believer – has to leave their execution to others. And in accordance with the media conditions mentioned above, the person who claims to be equipped with this capacity is well advised 48 Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, “Century X,” 950. 49 Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, “Century X,” 901. 50 Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, “Century X,” 956.

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to try it within a setting that provides for the limited distances and ‘weak’ (including: light) objects, preferably “things living.” 51 To that effect, it is interesting to see an unequivocal practitioner of transitive ‘spiritual’ power struggle with the same media issues as Bacon while trying to explain its agency. Franz Anton Mesmer, as his writings demonstrate, apparently considered it vital that, in order for his theory of animal magnetism to be accepted by medical authorities, the putative influences of the mind on other people’s bodies be something “agreeable to Nature,” as Bacon would have it. Drawing from the Paracelsian notion of a cosmic “influx,” but also from Newton’s ether theory and his later theory of forces of gravity, Mesmer’s healing practices are based on the idea of a “universally spread fluidum” (fluide universellement répandu).52 His spectacular therapeutic sessions, including collective healing circles, relied on the idea that this subtle fluidum can be set in motion “through unmediated or mediated contact with a magnetized body.” As he points out, the magnetic effect can be evoked by “mere will,” since “all kinds of conductors and media, and even looks,” are sufficient to provide a connection: The actual communication [Die wirkliche Mittheilung] operates through unmediated or mediated contact with a magnetized body, that is, with a body inflamed by this invisible fire; so that through the mere direction of the hand and by means of all kinds of conductors and media, and even looks, the mere will may be sufficient to this end.53

51 Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, “Century X,” 957. In another place, he states: “the rule, as I conceive, is, that it [imagination] hath most force upon things that have the lightest and easiest motions. And therefore above all, on the spirits of men.” (Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, “Century X,” 957.) – I can only briefly mention here that in certain operations based on the power of imagination, these conditions may even imply the insertion of an additional human “medium,” a person who is weak and credulous enough not to divert the transmission (which, as to be expected, not only qualifies boys and children over adults, but also women over men). 52 Mesmer, Anton Franz. Mémoire sur la découverte du magnétisme animal [1779]. The document’s twenty-seven propositions are reprinted in Tatar, Maria. Spellbound: Studies on Mesmerism and Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. 273–276. In a German compilation of Mesmer’s French texts, the term is translated as “All-Ströme” or “All-Flut;” cf. Mesmer, Friedrich [sic] Anton. Mesmerismus. Oder System der Wechselwirkungen, Theorie und Anwendung des thierischen Magnetismus als die allgemeine Heilkunde zur Erhaltung des Menschen. Ed. Dr. Karl Christian Wolfart. Berlin: Nikolaische Buchhandlung, 1814. 176. Some, but not all of Mesmer’s writings in English translation can be found in: Mesmerism: Being the First Translation of Mesmer’s Historic ‘Mémoire sur la découverte du Magnétisme Animal’ to Appear in English. London: Macdonald, 1948. For an updated translation, see Mesmerism: A Translation of the Original Medical and Scientific Writings of F. A. Mesmer, M. D. Ed. and trans. George Bloch. Los Altos: William Kaufmann, 1980. 53 Mesmer, Mesmerismus, 112 (my translation, emphasis in the original). Notably, this process of transference is often termed “fascination” among English and French followers of mesmer-

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A coeval illustration of this process – taken from a sympathizer’s tract on Physic and Occult Sciences – shows the necessity of grounding such ‘communication’ in the realm of ‘actuality’ (“actual communication”) by making it visible (fig. 3). Not only does this visualization suggest that Mesmer’s conception of contact at a distance inherits the idea of imagination and eye-contact as contagion, it also hints at a possible transformation concerning the mediating substances involved in this process: in their diagrammatic regularity, the dotted lines that connect the mesmerist to his patient obviously represent a flow of forces rather than particles. They can therefore be regarded as the graphic synthesis of the diverse references and analogies that Mesmer used in order

Fig. 3: A scene of Mesmerist transmission. Source: Sibly, Ebenezer. A Key to Physic and the Occult Sciences. 5th ed. London, 1814 [1794]. Facing 200.

ism. See, for example, the mesmerist tract by Newman, John B. Fascination, or the Philosophy of Charming. New York: Fowlers & Wells, 1847.

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to capture the nature of the transmission at stake (including light, gravity, and the newly understood electric and magnetic forces) – all of which oscillate between the material and the immaterial.54 In contrast to longstanding academic tendencies to oppose Mesmer’s approach to ‘enlightened’ science, his attempts to present the transmission at stake as ‘nearly immaterial’ without giving up the idea of a material contact do indeed accord with a general epistemic insecurity regarding such forces at the time.55 This demonstrates that the Cartesian split of substances did not abolish the assumption of some kind of ‘spiritual’ mediation in order to account for the internal processing of exterior input. The impact of the further radicalized opposition of matter versus mind is evident, however, in Mesmer’s notion of an ‘inner sense’ (innerer Sinn), which is said to communicate the input of the outer senses to the nervous system – a form of mediation (or Mittheilung) which again proceeds by means of a fluidum. While this integrative function accords with the traditional idea of the sensus communis, Mesmer’s inner sense is also in charge of the perception of forces that evade the outer senses. This is why this sensory organ can be held responsible for the transmission of thoughts and affects by mere will, a form of communication that is assumed to work best when the outer senses are paralyzed (for example, while asleep, or somnambulant). As this suggests, the accordance of two wills “in rapport” must be understood as the communication between two interiorized agencies.56 And when Mesmer (although somewhat inconsequentially) qualifies the effect of the will as something that “immediately” (unmittelbar) connects with the other’s inner sense,57 it becomes even clearer that the move toward the immaterialization of the forces of mental transmission goes along with the interiorization of the minds involved. The voluntary influence on another’s mind discussed by Bacon and Mesmer nowadays recalls the notion of “suggestion,” a term which is apparently only established in the early seventeenth century (so Bacon’s use of it with regard to the transmission of “vehement wishes” – as quoted above – was rather avant-garde). In the modern concept of suggestion, as established in mass-psychology and psychoanalysis around 1900 by Gustave Le Bon, Freud,

54 Barkhoff, Jürgen. Magnetische Fiktionen, Literarisierung des Mesmerismus in der Romantik. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995. 41. 55 Feldt, Heinrich. “Vorstellungen von physikalischer und psychischer Energie zur Zeit Mesmers.” Franz Anton Mesmer und die Geschichte des Mesmerismus. Ed. Heinz Schott. Stuttgart: Steiner-Verlag Wiesbaden, 1985. 31–43; Koschorke, Albrecht. Körperströme und Schriftverkehr. Mediologie des 18. Jahrhunderts. Munich: Fink, 1999. 101–112. 56 Mesmer, Mesmerismus, 203 (emphasis in the original). 57 Mesmer, Mesmerismus, 202 (emphasis in the original).

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and others, what Bacon referred to as the “mastering spirit” and the “force of confidence” and what Mesmer discussed as “communication of the will” (Mittheilung des Willens) is officially ‘despiritualized,’ if you take spirits to mean some kind of material quality, however subtle. As a key concept in accounting for the transmission of emotions among the masses, as well as for the manipulative power of hypnosis (which Le Bon regards as the former’s structural basis of such transmissions), such modern accounts of suggestion heavily rely on the vocabulary of (mental) “contagion,” and “epidemic” or “psychic infection.” 58 This of course once more provokes the question as to whether the lexical field of infection is here being used ‘merely’ metaphorically, particularly since Freud himself noted a certain fuzziness in this regard.59 Be this as it may, the use of scientifically obsolete concepts as metaphor has to be considered as a rhetorical equivalent to the attempts at demystification on which it draws. The ‘magical’ ability of metaphors to suggest causal relations, however, would be the topic of another essay.

Outlooks Confronted with these many attempts to domesticate the topology of fascination as contact at a distance and bring it home to the grounds of reason where contact guarantees causality (which can even be extended to the use of metaphorical speech), one might wonder what happened to the much-trumpeted epistemic rupture, the challenge to the inside/outside dichotomy announced at the beginning of these remarks. If even the supposed magicians or somewhat occult figures like Mesmer diminish the scandalon of action at a distance, the putative magic once again appears to be a “bastard sister of science,” to borrow a phrase from the anthropologist James George Frazer.60 And yet, as I can only adumbrate within the bounds of this essay, the topology of fascination has indeed inspired the conception of different modes of subjectivity, and moreover: of aesthetic experience – modes which also account for the permea-

58 Le Bon, Gustave. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Kitchener: Batoche Books, 2001. 17 et passim. 59 Freud, Group Psychology, 27. For a more in-depth discussion of suggestion as infection in Le Bon and Freud, see my essay “‘Rumoritis’: Zur Modellierung von Massenkommunikation als Epidemie.” Die Kommunikation der Gerüchte. Ed. Jürgen Brokoff et al. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008. 278–299. 60 Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Religion and Magic. Mineola: Dover Books, 2002 [abridged edition, 1922]. 50.

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bility between interiority and exteriority, subject and object as implied in the idea of contact at a distance without being phobic about it. A more comprehensive examination would have to account for – for example – the Romantic remystification of the ‘enlightened eye,’ which counters the prevailing identification of looking with knowing, as seen in the scenarios of ‘re-enchantment’ evoked by Ludwig Tieck or E. T. A. Hoffmann. And one would certainly have to think about twentieth century French thinkers of fascination, such as Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes, who take its dynamics of exteriorization and the agency of objects and images as a starting point for redesigning subjectivity as the fundamental disposition of being looked at and addressed by things. Given its historical background, one of the most significant of such alternative approaches to the topology of fascination seems to be its appropriation in some of the writings of Maurice Blanchot. It is no easy undertaking to comment on the poetological impact he attributes to the subject, most emphatically in his programmatic text The Essential Solitude (La solitude essentielle), with which we finally leave the mode of explication in favor of a performative invocation of the phenomenon in question. “What fascinates us robs us of our power to give sense,” Blanchot writes – a statement that might also apply to the reader confronted with the poetics of fascination staged in this text.61 As its title suggests, the essay deals with the condition of writing as a state of radical interiority, by which the writer excludes himself from the outside world. Yet what distinguishes this essential solitude from mere productive reclusion that protects from distraction is an openness to something exterior – and this is where fascination comes in. In order to distance this mode of experience from more mundane versions of loneliness, Blanchot introduces several dichotomies; most notably he distinguishes the interminable ‘work’ (œuvre) from the final ‘book’ which can never be more than a substitute, since the work’s infinity exceeds any attempt at reappropriation. Exerting an “open violence” on the writer, the work banishes him from its realm, so that he necessarily ends up being “out of work” (désœuvré).62 Adding to the spatial tropes employed by Blanchot in this scenario, the writer’s situation is located in a particular space of time, the entering of which implies a surrender to a “time of time’s absence” (le temps de l’absence de temps – a contraction of opposites which Blanchot does not want to be misunderstood as being ruled by any dialectics).63 When fascination is said to “reign” (règne) in this space-time61 Blanchot, Maurice. “The Essential Solitude.” Maurice Blanchot. The Space of Literature. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. 21–34, here 32. 62 Blanchot, “The Essential Solitude,” 23. / Blanchot, Maurice. “La solitude essentielle.” Maurice Blanchot. L’espace littéraire. Paris: Gallimard, 1955. 11–32, here 17. 63 Blanchot, “The Essential Solitude,” 30. / Blanchot, “La solitude essentielle,” 26.

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continuum,64 its dominion implies the by now familiar association of a heteronomous power to which the fascinated writer is subjected. If, nevertheless, the connection of Blanchot’s statements to the historical topography of fascination as outlined above so far may seem tenuous, take a look at the answer to the question “Why fascination?”: Seeing presupposes distance, decisiveness which separates, the power to stay out of contact and in contact avoid confusion. […] But what happens when what you see, although at a distance, seems to touch you with a gripping contact, when the manner of seeing is a kind of touch, when seeing is contact at a distance? […] What happens is not an active contact, not the initiative and action which there still is in real touching. Rather, the gaze gets taken in, absorbed by an immobile movement and a depthless deep. What is given us by this contact at a distance is the image, and fascination is the passion for the image [la passion de l’image].65

As this paragraph demonstrates, Blanchot uses in their most basic, literal sense the contradictory elements that the discourse of fascination as contagion tried to reconcile (seeing as ‘contact at a distance’). But he no longer aims at any reconciliation or explanation – on the contrary, he prolongs the unfolding of non-dialectical opposites that represent the essential solitude of the writer as a process of incessant withdrawal and dispossession, and establishes fascination as a status that allows for a kind of dwelling within a quasi-spatial arrangement of paradoxes – at least rhetorically (although language is the only space inhabited by the writer, according to Blanchot’s emphatic view on this form of existence). Anyhow, this situation lacks any existential comfort, as emphasized when fascination is related to the image and said to be la passion de l’image – an expression which is only partly grasped if translated as “passion for the image” because it also seems to imply a state of being affected by the image to the point of suffering. Although Blanchot tends to charge the image with a power of a different order (for example, when he opposes the communicative functionality of words to their becoming images), it does not qualify as a simple ‘exit’ from the realm of language.66 If, in his solitude, the writer is on his own with his ‘fascinating’ imagination, this experience is once more described in terms of unattainability: Fascination is solitude’s gaze. It is the gaze of the incessant and interminable. In it blindness is vision still, vision which is no longer the possibility of seeing, but the impos-

64 Blanchot, ”The Essential Solitude,” 31. / Blanchot, “La solitude essentielle,” 28. 65 Blanchot, “The Essential Solitude,” 32. / Blanchot, “La solitude essentielle,” 29. 66 For all that, Blanchot at one point resorts to a psycho-phenomenological approach to fascination by referring to the child’s fascination by his mother, who “concentrates in herself all the powers of enchantment.” (Blanchot, “The Essential Solitude,” 32.)

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sibility of not seeing, the impossibility which becomes visible and persevere – always and always – in a vision that never comes to an end: a dead gaze, a gaze become the ghost of an eternal vision.67

This ‘dead gaze’ not only reconnects – even if admittedly vaguely – Blanchot’s rather idiosyncratic approach to fascination to the older attempts to handle the affects effected by a threatening look by attributing it to a death-bringing, ‘evil’ eye. Moreover, the impossibility which haunts the writer being looked at in this scenario points to the irreducible difference between the visible and the verbal, thereby assigning fascination a central function in Blanchot’s poetological project: If writing means “to let fascination rule language” (Écrire, c’est disposer le langage sous fascination), it is directed at the recognition of images which tend toward both figuration and, dissolving back into formlessness, disfiguration.68 As it happens, this volatility recalls the usage of fascination in less ‘essential’ circumstances, namely as the emphasis upon an inability to do justice to the subject matter which Ernst Robert Curtius considered to be the root of what he named “inexpressibility topoi” (Unsagbarkeitstopoi) – an inability of which Blanchot’s essay gives a rather wordy account, thereby adding to the aforementioned nesting of opposites.69 As should be clear by now, today’s understanding of fascination as “an irresistible feeling of attraction” – or, in the more sober case of Mr. Spock, a reaction to the “unexpected” – is not as remote from its pre-modern conceptions as one might have initially suspected. Blanchot’s version is but an extreme example of the general tendency in modern accounts of contact at a distance to completely suspend questions of causality in favor of an intensified attention to the state of being ‘contacted’ – and of course, at this point we are dealing not so much with evil eyes but rather with the inexplicable, ‘wondrous,’ and above all powerful appeal of a person or an object. Still, the older discourse resonates here insofar as this connection implies a vulnerability to outside influences that goes along with the fundamental passivity of the fascinated subject-becoming-object. Such a state does not necessarily have to be experienced as an oppressive loss of self-determination, but can take the form of a readiness to be invaded and/or borne away by exterior forces. Nevertheless, it is shaped by the inescapable asymmetry of the underlying power relation. If this exposure to something ‘out there’ which is beyond my control

67 Blanchot, ”The Essential Solitude,” 32. 68 Blanchot, “The Essential Solitude,” 33. / Blanchot, “La solitude essentielle,” 31. 69 Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. 159. / Curtius, Ernst Robert. Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter. 11th ed. Tübingen-Basel: Franke, 1993. 168.

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but actually remote-controls me is what the topology of fascination is all about, Paul Valéry is to be credited for stripping it down in a highly evocative fashion. In a collection of aphorisms that he published in 1930 under the title Suite, he elucidates how to conceive of fascination as follows: As to fascination, the created stupor, – like the long sojourn in a landscape illuminated by the moon, and this calm that envelopes you in bonds, – the infinite wait, – the whole being becoming a passive sense, an eye which does not see more than one thing, an ear which follows, precedes, obeys, – obeys in anticipating – and the whole being becoming uninhabitated/unhabitated by itself, deserted like this lunar space, ready to receive a foreign will.70

In fact, the vanishing point of this paratactical arrangement that imitates the extended momentariness of the phenomenon in question – the foreign will – finally situates this experience in the context of hypnosis. Yet the description of the deserted self as a space as empty as the nocturnal landscape that surrounds it, which suggests a permeability of the interior with the exterior that borders on mimesis, indicates that it is accessible to a more general structure of experience – if we accept that “[a]s long as there is something like experience, it is not entirely mine.” 71 Its scope certainly extends to aesthetic experience as aisthesis, as inextricably bound to sensory perception. As we have seen, discourses on fascination claim that such input is always infused with ‘vehement affects,’ ‘strong imaginations,’ and the like, thereby effecting its stubborn resistance to post-processing by and integration into reason. Whether approaches to fascination attempt to abolish the magic of contact at a distance in favor of comprehensible causal explanations, or simply embrace its inexplicability, its inherent challenge to notions of interiority is emphasized by this constant rethinking, which evinces the insistence of a symptom.

Bibliography Aquinas, Thomas. The ‘Summa theologica’ of St. Thomas Aquinas. Literally translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Vol. 1.5: QQ CIII–CXIX. London: Oates & Washbourne, 1922. Bacon, Francis. The Works of Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England. Vol. 4: Sylva Sylvarum: Or, A Natural History in Ten Centuries. Ed. Basil Montagu. London: Pickering, 1826. Bacon, Francis. The Oxford Francis Bacon. Vol. 4: The Advancement of Learning. Ed. Michael Kiernan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

70 Valéry, Paul. Suite. Colmar, Paris: Hartmann, 1930. 71 (my translation). 71 Ronell, Avital. “Preface.” Avital Ronell. Finitude’s Score: Essays for the End of the Millenium. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. ix–xiv, here ix.

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Bacon, Francis. “Of Envy.” The Oxford Francis Bacon. Vol. 15: The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall. Ed. Michael Kiernan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 27–31. Bacon, Roger. The Opus Majus of Roger Bacon. Trans. Robert Belle Burke. 2 vols. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1928. Barck, Karlheinz. “Wunderbar.” Ästhetische Grundbegriffe. Ed. Karlheinz Barck et al. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2005. Vol. 6. 730–773. Barkhoff, Jürgen. Magnetische Fiktionen, Literarisierung des Mesmerismus in der Romantik. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995. Blanchot, Maurice. “La solitude essentielle.” Maurice Blanchot. L’espace littéraire. Paris: Gallimard, 1955. 11–32. Blanchot, Maurice. “The Essential Solitude.” Maurice Blanchot. The Space of Literature. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. 21–34. Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Curtius, Ernst Robert. Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter. 11th ed. TübingenBasel: Franke, 1993. Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750. New York: Zone Books, 2001. Del Rio, Martín. Disquisitionum magicarum libri sex: quibus continetur accurata curiosarum artium, & variarum superstitionum confutatio, utilis theologis, jurisconsultis, medicis, philologis. Lugduni, 1602. Del Rio, Martín. Investigations into Magic. Ed. and trans. P. G. Maxwell-Stuart. Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press, 2000. Descartes, René. “The Passions of the Soul.” The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Trans. John Cottingham et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. 325–404. Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners, and State Formation and Civilization. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Oxford, Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994. Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. “Fascination.” Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Ed. Angus Stevenson. 6th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Vol. 1. 932. “Fascinum.” Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexikon. Ed. Johann Heinrich Zedler. Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1961 [reprint: Halle-Leipzig, 1735]. Vol. 9. 289. “Faszination.” Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens. Ed. Eduard Hoffmann-Krayer and Hanns Bächtold-Stäubli. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 1987 [reprint: Berlin, Leipzig, 1927]. Vol. 2. 1263–1266. Feldt, Heinrich. “Vorstellungen von physikalischer und psychischer Energie zur Zeit Mesmers.” Franz Anton Mesmer und die Geschichte des Mesmerismus. Ed. Heinz Schott. Stuttgart: Steiner-Verlag Wiesbaden, 1985. 31–43. Foucault, Michel. “The Thought of the Outside.” Trans. Brian Massumi and Robert Hurley. Essential Works of Foucault. Vol. 2: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. Ed. James D. Faubion. London: New Press, 2000. 147–169. Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Religion and Magic. Mineola: Dover Books, 2002 [abridged edition, 1922]. Freud, Sigmund. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Trans. James Strachey. London: International Psychoanalytic Press, 1959. Hasse, Dag Nikolaus. Avicenna’s ‘De anima’ in the Latin West: The Formation of a Peripatetic Philosophy of the Soul, 1160–1300. London: Warburg Institute, 2000.

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Jahn, Otto. “Über den Aberglauben des bösen Blicks bei den Alten.” Berichte über die Verhandlungen der Königlich-Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, Philologisch-Historische Klasse 7 (1855): 28–110. Koschorke, Albrecht. Körperströme und Schriftverkehr. Mediologie des 18. Jahrhunderts. Munich: Fink, 1999. Kramer, Heinrich, and James Sprenger. The ‘Malleus maleficarum.’ Trans. Montague Summers. New York: Dover, 2007. Le Bon, Gustave. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Kitchener: Batoche Books, 2001. Mesmer, Friedrich [sic] Anton. Mesmerismus. Oder System der Wechselwirkungen, Theorie und Anwendung des thierischen Magnetismus als die allgemeine Heilkunde zur Erhaltung des Menschen. Ed. Dr. Karl Christian Wolfart. Berlin: Nikolaische Buchhandlung, 1814. Mesmer, Franz Anton. Mesmerism: Being the First Translation of Mesmer’s Historic ‘Mémoire sur la découverte du Magnétisme Animal’ to Appear in English. London: Macdonald, 1948. Mesmer, Franz Anton. Mesmerism: A Translation of the Original Medical and Scientific Writings of F. A. Mesmer, M. D. Ed. and trans. George Bloch. Los Altos: William Kaufmann, 1980. Newman, John B. Fascination, or the Philosophy of Charming. New York: Fowlers & Wells, 1847. Plutarch. Plutarch’s Moralia in Sixteen Volumes. Trans. Paul A. Clement and Herbert B. Hoffleit. Bilingual edition. London, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969. Ronell, Avital. “Preface.” Avital Ronell. Finitude’s Score: Essays for the End of the Millenium. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. ix–xiv. Scot, Reginald. The Discoverie of Witchcraft. With an Introduction by the Rev. Montague Summers. New York: Dover, 1989. Sibly, Ebenezer. A Key to Physic and the Occult Sciences. 5th ed. London, 1814 [1794]. Siebers, Tobin. The Mirror of Medusa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Sonntag, Michael. “‘Gefährte der Seele, Träger des Lebens.’ Die medizinischen Spiritus im 16. Jahrhundert.” Die Seele. Ihre Geschichte im Abendland. Ed. Gerd Jüttemann et al. Weinheim: Psychologie-Verlag-Union, 1991. 165–179. Tatar, Maria. Spellbound: Studies on Mesmerism and Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. Valéry, Paul. Suite. Colmar, Paris: Hartmann, 1930. Weingart, Brigitte. “‘Rumoritis’: Zur Modellierung von Massenkommunikation als Epidemie.” Die Kommunikation der Gerüchte. Ed. Jürgen Brokoff et al. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008. 278–299.

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Chardin: Inwardness – Emotion – Communication 1

Sir William Hamilton cuts a ridiculous figure (fig. 1). Or at least he does as depicted by Thomas Rowlandson, who shows him perfectly enraptured by the Attitude or tableau vivant produced by his lover, Emma Hart, an actress whom the British ambassador in Naples ended up marrying, too, much to the displeasure of society.2 Sir William looks ridiculous, and not only because of the erotic motive driving his appearance in front of this image,3 a living embodiment of an antiquity; nor is his ridiculousness due only to the genre, the caricature – for caricature only highlights what is generally agreed upon, or else it would be neither intelligible nor funny. To modern eyes, the study of art is a contemplative business, one that ought to create distance and engender reflection – an idea to which Sir William’s passion is ill-suited. The critical and reflective approach to art that develops in conjunction with eighteenth-century rationalism 4 supersedes the sensual, but also the emotional contact with the world. Inwardness and reflection are now regarded as the positive effects of aesthetic experience; that is to say, ultimately a form of control not only over the object under consideration but also over one’s own sensual-emotional response to it. The backdrop against which this new, reflective mode of aesthetic experience takes shape is the baroque culture of looking at art, a culture of passionate expressiveness – especially so, of course, in the particular form the baroque took under the Counter-Reformation.5 Here, looking at art serves a vivid empathetic-imaginative realization of the passion of Christ, an experience that is to fortify the faithful and summon them to

1 Translated from the German by Gerrit Jackson. I am grateful to him as well as to Anja Titze and Svenja Mordhorst for their assistance. 2 Märtens, Susanne. Art and Appetites. Studien zur Ästhetik des Grotesken bei John Hamilton Mortimer und Thomas Rowlandson. Freiburg: Rombach, 2007 (= Reihe Cultura 40). On Lady Hamilton’s tableaux vivants, see Ittershagen, Lady Hamiltons Attitüden. 3 Bätschmann, Oskar. “Belebung durch Bewunderung. Pygmalion als Modell der Kunstrezeption.” Pygmalion: Die Geschichte des Mythos in der abendländischen Kultur. Ed. Mathias Mayer and Gerhard Neumann. Freiburg: Rombach, 1997. 325–370. 4 See the pointed discussion by Christoph Menke, who elaborates the concept of “aesthetic critique” as a counter-model to the rational concept of critique: Menke, Christoph. “The Aesthetic Critique of Judgment.” The Power of Judgment: A Debate of Aesthetic Critique. Ed. Daniel Birnbaum. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010. 8–29. 5 Imorde, Joseph. Affektübertragung. Berlin: Mann, 2004.

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Fig. 1: Thomas Rowlandson. Lady Hxxxxxxx’s Attitudes. Around 1800. Etching, 23,8 × 17,1 cm. London, British Museum. Source: Ittershagen, Ulrike. Lady Hamiltons Attitüden. Mainz: Zabern, 1999. 10, plate 1.

follow the suffering son of God (fig. 2). The image seeks to impart the passionate emotions it represents to the beholder, whose tears will flow as a sign that he has felt the sufferings of the savior. Yet art arousing the passions in the service of the right path is not an invention of the Counter-Reformation. The ancient poets already discussed

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Fig. 2: Peter Paul Rubens. The Crucified Christ. C. 1612. Oil on wood, 145,3 × 91,8 cm. Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlung, Alte Pinakothek. Source: Bosch-Abele, Susanne. Kreuzigung. Berlin: Phaidon Press, 2005. 139.

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the passionate involvement of the beholder in the representation. Horace, for instance, writes: As human aspects smile again Upon the smilers, so their eyes Will with the tearful sympathise. If you wou’d have me really weep, Your own distresses must be deep […].6

Again, the idea is one of a transfer of affects, which pass from the representation to its beholders. He alone can learn whose emotions have been stirred, as the classical triad of “pleasure, movement, instruction” already teaches us. And so the passions migrate from those who represent, via the representation, to the audience, which is led onto the right path only by having its strong passions excited. The beginnings of modernity, around the second half of the eighteenth century, put a temporary stop to such heated notions about art and its effects – or so it would seem. What is now in demand are inwardness and reflection, on the part of the beholder, but also as a motif in painting, as the example of Chardin illustrates with particular clarity. Even his subjects, often children and domestic employees, are not chosen with a view to the excitation of strong passions. Chardin’s genre paintings instead emphasize quiet self-absorption in domestic spaces and familial contexts. How these embodiments of solitary absorption likewise produce and communicate emotionality: that is the question I want to address in the following. The noisy and “affected” registers are rejected as “unnatural,” as a culture of pure surface, and are supplanted by more intimate forms of emotional exchange. Yet even the quieter sentiment, the emotion turned inward, must show itself in order to be recognizable as such, and it must address someone or something in order to affect us, in the bourgeois household and the salon as much as in painting. As a consequence, the emerging cultural technique of inwardness – which contradicts its own terms at the moment that it shows itself – is dependent on communication, on visibility, and hence also on representation. It is art, and Chardin’s painting first and foremost, that not only creates depictions of the new theme of inwardness but also illustrates this paradox, the fundamental problem of the representability of inwardness. Indirect forms of touch, in exchanges within the pictures as well as in the communication with the beholder, stage inwardness

6 Horace. “Art of Poetry.” Trans. Christopher Smart. The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart. Vol. 5: The Works of Horace. Translated into Verse. Ed. Karina Williamson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. 354–377, here 359.

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on the levels of motif and structure. These indirect forms coalesce with baroque modes of address, engendering forms of transmission from picture to beholder that no longer operate by means of gestures and facial expressions, but now by virtue of the sensual effects of fabrics and materials. The demonstrative installation of an intimate interior space in the picture establishes the appropriate frame for silent communication, a frame that at once also – by virtue of its being open toward the beholders, a quality the works acknowledge as problematic – addresses the paradox of inwardness on display. *** I begin with one of the two paintings that endeared Chardin to Louis XV: The Laborious Mother (fig. 3), painted in 1739–1740. This picture, of which Chardin painted a number of variations, places figures and space in a new interrelation. Their specific configuration generates new forms of communication, both among the figures and between the picture and the beholder. Both forms of communication are shaped by domestic interiority,7 by the establishment of an inside sealed off against an outside that is nonetheless present. The Laborious Mother is designed to show, even demonstrate, how interiority in its specifically modern, bourgeois form is produced. The central scene of mother and child looking intently at the needlework spread out between them is surrounded by objects that are markers of domesticity and domestic industry: the yarn reel and the sewing-box with the dog, as attributes of virtuous bourgeois life, are inserted between the figures represented and the beholder, a visual barrier that at once sets the tone of the representation. In the background, directly behind the woman and the child, a simple green folding screen closes off the room, optically constraining it to the scene that is, quite literally, one of intent contemplation. The motif of absorption – Michael Fried’s term for what he singled out as the distinguishing mark of an anti-theatrical form of painting that takes shape in early modernity 8 – is emphasized and intensified by framings within the image. For the screen at once also blocks a slightly open door indicating that there is an outside to this self-absorbed scene, an outside that is connected to the inside even if it is present not in concrete reality but only structurally. 7 Innenräumlichkeit: Wolfgang Kemp has elaborated this untranslatable concept in his theory of the interior as a genre. Cf. Kemp, Wolfgang. “Beziehungsspiele. Versuch einer Gattungspoetik des Interieurs.” Innenleben. Die Kunst des Interieurs. Vermeer bis Kabakov. Ed. Sabine Schulze. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 1998. 17–29. 8 Fried, Michael. Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. On Chardin, cf. 49–55.

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Fig. 3: Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin. The Laborious Mother.9 1739–1740. Oil on canvas, 49 × 39 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Source: Wildenstein, Georges. Chardin. Zurich: Manesse, 1963. Plate 30.

9 My translation. Please note that the original title – La mère laborieuse – is also translated as The Diligent Mother.

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Fig. 4: François Bernard Lépicié. The Laborious Mother, after Chardin. 1740. Engraving, 37,3 × 26,4 cm. Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie. Source: Jean Siméon Chardin, 1699−1779: Werk, Herkunft, Wirkung. [Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle, 5 June – 22 August 1999.] Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 1999. 200, plate 65.

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The blocking of access to this outside is, in this painting, not the effect of a quasi-natural interior space; rather, the way interiority is engendered comes to the fore in the demonstrative way the exit door is concealed by a folding screen. Its folds, with the panel at its right-hand end arranged such that the outward-facing side is turned inward, indicate the reversibility of inside and outside and precisely through this commutability render the appointments visible that create an interior space. The very invisibility of the outside, which remains concealed behind the screen and beyond the half-closed door, illustrates the structural role an outside plays for the constitution of an inside.10 The motif of the folding screen not only makes it clear that any inside is related to an outside, but also that the delineation of the border between inside and outside is a deliberate act involving, in this case, quite literally the installation of a movable wall that guards against the effects of this outside, against cold and draft, but also against outsiders approaching or looking in. In the interior space thus created, against the backdrop of the open folding screen, unfolds the scene between the two figures, who are generally regarded as mother and daughter, at least since the engraving Lépicié senior created in the same year as the painting, which bears a caption to that effect (fig. 4). The screen encloses the two from behind, cutting them out of the room it insulates exclusively for them. No direct gaze or physical contact establishes communication between the two figures. Both regard the needlework between them, jointly holding it in their hands, which nonetheless do not touch. The index finger of the mother’s right hand points at the needlework, an educational gesture that suggests that the mother’s gaze is one of supervision. What it is she indicates to the child remains unclear: Chardin paints neither an obvious mistake in the needlework (as Lépicié’s caption beneath his reproduction, deviating from the original painting, suggests 11) nor a particularly fine piece of work. And so the painting comments neither on her gaze nor on her gesture, refusing to classify them as 10 See Gehring, Petra. Innen des Außen – Außen des Innen. Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard. Munich: Fink, 1994, as well as Anselm Haverkamp, who has described the figure of the exteriority of the interior in a variety of perspectives. Of particular interest for our context: Haverkamp, Anselm. “Tür im Raum. Die Dialektik des Innen im Außen an drei Bildern.” Innenleben. Die Kunst des Interieurs. Vermeer bis Kabakov. Ed. Sabine Schulze. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 1998. 62–67. 11 “A trifle amuses you, my daughter, / This leaf was done yesterday, / I can see from each stitch / How far your mind is distracted. / Trust me, flee idleness, / And savour this truth, / That work and good behaviour, / Are worth more than wealth or beauty.” (Scott, Katie. “Chardin Multiplied.” Chardin. [Paris, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, 7 September – 22 November 1999; Düsseldorf, Kunstmuseum im Ehrenhof, 5 December 1999 – 20 February 2000; London, Royal Academy of Arts, 11 March – 29 May 2000; New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 27 June – 3 September 2000.] Ed. Pierre Rosenberg. New Haven: Yale University Press,

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praise or censure. What is at issue, in the absence of such disambiguation, is communication itself, in this case a – nonetheless hierarchically organized – exchange between an adult and a girl. Within the horizon of the time, this exchange is immediately legible as a scene of pedagogy. Andreas Gruschka has described both the educational reforms of the second half of the eighteenth century and the depictions of pedagogical scenes in Chardin with great precision.12 As early as the seventeenth century, in Locke and Fénelon, a new kind of attention develops for the formation and education of minors, both boys and girls;13 now, in the mideighteenth century, this attention acquires an increasingly emotional tenor.14 If advisors from Fénelon to Rousseau seek to bolster ethical, religious, and moral values that guide the formation of Christians (Fénelon) or good citizens (Rousseau), a rising chorus of voices places the emphasis less on the aims than on the very process of education. Besides the educator’s exemplary lifestyle and pedagogical strictness, such new educational models also deploy emotional and caring attention as a means to the successful formation of the child’s heart and body (the object all these treatises have in common), a change that can clearly be traced as part of the larger shift from a feudal to a bourgeois society. How little these models aim at decidedly physical forms of care or bodily tenderness, let alone expressions of strong affect, is indicated by the represen-

2000. 61–75, here 75, note 34.) The exhibition catalog Jean Siméon Chardin, 1699–1779: Werk, Herkunft, Wirkung devotes an entire section to prints after Chardin; cf. 153–215. 12 Gruschka, Andreas. Bestimmte Unbestimmtheit. Chardins pädagogische Lektionen. Wetzlar: Büchse der Pandora, 1999. 13 Fénelon, for instance, points out that the education of girls is no less important than that of boys, since the former will, as mothers, play a decisive role in Christian parenting; cf. Fénelon, François. The Education of a Daughter. Bedford: Applewood Books, 1996. Rousseau takes up the idea and puts it even more strongly: he sees the role of girls not only in their future motherhood – because of their compulsive nature, men, too, require women to tame and pacify them, most immediately so that women, in their weakness, do not become men’s victims. Rousseau’s argument is in candid violation of his postulate of the development of the individual, however limited the latter may be by the need to first satisfy the needs of the body. Cf. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Émile, or: On Education. Trans. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1979. 358−360. See also Deuber-Mankowsky, Astrid. “Natur/Kultur.” Gender@Wissen. Ein Handbuch der Gender-Theorien. Ed. Christina von Braun and Inge Stephan. Cologne: Böhlau, 2005. 200–219. 14 Scott, Katie. “Kinderspiel.” Meisterwerke der französischen Genremalerei im Zeitalter von Watteau, Chardin und Fragonard. [Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, 6 June – 7 September 2003; Washington, D. C., National Gallery of Art, 12 October 2003 – 11 January 2004; Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Altes Museum, 4 February – 9 May 2004.] Ed. Colin B. Bailey et al. Berlin, Cologne: Dumont, 2004. 90–105.

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Fig. 5: Daniel Nicolaus Chodowiecki. Wirkungen der Vernunft (Effects of Reason). 1773. Etching. Source: Basedow, Johann Bernhard. Elementarwerk. Dessau, Leipzig: Crusius, 1774. Vol. 4. Plate 26, detail.

tations of pedagogical scenes that accompanied such handbooks as illustrations and media of guidance (fig. 5).15 In these depictions of scenes of instruction and learning, a loving but always measured and thus controlled caring attention to the pupil serves one predominant aim: the practice of rational and efficient techniques for the acquisition of knowledge, be it through experimentation or reading. As an exemplary scene by Daniel Chodowiecki shows, eyes fixed on the same object, attention to a shared topic, but also the arrangement of the bodies relative to one another illustrate the new form of caring tuition. The educators avoid immediate physical contact and affective gestures; the latter are declared outright undesirable, not only in the pedagogical scene

15 On the pedagogical use of visual media, see Heesen, Anke te. Der Weltkasten: Die Geschichte einer Bildenzyklopädie aus dem 18. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Wallstein, 1997, and Stafford, Barbara. Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994.

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Fig. 6a: Daniel Nicolaus Chodowiecki. Natürliche und affectierte Handlungen des Lebens, erste Folge: Kunstkenntnis (Natural and Affected Conducts of Life, Part One: Connoisseurship). 1778. Etchings, 8,3 × 4,7 cm each. Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett. Source: Geismeier, Willi. Daniel Chodowiecki. Leipzig: Seemann, 1993. 165.

itself but equally in all areas of conduct – “[in allen] Handlungen des Lebens,” as Chodowiecki called his guide to correct behavior. Basedow, for whose Elementarwerk of 1770–1774 the artist created these illustrations, explicitly warns against strong and uncontrolled affect. The two series Natural and Affected Conducts of Life, created in 1778 and 1779 for the Goettinger Taschen Calender (figs. 6a and 6b),16 consist of instructive pairs of images that oppose true and false postures, in depictions that seek to show how the wrong mental attitude manifests itself in a similarly incorrect physical attitude. The correct life is delineated against the backdrop of the false life led by the nobility and especially by its imitators, who were particularly inclined toward excessive practices of expression. In Chodowiecki, too, the key term for the desired reform is naturalness. The term that designates its opposite openly names the resentment the late

16 Goettinger Taschen Calender vom Jahr 1779. Göttingen: Johann Christian Dieterich. Twelve etchings by Daniel Nicolaus Chodowiecki, 8,3 × 4,7 cm each; Goettinger Taschen Calender vom Jahr 1780. Göttingen: Johann Christian Dieterich. Twelve etchings by Daniel Nicolaus Chodowiecki, 8,2 × 4,7 cm each.

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Fig. 6b: Daniel Nicolaus Chodowiecki. Natürliche und affectierte Handlungen des Lebens, zweite Folge: Der Unterricht (Natural and Affected Conducts of Life, Part Two: Instruction). 1779. Etchings, 8,2 × 4,7 cm each. Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett. Source: Geismeier, Daniel Chodowiecki, 163.

eighteenth century feels against the passions: “affected” feelings, strong feelings not regulated by reason but instead ruled by the senses, are what must be unlearned. In these depictions of the correct attitude, body and mind are literally with themselves. These are attitudes that permit no expansive involvement with the environment, no stray glances or gestures. Discretion, the ability to distinguish between oneself and others, governs this image of the self-possessed and precisely not expressive human being. The instrument that enables the representation of such distinction is the delineation, which sustains the differences between the motifs: an ornamental style on the one hand, on the other hand clarity and straightforwardness. The depiction of a scene of instruction in the first series is designed to transmit a similar message. Whereas the “affected” teacher addresses his pupils in enthusiastic and ambiguously directed body language, the “natural” teacher articulates his meaning in spare but unambiguous indicating gestures. The physical form of address is reflected in the children’s bodies, too.17 Wigs, 17 Kemp, Wolfgang. “Die Beredsamkeit des Leibes. Körpersprache als künstlerisches und gesellschaftliches Problem der bürgerlichen Emanzipation.” Städel-Jahrbuch 5 (1975): 111–134.

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crinolines, and frocks ornamentally extend the silhouettes of the “affected” children into space; their bodies are at once concealed and emphasized by fabrics and adornments. The “natural” children appear free from such dressage and trimmings, in loosely girded dresses that gently and protectively envelop their bodies. With their hands resting demurely at their sides, their faces and gestures expressing modesty, these children’s bodies echo those of adults, whose inner attitude is apparent in their outward posture and, thus manifest, becomes an example to be emulated. By contrast, the caricatured manner in which the “affected” teacher, and his physiognomy in particular, is drawn, is meant to prevent an empathetic identification that would allow the wrong image to imprint itself. Naturalness such as Chodowiecki’s depictions seek to represent reveals itself in clear contours and distinctions between the figures, but also in distinctions between the figures and the space that surrounds them. The ornamental verve of the “affected” figures threatens to dissolve their individuality, to tie them together in a formal arrangement in which they are no longer clearly distinguishable as individuals.18 The girl’s skirt, billowing widely, spreads across the boy’s legs, her fan extends in front of his lower body, his hand hides under the lapel of his coat. The ornamentation of the bodies continues in the furniture, in the curved and ornate legs of the table. The bulging shape of the vase repeats the teacher’s arched body, infecting the entire interior with his corporeality. The formal dissolution and ornamental expansion of the bodies are markers of an inner dissolution, of a lack of that self-possession and clarity of form that are among the values the new bourgeois subjectivity champions against the Rococo. The literally sprawling will to formal creation that manifests itself, in these depictions, in the “affected” postures of bodies and furniture leads precisely not to the clear form that is the distinguishing mark of the rational citizen. Instead, this exuberant creativity leads to a loss of contour and of bodily substance alike; the latter is overgrown by accessories, by wigs, crinolines, and adornments, and at once brought to the fore in immodest ways, in the ornamental sign that loudly emphasizes the deceptive appearance of these bodies as such. As the matching images illustrating the contemplation of art (see fig. 6a) show, it is the ideal of the naturalness, of the being-with-themselves of these bodies, that is threatened, a menace that is present by virtue of their very representation, which always already presupposes a being-regarded, a show-

18 On the blurring and indeed dissolution of spatial boundaries in Rococo ornamental decorations, see Scott, Katie. The Rococo Interior: Decoration and Social Spaces in Early Eighteenth Century Paris. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

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ing-oneself.19 On the level of the motif, these images gesture toward the dangers of looking at art, which, even if the art is good, may lead to false affects, to wrong passions with which the beholder is quite beside himself.20 The true reason behind the problem surrounding images, however, is representation itself, which highlights that the natural body, too, is a product of self-observation and control, a product that, in order to attain recognition, must show itself. Chodowiecki’s images, aiming at an education toward naturalness and inwardness, thwart their own project: in the natural body, the body that does not aim to be looked at, the work of dressage is only less visible than in the “affected” body that freely acknowledges its being dressed and trimmed and exhibited. Chardin not only places different emphases with regard to the pedagogical aspect; he also takes a different approach to the problem of the representation of naturalness, of inwardness exhibited. Unlike Chodowiecki, but also unlike the graphical reproductions of his paintings, Chardin offers no commentary on his paintings; which is to say, they do not depict moral examples. His paintings, too, illustrate inwardness, but they do so neither in contrast with forms of baroque expressiveness nor by representing it as an unambiguously positive value whose only impediment is the problem of representation: the problem of how to render inwardness visible without attracting the suspicion that this inwardness is in fact staged to express and impress. As I will demonstrate in the example of Chardin’s Laborious Mother, Chardin addresses this problem head-on: the picture stages the question of the representability of 19 Wild, Christopher. Theater der Keuschheit – Keuschheit des Theaters. Zu einer Geschichte der (Anti-)Theatralität von Gryphius bis Kleist. Freiburg: Rombach, 2003. On the ideal of quiet self-presence, see Kemp, Wolfgang. “Die Kunst des Schweigens.” Laokoon und kein Ende: Der Wettstreit der Künste. Ed. Thomas Koebner. Munich: Edition Text+Kritik, 1989. 96–119. Doris Kolesch has shown that the intimate and sentimental forms of exchange in the bourgeois salon suffer the same aporias: even the sentiment virtuously turned inward must show itself to be seen and acknowledged; cf. Kolesch, Doris. Theater der Emotionen. Ästhetik und Politik zur Zeit Ludwigs XIV. Frankfurt: Campus, 2006. See also Söntgen, Beate. “Das Theater des Herrn Diderot findet im Innenraum statt. Zum Rahmen wahrer Darstellung im späten 18. Jahrhundert.” Theaterfeindlichkeit. Ed. Gabriele Brandstetter et al. Munich: Fink, 2011. 127–146. 20 Werner Busch reads the difference between the two depictions differently, as a shift between communicative structures: the courtier can withdraw into binding codes and conventions of speech that foreground solely the how and no longer the what of an exchange, whereas the bourgeois, immersed in a profound engagement of the what, the content, can no longer articulate his thoughts intelligibly – a problem that, as Busch describes it, unfolds into a split between content and form: Busch, Werner. “Chodowieckis Darstellung der Gefühle und der Wandel des Bildbegriffes nach der Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts.” Tradition, Norm, Innovation. Soziales und literarisches Traditionsverhalten in der Frühzeit der deutschen Aufklärung. Ed. Wilfried Barner and Elisabeth Müller-Luckner. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1989. 315–343, esp. 317, 337.

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inwardness as such in the medium of painting, and in such a way that the visibility of the problem of representation does not render its subject any less moving. The painting does this by virtue of the spatial disposition of the representation and by integrating the beholder into the scene of absorption. The representation shows that inwardness is not a feature of an isolated and emphatically self-absorbed subject but in fact embedded in structures of communication. I have attempted to show how Chardin’s interiors are emphatically inward spaces, isolated in The Laborious Mother by the folding screen. The question of access returns in the foreground, this time with relation not to the imaginary world outside the painted interior but to the outside that is the space of the beholder. The little dog, as the guardian of the threshold of the image, looks at us, rendering us who are uninvolved spectators present in the represented scene just as this scene is demonstratively closed off to us by the absorption with which the figures regard the fabric. Drawing on the Diderotian model of the fourth wall, Michael Fried has described absorption represented as a means to create the illusion of participation: the exclusion of the beholder enables her to imaginarily enter the represented scene as a clandestine observer.21 The dog’s gaze thwarts this fantasy of unhindered participation without, however, cancelling it altogether. The painting thus invokes the fourth wall, at once deploying it as a means of illusion and disclosing it as this means: it is visible by virtue of the attention the little dog pays to a presence in front of the painting, to the place where we, the beholders, find ourselves, causing an irritation that disturbs the effect it creates, that of beholding an unobserved scene. If we were where the dog places us, which is to say, within the space of the image and close to the represented scene, this scene would not take place as it does.22 The woman and the girl would respond to the presence of a third party. The communicative dysfunction that is, according to Johannes Lehmann, the mark of the fourth wall (which is to say, the radical separation of the space of representation from the space of beholding) 23 not only becomes visible as such in Chardin, he also gives it a productive turn: the fourth wall functions even as it becomes obvious as a paradoxical practice. The fantasy of immersion is supplanted by the power of painting to create a scene that we could not otherwise observe, to place it not just before our imaginations but before our very eyes. As the picture exhibits the creation of

21 Fried, Absorption and Theatricality. 22 I am grateful to Peter Risthaus for this observation. 23 Lehmann, Johannes Friedrich. Der Blick durch die Wand. Zur Geschichte des Theaterzuschauers und des Visuellen bei Diderot und Lessing. Freiburg: Rombach, 2000.

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interior space as a work of representation, it also foregrounds painting’s ability to render something invisible – inwardness – visible and observable. Chardin, unlike Chodowiecki, does not stake this representation on naturalness in the sense of a denial of the aspect of representation. Instead, he shows how the scene is set for a form of beholding that hovers halfway between distanced observation and emotional participation. That is the modern, the reflective side of Chardin’s painting. The spatial disposition of the picture, inclusions and exclusions, and the emphasis placed on the threshold render the problem of the representation of modern inwardness visible, a problem that will soon be treated extensively in the discourse on the theater.24 Yet it would be too simple to regard this reflection on the modern problem of representation as the sole defining feature of Chardin’s work. His interiors not only reveal the premises of their construction as spaces of absorption and the paradox of unobserved beholding. By virtue of and beyond the illustration of this paradox, they enable us to engage in an emotionalized and empathetic participation in the scenes they depict, by illustrating forms of personal relation and communication that are defined not, or hardly, by overt emotion but instead by touching and being touched.25 Touching is a motif and a form of communication that stands athwart observation. Touching is premised not on distance but on spatial proximity.26 Chardin’s paintings are distinguished by the subtle interplay of distance and closeness, of observation and emotion, as other depictions of quiet scenes by the same artist show. Although almost demonstrative in their emphasis on inwardness, they are defined by baroque structures. This interplay is especially conspicuous in the Soap Bubbles paintings.27 These depictions share in the new attention to childhood and childlikeness,

24 Söntgen, Beate. “Bild und Bühne. Das Interieur als Rahmen wahrer Darstellung.” Räume des Subjekts um 1800. Zur imaginativen Selbstverortung zwischen Selbstaufklärung und Romantik. Ed. Rudolf Behrens and Jörn Steigerwald. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010. 53–69. 25 Hubertus Kohle has discussed the silent forms of communication in terms of time, as a matter of ephemerality and permanence, but also as a form of autonomy that subordinates “the aspect of content to a pictorial-aesthetic quality.” (Kohle, Hubertus. “Exkurs: J. B. S. Chardin.” Hubertus Kohle. Ut pictura poesis non erit, Denis Diderots Kunstbegriff. Mit einem Exkurs zu J. B. S. Chardin. Hildesheim: Olms, 1989. 148–162, here 159.) 26 See the seminal study by Binczek, Natalie. Kontakt: Der Tastsinn in Texten der Aufklärung. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2007. 27 Chardin. [Paris, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, 7 September – 22 November 1999; Düsseldorf, Kunstmuseum im Ehrenhof, 5 December 1999 – 20 February 2000; London, Royal Academy of Arts, 11 March – 29 May 2000; New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 27 June – 3 September 2000.] Ed. Pierre Rosenberg. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Plates 42 and 43.

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Fig. 7: Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin. Soap Bubbles or Young Man Blowing Bubbles. 1734. Oil on canvas, 61 × 63 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Source: Chardin, ed. Rosenberg, plate 42.

to the acquisition of knowledge and play; and, as Katie Scott has shown, they draw on allegorical-emblematic pictorial structures that attach to this new subject.28 The upright version painted in 1739 – an engraving after this version was widely disseminated – has been lost.29 I will discuss the New York panel, of roughly quadratic format, which presents the scene in a particularly closeup view (fig. 7). A young man leans over a stone window parapet and blows a soap bubble as a boy watches. Both look intently at the large iridescent sphere, which is distended and seems to be about to pop. While the man’s right hand firmly holds the straw, his left is slightly spread, indicating his strained concentra-

28 Scott, “Kinderspiel.” 29 Chardin, ed. Rosenberg, 208.

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tion; the fingers extend beyond the parapet, and one canted finger points in our direction, lending the curvature of the fragile sphere, its lightness and transparency notwithstanding, a bodily weight that can be felt to extend into the beholder’s space. Like The Laborious Mother, and even more conspicuously, the painting contains a frame within the picture, here laid out with greater geometric clarity. This frame within the frame is an instance of baroque trompe-l’oeil and simultaneously a modern move, isolating the playful experiment with its display of curiosity and attention. The stone parapet is a motif that serves at once to separate the space of the image from that of the beholder, and to blur the distinction; as a deceptively realistic painted barrier, it partakes of both spaces.30 With its massive materiality, moreover, it serves as a backdrop or stage that sets off the fragility of the soap bubble, which, for its part, is another motif associated with transitions: on the one hand, it bulges outward from the space of the image toward the beholder; on the other hand, it is an emblem of transience, of transition into nothingness. Yet what is central here is not the transience of earthly existence but the spatial threshold itself. There is yet another motif of transition, one that, as Katie Scott has pointed out, resides in the constellation involving the two young men and the soap bubble: the threshold of adolescence – it, too, is an object of heightened pedagogical attention at the time.31 In Chardin’s oeuvre, we can trace a metamorphosis of the figure of the soap-bubble blower. In an early version (fig. 8),32 this character appears duplicated as a putto in a relief, firmly rooted in the emblematic tradition, even if this tradition is besieged and threatened, almost violently cut off, by the frame. The literal flatness of the traditional figure, thus Katie Scott, contrasts with the vivid reality and individuality of the boys.33 In later paintings, the soap-bubble blower then reappears without immediately discernible reference to the classical tradition, as a boy of flesh and blood, at first in Dutch-baroque garb (fig. 9), as part of a genre scene with a laundry woman; and, finally, in close-up, as the central figure in our painting. The transposition of this motif from the context of baroque emblematic representation into that of experimentation in pedagogy and the natural scien-

30 Kase, Oliver. “Offene und geschlossene Fenster: Mimesis-Korrekturen im Atelierbild 1806– 1836.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte (2006): 217–250; Stoichita, Victor Ieronim. The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting. Trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Esp. 3–16. 31 Scott, “Kinderspiel.” 32 The painting is a trompe-l’oeil depiction of François Duquesnoy’s marble relief; cf. Scott, “Kinderspiel,” 96. 33 Scott, “Kinderspiel,” 96–97.

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Fig. 8: Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin. Eight Children Playing with a Goat. 1732. Oil on canvas, 23,5 × 40 cm. Private collection. Source: Scott, “Kinderspiel,” 96, plate 65.

ces is the one and obvious aspect; it must be considered in connection with the contemporary Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, an aspect Katie Scott has also discerned in these pictures.34 The other and less obvious aspect, which I will discuss in the following, is the way baroque methods of blurring spatial distinctions and addressing the beholder continue to operate in this painting. The framing is the most conspicuous baroque element; in Chardin, I have argued, it takes on a new function without losing its old one: 35 it selects and isolates a scene so that its pedagogical character can come to the fore. At the same time, this framing marks the threshold between the beholder’s space and that of the image, a division the trompe-l’oeil blurs. The play with the soap bubble is similarly ambiguous, baroque and modern at once: given the opaque suds out of which it forms, the bubble seems a miracle of transparency – but through it we see nothing but the solid barrier of the stone wall. The transformation of matter – the motif of the soap bubble is its condensed repre-

34 Jauß, Hans R. “Ästhetische Normen und geschichtliche Reflexion in der Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes.” Published in: Charles Perrault. Parallèle des anciens et des modernes en ce qui regarde les arts et les sciences. Munich: Eidos, 1964 [reprint: Paris, 1688–1696]. 8–64. 35 Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image, 53–63.

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Fig. 9: Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin. The Washerwoman. 1733. Oil on canvas, 37 × 42,5 cm. Stockholm, Nationalmuseum. Source: Chardin, ed. Rosenberg, plate 34.

sentation – at once takes up the baroque play with appearance and substance, and speaks to the contemporary sensualist attention to natural phenomena.36 The form of absorption Chardin chooses in this painting is not limited to focusing all eyes on a shared object. The young man’s concentration is equally evident in the caution with which he holds the straw, blowing into the thin pipe. This action extends the sensualist spectrum to include the sense of taste; so the small scene, framed as an experiment, in fact invokes baroque allegories of the senses. Hands, eyes, mouth, and sphere form a dense compositional 36 Lasin, Gabriele. “Newtonian Science and Lockean Epistemology in Chardin’s Soap Bubbles.” Visualising the Unseen, Imagining the Unknown, Perfecting the Natural: Art and Science in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Ed. Andrew Garciano. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008. 83– 114.

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constellation by virtue of spatial proximity, axes, and the bright light that lends a theatrical glow to the young man’s skin, whereas the boy is lifted out of the darkness of the background only by the focus of his eyes. His gaze falls upon the spot where the soap bubble is smoothly attached to the straw, which is to say, upon the origin of the iridescent appearance. This line of sight emphasizes not so much the miraculous beauty of the sphere but rather the question of its genesis. How difficult the boy finds it to access this knowledge is indicated by his position: he is so small that he can hardly look over the parapet; which is also to say that he cannot see the bubble in its entirety. The means of its creation – the suds, whose opaqueness stands in such contrast to the bubble, the bubble-blower’s hands, and the straw that connects the bubble to his mouth – are located on the foremost pictorial plane, which is pulled, by the sphere itself but equally by the canted finger of the left hand, into the space of the beholder. This threshold is marked by a dense aggregate of moments of sensuality: blowing, tasting, balancing, the vivid fleshiness of the hand with red spots and white areas where the bones press against the skin, but also the gleaming surface of the untouchable sphere. From the threshold, they transmigrate into the space of the beholder as a sensual experience, an experience that fuses the pleasure taken in what is represented with the pleasure of representation.37 The gentle but insistent accent on elements of sensuality also concerns the interrelation between the two young men. Like many of Chardin’s figures, they communicate only indirectly, through their gazes fixed on the shared object of attention, the soap bubble. Yet they are physically close to each other; the boy’s cheek touches, almost invisibly but clearly palpable on the material level, the young man’s jacket. This restrained physical contact keeps the subject of touching suspended between a curious exploration of the physical world and emotional closeness. Both are imparted, by the painting’s sensual evocativeness, to the beholder. Chardin, particularly in his early works, was no less a master of more aggressive forms of the baroque communication of affect, as his ambitious painting The Ray demonstrates (fig. 10). Together with The Buffet,38 it was among the paintings he presented at the Royal Academy in 1728; that same day, he was admitted to the Academy and assigned to the category of painters of animals and fruits, from which the artist later sought to disassociate himself by means of his bourgeois interiors. The Ray stands out from his oeuvre by

37 Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image. 38 Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin. The Buffet. 1728. Oil on canvas, 194 × 129 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre. In: Chardin, ed. Rosenberg, plate 12.

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Fig. 10: Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin. The Ray. 1725–1726. Oil on canvas, 114,5 × 146 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Source: Chardin, ed. Rosenberg, plate 2.

virtue of its sheer size (the painting measures 45 by 57.5 inches), the wealth and dense arrangement of objects, and the drastic depiction of the bleeding animal. It is this visibility of baroque forms of address directed immediately at the body that is of particular interest for our context, a feature that, in a more restrained form, constitutes the emotional quality also of his later paintings. Despite the wealth and density of elements, the picture is clearly structured. The extended body of the ray forms a triangle that is supported by the entire composition and culminates in the hook from which the dead fish is suspended. On the sides, clear boundaries anchor the still life; the edges do not cut across any objects. On the right-hand side is an arrangement of crockery; on the left are animals intended for consumption as well as weights, and a few scallions. A little cat, its back arched and its fur raised, gingerly steps over the open oysters; as a live animal, it disrupts the genre of nature morte. The almost demonstratively artificial arrangement is presented in a close-up view, on a miniature stone stage. Here, too, the ledge accentuates the threshold between the space of the image and that of the beholder, a boundary

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blurred by the objects extending beyond it. The knife, its haft precariously balanced on the edge of the ledge, communicates with the dead fish, whose open mouth likewise extends beyond the shelf. This constellation of fish and knife takes up the violent killing of animals, a theme emblematically present in the ray, and moves it closer to the beholder. The ray itself exemplifies the suffering creature. The painting presents the ray’s body, speared, spread open, and bleeding, in full frontal detail. The mouth and the eye-like openings anthropomorphize the fish, which seems to fix us with an accusatory gaze from its dead cavities. Its companion is the little cat, very much alive, an embodiment of amazement or perhaps fright. This response is not owed to the sight of the dead fish; what frightens the cat, rather, is the sinister consistency of the oysters. The paws threaten to slip on the gelatinous mass; the open shells, too, rest fragilely on a pile of as yet unopened oysters. As a work that has gone through the school of the grand Flemish still life, The Ray is a brilliant piece of painting; despite its muted colors, among which hues of brown predominate, it differentiates surfaces, textures, and bleeding viscera to great effect.39 Yet Chardin not only demonstrates technical bravura in the contrasts between flesh, fur, fabric, and metal; the picture proves that painting can evoke effects the academic tradition assigns to history painting even in the depiction of lowly objects. The Ray not only contains an implicit emblematic vanitas reference, a subject the still life usually veils in decorously putrescent fruit and drooping blossoms. The painting engages forms of address generally reserved for martyrs and heroes (see fig. 2). The fish, in the biblical tradition also a figure of Christ,40 is presented like Christ crucified, exhibiting his wounds to bring the reality of his sacrificial death home to the empathetic imagination. In the oysters, we have a motif relating to the ingestion of a living being, accompanied by the fright and amazement embodied in the little cat. Yet my point is not to develop a full-blown theological exegesis of this sort of embedment of Christological figures in an everyday context. The depiction of creatural suffering is of interest in our context as a technique of vivid and almost palpable representation that aims at an affective, emotional, and empathetic response on the

39 Ewa Lajer-Burcharth has emphasized the physical address of the still lifes, the way objects emerge from the space of the picture and the violent implications, in The Ray as well as the paintings of hares: Lajer-Burcharth, Ewa. “The Object as Subject.” The Lure of the Object. Ed. Stephen Melville. Williamstown: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2005. 157–177. 40 Kirschbaum, Engelbert. Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie. Rome, Freiburg, Basel, Vienna: Herder, 1970. Vol. 2. 35–39.

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part of the beholder.41 Instead of limiting himself to emblematic references, Chardin also addresses us immediately and physically: with the disgusting sight, as Diderot called it,42 of the viscera laid bare, which at once invoke the pain of a body violently forced open, but also by engaging the sense of touch, which, with the cat, seems to feel the cool, viscid substance of the oysters. Other depictions of dead animals likewise bring out both the figural aspect and evocation by means of touch. Hare with Powder Flask and Game Bag (fig. 11) presents the carcass stretched diagonally across the space of the image. This space is hardly present as such; there is a stone wall the color of sand with a ledge across whose edge the animal’s head and forelegs extend. This representation is less bloody, but the hind legs are violently spread apart, held in position by a nail.43 That the animal is dead is indicated by its head hanging from a broken neck; the manner of its death, by the game bag. The violent use of the animal’s body is emphasized by the nail and even more by the strap pulled over its splayed and bleeding genitals. Chardin’s contemporaries, such as Oudry, created hunting still lifes lavishly appointed with a wealth of animals, weapons, and other devices and a combination of materials including fur, feathers, and crockery (fig. 12). Chardin once again gives the popular genre a Christological turn. Like the ray, the hare, a symbol of the resurrection,44 is a figure of creatural suffering that affects us by addressing us physically. The spread hind legs and the strap over the open wound communicate the pain the dead animal no longer feels to the beholder, who feels it in the hare’s stead. If the ray called upon our compassion with the sight of its bloody flesh and in particular with the anthropomorphized shape of its fish-head, the hare enacts more subtle sensual forms of address evoked through the representation of physical contact. Chardin’s depictions of dead animals, the way he stages them, demonstrate his familiarity with baroque practices of vivid representation that aim at the beholder’s empathy. Yet such representation and communication of bodily sensations is also part of the art of embodiment Michael Fried has described as a distin-

41 Imorde, Affektübertragung. See also Campe, Rüdiger. “Vor Augen Stellen: Über den Rahmen rhetorischer Bildgebung.” Poststrukturalismus. Herausforderung an die Literaturwissenschaft. Ed. Gerhard Neumann. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997. 208–225. 42 “The object itself is disgusting, but that is the fish’s very flesh, its skin, its blood.” (Diderot, Denis. “Salon of 1763.” Denis Diderot. Selected Writings. Ed. Lester G. Crocker. Trans. Derek Coltman. New York, London: Macmillan, 1966. 148–151, here 150.) 43 Ewa Lajer-Burcharth has already highlighted the pathos of the representation implicit in the beholder’s empathy for the dead hare and the similarities to the Christian passio; but she reads it as a form of loss of self: Lajer-Burcharth, “The Object as Subject,” 170–171. 44 Kirschbaum, Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie, vol. 2, 221–225.

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Fig. 11: Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin. Hare with Powder Flask and Game Bag. 1728–1730. Oil on canvas, 98 × 76 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Source: Chardin, ed. Rosenberg, plate 24.

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Fig. 12: Jean Baptiste Oudry. Hunting Rifle, Pâté, and Game. 1720. Oil on canvas, 144 × 116 cm. Stockholm, National Museum. Source: Ebert-Schifferer, Sybille. Die Geschichte des Stillebens. Munich: Hirmer, 1998. 247, plate 180.

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guishing mark of painterly realism in the nineteenth century in examples from Courbet, Eakins, and Menzel.45 Seen in this perspective, Chardin stands on the threshold between baroque and modern practices of representation. He invokes techniques of vivid presentation, inviting empathetic and compassionate contemplation, an approach already recommended in ancient poetics, thus in Horace.46 Yet he at once distances what he so vividly presents. These are dead animals; they no longer feel the bodily pain they communicate. The process of transmission or communication itself becomes an object of observation – and observable as an effect of painting: dead matter presenting a dead animal so vividly that the beholder can feel even its bodily sensations, feel them even within herself. Michael Baxandall has described Chardin’s interest in the representability of perception, albeit with a different emphasis.47 Discussing Lady Taking Tea (fig. 13), he shows that Chardin’s work, unlike the baroque painting before him, is no longer about the representation of materiality and physical qualities but instead about the representation of the perception of materials and bodies.48 The evidence he offers for this persuasive claim is in the use of the interplay between exact and blurred depiction, which is motivated not by the objects but instead illustrates the process of perception itself, the work of focusing and delimiting the field of vision. The transition from the woman’s cheek to her neck, for example, is brightly lit and precisely delineated, whereas her eye and mouth, features that are crucial for the representation and individualization of a figure, are blurred. The right hand, like the teapot, is painted so vividly as to seem almost tangible, while the left hand, although positioned immediately behind the right, appears blurred. Such alternation between exactitude and blurriness, not motivated by a hierarchy among the objects depicted, decenters the entire representation. The eye jumps from one area that is “focused” to the next, recon45 Fried, Michael. Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. 1–90. See also Fried, Michael. Courbet’s Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990, and Fried, Michael. Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. 46 See above, page 104, note 6. 47 Baxandall, Michael. Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. 74–104. See also Meister, Carolin. “Das Stilleben als optisches Theater: Zur Reflexion von Newtons Theorie der Körperfarben in der Lichtmalerei Chardins.” Verfeinertes Sehen. Optik und Farbe im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert. Ed. Werner Busch. Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008. 133–150. 48 Baxandall uses the term “substance;” I prefer “material,” “materiality,” “body,” or “physical quality” because substance in the strict philosophical sense of the term is precisely without qualities perceptible to the senses. I am grateful to Peter Risthaus for pointing this out to me.

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Fig. 13: Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin. Lady Taking Tea. 1736. Oil on canvas, 80 × 99 cm. Glasgow, Hunterian Museum. Source: Wildenstein, Chardin, plate 18.

structing what and, more importantly, how the painter’s eye saw. What thus comes to the fore is not the object but the act of perception. Chardin’s interest in processes of perception, which Baxandall persuasively traces to the contemporary popularity of Lockeanism, concentrates, thus his reading, on the visual, on representing the very process of seeing. Yet his hypothesis can be extended to include the sense of touch and the interplay between the senses.49 Unlike the act of vision, physical touch is not something a painting can represent as a process that takes place in time. As the example of the dead hare demonstrates, the representation of touch as a process of perception must instead aim to represent the sensations engendered when materials and bodies touch one another or are touched by the human hand. At the center of the painting is a gaping wound; the open flesh is touched by the strap of the game bag, which splits the fur and cuts into the skin of the shank. The wound is

49 See Binczek, Kontakt, especially chapter 7 (317–344), where Binczek discusses the revaluation of the sense of touch in Condillac.

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visible because of the particular position of the hind legs, which in turn suggests the violent act of suspending the animal. The nail, though discreet and not visibly bloody, likewise renders the resistance of skin, sinews, and bones palpable in visual representation. The violence of killing, the image suggests, parallels the act of painting: the “crucifixion” of the hare after it was shot serves the purposes of the painter, who arranges his model in accordance with the use he will make of it. The painting activates the symbolic-emblematic layer of meaning, an indication of vanitas, and fuses it with the painter’s presence and his actions, which aim to eternalize his object. The presence of the sensations evoked by touching conversely also affects the symbolic level, suggesting the price of immortality: the mortification of what is represented in the picture.50 As the crucified hare, vivid in its deadness as though it were present before us in the flesh, illustrates, both, mortification and animation, are the work of the painter’s hand. In Soap Bubbles, too, we recognize that it is not visual perception alone that is at issue. To the contrary: nuances of tactile sensation play an important, even a defining role in this painting. The flow of air that transforms murky suds into a transparent sphere, the trembling film precariously clinging to the thin reed, the fragile balance of the right hand resting on the left: these all bring the theme of touch, of physical contact and exchange, to the fore. The restrained gesture of the boy’s cheek touching the young man’s arm illustrates that what is at stake here is not only a new form of curious attention to approaches to the world that combine the sensual with a foundation in the natural sciences, but also the depiction of a quiet communicative, emotional, and caring exchange that connects the two figures. Soap Bubbles presents an especially conspicuous fusion of allegorical and modern practices of representation, intertwining the homo bulla motif with a sensualist turn toward the world of phenomena that simultaneously also appears as playful experimentation, as recommended by recent innovative efforts in pedagogy. The theme of touch, too, occupies a place between baroque allegories of the senses and new forms of emotional communication. The allegorical dimension is deemphasized in the interiors without quite being entirely obliterated by the representation of everyday lived reality. In 50 The debate over mortification and vivification has been particularly intense with regard to photography; cf. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill & Wang, 1994. See also Sykora, Katharina. Die Tode der Fotografie. Munich: Fink, 2009. Placing different accents, Annette Geiger speaks of a “photographic gaze” in Chardin, particularly in the still lifes: Geiger, Annette. Urbild und fotografischer Blick. Diderot, Chardin und die Vorgeschichte der Fotografie in der Malerei des 18. Jahrhunderts. Munich: Fink, 2004. 75.

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The Laborious Mother, that is evident most immediately in the way the yarn reel, the sewing-box, and the bobbin are isolated from their surroundings, objects that, as in the Dutch tradition, serve as signs of female domestic industry and thus define the tone of this scene between mother and daughter. I have attempted to show how this is, despite the appearance of everyday life, a display, a scene to be looked at; the painter and the beholder are present, however discreetly, and their presence is constitutive of the scene represented in the sense that it renders something invisible – inwardness – visible and witnessable. Within the framework of this demonstratively established interiority and inwardness, a scene of caring instruction unfolds that does not articulate itself through defined affects, through directed gestures or facial expressions. It is instead a form of indirect communication that creates mutual understanding in looking together, in shared contemplation of a representation, a piece of patterned needlework, and in touching together, touching the same piece of fabric. Within the picture, a representation is the medium of a form of contact, a horizontal and quiet form of affectivity the scene imparts to its beholder as well. The interior space as established by Chardin is the appropriate framework for this mode of communication, for muted, inward-directed forms of mutual emotional understanding. Bourgeois norms regarding femininity and domesticity form the background of this picture, but its refusal to comment on the scene it represents renders them less significant. What is imparted to the beholder are forms of sensual communication and quiet emotional participation. The new bourgeois motif of inwardness or interiority creates a stage not merely for self-absorption. Inwardness is turned toward communication, via forms of contact that address others and open up a shared space, forms of communication between the figures within the image, but also with the beholder, whose presence in the representation is acknowledged by the guardian on the threshold.

Bibliography Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill & Wang, 1994. Basedow, Johann Bernhard. Elementarwerk. Dessau, Leipzig: Crusius, 1774. Bätschmann, Oskar. “Belebung durch Bewunderung. Pygmalion als Modell der Kunstrezeption.” Pygmalion: Die Geschichte des Mythos in der abendländischen Kultur. Ed. Mathias Mayer and Gerhard Neumann. Freiburg: Rombach, 1997. 325–370. Baxandall, Michael. Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Binczek, Natalie. Kontakt: Der Tastsinn in Texten der Aufklärung. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2007.

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Bosch-Abele, Susanne. Kreuzigung. Berlin: Phaidon Press, 2005. Busch, Werner. “Chodowieckis Darstellung der Gefühle und der Wandel des Bildbegriffes nach der Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts.” Tradition, Norm, Innovation. Soziales und literarisches Traditionsverhalten in der Frühzeit der deutschen Aufklärung. Ed. Wilfried Barner and Elisabeth Müller-Luckner. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1989. 315–343. Campe, Rüdiger. “Vor Augen Stellen: Über den Rahmen rhetorischer Bildgebung.” Poststrukturalismus. Herausforderung an die Literaturwissenschaft. Ed. Gerhard Neumann. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997. 208–225. Chardin. [Paris, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, 7 September – 22 November 1999; Düsseldorf, Kunstmuseum im Ehrenhof, 5 December 1999 – 20 February 2000; London, Royal Academy of Arts, 11 March – 29 May 2000; New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 27 June – 3 September 2000.] Ed. Pierre Rosenberg. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Deuber-Mankowsky, Astrid. “Natur/Kultur.” Gender@Wissen. Ein Handbuch der GenderTheorien. Ed. Christina von Braun and Inge Stephan. Cologne: Böhlau, 2005. 200–219. Diderot, Denis. “Salon of 1763.” Denis Diderot. Selected Writings. Ed. Lester G. Crocker. Trans. Derek Coltman. New York, London: Macmillan, 1966. 148–151. Ebert-Schifferer, Sybille. Die Geschichte des Stillebens. Munich: Hirmer, 1998. Fénelon, François. The Education of a Daughter. Bedford: Applewood Books, 1996. Fried, Michael. Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Fried, Michael. Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Fried, Michael. Courbet’s Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Fried, Michael. Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Gehring, Petra. Innen des Außen – Außen des Innen. Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard. Munich: Fink, 1994. Geiger, Annette. Urbild und fotografischer Blick. Diderot, Chardin und die Vorgeschichte der Fotografie in der Malerei des 18. Jahrhunderts. Munich: Fink, 2004. Geismeier, Willi. Daniel Chodowiecki. Leipzig: Seemann, 1993. Goettinger Taschen Calender vom Jahr 1779. Göttingen: Johann Christian Dieterich. Goettinger Taschen Calender vom Jahr 1780. Göttingen: Johann Christian Dieterich. Gruschka, Andreas. Bestimmte Unbestimmtheit. Chardins pädagogische Lektionen. Wetzlar: Büchse der Pandora, 1999. Haverkamp, Anselm. “Tür im Raum. Die Dialektik des Innen im Außen an drei Bildern.” Innenleben. Die Kunst des Interieurs. Vermeer bis Kabakov. Ed. Sabine Schulze. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 1998. 62–67. Heesen, Anke te. Der Weltkasten: Die Geschichte einer Bildenzyklopädie aus dem 18. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Wallstein, 1997. Horace. “Art of Poetry.” Trans. Christopher Smart. The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart. Vol. 5: The Works of Horace. Translated into Verse. Ed. Karina Williamson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. 354–377. Imorde, Joseph. Affektübertragung. Berlin: Mann, 2004. Ittershagen, Ulrike. Lady Hamiltons Attitüden. Mainz: Zabern, 1999. Jauß, Hans R. “Ästhetische Normen und geschichtliche Reflexion in der Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes.” Published in: Charles Perrault. Parallèle des anciens et des

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modernes en ce qui regarde les arts et les sciences. Munich: Eidos, 1964 [reprint: Paris, 1688–1696]. 8–64. Jean Simé on Chardin, 1699–1779: Werk, Herkunft, Wirkung. [Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle, 5 June – 22 August 1999.] Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 1999. Kase, Oliver. “Offene und geschlossene Fenster: Mimesis-Korrekturen im Atelierbild 1806– 1836.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte (2006): 217–250. Kemp, Wolfgang. “Die Beredsamkeit des Leibes. Körpersprache als künstlerisches und gesellschaftliches Problem der bürgerlichen Emanzipation.” Städel-Jahrbuch 5 (1975): 111–134. Kemp, Wolfgang. “Die Kunst des Schweigens.” Laokoon und kein Ende: Der Wettstreit der Künste. Ed. Thomas Koebner. Munich: Edition Text+Kritik, 1989. 96–119. Kemp, Wolfgang. “Beziehungsspiele. Versuch einer Gattungspoetik des Interieurs.” Innenleben. Die Kunst des Interieurs. Vermeer bis Kabakov. Ed. Sabine Schulze. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 1998. 17–29. Kirschbaum, Engelbert. Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie. Rome, Freiburg, Basel, Vienna: Herder, 1970. Vol. 2. Kohle, Hubertus. “Exkurs: J. B. S. Chardin.” Hubertus Kohle. Ut pictura poesis non erit, Denis Diderots Kunstbegriff. Mit einem Exkurs zu J. B. S. Chardin. Hildesheim: Olms, 1989. 148–162. Kolesch, Doris. Theater der Emotionen. Ästhetik und Politik zur Zeit Ludwigs XIV. Frankfurt: Campus, 2006. Lajer-Burcharth, Ewa. “The Object as Subject.” The Lure of the Object. Ed. Stephen Melville. Williamstown: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2005. 157–177. Lasin, Gabriele. “Newtonian Science and Lockean Epistemology in Chardin’s Soap Bubbles.” Visualising the Unseen, Imagining the Unknown, Perfecting the Natural: Art and Science in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Ed. Andrew Garciano. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008. 83–114. Lehmann, Johannes Friedrich. Der Blick durch die Wand. Zur Geschichte des Theaterzuschauers und des Visuellen bei Diderot und Lessing. Freiburg: Rombach, 2000. Märtens, Susanne. Art and Appetites. Studien zur Ästhetik des Grotesken bei John Hamilton Mortimer und Thomas Rowlandson. Freiburg: Rombach, 2007 (= Reihe Cultura 40). Meister, Carolin. “Das Stilleben als optisches Theater: Zur Reflexion von Newtons Theorie der Körperfarben in der Lichtmalerei Chardins.” Verfeinertes Sehen. Optik und Farbe im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert. Ed. Werner Busch. Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008. 133–150. Menke, Christoph. “The Aesthetic Critique of Judgment.” The Power of Judgment: A Debate of Aesthetic Critique. Ed. Daniel Birnbaum. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010. 8–29. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Émile, or: On Education. Trans. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1979. Scott, Katie. The Rococo Interior: Decoration and Social Spaces in Early Eighteenth Century Paris. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Scott, Katie. “Chardin Multiplied.” Chardin. [Paris, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, 7 September – 22 November 1999; Düsseldorf, Kunstmuseum im Ehrenhof, 5 December 1999 – 20 February 2000; London, Royal Academy of Arts, 11 March – 29 May 2000; New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 27 June – 3 September 2000.] Ed. Pierre Rosenberg. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. 61–75. Scott, Katie. “Kinderspiel.” Meisterwerke der französischen Genremalerei im Zeitalter von Watteau, Chardin und Fragonard. [Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, 6 June –

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7 September 2003; Washington, D. C., National Gallery of Art, 12 October 2003 – 11 January 2004; Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Altes Museum, 4 February – 9 May 2004.] Ed. Colin B. Bailey et al. Berlin, Cologne: Dumont, 2004. 90–105. Söntgen, Beate. “Bild und Bühne. Das Interieur als Rahmen wahrer Darstellung.” Räume des Subjekts um 1800. Zur imaginativen Selbstverortung zwischen Selbstaufklärung und Romantik. Ed. Rudolf Behrens and Jörn Steigerwald. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010. 53–69. Söntgen, Beate. “Das Theater des Herrn Diderot findet im Innenraum statt. Zum Rahmen wahrer Darstellung im späten 18. Jahrhundert.” Theaterfeindlichkeit. Ed. Gabriele Brandstetter et al. Munich: Fink, 2011. 127–146. Stafford, Barbara. Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994. Stoichita, Victor Ieronim. The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting. Trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Sykora, Katharina. Die Tode der Fotografie. Munich: Fink, 2009. Wild, Christopher. Theater der Keuschheit – Keuschheit des Theaters. Zu einer Geschichte der (Anti-)Theatralität von Gryphius bis Kleist. Freiburg: Rombach, 2003. Wildenstein, Georges. Chardin. Zurich: Manesse, 1963.

II. Interiority/Exteriority: Thinking and Writing Emotion

Bernhard Greiner

“… that until now, the inner world of man has been given … such unimaginative treatment” Constructions of Interiority around 1800 1

Interiority in the philosophical tradition Novalis’s note from the fall of 1799, from which the above quotation is taken, requires a familiarity with eighteenth century Enlightenment philosophy, the culture of sentimentalism, and the Pietistic self-exploration of the soul. Only when all these inward turns are understood to be targets of his criticism of “unimaginativeness” (Geistlosigkeit) can it be seen how a fundamentally new way of accessing interiority can be expected from the “physics for the mind” he proposes. The note continues: What is called psychology is also one of the masks that have taken up the places in the sanctuary where real images of the Gods should stand. How little has physics been used for the mind – and the mind for the outer world. Understanding – imagination – reason – these are the meager frameworks of the universe within us. No word of their wonderful mixtures, formations, transitions. It occurred to no one – to seek out still new, unnamed forces – to trace their sociable relations – who knows what wonderful combinations, what wonderful generations await us in our inner world.2

When he accuses psychology of holding up masks in the place where the “images of the Gods should stand,” Novalis is not constructing a simple opposition between the mechanics of the soul – the way Schiller speaks of the “gears” of the human soul,3 which run in a predetermined and therefore predictable fashion – and the soul filled with spirit. Rather than introducing a living face or a face filled with spirit in opposition to the mask, Novalis evokes what is completely lifeless: images or statues, which, as images of the Gods,

1 Translated from the German by Andrew Kirwin. All translations from the German and all modifications of published translations by Andrew Kirwin, if not indicated otherwise. 2 Novalis. Schriften. Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs. Vol. 3: Das philosophische Werk II. Ed. Richard Samuel et al. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1983. 574. 3 Schiller, Friedrich. “Was kann eine gute stehende Schaubühne eigentlich wirken?” Friedrich Schiller. Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden. Vol. 8: Theoretische Schriften. Ed. Rolf Peter Janz. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992. 185–200, here 196.

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are nevertheless pervaded by representation and presence. Similarly, the talk of a “physics for the mind” does not have the aim of submitting the ideal world to the laws of nature. It seeks rather to establish the validity of one in the field of the other: to unfold the inner world of the mind, by which is meant the Kantian mental faculties of the imagination and the understanding as well as that of reason, the faculty for ideas, within the horizon of the different fields of physics: mechanics, acoustics, thermodynamics, optics, electricity, and magnetism. This would occur through a mutual dissolution of their boundaries, and would have an enlivening effect. Many of the thought experiments in Novalis’s notes have this in mind. This one, for example, in reference to acoustics: “Nature is incomprehensible per se. Tranquility and formed incomprehensibility. / Phil[osophy] is prose. Her consonants. Far away phil[osophy] sounds like poetry – because every call into the distance becomes a vowel.” 4 Or this one, in reference to kinetics: Centripetal force – is the synthetic effort – centrifugal force – the analytic effort of the spirit – striving for unity – striving for multiplicity – through the mutual determination of both through the other – that higher synthesis of the unity and multiplicity itself is generated – through which one is in all and all is in one.5

In hybrid fashion, “allusions to electricity, magnetism, and galvanism” then become the motor of the plot in the Klingsohr fairy tale, as Novalis himself points out.6 The aim of such a “physics for the mind” is to develop new “sociable relations” and “wonderful amalgamations” between the two, and with that, to overcome the separation of physics, initiated by Aristotle, into organic and inorganic nature. Such developments are expected to emerge from a new kind of inward turn in man. That is the reference point for modern thought, raised to a programmatic level in the much-cited seventeenth fragment from Pollen: “[…] is not the universe within ourselves? The depths of our spirit are unknown to us – the mysterious way leads inwards. Eternity with its worlds – the past and future – is in ourselves or nowhere. The external world is the world of shadows – it throws its shadow into the realm of light.” 7 The idea that such priority should be granted to an inner world has a long tradition. Augustine already differentiates between the outer and the inner human (homo exterior/homo interior), the latter being equivalent to “I the 4 Novalis, Schriften, vol. 3, 302. 5 Novalis. Schriften. Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs. Vol. 2: Das philosophische Werk I. Ed. Richard Samuel et al. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1981. 589. 6 Novalis, Schriften, vol. 3, 643. 7 Novalis. “Miscellaneous Observations.” Novalis. Philosophical Writings. Ed. and trans. Margaret Mahony Stoljar. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. 23–46, here 25.

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spirit” (ego animus), which is the better one (“sed melius quod interius”) 8 because it is better suited to lead to God. God is thus to be found in the innermost regions of the self: “But you were more inner than my innermost, and higher than my highermost.” 9 For Augustine, this inner world has nothing emotional about it, and that is precisely what allows it to be placed in a tradition that leads to the epistemology and philosophy of self-consciousness around 1800. Augustine understands the inner world essentially as memoria, since what we know about our inner world originates from memory, which preserves the part played by the subject’s self-reflection in its acts of cognition, will, and action. This already points to a concept of interiority that understands the subject’s being as re-flection. In early modernity, this re-flection was unfolded so comprehensively by Shakespeare in his Hamlet drama that, as Harold Bloom writes, “we seem to have read it before, even when we encounter it for the first time.” 10 In the field of epistemology, with its question of the certainty of knowledge and the possibility of objective cognition, the rationalism of the seventeenth century continues this high valuation of interiority by locating the highest principle of all the activity of the understanding, as well as all guarantees of the certainty of knowledge, in the evident self-experience of self-consciousness. The philosophy of the Enlightenment sets up a relationship of correspondence between the “I” that uses its reason and the rational order of the external world (that is, nature and society): man can make reason the standard of his reference to reality because he is in a world that satisfies the demands of reason. The more this correspondence becomes doubtful, the more intensively a variety of discourses form around conceptions of a connection between the “I” that is unconditioned because it follows reason, and the conditioned world as that which is always already given. These conceptions necessarily lead into the interior of the “I” as the space in which the unconditioned is experienced: for example, the discourse of sentimentality, in which feeling is central but the reference point is virtue, or the increasingly important concept of compassion, which, as an affect, belongs to nature, but is moral in its content, or the discourse of grace, which in Germany was essentially carried out by Winckelmann, Wieland, and Schiller and came to an end in Kleist: those who show 8 Augustine. St. Augustine’s Confessions. Trans. William Watts. Bilingual edition. 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1912. Vol. 2. X, 6, 9. See also Lobkowicz, Nikolaus. “Zur Einleitung: Gibt es eine Ontologie der Innerlichkeit?” Rationalität und Innerlichkeit. Ed. HannaBarbara Gerl-Falkovitz. Hildesheim, Zurich, New York: Olms-Weidmann, 1997. 1–20. 9 Augustine, Confessions, vol. 1, III, 6, 11. 10 Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. London: Fourth Estate, 1998. 405.

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grace follow their nature and yet always fulfill the demands of the moral law. With his “Copernican turn” in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant fundamentally established the prevalence of interiority, understanding it in a gnoseological way as the place of cognition and the consciousness that turns toward itself. It was no longer assumed that cognition (in order to be objective) must direct itself toward objects, but rather the other way around.11 Accordingly, the aim of the first critique is to show that the subjective conditions of our thought have objective validity, that is, are capable of leading to binding (generally valid and necessary) cognitive judgments, and are therefore capable of producing truth. If cognition is to come about, the manifold of intuition must be directed toward the conditions of the subject’s cognition: only insofar as something is given to us within the a priori representations of space and time, available to us before all experience, can something become an object of cognition. Something is only cognized when the manifold of intuition is synthesized in accordance with the categories – with the logical functions of judging (quantity, quality, relation, and modality). The a priori conditions of synthesis (the categories) of all possible objectivity of our cognition, that is, the cognizibility of something as something, are thus anchored in subjectivity. The cognizing subject with its inner, mental faculties – sensibility, which produces an intuition, and understanding, which brings the intuition to a concept – grounds and conditions the cognizing relation to the world. The limit of all knowledge, indicated by the epistemological theory developed from this starting point, is both the theory’s problem and its accomplishment. This limit applies to that which is given in space and time according to the a priori conditions of givenness, and establishes the possibility of its objectivity. But it does not encompass the empirical way in which the given appears, and furthermore, it draws a boundary line against the field of practical (moral, that is, grounded in reason’s ideas) action. The understanding that produces cognition cannot be the source of any conditions in the world of moral will. And vice versa: reason, which sets purposes, and action, which is bound to the idea of freedom, contains no assurance that the actuality of experience can be structured according to the demands of reason.12 Subjectivity – the interior of man with the faculties of understanding and reason – is now elevated to the constitutive ground of all cognition as well as all moral action,

11 Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. “Preface to the 2nd edition (1787),” 112. 12 See Kant’s pointed formulations at the beginning of part nine of the introduction to the Critique of the Power of Judgment. Ed. Paul Guyer. Trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 80.

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and presents itself as something fundamentally distinct and separate. It is fundamentally separate in its relation to what is external, the cognitive/theoretical and the practical relation to the world. A sort of bridge between the two is built by the Critique of the Power of Judgment. In an aesthetic judgment, when we assign to a given intuition the predicate “beautiful,” or, as a combination ex negativo, the predicate “sublime,” we regard the given intuition, that is, nature, as though it were conducive to the idea of reason (of freedom), as though it were open to it, and in that sense, as though it were organized according to a purpose. Yet what is at stake here are only processes in the interior of the judging subject, the activity of its mental faculties. In the words of Kant, it is the way “the subject feels itself as it is affected by the representation.” 13 Produced in the wake of this conception of beauty and encouraged by this new centering of the world in the knowing and purpose-setting subject, German classical literary works give a new status to interiority. They mine the themes and questions that suggest themselves within this horizon of thought: the specific world-disclosure of this interiority, its latent conflict between the parts devoted to cognition and action, and perspectives of inner reconciliation under the sign of the beautiful. In the following, this will be investigated through an analysis of the sixth book of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre), “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul.” First, however, the philosophical debate on the conditions of possibility of objective cognition must be clarified at the point where it becomes important for the early Romantics and their completely new and necessarily artistic inward turn.14

13 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 89 (§ 1). 14 For a more detailed account of this, see Frank, Manfred. Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989. See also Frank, Manfred. Unendliche Annäherung. Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997. The following commentary on the philosophical basis of the Romantic turn inward is indebted to the pointed summary of the debate on the principle of self-consciousness from Kant to the early Romantics in: Barth, Andreas. Inverse Verkehrung der Reflexion. Ironische Textverfahren bei Friedrich Schlegel und Novalis. Heidelberg: Winter, 2001.

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The aporetic ground of self-consciousness and its Romantic disclosure The truly fundamental question – which also pertains to the central moment of interiority –, that is, how there could exist knowledge of pure self-consciousness (of evident self-experience in self-consciousness) that would provide the ground of all certainty in knowledge, could not be satisfactorily answered starting from the premises of the Critique of Pure Reason. If a state of affairs can only be known when it is determined by a predicative statement, then that must also be true for the constitutive ground of all knowledge, which lies prior to such statements and so cannot be captured in them. Self-consciousness fundamentally transcends the process of cognition; the attempt to determine it in a reflective-theoretical way leads to an aporia. In the case of selfconsciousness, the “I” that is conscious (the subject of reflection) is identical with that to which reflection is directed (the object of reflection). In order for the positing of identity to be possible, for the identical unity of self-consciousness (“I” = “I”) to exist as the constitutive ground of all certainty, the reflective “I” must already have knowledge of itself. Only then can it know that it has grasped itself – that the subject and object of reflection are identical through the principle of identity. Such “knowledge” can only be pre-reflective: it is the familiarity of the reflective “I” with itself, always already there and yet preceding the application of the principle of identity which brought about the “I” in the first place. This is what is meant when Novalis notes in his Fichte Studies: “what reflection finds [in the case of self-consciousness, the “finding” of reflection has the meaning of “bringing about”] appears to already be there.” 15 In place of the presupposition of the “I” as prior to self-consciousness, Fichte determines the “I” as positing. There is no pre-reflective familiarity of the subject with itself that exists prior to self-consciousness; rather, the subject emerges simultaneously with the consciousness “I” = “I.” 16 In this positing, the “I” knows itself to be immediately identical with itself. But in order for this to be knowledge, the principle of difference must be introduced into this act (since something can only be determined and known by being differentiated from something else) – that is, the breaking of the “I” on the “Not-I.” Fichte there-

15 Novalis, Schriften, vol. 2, 112. Cf. Menninghaus, Winfried. Unendliche Verdopplung: Die frühromantische Grundlegung der Kunsttheorie im Begriff absoluter Selbstreflexion. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987. 16 Henrich, Dieter. “Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht.” Subjektivität und Metaphysik. Festschrift für Wolfgang Cramer. Ed. Dieter Henrich. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966. 188–232, here 199.

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fore also seeks to grasp the unconditioned ground of all certainty in knowledge within the framework of the Kantian model of reflection. By contrast, the early Romantics emphasize how untenable every reflective-theoretical explanation of self-consciousness is. In self-consciousness, we do have a familiarity with ourselves. But its ground escapes conceptual knowledge, disappearing when we try to grasp it conceptually, and it is not representable. This ground can therefore only be disclosed to self-consciousness as feeling. Thus Friedrich Schlegel speaks of a “feeling of the self,” and, in reference to the aforementioned familiarity with the self in self-consciousness, talks of the “certainty of something incomprehensible”: We are dealing with a concept of “I”-ness. So if we seek to comprehend it in its innermost essence, then the point to which we should especially direct our attention is the mystery of the self-feeling, the self-consciousness that accompanies and conditions all our representations. – This, related to knowledge and the possibility of knowledge, delivers the certainty of something incomprehensible.17

Out of this “mystery of self-consciousness,” Novalis develops the notion of an insoluble “conflict in the self” between the divisible “I” (the division of subject and object of consciousness in self-consciousness) and the indivisible “I” (the constitutive familiarity of the self with itself as an unmediated unity prior to the positing of self-consciousness in a judgment): “We are I – consequently identical and divided – consequently mediate and immediate I at the same time. The mediate I is of course the divided I. The pure I is only divided insofar as it is one, and it is only one insofar as it is divided. This is the famous antagonism in the I.” 18 The act of making certain of the self in self-consciousness leads to an insoluble conflict between feeling and reflection, unconditionality and conditionality, the indivisible/infinite and the divisible/finite “I.” Fichte devises a solution to the logical insolubility of this paradox by starting at the point at which both sides of the contradiction meet. This point is then extended by the imagination and developed further into the idea of a certain hovering, in which each side is simultaneously comprehended and represented:19 “Imagi-

17 Schlegel, Friedrich. “Die Entwicklung der Philosophie in zwölf Büchern. Zweites, drittes und viertes Buch: Die Psychologie als Theorie des Bewusstseins.” Kritische Friedrich-SchlegelAusgabe. Vol. 12. Part 2: Schriften aus dem Nachlaß: Philosophische Vorlesungen (1800–1807). Ed. Jean-Jacques Anstett. Munich, Paderborn, Vienna: Schöningh, 1964. 324–408, here 333. 18 Novalis, Schriften, vol. 2, 127. 19 Winfried Menninghaus has recently emphasized this point. Cf. Menninghaus, Winfried. “Raum-Chiffren frühromantischer Philosophie.” Räume der Romantik. Ed. Inka Mülder-Bach and Gerhard Neumann. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007. 13–25.

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nation is a faculty that hovers in the middle between determination and nondetermination, between what is finite and what is infinite.” 20 “This faculty, almost always misjudged, is what connects together a unity out of constant oppositions – what intervenes between moments that would sublate one another, and preserves both of them.” 21 Through the idea of hovering, the spatial point at which the oppositions meet is made temporally dynamic. This spatio-temporal figure of hovering between oppositions, whose contradictoriness is logically insoluble, became a fundamental figure of the Romantic dissolution of boundaries 22 (as the unity of differentiation and non-differentiation), of the comprehension and representation of the unrepresentable ground of the “I,” and thus of the Romantic constructions of interiority. Novalis universalizes this figure of hovering when he writes: All being, being in general is nothing except being free – hovering between extremes, which are necessarily to be united and necessarily to be separated. All reality streams out of this light-point of hovering – everything is contained in it – obj[ect] and subject are through it, not it through them. I-ness or the productive force of the imagination, the hovering – determines, produces the extremes, that in-between which the hovering takes place. – This is an illusion, but only in the realm of the common understanding. Otherwise, it is something thoroughly real, for the hovering, its cause, is the source, the Mater of all reality, reality itself.23

The spatio-temporal figure of hovering proves to be an essential moment in Romantic constructions of interiority. Another central moment, simultaneously a figure of representation and of interpretation of the inaccessible ground of the “I” in self-consciousness, is lack; the presence of the ground of the unity of self-consciousness is only possible in the state of having been removed (think of Novalis’s allegorical figuration of the night in Hymnen an die Nacht). Just as the presupposed familiarity with ourselves in the act that founds selfconsciousness and interiority escapes our conceptual grasp, so does it also thwart philosophical representation, which cannot get beyond the ground of non-representability. At this point, the beautiful, functioning (as in Kant) as a bridge between the world of appearances and that of ideas, is capable of going

20 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. “Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre.” Fichtes Werke. Vol. 1: Zur theoretischen Philosophie I. Ed. Immanuel Hermann Fichte. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1971. 83–328, here 216. 21 Fichte, “Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre,” 204–205. 22 Schulz, Walter. Metaphysik des Schwebens. Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Ästhetik. Pfullingen: Neske, 1985. 23 Novalis, Schriften, vol. 2, 266.

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further. It does so not only in the mode of negative aesthetics – the representation of non-representability – but also positively, through its own ability to lead to that which transcends all representation (which demands difference and delimitation). The sensuous plenitude of the beautiful, the transcendence by aesthetic ideas of all conceptual determination, can be understood in a manner equivalent to Kant’s argument in the Critique of the Power of Judgment.24 That which is infinite and exceeds every intuition can be made present “symbolically.” 25 Art, the beautiful, is therefore not only one possible field for the Romantic turn toward interiority, but rather the sole genuine entrance to its core, to the self-mediation in the “I” which should in principle be inaccessible, and, in this sense, to the infinite depth of the interior. But if Romantic interiority can only be grasped and represented in this way, in the medium of art, then this medium cannot leave what it grasps untouched, and, for this reason, Romantic interiority is to be considered genuinely poetic. Several of these – necessarily poetic – explorations of interiority in the classical-romantic period will be considered in the following.

Theatrical interiority: the Confessions of a Beautiful Soul The “Beautiful Soul” in the sixth book, the “religious book,” 26 of Wilhelm Meister, is much criticized, both by figures in the novel and by outside observers, for her turn toward interiority. Her uncle tells her, “one should not pursue the cultivation of one’s moral life in isolation, shut inside oneself.” 27 This is interpreted as a vote in favor of maintaining a balance between striving toward a “moral culture” and forming a “finer sensibility.” But the passage does not elaborate on how morality and sensibility can be connected, although the predicate “beautiful” in the Beautiful Soul would point to an answer, in the

24 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 191 (§ 49). 25 In the sense of the concept of “symbol” developed by Kant in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, 225 (§ 59). 26 See Goethe’s letter to Schiller from 18 March 1795: Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche. Part 1: Sämtliche Werke. Vol. 9: Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung. Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten. Ed. Wilhelm Voßkamp et al. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992. 1253. 27 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Ed. and trans. Eric A. Blackall and Victor Lange. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. 248 (translation modified).

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sense in which it is understood in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. It is worth noting, however, that “moral culture” is associated with the turn inward, and sensibility with the turn outward. The field of morality is interpersonal action, while that of sensibility are the drives and desires of the ego. The uncle’s categorizations thus appear to be a reversal, based on the onesided development of only one orientation. The ideal would be to have both at the same time, but how should such a state be conceived? As an immediately given and in this sense “natural” unfolding of the one in the field of the other, in such a way that the following of reason’s commands itself would have a sensuous quality, while, similarly, the development of an inward directedness would have the quality of a turn outwards? Or as a mediated “both at the same time,” insofar as a moral education would promote a “finer sensibility,” and a richly developed relation to the inner self would open up more elaborated relations to the outside? A realization of the first possibility would be grace. Natalie, the embodiment of grace in the novel, expresses her view on the one-sided development of interiority in the Beautiful Soul in no uncertain terms: she had “perhaps too much concern with herself.” 28 This view was adopted by Friedrich Schlegel in his “critique” of Wilhelm Meister and had a lasting influence on later interpretations of the Beautiful Soul: She constantly stands before the mirror of her conscience, prinking and preening her feelings. In this figure the highest degree of inwardness is reached – which was bound to happen, for the work has from the start displayed a decided inclination towards distinguishing sharply between the inner and the outer life, and to contrasting them. In this section, the inner life has as it were hollowed itself out.29

If Friedrich Schlegel sees in this inward turn “the very peak of consciously articulated one-sidedness,” 30 then he contradicts himself, since in the same breath he allows the Beautiful Soul to speak. He introduces a category – theatricality – that in Goethe’s understanding holds the promise of allowing contradictory orientations, such as one to interiority and another to exteriority, to be put in practice at the same time: […] and if Wilhelm continues to interest us only by virtue of his own capacity to be interested in everything, the way in which the aunt is interested in herself gives her the right to communicate her feelings. Fundamentally she too lives a theatrical life, only with this difference: that she combines all the roles which in the Count’s residence had been

28 Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 317. 29 Schlegel, Friedrich. “On Goethe’s Meister.” Trans. Peter Firchow. Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics. Ed. Jay M. Bernstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 269– 286, here 282 (translation modified). 30 Schlegel, “On Goethe’s Meister,” 282.

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distributed among many figures who all acted and performed to one another; moreover, her inner life is the stage on which she is at the same time actor and spectator and mistress of the intrigues behind the scenes.31

Interiority is understood here as a theatrical occurrence, in which the “I” not only splits into actor and spectator, but is also reconstituted as the separate parts are brought back together into an identity. In this way, interiority is constructed as an act of self-reflection, and a metaphor of space and action is found for it (the inner stage and the imaginative play in front of spectators). Friedrich Schlegel comes very close to Goethe’s conception and practice of theater, since once again he splits up the activity of the actress in this theater of interiority. If, as an actress, she still attends to the intrigues offstage, then she acts on two ontologically distinct levels at the same time: as an actress, she represents something – her indivisible, unconditioned “I,” which one could also call her “I-idea” – and yet acts in the actuality of the play, in which the “I” knows itself to be conditioned in a variety of ways. The Beautiful Soul emphasizes the importance of her insistence on her “I” as the unconditional and absolute authority over her actions and development throughout her (feminine) educational history (Bildungsgeschichte). Wilhelm, on the other hand, learns to rein in his emphatic demand to be an unconditioned person – “even as a youth I had the vague desire and intention to develop myself fully, myself as I am” 32 – in favor of his social existence. The Beautiful Soul distinguishes her unconditionally grasped “I” from her empirical existence, which she depicts through the images “body” and “dress” as conditioned and transient. The Beautiful Soul “demand[s]” from her fiancée “complete freedom to determine my actions according to my own convictions.” 33 During the time in which she is turning away from her fiancé, she insists to her father, “that I would rather leave my country, my parents and my friends and earn my bread elsewhere, than abandon my convictions.” 34 In a similar way, even after her religious turn, she insists on her “I”: “My decision to extricate myself in spiritual matters from the influence and advice of my friends resulted in my acquiring the courage to pursue my own course in external relationships.” 35 The Beautiful Soul even turns this unconditioned “I” to the world of ideas: “my actions are always drawing nearer and nearer to the idea of perfection that I have for myself, and I find it easier every day to do what I think is right.” 36 31 32 33 34 35 36

Schlegel, “On Goethe’s Meister,” 282 (translation modified). Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 174. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 230. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 231. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 237. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 255.

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She distinguishes from this the conditioned and transient “I,” the “body” and “dress”: “It was as if my soul were thinking without my body, looking on the body as something apart from itself, like some garment or other. […] the body will be rent like a garment, but I, the well-known I, am.” 37 The doubling of the “I” on the “stage of interiority” into soul and body, spirit and dress appears theatrical, as Friedrich Schlegel noted, because it is unfolded before a part of the “I” that functions as a spectator. This spectator “I” recognizes, in its relation to the outside, that it is embedded in a societal theater from which it strives to escape. Hence the Beautiful Soul says this about her estrangement from her fiancé: “I removed my mask and began to act always according to the dictates of my heart,” 38 and after the final separation, “[I] tore my heart and mind away from the whole affair, with the same eagerness as one leaves a theater after the final curtain has been lowered.” 39 The Confessions constitute interiority, conceived as a theatrical structure, by tracing the history of its formation (Bildung). It is characteristic of the reported events that they introduce certain patterns that are then developed further. The first two sections appear to introduce the interpretative perspective of “sickness” for the interiority of the Beautiful Soul, when the narrator says a “nine month sickbed” was the reason for her “unusual way of thinking.” 40 But no birth follows from the nine month “pregnancy.” The birth apparently occurred before, in the previous “hemorrhage,” which is reported as an “instant” in which her soul became “all feeling and memory.” 41 Because the “I” of both feeling and memory is “whole,” this event cannot be understood as a splitting up, but rather only as the doubling of an affective and a reflective “I,” both of which emerge at the same time. The further formation of interiority is shown as a process in which the Beautiful Soul leaves the educational institutions that are open to her as fields of self-realization – family, bourgeois/courtly society, religious (Pietistic/Moravian church) community – because they allow no room for a feminine “I” who wants to gain autonomy over herself. This departure occurs through the appropriation of literary and mythological models. The “I” does not become transparently understandable through reference to such models,42 but in an act of appropriation it makes them into a moment of its interiority. 37 Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 253. 38 Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 230. 39 Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 232. 40 Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 217. 41 Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 217. 42 While it is characteristic for many figures in the novel that literary or mythological figures appear through them – Friedrich as Cupido, Nathalie as Minerva, Philine as Venus, Fortune,

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In the realm of the family, the Beautiful Soul resists giving in to the speech of her fatherly mentor, who loads the girl with anxiety about sexuality, which virtue cannot withstand. He puts forward the demands of virtue, only to undermine them at the same time. The Beautiful Soul, in adopting the self-image of a literary Phyllis, rejects the notion that women are essentially seducible creatures and constructs her own identity as an “other” Phyllis. The Beautiful Soul ventures out of the bourgeois and courtly social order, the fields for securing a stable identity, because she is not ready to meet their contradictory expectations of her. A woman should be educated, be able to use her understanding, and at the same time hide her education in order not to disrupt her inferior position with respect to men. Similarly, she should orient herself to the demands of morality (and still recognize herself as free in her actions), and at the same time be held accountable to the demands of nature and sensuality (that is, let go of the moral commandments for the sake of that one man). The Beautiful Soul says of her bridegroom, to whom she allows no “freedoms”: “he appreciated my standpoint but sought to undermine it.” 43 By balancing this double demand not for herself, but for the man, she would become for him a mirror in which he could see the demands of reason and nature as united and enjoy the sight of himself as a whole person. But the Beautiful Soul refuses to accept this position in relation to her fiancé, whom she and others call Narcissus, and by doing this she develops into an “other” Narcissus figure. The masculine “Narcissus” receives a serious injury during a fight in society. The Beautiful Soul takes the bleeding man to another room, binds his wounds, and keeps him conscious until a doctor comes. There follows a vision of herself in the mirror: “Our hostess then took me into her bedroom. She had to undress me completely, and I cannot fail to admit that when I first happened to see myself in the mirror while they were washing his blood off me, I thought I could consider myself beautiful, even without my clothes.” 44 The beauty of the Beautiful Soul is introduced here as corporeal beauty, but at the same time as ideal beauty, since the “I” experiences itself as wholly individual (none of the pieces of clothing in the house fit her) and “indescribably altered,” which of course literally means it has become “other.” The category of the beautiful ensures that these two experiences of the “I” can go

Hera, and Parca, Wilhelm as Hamlet, the sick king’s son, and Tancred. Cf. Schlaffer, Hannelore. Wilhelm Meister: Das Ende der Kunst und die Wiederkehr des Mythos. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1980. 43 Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 226. 44 Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 223.

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together. If one understands beauty the way it is conceived in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, then the “I,” as an idea that transcends every intuition, becomes the equivalent of the sensuous “I,” which, as something beautiful, transcends any conceptual fixation.45 Through the appropriation of the Narcissus myth, the criticism made by the other figures of the novel that the Beautiful Soul “circles within herself” is put into question. It is appropriate that the Beautiful Soul does not point away from herself toward the mythical figure, but rather makes it into a moment of her self that fills her interiority: Narcissus is sent away, but the act of self-formation remains founded on her self-perception in the mirror. Ovid’s Narcissus rejected Echo’s love. When he looks into the reflecting pool, the other sex fixes her lustful gaze on him. He perceives himself as someone who is desired, and so loses himself in self-directed love. The myth thereby assigns to the woman the function of a mirror in which the man can enjoy love of himself without falling into the destructive relation between the image and that which it represents. But the Beautiful Soul refuses the role of mirror, the masculine Narcissus gets his marching orders, and in contrast to Ovid, the feminine Narcissus from the mirror scene develops out of the act of wiping off from her own body the traces of the other sex, and of the lustful objectifying gaze of the other. The Beautiful Soul’s self-formation through her perception of herself in the mirror is not in danger of turning into vulnerability toward the image of a figure that is unreachable, and of forfeiting herself to it. Her self-perception as “beautiful” is accented by the Kantian conception of “disinterested pleasure.” 46 In the field of religion as well, the Beautiful Soul learns to form her interiority in opposition to masculine discourse. The Pietistic/Moravian community life that is represented in the novel, with its cult of friendliness and emphasis on personal access to God, opens up a field of self-development and formation of interiority that was prevalent in the eighteenth century. After her rejection of the familial and bourgeois/courtly role expectations, the Beautiful Soul remains connected to this world, but with increasing inner distance, the more she develops her own religiosity. As a friend (phile) of the “divine friend,” she frees herself from the tutelage of a court chaplain as well as a Moravian she had called by the name of “Philo;” and by doing so, she finally forms herself into a “Moravian sister of [her] own accord.” 47 The Confessions thus follow the model of a Pietistic conversion narrative. They emphasize a personal, erotically charged relation to God (the Beautiful Soul calls it the turn to the “invisible

45 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 191 (§ 49). 46 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 90 (§ 2). 47 Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 242.

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friend,” 48 to an “absent friend” 49), but they manifest an “I” that does not get lost in the experience of God, but rather establishes itself in this experience as a force that appropriates the faith autonomously. The aforementioned mirror scene turns out to be a Kontrafraktur – the rewriting of a song while keeping its melody – of the Pietistic conversion narrative. Instead of being lifted upward to God by metaphorically bathing in Christ’s blood,50 which was typical for these narratives, the “I” literally washes the blood of a man from her body and experiences an ideal and at the same time corporeal lift upward to her own “I.” The Confessions construct interiority structurally as a theater on which the Beautiful Soul represents something different from the reality of representing (allowing for the transformative appropriation of models), and on which she simultaneously observes herself as a spectator. Furthermore, this interiority is constructed with respect to the history of its emergence: in the transformative appropriation of literary, mythological, and religious models. The essence of this interiority is determined to be beauty, which allows for the simultaneous recognition and playing-out of her sensuous, empirical, and conditioned, as well as her ideal and unconditioned parts, and achieves a relation to the self that has the quality of “disinterested pleasure,” which is free from desire. Functionally, this construction of interiority, as the female counterpart to the story of the protagonist Wilhelm, is directed toward Bildung, which the novel conceives exactly along the lines of Mendelssohn’s introduction of the term in his article: On the Question: What Is Enlightenment?, as a field of combination for physical and social determinations on the one hand, and ideal freedom on the other.51 Wilhelm can open himself to the institutions of Bildung, allow himself to be educated by many people, since as fields of male-dominated 48 Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 237. 49 Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 240. 50 An abundance of examples of this metaphorical constellation is given by Strack, Friedrich. “Selbst-Erfahrung oder Selbst-Entsagung? Goethes Deutung und Kritik des Pietismus in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre.” Verlorene Klassik? Ein Symposion. Ed. Wolfgang Wittkowski. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986. 52–73. 51 “Bildung is composed of [or: disintegrates into] culture and Enlightenment.” (Mendelssohn, Moses. “On the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” What Is Enlightenment? EighteenthCentury Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions. Ed. James Schmidt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. 53–57, here 53.) Here, “culture” stands for the area of human praxis in which the human knows himself to be conditioned in manifold ways. “Enlightenment” refers to the theoretical relation to the world, to rational cognition and competence, in which the human knows himself ideally and sets himself free. Mendelssohn wants to argue that Bildung is the successful unification of both human ways of being, but in fact his argument begins by evoking a state of decay, and as his argument moves forward, he cannot shake off this image. He wants to describe the joining together of both ways of being in the progression of Bildung,

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discourse they always offer him possibilities for development. In light of this, it is appropriate that the Beautiful Soul departs from the institutions of Bildung available to her, since they offer no space for the development of a female “I” who wants to gain autonomy over herself. Instead, the Beautiful Soul creates a space that is independent of these institutions, and can exist only within her own “circle,” as the space of interiority. Is the “I” that develops in this way condemned to “circle within herself,” as other figures in the novel, Friedrich Schlegel, and readers who followed him would have it? This criticism does not consider the intersubjective field of self-realization that the novel offers to her interiority in the form of authorship. The Beautiful Soul’s authorship manifests itself in a narration very different from that of the other books in the novel, though it also plainly contradicts the Beautiful Soul’s insistence on her “I.” The voice of a female first person narrator takes the place of the narrator of totality of the novel, of whom Friedrich Schlegel said that he hovers, cheerfully ironic, over the whole.52 But the two voices do not let themselves simply be combined in that of the real author; it was known from the time of the first reactions to the novel, and it was also confirmed by Goethe,53 that not only did he draw on the biography of the canoness Susanna von Klettenberg of Frankfurt, but also from authentic testimonials (for example, regarding the Narcissus plot: Susanna von Klettenberg’s fiancé was in fact called Narcissus, the fight in society did actually occur, and in the trial that followed Susanna von Klettenberg testified as a witness; her letters and writings demonstrate just the kind of religiosity presented in the Confessions). The “I” that writes in the Confessions moves along the boundary between fiction and documentation. Alongside the author, a voice speaks that is historically documented and made socially concrete in the form of a fictive narrator. A narration is being practiced that allows many voices to speak without submitting them to one dominant voice, and it is therefore “dialogic” in Bachtin’s sense. The isolation for which the Beautiful Soul is criticized is partly forced upon her by other characters such as the uncle (insofar as he excludes her from the upbringing of his nieces and nephews), and yet she has always already subverted it through the composition of the Confessions. Before we even encounter them, we read about the positive impression they made on a female reader, but in practice he details an increasingly expanding list of the possibilities for conflict between the two. 52 Schlegel, “On Goethe’s Meister.” 53 See Goethe’s letter to Schiller from 18 March 1795: “And yet […] such a representation would have been impossible if I had not collected the studies on nature for it earlier.” (Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, part 1, vol. 9, 1253.)

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Aurelie. With authorship, just as with Pietistic religious practice, an already established field of female self-formation and self-realization is taken up and transformed. Similar to the way the Beautiful Soul cites literary, mythological, and religious models but accentuates the way she differs from them – being not just another Phyllis, another Narcissa, another Phile –, the narration aims at maintaining the alterity, not the identity, of the “I” that speaks. In addition to the fictive female narrator, the voices of the author and the historically documented figure are given a turn. They speak the language of several literary genres – the pastoral novel, the love novel, the conversion narrative, the book of religious edification, and the mythical narrative – but in such a way that the narration’s difference from these literary models is always emphasized. If, after the Narcissus scene, all clothes become “strange disguises” to the Beautiful Soul, then the narration carries out this disguise structurally, in accordance with the metaphorics of masks and clothes that pervade the confessions, by using the traditional literary models as disguises, while emphasizing what is unfitting in them and giving the excess room to other voices. In this way, the narrative operation brings theatricality, in the form of a mask, into the Bildung of interiority, though a voice does not speak from behind this mask, in the sense of the ancient “persona,” but rather many voices resound through it, and they are not beholden to one that is ultimately dominant. The interiority constructed by the Confessions and interrogated with respect to its relation to the world or to exteriority shows itself to be indebted to a transformative appropriation of many different figurations of literature, mythology, and religious scripture which are connected by the structural deployment of conceptions of theatricality, of the beautiful, and of Bildung. This movement of altering and taking in “world” into interiority has its exact equivalent in a turn outward through a narration that lets many voices speak without structuring them in a hierarchical order. The movement inward that grounds and shapes the space of interiority, and the movement outward that gives a multivocal and truly intersubjective reality to this interiority, stand in a clear relationship of mutual grounding to one another. They make one another possible, not as a metaphorical unfolding of one on the field of the other, but as a mediated making-possible of one through the other. Since this relation corresponds to that of the beautiful developed in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, it is to be expected that the construction of interiority and the turn outward found here can also be deployed in an exemplary manner for literature that has its aesthetic and philosophical point of perspective in Kant’s determination of the beautiful, that is, the literature of German Classicism. However, Romantic constructions of interiority differ pointedly from this model.

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“Speak from afar …”: Heimlichkeit and Unheimlichkeit of the Romantic inner world The content of the inner world in Romanticism is defined in quite similar fashion by the relevant programmatic texts: “Everything is eternally related in the Interior,” 54 as one Brentano poem puts it. Novalis describes the inner world through the concept of “mind” (Gemüt), which he gives a Romantic accent: as the place in which “everything is connected in the most unique, pleasing, and lively way,” and at the same time as the ability to create such a connection.55 And as poetry and “mind” converge in this way,56 he also sees them as mutually constituting one another: “Poetry is mind-arousing art [Gemütherregungskunst].” 57 Hoffmann conceives the inner world in an analogous way, locating it in the mythical Atlantis as “life in poetry, poetry where the sacred harmony of all things is revealed as the most profound secret of Nature.” 58 It is not this general content of the inner world and interiority (the latter understood as a programmatic turn of the “I” toward such an inner world) that stands in the center of Romantic thematizations of interiority, but rather questions concerning the possibility of experiencing, accessing, and representing it, as well as its poetic ground and the relation of this inner world to the outside. Brentano’s poem Sprich aus der Ferne / Heimliche Welt is worthy of attention because it develops the content of the Romantic inner world out of the relation of the speaking “I” to this world: Speak from afar Secret world, That so gladly Consorts with me.

Sprich aus der Ferne Heimliche Welt, Die sich so gerne Zu mir gesellt.

When the evening sun has set, No joyous color speaks anymore

Wenn das Abendrot niedergesunken, Keine freudige Farbe mehr spricht

54 A line from the poem Speak from afar / Secret world (Sprich aus der Ferne / Heimliche Welt). Cf. Brentano, Clemens. “Godwi.” Clemens Brentano. Werke. Ed. Friedhelm Kemp. Munich: Hanser, 1963. Vol. 2. 7–445, here 156. 55 Novalis, Schriften, vol. 3, 650–651. 56 “Through poetry there arises the highest sympathy and common activity, the most intimate communion of the finite and the infinite.” (Novalis. “Logological Fragments I.” Novalis. Philosophical Writings. Ed. and trans. Margaret Mahony Stoljar. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. 47–66, here 54.) 57 Novalis, Schriften, vol. 3, 639. 58 Hoffmann, E. T. A. “The Golden Pot.” Tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann. Ed. and trans. Leonard J. Kent and Elizabeth C. Knight. New York: Continuum, 1982. 14–92, here 92.

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And the wreaths of silently glowing sparks Night braids ‘round the shadowed brow: The stars’ Sacred meaning Drifts over to me Gently through the distance.

Und die Kränze stilleuchtender Funken Die Nacht um die schattigte Stirne flicht: Wehet der Sterne Heiliger Sinn Leis durch die Ferne Bis zu mir hin.

When the moon’s quietly soothing tears Ease the nights’ hidden woe; Peace is then drifting. In golden ships The spirits sail in a heavenly sea. Glittering songs’ Resounding course Winds down, Surges upward.

Wenn des Mondes still lindernde Tränen Lösen der Nächte verborgenes Weh; Dann wehet Friede. In goldenen Kähnen Schiffen die Geister im himmlischen See. Glänzender Lieder Klingender Lauf Ringelt sich nieder, Wallet hinauf.

When midnight’s sacred horror Fearfully slinks through the dark forests, And the shrubs peer wondrously, Everything darkly profoundly shows itself: Transforms in the dark Friendly play, Quietly lights glitter Shimmering aim.

Wenn der Mitternacht heiliges Grauen Bang durch die dunklen Wälder hinschleicht, Und die Büsche gar wundersam schauen, Alles sich finster tiefsinnig bezeugt: Wandelt im Dunkeln Freundliches Spiel, Still Lichter funkeln Schimmerndes Ziel.

Everything amiably benevolently connected, Offers its hand in consolation and mourning, The lights are wound through the nights, Everything is eternally related in the Interior. Speak from afar Secret world, That so gladly Consorts with me.

Alles ist freundlich wohlwollend verbunden, Bietet sich tröstend und traurend die Hand, Sind durch die Nächte die Lichter gewunden, Alles ist ewig im Innern verwandt. Sprich aus der Ferne Heimliche Welt, Die sich so gerne Zu mir gesellt.59

The fact that the secret world (heimliche Welt) is an inner world constitutes a moment of its being secret (Heimlichkeit). The central experience offered by this world – the connectedness of everything that is separate, of heaven and earth, God (das Wehen des heiligen Sinnes of the stars as the pneuma of the spirit of God) and man, on the basis of an inner relatedness – is expressed in a strangely unmediated way. On the one hand, the conditional clauses in the long wenn-stanzas suggest a lawlike and repeatable derivation of the experience of relatedness of everything to everything from the inner world, though

59 Speak from afar / Secret world (Sprich aus der Ferne / Heimliche Welt). Cf. Brentano, “Godwi,” 155–156.

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this is also limited by all the conditions. On the other hand, the statement “Everything is eternally related in the Interior” is not connected in a grammatically correct way to the preceding parts of the sentence. If the preceding line gives the condition, the predicate should come at the beginning of the next line (Alles ist ewig …). If the conditional clause referred to both the preceding and the following lines, then it would not be separated from the latter through a comma. The poem’s central statement about the inner world is formulated as an independent main clause; it does not stand in a conditional or causal, but an associative relationship to the situation referred to. It emerges as the climax of the imagery that was built up before it, without really being grounded in that imagery. The statement is therefore only poetically secured. In the words of another Brentano poem, it is ‘borrowed from the image’ (here: of a ‘secret world’).60 The experience offered by this inner world therefore also has its reality only in the poem, which flows appropriately back to its beginning: a circling of poetry around itself that makes the representation of its ground appear in the relatedness of all to all. The “I” that speaks reaches an experience of the content of the inner world through a peculiarly ambivalent approach. The secret world is asked in the first stanza to speak from far away, which means to overcome the distance through speaking, although it is fixed to a position that is far away. Similarly, the speaking “I” says of the secret world that it likes to be in the “I’s” company, at the same time that it switches from a form of address indicating familiarity to a more distant sentence of judgment in the third person. The secret world should come closer and yet remain at a distance, be personal (a subject) and objective (an object). This ambivalence returns in the concept of heimlich, which belongs to two different fields of association: that of the familiar, the homey, and the hometown, and that of the secret (das Geheime) which is removed from the eyes of strangers, impenetrable, and dangerous.61 This meaning leads to the “uncanny” (das Unheimliche), in which both fields of association of heimlich connect, if one understands everything as uncanny “that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to

60 A line from Brentano’s poem The Evening Winds Are Blowing (Die Abendwinde wehen) reads: “That I must borrow all tears / All sighing and yearning / From this image / From which I step aside!” / “Daß ich muß alle Tränen, / All Seufzen und all Sehnen / Von diesem Bild entlehnen, / Dem ich zur Seite geh’!” (Brentano, Clemens. “Die Abendwinde wehen.” Clemens Brentano. Werke. Ed. Friedhelm Kemp. Munich: Hanser, 1968. Vol. 1. 567–569, here 569.) 61 See the article “heimlich.” Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Deutsches Wörterbuch. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1984. Vol. 10. 873–879.

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light.” 62 For everything to be connected to everything as the content of interiority, the principle of difference must be loosened, as it were. This makes apparent why the secret world (heimliche Welt) has to be kept hovering between nearness and distance. If it came too close, then this would mean the suspension of difference for the “I” that speaks as well as speech itself, and thus its dissolution. That would turn the heimlich from a world in which everything is related into the unheimlich of the dissolution of all form. Conversely, the inner world cannot remain in the distance, since only its nearness can allow its content, the dissolution of all boundaries, to be disclosed. That the heimliche Welt, as it comes closer, must be pushed into the distance, disclosing itself by withdrawing, can only be grounded in the mourning (Trauer) and the solace (Trost), which are named by the penultimate stanza along with the act of dissolving boundaries carried out by the inner world. Brentano’s poem carries with it the possibility of turning the heimlich of the Romantic inner world, insofar as it is not kept hovering between nearness and distance to the “I,” into the unheimlich. Other Romantic constructions of the inner world make this process into a central event, such as the Godwi novel, in which Brentano published his poem for the first time. The novel takes literally the relatedness of everything to everything: here the family is everything, insofar as all the important figures of the novel (with the exception of the poet Maria) turn out to be related to one another. But the proximate image of this family becomes a picture of horror. The author Maria, who is supposed to form the figures’ story into a novel, attempts to redraw the picture into that of a new “holy family,” in the sense of a new Romantic mythology, out of which comes only the conception of a perverted holy family, over which the author falls ill and dies.63 62 Freud writes this in reference to Schelling, in his survey of the meaning of the word heimlich on the occasion of his study on “The Uncanny.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 17: An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works (1917– 1919). Ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. 217–252, here 224. 63 The pseudo-holy family is made up of the following persons: Godwi the father, Annonciata (byname of the biblical Maria), who disdains him, their sister Marie, who marries Godwi the father after he treacherously drives away her bridegroom Joseph, and finally their son, Godwi. A half-brother of Godwi’s named Römer, which in Latin would be “Romanus,” gives an author named Maria the task of ordering into a novel the papers of all the figures who in the end turn out to be related. So there are three Marias: Annonciata, who refers to the virgin, to whom an angel announces the divine conception, Marie, who loves a Joseph, but is forced into marriage to a Godwi (wie-Gott = like God), and a Maria, who brings forth a novel. There is therefore a sequence: virgin – mother – poetic discourse. What is prophesized to the virgin in the biblical story of the holy family is brought into the world by the mother: the redeemer, whose place is taken in the novel by poetry. This poetry – a poetry which proclaims the relatedness of everything to everything – wants to enter into the space of religion, to take its

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Romantic totalization of the inner world: Blond Eckbert Five years before the appearance of Godwi, Ludwig Tieck had written Blond Eckbert (Der blonde Eckbert), in which he traces not the “I’s” state of hovering in-between distance and nearness to the inner world, but its entry deep into the inner world, conceiving this as an experience that distresses and ultimately destroys his characters when they cannot escape from the spell of this inner world back into the outside. Bertha’s path inward is presented as an entry into the world of her fantasies: that she will one day delight her poor parents with miraculously obtained precious stones, that the “most handsome knight in the world” 64 will show her the way out of her isolated life in ‘forest solitude’ (Waldeinsamkeit) 65 with the strange and extraordinary old woman. Bertha remembers the source of the material for her fantasies: “all these I deduced from myself and the being around me” 66 – a true circling within oneself. Bertha and Eckbert, who live in solitude in their castle, seek to establish a connection to the outside world by telling the story of Bertha, her path into forest solitude and her path out of it: she tells it before the instance of a third, who as an instance of differentiation can ensure that Bertha and Eckbert are not closed up in a purely “I”-centered world. Eckbert is especially driven by the compulsion to tell this story, and understandably so, since only in this way he can obtain a guarantee of the existence of a world outside Bertha’s inner world – the narrator of the novella calls her story the “innermost depth [Innerstes].” 67 It becomes a destructive and deadly experience for these characters that the addressee of the outwardly directed narration of what is “innermost” turns out to be an agent within the narrated world (he knows the name of the little dog, something Bertha could not remember), the later friend Hugo turns

place, even. Instead of a messianic novel, only a “wild novel” emerges. For further fields of allusion in this novel, see Kaminski, Nicola. “Kreuzweise schreiben: Maria/Vertumnus – die Crux doppelter Autorschaft in Brentanos Godwi.” Nicola Kaminski. Kreuz-Gänge: Romanexperimente der deutschen Romantik. Paderborn, Munich, Vienna, Zurich: Schöningh, 2001. 175–235. 64 Tieck, Ludwig. “Blond Eckbert.” Eight German Novellas. Trans. Michael Fleming. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. 1–17, here 8. 65 “The woods lonely / A joy to me / Each day will be / In eternity. / What joy to me / The woods lonely.” (Tieck, “Blond Eckbert,” 6.) / “Waldeinsamkeit / Die mich erfreut, / So morgen wie heut / In ewger Zeit, / O wie mich freut / Waldeinsamkeit.” (Tieck, Ludwig. “Der blonde Eckbert.” Ludwig Tieck. Schriften in zwölf Bänden. Vol. 6: Phantasus. Ed. Manfred Frank. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985. 126–148, here 132.) 66 Tieck, “Blond Eckbert,” 8. 67 Tieck, “Blond Eckbert,” 1. / Tieck, “Der blonde Eckbert,” 127.

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out to be a reincarnation of the first friend Walter, and both ultimately turn out to be reincarnations of the old woman with whom Bertha lived. There exists only the inner world, it appears absolutely, and the narrating subject (first Bertha, then Eckbert) becomes the object of the narrative, of the instance of the third, who, by refusing to function in this way, gains destructive power over the figures who narrate their interiority. Whereas the miner from Henry von Ofterdingen (Heinrich von Ofterdingen) sings from an old mining song: “If the inner world [das Innere] can be uncovered, the day of freedom will dawn,” 68 Tieck’s novella is about the exact opposite effect. The fact that the expected guarantor of an outside world turns out to be the abyss of the totalized inner world is significant in multiple ways: psychologically, he rejects the task of differentiation (of inside and outside, subject and object) that falls to him as the third instance, and he thus rejects the oedipalization, making him an instance of the dissolution of the “I” that then provides the “solution” at the end: that Bertha and Eckbert lived in an incestuous relationship. Sociologically, the act by which what is made (the inner world arising from the activity of the imagination) negates its maker produces the experience of alienation. Philosophically, the experience of the “I,” which in every turn outwards only becomes more closed up in its interiority, can be read as an elaboration of the imprisonment of the “I” in the circle of self-grounding that was described above. Since in this novella the decisive turn of the plot occurs through the narration, it appears to deserve particular attention. Both the character’s narration and the narration carried out by the novella circle around the attempt to mediate the protagonists’ inner world with the outside world. In the imagined world, this attempt fails, the inner world posits itself absolutely and becomes an abyss into which the characters sink. However, if one considers the act of narration “for itself,” ignoring the world to which it refers – and taking on an analogously absolute perspective –, then the attempt of mediation appears in a different light. The narrative first appeared in a collection called Volksmärchen, herausgegeben von Peter Lebrecht. Lebrecht is the main protagonist of an earlier smaller novel (Peter Lebrecht. Eine Geschichte ohne Abenteuerlichkeiten) that is representative of a narrowly bourgeois, everyday sensibility. The title therefore already points to the task of connecting the world of the fairy tale, the inner world into which Bertha retreats, to bourgeois reality. The narrative provokes the expectations

68 Novalis. Henry von Ofterdingen. Trans. Palmer Hilty. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1964. 75. / Novalis. “Heinrich von Ofterdingen.” Novalis. Schriften. Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs. Vol. 1: Das dichterische Werk. Ed. Paul Kluckhohn et al. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1977. 193–334, here 250.

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of the fairy tale form – through the figure of the witchlike old woman, the supernatural bird, the return of the dead, the paradisiacal world of ‘forest solitude,’ and the return of the once-maligned child to her parents as a newly rich young woman. Bertha the narrator emphasizes throughout that as strange as her story sounds, it is not to be understood as a fairy tale.69 It is therefore appropriate that what is fairy-tale-like is formed out of an un-fairy-tale-like reflective consciousness. Miraculous things occur, but this is not obvious to the characters; they act as though they are in a fairy tale, but they reflect on their situation and their actions. They have, very much unlike in a fairy tale, an inner world – and herein lies the interest of the narration. The heroes, like those of a fairy tale, have no comprehensive view of their situation, but unlike in a fairy tale, they experience this as disorientation.70 What the fairy tale heroes are not conscious of is made into an object and a problem, psychologized into the unconscious and the repressed. The fairy tale is, in Romantic thinking, the epitome of the poetic. “The fairy tale is the canon of poesy as it were – everything poetic must be like a fairy-tale,” 71 Novalis notes, and he also expressly relates the fairy tale to the inner world: “I think I am best able to express my state of soul [Gemüthsstimmung] in fairy tales. (Poetics. Everything is a fairy tale.)” 72 The form of the fairy tale, which is soon elevated above all else, is, in Tieck’s novella, with respect to the handling of the narration, always mediated through the structures of the unpoetic reality of experience. The narration, considered only in light of the way it is organized, achieves a connection between the inner and outer worlds, however, it does so by narrating the failure of this connection, when the narrated gains power over the narrating. The interiority that is narrated thus contradicts the narration, hollowing out the ground on which it stands. This contradiction between narrating and narrated, however, like a tilted image, bears being read the other way around, such that the narration liberates itself from negation by its object, and triumphs as “absolute poetry.” Tieck unfolds the inner world as both the subject and object of narration, the latter insofar as what is narrated has always already gained power over the characters who narrate, as their compulsion to narrate demonstrates. When he published his novel later in the short story collection Phantasus, Tieck sought to stabilize the ambivalence between the self-negation and triumph of 69 Tieck, “Blond Eckbert,” 2. 70 “One-dimensionality” and “surface-ness” (Flächenhaftigkeit) characterize the fairy tale’s heroes according to Lüthi, Max. Das europäische Volksmärchen. Bern: Francke, 1974. 71 Novalis. Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia: ‘Das Allgemeine Brouillon.’ Ed. and trans. David W. Wood. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. 167. 72 Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia, 377.

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the narration of interiority, and at the same time of interiority as a process of narration. He did this through the figure of allegorical reference between the inner and outer worlds, thereby neutralizing, however, the abyssal maelstrom and the poetic absolutism that ran through the earlier text – at least in the new frame narrative he gave to it, where one of the members of the storytelling society explains: There is a way of seeing everyday life as a fairy tale, and one can likewise get to know what is most wonderful, as though it were the most everyday. One could say that everything, the most familiar as well as the most wonderful, the lightest and the merriest have truth and grab us only because in the background, this allegory serves as a support to the whole.73

Romantic interiority as a “redemption” of messianic poetry: Henry von Ofterdingen The theme of the first part of Henry von Ofterdingen is Henry’s “maturing into a poet.” 74 This is a path leading inward, as the novel shows vividly, in a variety of ways, and on a new field of experience at every stage of his protagonist’s journey – this view of the novel’s plot has long been a commonplace. Let us be reminded of the beginning, which is programmatic for this view, and of the conclusion of the journey in the company of Klingsohr. Henry’s dream of the blue flower leads him first through a diverse array of images of an “infinitely varied and colorful life” and then to events with

73 Tieck, Ludwig. “Erste Abteilung. Einleitung.” Ludwig Tieck. Schriften in zwölf Bänden. Vol. 6: Phantasus. Ed. Manfred Frank. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985. 105–113, here 113. Within the story, Tieck attempted to develop further the allegorization referred to here by making certain changes. For example, he changed the name of the little dog which Bertha does not remember, but the outside listener does, from “Strohmi” to “Strohmian,” an anagram for “romantisch” (with the “c” missing). The story of abyssal enclosure in the interior is thus simplified into a friendly warning against Romantic subjectivism. Cf. Davidowski, Christian. “Anagramm und Selbstbezüglichkeit in Tiecks Blondem Eckbert.” Euphorion 102 (2008): 91– 105. There are references to scholarship on Tieck’s text there, as well as in Sander, UlrikeChristine. “Tiecks Der Blonde Eckbert – Alptraum der Indifferenz.” Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 48 (2004): 117–142. In addition, see Rath, Wolfgang. Ludwig Tieck. Das vergessene Genie. Studien zu seinem Erzählwerk. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1996. 74 See Novalis’s letter to Ludwig Tieck from 23 February 1800: Novalis. Schriften. Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs. Vol. 4: Tagebücher. Briefwechsel. Zeitgenössische Zeugnisse. Ed. Richard Samuel et al. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1975. 321–323, here 322.

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more clear contours. The dreamer goes up a mountain path, and on a high cliff he takes a passageway in the rocks leading to a vault, in which a dazzling golden jet of liquid, of unknown origin, shoots to the vault’s ceiling and dissipates, collecting again in the basin. With the liquid from the broken, and in this sense “reflected” jet, Henry moistens his lips, after which a “spiritual breath of air” penetrates him. He then takes a bath in the basin, by which he is “intoxicated” and which yet allows him to be “conscious of every impression,” 75 and he swims toward the glowing current that flows out of the basin and into the interior of the rocks. In this way, he gets further into the interior and the depths of the mountain, where he then begins to have a dream within his dream, only to awaken out of it and to catch a glimpse of the blue flower in a blue-shaded world.76 The dream path thus leads upwards first, and then horizontally into the interior of a mountain and into its depths. Concerning the dream-within-a-dream constellation, Novalis makes a note in the Miscellaneous Observations (Vermischte Bemerkungen) that is then taken over by Friedrich Schlegel in his Athenäum-Fragments: “We are close to waking when we dream that we are dreaming.” 77 Henry does not, however, awaken into the intersubjective world of experience, but into a higher world that stands under the sign of the blue flower: a poetic world. In the discussion on dreams that follows between Henry and his father, during which the latter dismisses dreams in typical Enlightenment fashion as “spindrift” (Träume sind Schäume) and stresses that “the times are past when divine apparitions appeared in dreams,” 78 Henry explicitly defines dreams as openings into the inner world: “Is not every dream, even the most confused one, […] a significant rent in the mysterious curtain that hangs a thousandfold about our inner life?” 79 If one understands the dream in this way, as a path into the interior of the “I,” then the connection with the broken jet, through which a “spiritual breath of air” blows on Henry, can be read as an allegory for intellectual intuition. Through intellectual intuition, the “I” constitutes itself (as self-consciousness), but nevertheless, as described above, it does so on an unreachable ground, just as the origin of the golden jet remains a secret in the dream.80 The self-awakening of the “I,” which happens to the dreamer more than he makes it happen, is figured as contact with the divine in the “spiritual breath of air,” if this is 75 Novalis, Henry von Ofterdingen, 17. 76 Novalis, Henry von Ofterdingen, 16–18. 77 Novalis, “Miscellaneous Observations,” 25. 78 Novalis, Henry von Ofterdingen, 18. 79 Novalis, Henry von Ofterdingen, 19. 80 Herbert Uerlings interprets the scene in this way in his Friedrich von Hardenberg, genannt Novalis. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1998. 218–220.

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understood as pneuma, the “holy ghost,” that blows when and where it wants (cf. John 3:8). Contact with the divine is exactly what Henry’s father negates: a divine face joined the dream, whether this is understood as the “I” itself or the horizon into which the “I” with its dream and its dream-within-a-dream awakens. Henry indicates the latter through his formulation of the dream as a “tear in the mysterious curtain” that falls into the interior. The Bible speaks of a “tear in the curtain of the temple” during the scene of Christ’s death (Luke 23:46). This curtain keeps what is most sacred concealed, and its tearing indicates the new covenant God makes with humanity through the death of his son, promising the redemption of mankind. If Henry’s dream, leading him into his inner world, is understood as his awakening to a poetic “I,” then Henry moves this poetic existence into the horizon of a messianic turning point in time, just as in his conversation with his father he describes human life as a “pilgrimage to the holy sepulchre.” 81 Henry awakens in his interior to this higher, poetic world, which is reflected in his subsequent real awakening into everyday reality, which now has a romanticized momentum due to this higher awakening in interiority. In Novalis’s novel, the path inward does not lead the hero, as in Tieck’s story, into an abyssal enclosure of the “I” in itself, but rather opens a view for him into the outside worlds (nature, economy, history) that is understood in a new – romanticized – way in the light of the inner world. Accordingly, at the end of his hero’s journey the narrator connects the statement that “Henry was by nature born to be a poet” 82 with the reference to the simultaneous openings to the inside and the outside: “everything he saw and heard seemed merely to push aside new door-bolts in him and to open new windows for him. He saw the world lying before him in its great and varying relations.” 83 In their conversations with Henry about the essence of a poet, the merchants set the inner and outer worlds in strict opposition to one another and associate the poet and his effect on people only with the interior, seeing him as a creator and developer of inner worlds: It is all internal, and as those other artists [that is, painters, musicians] delight the outer senses with pleasurable sensations, so the poet fills the inner sanctuary of the mind with new, wonderful, and pleasing thoughts. He knows how to stir those secret powers in us at will, and by means of words he enables us to perceive a glorious unknown world. Within us as out of deep caverns there rise ancient and future times, countless people,

81 Novalis, Henry von Ofterdingen, 19. 82 Novalis, Henry von Ofterdingen, 94. 83 Novalis, Henry von Ofterdingen, 94.

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marvelous regions, and the strangest occurrences, snatching us away from the familiar present.84

Just as the miner in his portrayal of the art of mining refers to a consonance of the physical and the psychic – that by digging for precious metals in the mine, he dug “the most precious passage of my heart” 85 – the inner unfolding that Henry experiences in the encounter with the miner opens for him a higher understanding of his relation to the outside world: The fairy tale of that evening mirrored itself in Henry’s soul. He felt as though the world lay unlocked within him and was revealing to him as to an intimate friend all its treasures and hidden charms. […] The words of the old miner had opened a secret tapestry door within him. He saw his own little room hard by a lofty cathedral from whose stone floor the solemn past arose while from the dome the bright and cheerful future hovered, singing in golden cherubs toward the past. […] Now he surveyed at a glance all his relations to the wide world around him, felt what he had become through it and what it would become to him […].86

In the discussion of the poetic life, Klingsohr demands both: liveliness of mind, and knowledge of the outside world originating in the inner world and the understanding about “how everything happens and logically and sequentially hangs together.” 87 In another context, Novalis describes it as a feat of the mind (Gemüt) to bring together by chance the “most alien things,” 88 whereby the mind and the imagination come close together. In order for these to become active, Klingsohr demands a counterweight in the knowledge of the understanding, which connects things according to the laws of nature and of human action. The inner world and its guiding principle – arbitrariness, free activity of the imagination – have priority, however. The principle of a productive turn to the outside world – knowledge and recognition of the non-arbitrary, lawful, necessary relations – is not meant as a corrective to the other principle, but a confirmation. For example, when Novalis says that in contrast to the normal fairy tale, which presents “an ensemble of wondrous things and happenings” without any coherence, a “higher fairy tale” would emerge if, “without putting to flight its spirit, we introduce some element of understanding into it – (coherence, meaning, etc.).” 89 The Klingsohr fairy tale will then 84 Novalis, Henry von Ofterdingen, 33 (translation modified). 85 Translated by Andrew Kirwin. Novalis, “Heinrich von Ofterdingen,” 246: “[…] da habe ich […] den edelsten Gang meines Herzens erschürft.” Cf. Novalis, Henry von Ofterdingen, 71. 86 Novalis, Henry von Ofterdingen, 77 (translation modified). 87 Novalis, Henry von Ofterdingen, 108. 88 Novalis, Schriften, vol. 3, 650–651. 89 Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia, 171.

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demonstrate how such a demand can be fulfilled: in its free play with Greek and Nordic mythology, literary allusions (for example, to other fairy tales), alchemistic and theosophical ideas (for instance, an “alchemical marriage”), and the application of the most recent discoveries in the natural sciences: in physics (magnetism, electrostatics) and in chemistry (galvanism). If Klingsohr does not transfer this understanding to Henry, but instead brings it to a point of clarity in the latter’s consciousness, then we should consider what kind of position he puts himself into with respect to Henry by doing so. From the kind of encounters Henry has on his journey, Klingsohr can already recognize the poet in his future son-in-law: I have observed very well that the spirit of poetry is your friendly attendant. Your travel companions have imperceptibly become the voices of it. Around the poet everything breaks forth in poetry. The land of poetry, the romantic Orient, greeted you with its sweet sadness; war with its wild glory spoke to you, and you encountered nature and history in the form of a miner and a hermit.90

To this, Henry adds the experience of love, asking Klingsohr for Mathilde’s hand in marriage. Klingsohr allows Mathilde to decide for herself, offering the following peculiar explanation: “‘What do you think,’ said Klingsohr, turning to Mathilde, who was just coming toward him. ‘Would you like to be Henry’s inseparable companion? Wherever you stay, there will I stay also.’ Mathilde was taken aback; she flew into the arms of her father.” 91 Is Mathilde frightened only because she realizes she is at a turning point in her life, or also because she recognizes the formula her father uses with her? It is the same formula used by the Moabite Ruth (a non-Jew) in the Bible to declare her steadfast allegiance to Naomi, her Jewish mother-in-law. After fleeing a famine, Naomi and her husband Elimelech, from the tribe of Juda, and their two sons joined the Moabites. There the sons both took Moabite wives. Then Elimelech and the two sons die, and so Naomi decides to return to Juda. The daughters-in-law were supposed to have returned to their paternal (Moabite) families, since they had no children. One of them follows this rule, but the other, Ruth, insists on going with Naomi to the land of Juda, although as a Moabite she would have no rights there. To Naomi she insists emphatically: “I will go where you go, I will live where you live; your people will be my people, your God will be my God” (Ruth 1:16). With Naomi having returned to her country of origin, Ruth makes repeated advances on Boas, a member of Elimelech’s family. Naomi explains to her

90 Novalis, Henry von Ofterdingen, 111 (translation modified). 91 Novalis, Henry von Ofterdingen, 112.

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daughter-in-law that Boas is one of her “redeemers.” With the term “redeemer,” she is referring to the institution of Lerivate marriage (cf. Moses 5, 25:5–7), according to which a widow who is left childless should marry one of the brothers of the dead husband so that the wife’s share of the inheritance stays with the husband’s family.92 Ruth’s successful advances have the effect of “redeeming” her, which means Boas buys Naomi’s share of the inheritance and marries Ruth. This marriage results in a son, and this son’s grandson later becomes King David. The book of Ruth ends with this genealogy. Among the descendants of this tribe is Joseph, husband of Mary and parent of Jesus (cf. Matthew 1:5–16, Luke 3:23–38). The book of Ruth thus tells of how a pagan woman inscribes herself into the genealogy of the greatest kings of Israel (David and Solomon) and, by way of Joseph’s proxy father position, the Christian Redeemer. By appropriating Ruth’s formula, Klingsohr enters the constellation of her “redemption.” The elements of this process are, however, markedly displaced from their original arrangement. In the story of Ruth, the declaration of unconditional obedience to the representative of another culture leads to her connection with a “redeemer,” from which are descended the greatest kings of this culture and, from the Christian perspective, the fulfillers of the messianic promise. When Klingsohr uses the Ruth-formula of unconditional obedience to his own family, it is Henry who is marked as the “other” who makes the connection with Mathilde. The possession that is meant to stay “in the family” though the potential marriage can only be Klingsohr’s poetic vocation, since Klingsohr appears in the novel only with this one asset. This poetic vocation is represented in the novel through the fairy tale that Klingsohr tells on the occasion of their engagement. For Novalis, however, fairy tales are genuine expressions of a certain attunement of mind (Gemütsstimmung). Here it is interiority that is put in motion by the idea of a redemptive event under the aegis of Eros (the basic principles of the fairy tale were thus reinscribed as the conversion of an erotic chaos into a stable order) 93 and of Fabel, the personification of poetry, who in the concluding image hovers above everything, having connected what was separated: the realms of death, of humanity, and heaven. Fabel now has the task of spinning out of herself an invincible golden 92 See the article “Leviratsehe.” Jüdisches Lexikon. Ein enzyklopädisches Handbuch des jüdischen Wissens in vier Bänden. Ed. Georg Herlitz and Ismar Elbogen. Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1927. Vol. 3. 1076–1078. 93 Kittler, Friedrich A. “Die Irrwege des Eros und die ‘absolute Familie.’ Psychoanalytischer und diskursanalytischer Kommentar zu Klingsohrs Märchen in Novalis Heinrich von Ofterdingen.” Psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Literaturinterpretation. Ed. Bernd Urban and Winfried Kudszus. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1981. 421–470.

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thread,94 which is acknowledged so clearly to be the thread of Romantic poetry. Klingsohr’s “possession” is interiority, which has acquired shape through the fairy tale. Henry, who in the Ruth constellation has taken the position of “redeemer,” has to make this interiority his own. Klingsohr is introduced as the supreme and peerless poet – “Klingsohr, the poet. You may be prouder of his acquaintance and friendship than of the emperor’s” 95 – who imparts wisdom concerning the art of poetry. As the one to be “redeemed” according to the Ruth constellation, he bows before Henry, the up-and-coming poet, as the perfected one bows before the one for whom everything is still only an expectation, the father before the son (-in-law). The relation thus appears “inverted,” and the transfer of ownership of the poem follows an “ordo inversus.” 96 The topos of the child-king shines clearly through this inversion, and with it, Novalis’s romanticization of the child, which appears in his writings on the fairy tale: “Confessions of a true, synth[etic] child – of an ideal child. (A child is far more clever and wise than an adult – the child must definitely be an ironic child.)” 97 Just as in the story of Ruth, where the interest shifted from the Ruth-Naomi relationship to that of Ruth and Boas, in the Klingsohr chapter of Ofterdingen, the interest shifts from Mathilde, whose death Henry anticipates in a dream, to Klingsohr’s connection with Henry. By making the poetic vocation, and therefore Klingsohr’s interiority (which has taken shape through the fairy tale), his own, Henry proves himself to be a “redeemer” in many respects and in this sense he is a poet, since Novalis gives him the task of “releasing” the bonds that keep everything differentiated from everything else and therefore frozen. By requiring that the poet satisfy not only the demands of the inner world of the mind but also the outer world of the understanding, Klingsohr passes on to Henry the task of translating the poetic inner world into historical reality, and thus of becoming the redeemer and releaser of bonds that separated inner and outer worlds. However, what is to be released is itself an act of release. The fairy tale that Klingsohr tells is an allegorical fairy tale, which means that its semiotic reference takes place over the fundamental divide between signifier and signified. What is narrated in the fairy tale, however, is the opposite – an “ordo inversus” once again: the realm of love and poetry that it 94 Novalis, Henry von Ofterdingen, 147–148. 95 Novalis, Henry von Ofterdingen, 97. 96 A central concept in Novalis’s theory of reflection and poetology. Cf. Frank, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik; Frank, Unendliche Annäherung; Barth, Inverse Verkehrung der Reflexion. 97 Novalis, Schriften, vol. 3, 281.

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constructs has its foundation and living center in the presence of one lover (the mother as the one whom everyone was missing 98) in all loving. This is represented as an act of the Eucharist, an in-corporation of the universal signifier which grounds a symbolic order – the presence of the signified in the signifier – which is just as valid for the realm of poetry as it is for that of love. The fairy tale, if one takes what is narrated together with the form of narration, enacts a release of the frozen opposition of signifier and signified, by creating a state of hovering in-between allegorical and symbolic mediation.99 This state of hovering is reflected again in the fairy tale, in that its narrative circles around two focal points: the infinite one in poetry, embodied in Fabel, and a finite one represented by the writer. The writer embodies the world of the understanding and therefore the principle of difference. He inscribed the anarchically floating desire into an earthly family, and brought about the death of the mother. After this, he disappears from the fairy tale, made to dance a “mad dance” by the tarantulas.100 The poetic state of the world at the end of the fairy tale must negate the writer and at the same time recognize him, since he himself is something written and constitutes the concluding image of a written novel. Klingsohr’s inner world, mobilized in a fairy tale, can therefore be recognized as a work of Romantic poetry (embodied in Fabel) that connects everything separated, as well the work of an insane writer, who kills the mother and only then writes as the universal signifier of all signifying. This inner world, whose dynamic aims at a comprehensive release of all bonds, a connection of everything with everything under the sign of the mother, so that everything can actually be recognized as related to everything else, is passed on to Henry the “redeemer”: he must actually make it, that is, translate it into the external world. The novel points the way to achieving this through the Ruth constellation: Henry, after appropriating Klingsohr’s inheritance as Boas appropriated Ruth’s and Naomi’s, will father a line of poetic descendants, poems, which themselves will achieve royal, even messianic rank, or at least awaken poets of this rank. In this state of hovering between allegorical and symbolic realization, between romantic-poetic “sympathy and common activity […] of the finite and the infinite” 101 and the insanity of such

98 Novalis, Henry von Ofterdingen, 145. 99 Accordingly, the scholarship has come to reciprocal determinations of this state of hovering, be it as a “re-allegorization of the symbol” (Grob, Karl. Ursprung und Utopie: Aporien des Textes. Versuche zu Herder und Novalis. Bonn: Bouvier, 1976. 166–169), or “re-symbolization of the allegory” (Vietor, Sofia. Das Wunderbare in den Märchen von Goethe und Novalis. Halle, Zurich: Stekovics, 1995. 99). 100 Novalis, Henry von Ofterdingen, 140. 101 Novalis, “Logological Fragments I,” 54.

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a release of bonds, both focused on being brought into actuality in the outside world – which carries with it the promise of messianic redemption –, here is arguably the most comprehensive construction of Romantic interiority.

Bibliography Augustine. St. Augustine’s Confessions. Trans. William Watts. Bilingual edition. 2 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1912. Barth, Andreas. Inverse Verkehrung der Reflexion. Ironische Textverfahren bei Friedrich Schlegel und Novalis. Heidelberg: Winter, 2001. Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. London: Fourth Estate, 1998. Brentano, Clemens. “Godwi.” Clemens Brentano. Werke. Ed. Friedhelm Kemp. Munich: Hanser, 1963. Vol. 2. 7–445. Brentano, Clemens. “Die Abendwinde wehen.” Clemens Brentano. Werke. Ed. Friedhelm Kemp. Munich: Hanser, 1968. Vol. 1. 567–569. Davidowski, Christian. “Anagramm und Selbstbezüglichkeit in Tiecks Blondem Eckbert.” Euphorion 102 (2008): 91–105. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. “Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre.” Fichtes Werke. Vol. 1: Zur theoretischen Philosophie I. Ed. Immanuel Hermann Fichte. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1971. 83–328. Frank, Manfred. Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989. Frank, Manfred. Unendliche Annäherung. Die Anfänge der philosophischen Frühromantik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 17: An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works (1917–1919). Ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. 217–252. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Ed. and trans. Eric A. Blackall and Victor Lange. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche. Part 1: Sämtliche Werke. Vol. 9: Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung. Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten. Ed. Wilhelm Voßkamp et al. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992. Grob, Karl. Ursprung und Utopie: Aporien des Textes. Versuche zu Herder und Novalis. Bonn: Bouvier, 1976. “Heimlich.” Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Deutsches Wörterbuch. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1984. Vol. 10. 873–879. Henrich, Dieter. “Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht.” Subjektivität und Metaphysik. Festschrift für Wolfgang Cramer. Ed. Dieter Henrich. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966. 188–232. Hoffmann, E. T. A. “The Golden Pot.” Tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann. Ed. and trans. Leonard J. Kent and Elizabeth C. Knight. New York: Continuum, 1982. 14–92. Kaminski, Nicola. “Kreuzweise schreiben: Maria/Vertumnus – die Crux doppelter Autorschaft in Brentanos Godwi.” Nicola Kaminski. Kreuz-Gänge: Romanexperimente der deutschen Romantik. Paderborn, Munich, Vienna, Zurich: Schöningh, 2001. 175–235. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

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Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Ed. Paul Guyer. Trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kittler, Friedrich A. “Die Irrwege des Eros und die ‘absolute Familie.’ Psychoanalytischer und diskursanalytischer Kommentar zu Klingsohrs Märchen in Novalis Heinrich von Ofterdingen.” Psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Literaturinterpretation. Ed. Bernd Urban and Winfried Kudszus. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1981. 421–470. “Leviratsehe.” Jüdisches Lexikon. Ein enzyklopädisches Handbuch des jüdischen Wissens in vier Bänden. Ed. Georg Herlitz and Ismar Elbogen. Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1927. Vol. 3. 1076–1078. Lobkowicz, Nikolaus. “Zur Einleitung: Gibt es eine Ontologie der Innerlichkeit?” Rationalität und Innerlichkeit. Ed. Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz. Hildesheim, Zurich, New York: Olms-Weidmann, 1997. 1–20. Lüthi, Max. Das europäische Volksmärchen. Bern: Francke, 1974. Mendelssohn, Moses. “On the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions. Ed. James Schmidt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. 53–57. Menninghaus, Winfried. Unendliche Verdopplung: Die frühromantische Grundlegung der Kunsttheorie im Begriff absoluter Selbstreflexion. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987. Menninghaus, Winfried. “Raum-Chiffren frühromantischer Philosophie.” Räume der Romantik. Ed. Inka Mülder-Bach and Gerhard Neumann. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007. 13–25. Novalis. Henry von Ofterdingen. Trans. Palmer Hilty. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1964. Novalis. Schriften. Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs. Vol. 4: Tagebücher. Briefwechsel. Zeitgenössische Zeugnisse. Ed. Richard Samuel et al. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1975. Novalis. “Heinrich von Ofterdingen.” Novalis. Schriften. Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs. Vol. 1: Das dichterische Werk. Ed. Paul Kluckhohn et al. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1977. 193–334. Novalis. Schriften. Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs. Vol. 2: Das philosophische Werk I. Ed. Richard Samuel et al. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1981. Novalis. Schriften. Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs. Vol. 3: Das philosophische Werk II. Ed. Richard Samuel et al. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1983. Novalis. “Miscellaneous Observations.” Novalis. Philosophical Writings. Ed. and trans. Margaret Mahony Stoljar. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. 23–46. Novalis. “Logological Fragments I.” Novalis. Philosophical Writings. Ed. and trans. Margaret Mahony Stoljar. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. 47–66. Novalis. Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia: ‘Das Allgemeine Brouillon.’ Ed. and trans. David W. Wood. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. Rath, Wolfgang. Ludwig Tieck. Das vergessene Genie. Studien zu seinem Erzählwerk. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1996. Sander, Ulrike-Christine. “Tiecks Der Blonde Eckbert – Alptraum der Indifferenz.” Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 48 (2004): 117–142. Schiller, Friedrich. “Was kann eine gute stehende Schaubühne eigentlich wirken?” Friedrich Schiller. Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden. Vol. 8: Theoretische Schriften. Ed. Rolf Peter Janz. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992. 185–200. Schlaffer, Hannelore. Wilhelm Meister: Das Ende der Kunst und die Wiederkehr des Mythos. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1980.

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Schlegel, Friedrich. “Die Entwicklung der Philosophie in zwölf Büchern. Zweites, drittes und viertes Buch: Die Psychologie als Theorie des Bewusstseins.” Kritische FriedrichSchlegel-Ausgabe. Vol. 12. Part 2: Schriften aus dem Nachlaß: Philosophische Vorlesungen (1800–1807). Ed. Jean-Jacques Anstett. Munich, Paderborn, Vienna: Schöningh, 1964. 324–408. Schlegel, Friedrich. “On Goethe’s Meister.” Trans. Peter Firchow. Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics. Ed. Jay M. Bernstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 269–286. Schulz, Walter. Metaphysik des Schwebens. Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Ästhetik. Pfullingen: Neske, 1985. Strack, Friedrich. “Selbst-Erfahrung oder Selbst-Entsagung? Goethes Deutung und Kritik des Pietismus in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre.” Verlorene Klassik? Ein Symposion. Ed. Wolfgang Wittkowski. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986. 52–73. Tieck, Ludwig. “Erste Abteilung. Einleitung.” Ludwig Tieck. Schriften in zwölf Bänden. Vol. 6: Phantasus. Ed. Manfred Frank. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985. 105–113. Tieck, Ludwig. “Der blonde Eckbert.” Ludwig Tieck. Schriften in zwölf Bänden. Vol. 6: Phantasus. Ed. Manfred Frank. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985. 126–148. Tieck, Ludwig. “Blond Eckbert.” Eight German Novellas. Trans. Michael Fleming. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. 1–17. Uerlings, Herbert. Friedrich von Hardenberg, genannt Novalis. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1998. Vietor, Sofia. Das Wunderbare in den Märchen von Goethe und Novalis. Halle, Zurich: Stekovics, 1995.

Julia Weber

Inside/Out Mediating Interiority in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Rat Krespel Novalis, one of early Romanticism’s most fervent proponents, repeatedly claimed that poetry primarily had to turn to discovering the depths of human consciousness: “We dream of traveling through the universe – but is not the universe within ourselves? The depths of our spirit are unknown to us – the mysterious way leads inwards.” 1 While this famous (and notorious) statement in his Blüthenstaub-Fragmente reads like a programmatic and irrefutable declaration, other fragments such as the following quote, taken from his Allgemeine Brouillon a few years later, sound less certain: “The inner world is more mine, as it were, than the outer. It is so inward, so secret – one would like to live exclusively in it […]. It is a shame that it is so dreamlike, so uncertain.” 2 The problem here is how to “discover” what is inside the mind, a problem Novalis acknowledges when he laments that the inner world is “so dreamlike, so uncertain.” What would the “mysterious” path toward interiority look like? And, supposing one could actually find something inside the mind, how would one convey the (imaginary) “inner world” to the “outside” world? In the following article, I will explore the images, narrative strategies, and rhetorical tropes involved in the literary invention of interiority by turning to E. T. A. Hoffmann’s novella Rat Krespel, written in 1816 and integrated later into the 1819 volume Die Serapionsbrüder. As a late-Romantic, Hoffmann shared many of Novalis’s concerns regarding the depiction of interiority. At the same time he is known for being a less idealistic and more pragmatic writer than Novalis and many of his contemporaries – a writer who, while always aware of the “duality” of life, attempted to reconcile his idealistic conceptions with empirical reality and new scientific discoveries. Throughout his life, Hoffmann was engaged in similar attempts to visualize the unknown realms of the psyche. This problem concerned him to the point that he even dramatized this endeavor in some of his texts by depicting the use of optical instruments to explore the mind’s interior. In his novella Meister Floh (1822), for example, the character Peregrinus Tyß uses a tiny magical lens to peer

1 Novalis. “Miscellaneous Observations.” Novalis. Philosophical Writings. Ed. and trans. Margaret Mahony Stoljar. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. 23–46, here 25. 2 Novalis. Notes for a ‘Romantic Encyclopaedia’: ‘Das Allgemeine Brouillon.’ Ed. and trans. David W. Wood. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. 110.

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inside people’s brains and read their thoughts; a similar device for looking into a person’s skull can be found in Der Magnetiseur (1814). Even though no such instrument appears in the novella Rat Krespel, I will read the text as a similar experiment, concerned with this same question of discovering and mediating interiority. This happens on two levels: on the one hand, the text examines the mystery of artistic creation and Romantic subjectivity. On the other, it explores a psychological notion of interiority. Hoffmann’s Rat Krespel is a text that processes Romantic conceptions of art and contemporary scientific ideas to define the intricate relationship between body and soul, interiority and exteriority, artistic creation and subjectivity. Having read Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert’s Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft (1808), Carl A. F. Kluge’s Versuch einer Darstellung des animalischen Magnetismus als Heilmittel (1811), and Johann Christian Reil’s writings on dream theory, Hoffmann closely followed discussions on mesmerism and animal magnetism, and even underwent magnetic therapy provided by his friend, the physician Adalbert Friedrich Marcus, at a hospital in Bamberg. In Rat Krespel he takes up all of these discourses and, as I will show, at the same time challenges Romantic concepts of art and transcendence, ultimately developing a narrative of interiority which anticipates the psychological narrative modes of the nineteenth century. The story of Rat Krespel opens with a scene in which the councilor Krespel, a well-regarded lawyer, diplomat, amateur musician, and instrument maker, is in the process of building his new home. Never having found a house that pleases him, Krespel decides to assume the role of architect himself. Instead of consulting with engineers or drawing up blueprints, however, Krespel applies an astonishing “intuitive” method to the construction of his new house. He asks his workers to erect four simple straight walls without any windows or doors, a hermetic building that provides no passage between inside and outside. After the workers raise these walls, he tells them to stop and repeatedly touches his nose to the walls of the building in order to decide intuitively where to place the door. Once the workers have cut an entrance where he directs them, he repeats this process from the inside: Krespel walked thoughtfully back and forth inside. The builders, hammers and picks in hand, followed behind him, and whenever he cried ‘Put a window here, six by four; and a little window over there, three by two!’ space was immediately knocked out.3

3 Hoffmann, E. T. A. “Councillor Krespel.” Selected Writings of E. T. A. Hoffmann. Vol. 1: The Tales. Ed. and trans. Leonard J. Kent and Elizabeth C. Knight. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1969. 168–188, here 170.

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This action attracts an audience of about a hundred people who have never seen anything like this, and who applaud every time a new window is built. This bizarre construction scene of a house initially erected without doors or windows can be interpreted as an (ironic) allusion to the figure of the Romantic artist, who creates without mimesis from his inner vision, and projects his highly individual views and ideas onto the outside world. Critical of the one-sided or too-strong Romantic emphasis on subjectivity, in the frame narrative of Die Serapionsbrüder, Hoffmann developed the so-called “Serapiontic Principle”: a complex of aesthetic strategies which, among other goals, endeavor to mediate between inner visions and outside reality, harmonizing imagination and perception. The house of the “artist” Krespel embodies the difficulties of this mediation: viewed from the outside, the house creates a disquieting impression (“den tollsten Anblick”), mostly because of its eccentric windows – the passages between interior and exterior – which are strangely fitted and placed in unusual positions; yet from the inside, the structure feels comfortable and pleasant.4 The introductory scene, which depicts the house’s construction, irritates, for the episode appears to have no further significance: it is simply exposition. The scene serves only to introduce the character of Krespel, who is described as one of the “most eccentric men”: 5 he acts strangely on the outside, therefore his “inner self” cannot be ascertained. The text draws a parallel between the spatial discrepancy between the outside and inside of the house and Krespel’s character, a figure also repeatedly referred to as “crazy” (“toll”), yet who is surprisingly balanced on the inside, according to professor M.’s diagnosis: “I believe that his inner consciousness is well, despite the apparent madness which springs to the surface.” 6 This incongruity of the house’s inside and outside is juxtaposed with Krespel’s biography throughout the story, creating a symbolic correspondence between the two of them. Symbolizing Krespel’s exceptional, but mostly unknown personal life, the house emerges as a metaphor for his character. An edifice with a strange façade and a comfortable inner space, it represents the double-sidedness of Krespel’s inner life and his outer appearance and behav-

4 Hoffmann, E. T. A. “Rat Krespel.” E. T. A. Hoffmann. Die Serapionsbrüder. Ed. Wulf Segebrecht. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2008. 38–65, here 42. / “[…] in a short time a completely finished house was standing, presenting a most unusual appearance from the outside […] but whose interior arrangements aroused a very special feeling of ease.” (Hoffmann, “Councillor Krespel,” 170.) 5 Hoffmann, “Councillor Krespel,” 168. 6 Hoffmann, “Councillor Krespel,” 180.

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ior.7 In an era when questions of physiognomy were hotly debated, the text grapples with the relation between inner traits and outer qualities by using a spatial metaphor that allows the reader to visualize both the inside and the outside perspective of Krespel’s character. The story of Rat Krespel is told from the perspective of the narrator and “Serapionsbruder” Theodor, a young lawyer and musician himself, who can be viewed as an alter ego of Hoffmann, who pursued the same professions.8 Attracted to the eccentric character of Krespel, Theodor endeavors to find out more about him and the young girl Antonia who lives in Krespel’s house. Intrigued by all sorts of stories about Krespel and Antonia, who has the most mysterious and beautiful voice people have ever heard, Theodor decides to visit Krespel. Unlike the townspeople, who learn about Krespel only by hearsay and never enter his house, the narrator attempts to get some “insight” into what is going on behind the façade (of Krespel and of the house). Supporting the metonymical system of correspondences between Krespel’s house and his character, the narrator attempts to find out more about Krespel and Antonia by entering Krespel’s house. It is as though during his visits, the narrator (and with him, of course, the reader) is slowly making his way to unravel the alleged secret of Krespel’s life. The narrator learns about Krespel’s instruments, in particular about his favorite violin, an old Cremona, gets to know Krespel’s daughter Antonia, and attempts to establish a close relationship with the two of them. Each time he visits and gets overly inquisitive, however, Theodor is banished from the house. This happens during his first and his last visit. Both times, he is forced to leave because he either asks Krespel to play his violin or asks Antonia to sing. Listening to Krespel playing the violin or hearing Antonia sing, the texts suggests, would allow Theodor to come closer to uncovering the secret. The first part of the tale follows the pattern of a detective story. Circling around a mysterious center, the text seems to reveal several pieces of information that neither narrator nor reader can yet piece together or make coherent sense of. All we know, or rather suspect, is that the secret matter at stake, or

7 On analogies between the house’s architecture and Krespel’s personality, see Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992. 31–32. 8 When Hoffmann first published the story in 1816 in a letter to Friedrich Baron de la Motte Fouqué, he figured himself as the narrator. Only later, when the novella was integrated into the series Die Serapionsbrüder, was the story ascribed to Theodor, the narrator. Cf. Segebrecht, Wulf. “Entstehung und Textüberlieferung.” E. T. A. Hoffmann. Die Serapionsbrüder. Ed. Wulf Segebrecht. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2008. 1268–1269.

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in German “[die] besondere geheime Bewandtnis” 9 of Krespel’s behavior, is related to music, or more generally, to artistic production. Let us examine more closely the two moments of crisis, when the narrator is closest to discovering the alleged secret and is forced to leave Krespel’s house. Both cases of expulsion take the form of an embrace. The first one occurs when Theodor asks Krespel to play his favorite violin: But his face assumed his sweet-sour expression, and he said in that slow singsong way of his, “No my dear Herr Studiosus!” And this ended the business; I had to continue to look at all sorts of curiosities, frequently childish ones. Ultimately he thrust his hand in a chest and withdrew from it a folded paper, which he then pressed in my hand, while most seriously saying, “You are a lover of art. Take this present as a true keepsake and value it above all else in the world.” Saying this, he softly clutched both my shoulders and shoved me towards the door, embracing me on the threshold. Actually, I was symbolically thrown out of the house.10

The expulsion from Krespel’s house occurs in the form of an embrace that lingers for a moment on the threshold of the house, a positioning that conveys the intricate intimacy of the moment. The second moment of forced farewell repeats this pattern. This second time, Theodor tries to persuade Antonia to sing for him, an attempt that is followed by a fit of rage by Krespel, who again embraces the narrator and – this time in a jointly performed pirouette – kicks him out: “He thereupon embraced me, and, grasping me firmly, slowly turned with me towards the door.” 11 Again, the obligatory leave-taking lingers for a moment on the threshold between interiority and exteriority, pointing to a possible access point to Krespel’s psyche and to the secret he bears. This time both figures, Krespel and Theodor, are entangled with one another; while embracing and spinning around, their perspectives seem to merge into one another for a brief moment. In the course of the story, we learn that Theodor is not the only one trying to uncover a secret. Krespel, too, is hoping to resolve an enigma. As the reader already knows, Krespel is not only a lawyer and diplomat but also an amateur violinist and violin-maker. It is important to note that in contrast to the two female artists, Antonia and her mother Angela, Krespel is no professional. He is an amateur mostly concerned with questions of craftsmanship, and he hardly plays the violin any more. His voice is constantly alternating between

9 Hoffmann, “Rat Krespel,” 45. / “[…] indeed, he is so good that he errs on the side of weakness, and there must be some hidden explanation behind it all.” (Hoffmann, “Councillor Krespel,” 173.) 10 Hoffmann, “Councillor Krespel,” 175. 11 Hoffmann, “Councillor Krespel,” 178.

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“rauh und heftig schreiend” and “leise gedehnt,” 12 always too low or too high, and it never meshes acoustically with what he is saying. While not going so far as to call him the “incarnation of dissonance,” 13 I would agree that Krespel definitely is entangled in problems of dissonance and mediation, whereas his daughter is renowned for her clear and harmonious voice, which is said to transcend the scope of the human voice. In order to uncover the secret of such unmediated expression, to which he has no genuine access, Krespel dismantles instruments – a fact that Theodor obtains from professor M.: [He] then takes it apart in order to examine its inner structure, and if he thinks that he has not found what he has been looking for, he flings the pieces into a large chest which is already full of dismantled violins.14

The amateur artist Krespel searches for a clue to the secret of artistic production. If we look at the German version, it says “findet er nach seiner Einbildung nicht das, was er gerade suchte.” 15 The somewhat pejorative comment “nach seiner Einbildung” – which would translate as “according to his imagination” or “according to his presumption” and which is not adequately conveyed in the English translation – suggests that Krespel wishes something to exist, or to be a certain way, though in actuality it is nowhere to be found. This remark may serve as another critical comment on Romantic attempts to “uncover” the secret of art. Similar to the system of correspondences connecting Krespel and the house, the text establishes a second symbolic correspondence between Antonia and one of Krespel’s violins. During Theodor’s first visit, Krespel shows him a special violin, an instrument he does not dare to dismantle. Krespel explains to Theodor: I am completely convinced that there is something peculiar about its inner construction and that if I take it apart I will discover a secret I have been looking for, but – laugh at me if you like – this dead thing, which depends upon me for its life and its voice, often speaks to me by itself in the strangest manner. When I played it for the first time, it

12 Hoffmann, “Rat Krespel,” 43. / “[…] his voice was harsh and screeching, sometimes it was slow and singsong.” (Hoffmann, “Councillor Krespel,” 171.) 13 Neymeyr, Barbara. “Musikalische Mysterien. Romantische Entgrenzung und Präfiguration der Décadence in E. T. A. Hoffmanns Rat Krespel.” E. T. A. Hoffmann-Jahrbuch 11 (2003): 73– 103, here 80 (my translation). 14 Hoffmann, “Councillor Krespel,” 172. 15 “[D]ann nimmt er sie auseinander, um ihre innere Struktur genau zu untersuchen, und wirft, findet er nach seiner Einbildung nicht das, was er gerade suchte, die Stücke unmutig in einen großen Kasten, der schon voll Trümmer zerlegter Violinen ist.” (Hoffmann, “Rat Krespel,” 45.)

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seemed as if I was but the hypnotist who so affects his somnambulist that she verbally reveals what she is able to see within herself. Do not suppose that I am idiotic enough to attribute even the slightest importance to ideas so fantastic in nature, but it is peculiar that I have never succeeded in convincing myself to dismantle that inanimate and dumb object.16

Krespel, for reasons he does not understand himself, does not dare to dissect the inanimate object. The choice of his words is revealing: The German verb “aufschneiden” is an almost anatomical term meaning to “cut open,” and is usually only used when discussing an animate body. The personification “that inanimate and dumb object” (“jenes dumme tote Ding”) attributes human characteristics to the violin, suggesting that it was once alive. Later, we learn that Antonia feels a strange sympathetic connection with this violin and has begged her father not to dissect her analogical double. “Why that is me – I am singing again!” 17 she cries when she first listens to her father playing the violin, remarking that its sound seems to have been created in the human chest. The uncanny identification of Antonia with the violin derives from the notion that Antonia’s physiology and the structure of the violin are homologous. On one of his early visits, the narrator finds Krespel in an especially good mood because he has discovered the secret of an old Cremona violin. He explains that its sound post was so fixed that it was about half a line more oblique than was customary, and is clearly elated by his discovery. The text suggests that a similar mechanical explanation might be the cause of Antonia’s strange voice, especially when a doctor discovers a defect in her chest. Or, as William Kumbier put it: “it may be that Krespel’s indefatigable dissection of violins is motivated by a search for a defect in the heart of the instrument comparable to the one in Antonie’s breast; […] he may think he has found it in the soundpost, which in French is called the violin’s ‘soul’ [âme].” 18

16 Hoffmann, “Councillor Krespel,” 175. / “Ganz überzeugt bin ich, daß in der inneren Struktur etwas besonderes liegt, und daß, wenn ich sie zerlegte, sich mir ein Geheimnis erschließen würde, dem ich längst nachspürte, aber – lachen sie mich nur aus wenn sie wollen – dies tote Ding, dem ich selbst doch nur erst Leben und Laut gebe, spricht oft aus sich selbst zu mir auf wunderliche Weise, und es war mir, als ich zum ersten Mal darauf spielte, als wär ich nur der Magnetiseur, der die Somnambule zu erregen vermag, daß sie selbstätig ihre innere Anschauung in Worten verkündet. Glauben sie ja nicht, dass ich geckhaft genug bin von solchen Fantastereien auch nur das mindeste zu halten, aber eigen ist es doch, daß ich es nie über mich erhielt, jenes dumme tote Ding dort aufzuschneiden.” (Hoffmann, “Rat Krespel,” 48.) 17 Hoffmann, “Councillor Krespel,” 187. 18 Kumbier, William. “Composed Composers: Subjectivity in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Rat Krespel.” Studies in Romanticism 43.2 (2004): 231–255, here 241.

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While the narrator wants to enter the house, the analogous space of Krespel’s secret, Krespel wants to dissect the body of the violin, the substitute body of Antonia, in order to explain the secret of her art, which again, in a manner of speaking, is also the secret of her “soul.” The text creates a complex symbolic system of correspondences in which all of these terms become interrelated, all seemingly pointing to the same unknown center. At this stage in the story, it is tempting to imagine that Krespel’s and Theodor’s investigations might eventually converge, as they are ultimately pursuing the same secret. Whereas the first part of the tale exposes the question and draws nearer to the presumed secret, the second part delivers an answer. This answer comes in form of a psychological-biographical self-account of Krespel, recounted or mediated by the narrator Theodor. Similar to their two perspectives merging into one another during the second obligatory leave-taking by Theodor (where he and Krespel perform their entangled pirouette), their perspectives now blend on the level of speech. Krespel/Theodor finally tells the story of how Krespel met Antonia’s mother Angela, a famous Italian singer, how they fell in love, got separated, and how after her death years later, their daughter Antonia came to live with him. He (again: Krespel/Theodor) also reports how a physician discovered the defect in Antonia’s chest that precludes a singing career if she does not want to aggravate her condition, and how Krespel tried to prevent her from singing by sequestering her in the house. I will not go into detail about the psychological aspects of Krespel’s story, a love triangle about which a lot could be said regarding psychological substitution or transference.19 Instead, I would like to focus on how the mystery is solved – or perhaps I should say on how it actually is not solved. In fact, the narrative provides an answer only to the narrator’s questions. Krespel’s search for the secret of art, on the other hand, is simply dropped. Once Antonia has died, Krespel is relieved. Dancing and jumping around, he sings: “Now I am free, free. I am free! I will no longer make violins – no more violins – hurrah! No more violins!” 20 The narrator, deeply disturbed by this reaction, accuses Krespel of having murdered his daughter, to which Krespel answers: Young man, you may take me for a madman; I can forgive you for that. We are both confined to the same madhouse, and you accuse me for imagining that I am God the

19 Prutti, Brigitte. “Kunstgeheimnis und Interpretation in E. T. A. Hoffmanns Erzählung Rat Krespel.” Seminar. A Journal of Germanic Studies 28.1 (1992): 33–45; Brandstetter, Gabriele. “Die Stimme und das Instrument. Mesmerismus als Poetik in E. T. A. Hoffmanns Rat Krespel.” Jacques Offenbachs ‘Hoffmanns Erzählungen’: Konzeption, Rezeption, Dokumentation. Ed. Gabriele Brandstetter. Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 1988. 15–38. 20 Hoffmann, “Councillor Krespel,” 180.

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Father because you consider yourself to be God the Son. But how dare you presume to force your way into the life of another person to uncover hidden facts that are unknown to you and must remain so? She is dead now and the secret is revealed.21

Referring to both of them as being locked in an asylum – a remark that can be read as a comment on the new epistemology of the closed self 22 and the philosophical difficulties the Cartesian separation between subject and object created –, Krespel calls on both of them to cease in their hubristic attempts to gain an insight into what is ultimately beyond their understanding. His own search for the secret of art, he suggests, is as futile as Theodor’s quest to gain access to another person’s psychology. Krespel’s and Theodor’s respective attempts to uncover secrets can be related to two different paradigms of the late eighteenth century. On the one hand, there is what can be called an emerging psychological conception: the spatial model of the soul. According to this model, the soul, or rather the psyche, as contemporary psychological theories preferred to refer to the “soul” (since “psyche” was supposed to be a more scientific term), is conceived as an interior space in which the emotions are arranged in different strata. This spatial conception of the soul will later culminate in Sigmund Freud’s “first topology,” a spatial model of the soul which understands the soul as different spatial realms (“Conscious,” “Preconscious,” and “Unconscious”).23 Similar to the imagery of the house, this model is arranged according to a visible exterior surface and an interior domain that is difficult to access. On the other hand, we have the physiological or medical discourse on the soul: Krespel’s attempt to dissect the body of the violin in search of its “inner structure” evokes the numerous medical attempts of the eighteenth century to locate the soul. Spurred on by the new discipline of “transcendental physiology,” a term Thomas Soemmering coined in 1796 in the hope of creating a new “Königsdisziplin” (“supreme discipline”), physiologists, neuroanatomists, and neuroscientists attempted empirically to locate the soul within the body, often by (this time literally) dissecting human bodies. Similar to developments in the history of medicine, which saw a rapid decline in efforts to localize the soul by dissecting the human body by the middle of the nineteenth century, the novella also abandons the “dissecting” approach of Krespel. For the reader, the “Kunstge-

21 Hoffmann, “Councillor Krespel,” 181. 22 On this process of “sealing off” the human body into a “closed system,” see Koschorke, Albrecht. “Physiological Self-Regulation: The Eighteenth-Century Modernization of the Human Body.” Modern Language Notes 123.3 (2008): 469–484. 23 Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. Joyce Crick. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Freud uses the terms “soul” and “psyche” here almost synonymously.

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heimnis” will not be answered. In fact, the strange sentence “She is gone and the mystery is solved” 24 is the only information the reader receives. How and why the secret is solved is not explained. Instead, the second half of the text develops a psychological-biographical narrative that allows the narrator, finally, to enter Krespel’s house, that is, his psyche. With this ending, the story clearly privileges a psychological account of interiority over a philosophical account of art. The secret of art cannot be deciphered as Krespel intended. Rather, a new psychological story of the self is created that enables the reader to access a person’s interiority. Abandoning such typically Romantic attempts to define art is portrayed as a relief (and maybe not only for Krespel). Though the issue is dropped from the main narrative, the question is resurrected in the form of an uncanny mystery. In the last episode of Krespel’s account, the Romantic desire for art’s reconciliation of opposites healing the rupture between subject and nature is reanimated one more time: One night, shortly before I arrived in H—, it seemed to Krespel that he heard someone playing the piano in the next room, and soon he distinctly recognized that it was B—, who was improvising in his usual style. He was about to rise, but it was as if there were a heavy weight upon him; he could not so much as stir. Then he heard Antonia’s voice singing softly and delicately until it slowly grew into a shattering fortissimo. The wonderful sounds became the moving song which B— had once composed for her in the devotional style of the old masters. Krespel said that the state in which he found himself was incomprehensible, for an appalling fear was combined with a rapture he had never before experienced. Suddenly he was overwhelmed by a dazzling lucidity, and he saw B— and Antonia embracing and gazing at each other rapturously. The notes of the song and the accompaniment of the piano continued, although Antonia was not visibly singing nor B— playing. The Councillor fell into a profound unconsciousness in which the vision and the music vanished.25

This scene conjures up, once more, Romantic phantasms of dissolving or transgressing boundaries through art on the metaphysical level. The scene gathers together almost all the main themes of Romanticism. It happens within a dream, the paradigmatic state of mind in which, according to Johann Christian Reil, individual self-restraint is suspended within the higher order of natural intuition. In this state, the Romantics believed, the inherent coherence of all nature would reveal itself to the human mind. In his dream, Krespel sees the tightly embracing couple, whose instruments continue to play without being touched. In other words, this is a scene of ultimate non-mediation. It is also a

24 Hoffmann, “Councillor Krespel,” 181. 25 Hoffmann, “Councillor Krespel,” 187.

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scene in which music, “the most Romantic of all arts,” 26 as Hoffmann called it, appears as the art form with the greatest potential to link each individual to an experience of self-transcendent unity with nature. Finally, the dreamlike musical experience is also an experience of love. But, at the same time, it is a “dream image” that ends in death. The previous quote continues as follows: When he awoke, the terrible anxiety of his dream still possessed him. He rushed into Antonia’s room. She lay on the sofa with her eyes shut, her hands devoutly folded, as if she were asleep and dreaming of heavenly bliss and joy. But she was dead.27

The final scene, once again, evokes all the different “strategies” (dreams, music, somnambulism, magnetism, love) that Romantics used as figures of transcendence in order to convey their conception of a reunified, unfragmented world. On the level of narration, this quest is abandoned in favor of a fundamental “psychologizing” of narrative, a trend that would come to the fore in later nineteenth-century narrative modes. Similar to the narrative Realism of, for instance, Gustave Flaubert or Henry James, in which the inner thoughts of a character are conveyed by a voice that belongs to a “clairvoyant” but discarnate narrator who “fuses” with the consciousness he narrates, the narrator’s and Krespel’s voice blend into a single voice in the second part of the text. I would like to call this new narrative mode, following the American literary critic Dorrit Cohn, a “psycho-narration.” According to Cohn, psycho-narration is a narrative technique that allows the creation of a “cohesion between the narrating and the figural consciousness,” 28 enabling the narrator to reach “into the most obscure regions of mental life.” 29 It allows for an almost unmediated way of presenting the “inner world” of a character; or, in Cohn’s terms, the creation of “Transparent Minds.” 30 This “psychologizing” of narrative, I will argue, must be also regarded as a “narrativizing” of psychology, since it is the new narrative strategy that creates the “psychology” (or access to the interiority) of the central character Krespel. In this perspective, “interiority”

26 Hoffmann, E. T. A. “Beethovens Instrumental-Musik.” E. T. A. Hoffmann. Fantasie- und Nachtstücke. Ed. Walter Müller-Seidel. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1966. 41–49, here 41 (my translation). 27 Hoffmann, “Councillor Krespel,” 188. 28 Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. 29. 29 Cohn, Transparent Minds, 52. 30 Cohn, Transparent Minds, 1.

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becomes a consequence of something external; it is, quite literally, an effect of narrative strategies. To see this more clearly, let us more closely analyze the narrative strategies of the story: being embedded in a general discussion of narrative strategies of Die Serapionsbrüder, the novella has often been praised for its complex narrative techniques.31 Its text follows a clear structure that slowly zooms in closer and closer while balancing different perspectives: in the introduction to the story, the so-called “Hausbauszene” (introductory scene in which the house is erected),32 Theodor speaks from a strictly external, heterodiegetic perspective. This first episode introduces Krespel through various people’s opinions and much direct speech. It is followed by Theodor’s first personal encounter with Krespel at the house of Professor M., who now provides the reader with an accurate homodiegetic account of his personal impressions of the councilor. After Krespel’s early leave-taking, a second personal perspective is added in the account of Professor M., who informs the narrator (and the reader) about Krespel’s past. This account is again rendered in direct speech which extends over more than three pages.33 These first external views of Krespel inform the reader about his behavior without yet giving any psychological explanation. They are followed by Theodor’s first attempt to enter the house, that is, to gain a more “internal” perspective.34 The narrator gathers a lot of information in this part, mostly in direct communication with Krespel, which is again delivered to the reader in direct speech. Unfortunately, this direct “access” to Krespel’s thoughts proves to be an unreliable source: a) because Krespel himself disrupts this access from time to time by driving his guest away and b) because of the inherent unreliability of Krespel’s own account: “The Councillor continued this frightening gibberish until he collapsed in utter exhaustion.” 35 It becomes clear that listening to Krespel’s own statements offers no real opportunity to understand the deeper psychology of such a highly idiosyncratic and unreliable individual. Puzzled by the contradictory information he has gained, Theodor comes to the hypothetical conclusion that the councilor might be crazy – a judgment that is countered by professor M.’s psychological diagno-

31 Neymeyr, “Musikalische Mysterien,” 73. Benno von Wiese even called the novella one of the peaks of Hoffmann’s storytelling; cf. Wiese, Benno von. Die deutsche Novelle von Goethe bis Kafka. Düsseldorf: Bagel, 1962. 91. For a discussion of Hoffmann’s narrative techniques, see Orosz, Magdolna. Erzählstrukturen und Erzählstrategien bei E. T. A. Hoffmann. Frankfurt: Lang, 2001. 32 Hoffmann, “Councillor Krespel,” 168–172. 33 Hoffmann, “Councillor Krespel,” 172–174. 34 Hoffmann, “Councillor Krespel,” 174–180. 35 Hoffmann, “Councillor Krespel,” 180.

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sis, which attests him to be quite “sane,” despite his appearance. Contradictory interpretations thus negating each other, the narrator resolves to confront Krespel in the most direct way by trying to force him to “confess”: “I wanted to shake him to the depths of his soul and so compel him to make an open confession of his horrible deed.” 36 Krespel, of course, refuses and counters with the question: “But how dare you presume to force your way into the life of another person to uncover hidden facts that are unknown to you and must remain so?” 37 This seems to suggest that a character’s innermost thoughts and motivations ultimately remain inaccessible to a non-omniscient (that is, homodiegetic) third-person narrator. What follows, rather unexpectedly, is Krespel’s own biographical account, this time told by Theodor in indirect speech. In this passage, Krespel becomes virtually discarnate, his voice seemingly fusing with that of the narrator Theodor to speak in one single voice. This transition happens so smoothly that several interpretations of the story refer to the account as an “autobiographical retrospective” 38 by Krespel, not acknowledging or realizing that it is still the narrator speaking to the reader. In this final account, Theodor summarizes inner developments over a longer period of time; he describes Krespel’s interior thoughts and feelings; and even reveals aspects of Krespel’s psyche that the latter might not be aware of himself. Sentences like “The Councillor’s heart felt as if it were pierced by a hundred daggers. It was as though a lovely tree and its superb blossoms had, for the first time, cast its shadow over him” 39 or “an icy shudder running through him” 40 indicate that Theodor now has full access to Krespel’s “inner” life. Almost disappearing from the fictional world, the narrator converges with Krespel, enabling him to render Krespel’s thoughts to the reader in as “un”mediated a way as possible. It becomes impossible to tell the difference between his interpretation and the words Krespel might have used to convey his story; the narrator’s and Krespel’s thoughts can no longer be differentiated. However, toward the end of the story the narrator reminds the reader twice of his own presence by emphasizing the particular way in which he received the information from Krespel: a) “You cannot imagine how dramatically the Councillor described the moment when he first saw Antonia. Even in the very bizarre nature of his language there was a wonderful power of description

36 37 38 39 40

Hoffmann, “Councillor Krespel,” 181. Hoffmann, “Councillor Krespel,” 181. Neymeyr, “Musikalische Mysterien,” 79 (my translation). Hoffmann, “Councillor Krespel,” 185. Hoffmann, “Councillor Krespel,” 186.

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which I am completely incapable of conveying” 41 and b) “‘I thought,’ Krespel told me, ‘I thought that she was really dead […]’ (and the Councillor now returned to his singsong voice).” 42 But these comments which serve to redifferentiate the narrator’s and Krespel’s perspectives derive mostly from the implicit necessities of the general structure of Die Serapionsbrüder, which require the presence of a clearly distinguishable, present narrator at the end of each story in order for the brothers to be able to discuss its value amongst themselves. Let us return to the opening scene that portrays the construction of Krespel’s home. The most unusual aspect of the house – the odd placement of the windows – points to a problem of transfer between inside and outside. This issue of mediation is also significant in Krespel’s de-/construction of violins. The shape of the violin derives exclusively from its inner sound requirements: its outside is a direct mediation of the inside. This conflation or seeming non-mediation of in- and outside (the secret of artistic creation, according to the text) is the secret the story traces on the level of the histoire, but it cannot solve the mystery. On the level of the discours, this secret of the unmediated presentation of an inner voice is unraveled. Here, what the narrator, Theodor, had been attempting to do (but failed to achieve) within the story can be realized: the entrance into Krespel’s mind. However, this access to “interiority” is neither possible through means of dissection (Krespel’s approach) nor through inquiry (Theodor’s first approach), but through a new form of interlacing voices within narration. More than anything else, this new technique for representing an internal perspective by a non-omniscient homodiegetic third-person narrator is the real accomplishment of Hoffmann’s “Erzählkunst.” It is the secret this “detective story” ultimately uncovers.

Bibliography Brandstetter, Gabriele. “Die Stimme und das Instrument. Mesmerismus als Poetik in E. T. A. Hoffmanns Rat Krespel.” Jacques Offenbachs ‘Hoffmanns Erzählungen’: Konzeption, Rezeption, Dokumentation. Ed. Gabriele Brandstetter. Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 1988. 15–38. Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. Joyce Crick. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

41 Hoffmann, “Councillor Krespel,” 185. 42 Hoffmann, “Councillor Krespel,” 186.

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Hoffmann, E. T. A. “Beethovens Instrumental-Musik.” E. T. A. Hoffmann. Fantasie- und Nachtstücke. Ed. Walter Müller-Seidel. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1966. 41–49. Hoffmann, E. T. A. “Councillor Krespel.” Selected Writings of E. T. A. Hoffmann. Vol. 1: The Tales. Ed. and trans. Leonard J. Kent and Elizabeth C. Knight. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1969. 168–188. Hoffmann, E. T. A. “Rat Krespel.” E. T. A. Hoffmann. Die Serapionsbrüder. Ed. Wulf Segebrecht. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2008. 38–65. Koschorke, Albrecht. “Physiological Self-Regulation: The Eighteenth-Century Modernization of the Human Body.” Modern Language Notes 123.3 (2008): 469–484. Kumbier, William. “Composed Composers: Subjectivity in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Rat Krespel.” Studies in Romanticism 43.2 (2004): 231–255. Neymeyr, Barbara. “Musikalische Mysterien. Romantische Entgrenzung und Präfiguration der Décadence in E. T. A. Hoffmanns Rat Krespel.” E. T. A. Hoffmann-Jahrbuch 11 (2003): 73–103. Novalis. “Miscellaneous Observations.” Novalis. Philosophical Writings. Ed. and trans. Margaret Mahony Stoljar. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. 23–46. Novalis. Notes for a ‘Romantic Encyclopaedia’: ‘Das Allgemeine Brouillon.’ Ed. and trans. David W. Wood. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. Orosz, Magdolna. Erzählstrukturen und Erzählstrategien bei E. T. A. Hoffmann. Frankfurt: Lang, 2001. Prutti, Brigitte. “Kunstgeheimnis und Interpretation in E. T. A. Hoffmanns Erzählung Rat Krespel.” Seminar. A Journal of Germanic Studies 28.1 (1992): 33–45. Segebrecht, Wulf. “Entstehung und Textüberlieferung.” E. T. A. Hoffmann. Die Serapionsbrüder. Ed. Wulf Segebrecht. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2008. 1268–1269. Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992. Wiese, Benno von. Die deutsche Novelle von Goethe bis Kafka. Düsseldorf: Bagel, 1962.

Rainer Nägele

Keller’s Cellar Vaults Intrusions of the Real in Gottfried Keller’s Realism1 The European nineteenth century is largely considered to be the century of Realism. Literary histories of German-language literature of this era commonly add to this a qualifying adjective: “poetic.” The Poetic Realism of Germanlanguage literature is differentiated from European Realism, which developed above all in the great realistic novels of France, England, and Russia. The adjective ‘poetic’ is supposed to suggest that here we are dealing not so much with a literature oriented outwards, toward the world and society, as with an inward gaze with a view to an individual’s experience of the world. One must add at this point that here ‘world’ very often collapses into the tiniest spaces or, where expanses open – as sometimes in Stifter – they are less of the world than of the earth and of forests. The epithet ‘poetic’ also implies, not least, a certain tendency toward transfiguration and reconciliation: instead of the sharp blades of wit, smiling humor. On the linguistic and figural level one could, following Roman Jakobson’s two aspects of language, conjecture about a displacement from the metonymic to the metaphorical. Without doubt, all these moments can be found here and there in certain German narratives of the nineteenth century. Upon a more precise look into the matter and a more exacting reading, however, this category of the poetic begins to curiously unravel. Precisely with the most distinguished writers of the time, with Keller and Stifter, the traits of the poetic take on very peculiar forms, with the effect that one could be tempted to speak not of a poetic but of an eccentric realism.2 Eccentric is to be understood here in various ways. As much as some of the authors of this time would like to inscribe their figures in the circle (Lebenskreis) of a gentle or sometimes not so gentle law, they fall again and again out of the prescribed sphere, often falling into a strange life of an eccentric, as one can see this emblematically crystallized in Stifter’s figure of Hagestolz. But precisely in such figures another de-centering becomes evident, a de-centering that unsettles the topological symmetry of inside and outside. For if 1 Translated from the German by Jason Kavett. All translations from the German and all modifications of published translations by Jason Kavett, if not indicated otherwise. 2 Other scholars speak of a fantastical realism, as for example Gregor Reichelt does with his notation of the fantastic in realism. Cf. Reichelt, Gregor. Literarische und gesellschaftliche Einbildungskraft bei Keller, Storm und Fontane. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001.

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Hagestolz is separated out of the circle or sphere of society, his name also indicates that in the hedge, on the fringe (Hag), a different enclosed sphere is prepared for him. In this contracted, scrapped inner world he is however also an absolutely closed figure, out of whose inner life, in the case that one can speak of one at all, no ray reaches into the interiorized outside. A topography becomes apparent, which is also imprinted upon Keller’s world, and presages in certain aspects what in Kafka’s worlds both folds in on itself and unravels. The relation to Kafka is to be understood here precisely and as an objective constellation. It is no coincidence that two of the most important models for Kafka – Flaubert and Dickens – are two of the greatest realistic narrators of the nineteenth century. Of course they are also authors who, outside of German-language literature, write ‘realism’ on the border where it becomes eccentric.3 In many of Keller’s figures, as also in those of Stifter, an experience of the most literal eccentricity breaks out, just as Kafka sketches it in his notebook: So does this circle almost close, along whose edge we walk. Now, this circle belongs to us, but belongs to us only as long as we maintain it; if we turn to the side just once, in some kind of self-forgetting, in the distraction of terror, in astonishment, in fatigue, we have already lost it into space […]. We are outside the law […].4

Such a derangement and displacement outside of the circle, outside of the law and all laws to the point of horror, is what Keller’s story of the three righteous combmakers narrates. That, of all people, it happens to three ‘righteous men’ who, in having precisely this quality, one would think must be in harmony with the law, is just one of the many ironies of this story, which – by virtue of this irony – confirms a law that the first sentence pronounces: “that three righteous men cannot live for long under the same roof without getting in each other’s hair.” 5 With this presupposition – a setting-forth of the conditions 3 Lukács had an absolutely correct diagnostic instinct when he separated Flaubert from what he considered to be the ‘good’ realistic writers and instead reads in him what are already the traits of ‘decadent’ modernism. Cf. Lukács, Georg. “Narrate or Describe?” Georg Lukács. Writer and Critic and Other Essays. Ed. and trans. Arthur D. Kahn. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1970. 110–148. 4 “So schliesst sich fast dieser Kreis, an dessen Rand wir entlang gehn. Nun dieser Kreis gehört uns ja, gehört uns aber nur solange als wir ihn halten, rücken wir nur einmal zur Seite, in irgendeiner Selbstvergessenheit, in eine Zerstreuung einem Schrecken, einem Erstaunen, einer Ermüdung, schon haben wir ihn in den Raum hinein verloren […]. Wir sind ausserhalb des Gesetzes […].” (Kafka, Franz. Oxforder Quartheft 2. Basel, Frankfurt: Stroemfeld, 2001. 32– 33.) 5 Keller, Gottfried. “The Three Righteous Combmakers.” Trans. Robert M. Browning. Gottfried Keller. Stories. Ed. Frank G. Ryder. New York: Continuum, 1982. 15–51, here 15.

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of narration which the first sentence sets in place – the story slides from the very beginning in the direction of the allegorical. One can see this as part of the old tradition of the exemplum, which illustrated moral concepts and theses since late antiquity through the middle ages and into early modernity. One can also articulate it in a more modern way, in a Brechtian vocabulary as it were, as an experimental laboratory procedure. But in both descriptive forms, the basic allegorical structure persists. And this is not an isolated case with Keller. Many of his stories start out from such general statements and adages: clothes make the man, buying the cat from the schemer, the forger of his happiness, etc. Indeed, entire narrative cycles like the Sinngedicht stand under the aegis of such presuppositions. The narrative development in The Three Righteous Combmakers (Die drei gerechten Kammmacher) varies between narrative sections that narrate not a single event, but rather something that repeats daily and weekly, and the sudden intrusion of a singular event, temporally marked by a “once” or “one day.” Each of the three combmakers breaks into the simultaneous and general course of time as this singularity. The first is Jobst: “One day, however, an orderly and meek-mannered journeyman from some part of Saxony turned up.” 6 Of course the irony is that this singularity very soon multiplies itself, and becomes threefold, and indeed even before the other two arrive, he manages to triple himself: “At night, he especially enjoyed the broad expanse of bed and made very economic use of this time to indemnify himself for the days to come and, as it were, to triple his person.” 7 Of course, here too the singular again brutally breaks in: “At one time he had been the only journeyman in the shop.” 8 This “one time,” still inscribed in the normal course of events, already announces another ‘one’: “One day, however, when he was already lying in bed at sundown, another journeyman came to apply for work and was shown into the bedroom by the master’s wife.” 9 And finally, a third comes as well: “But hardly a week had gone by when another journeyman came applying for work, a Swabian by the name of Dietrich.” 10 Each enters into the general order as a singularity, only, precisely as a singularity, to unravel into an almost indistinguishable threefold thing.11 This threefold thing is then raised to a higher power in Züs Bünzlin’s thought experiment: 6 Keller, “The Three Righteous Combmakers,” 16. 7 Keller, “The Three Righteous Combmakers,” 21. 8 Keller, “The Three Righteous Combmakers,” 21. 9 Keller, “The Three Righteous Combmakers,” 21. 10 Keller, “The Three Righteous Combmakers,” 23. 11 On tripleness as a structural moment of narration, see Seifert, Walter. Theorie und Didaktik der Erzählprosa: Analyse und Transfer auf semiotischer Grundlage. Cologne, Vienna: Böhlau, 1982. 214–217.

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Picture to yourselves in all detail that three Miss Bünzlins are suing for each of you and sitting here around you, dressed as I am and looking just like me, so that I am, as it were, here present in ninefold form, gazing at you with longing from every side! Are you doing that? 12

As in Baudelaire’s Sept vieillards, the allegorical machine relentlessly multiplies that which is always the same.13 Baudelaire’s poem calls the seven uncannily similar figures spectres baroques and thereby reminds us that the nineteenth century was also the century of the rise of modernity under the sign of baroque allegory and of the obsession with repetition from Marx to Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Freud.14 But here the question that arises is of how these kinds of allegorical structures interact with what literary and cultural history call realism. In conventional and prevalent cultural and art histories, words like “realism” and “realistic” appear where representation seems to dissociate itself from the allegorical. The Renaissance, above all, served for a long time as the stage of this displacement: the allegorical landscapes and figures increasingly transform into the representation of ‘real’ mountains and trees, and the faces become recognizable portraits of ‘real’ persons. Warburg’s iconographic studies have shown how precarious such schemata are, and baroque art and literature have brought to view and suggested to our readings, powerfully enough, how little history proceeds in a linear manner. But this schema persists and takes on new energy in the debates of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries on allegory and symbol. These are, at the same time, imprinted with a spatial opposition between inside and outside. To put it somewhat schematically, in the symbol phenomena produce meaning out of themselves, out of their immanence, whereas in allegory this meaning is stamped in from the outside. As much as the Realism of the nineteenth century understands itself as a displacement of and countermovement to Romanticism, it also remains bound to the Romantic concept of the symbol. This becomes clear above all with one of the last great theoreticians and defenders of Realism, Georg Lukács, who, completely lucid in his diagnostic vision, argues for allegory already in Flaubert and Zola.15 Here, certain aspects of Keller’s narration frustrate the common notions of Realism, and indeed not in the sense of an interiorized Poetic Realism, but 12 Keller, “The Three Righteous Combmakers,” 40. 13 Of course, on the basis of this restriction to tripleness and its multiplicity, one could also argue that here yet another conscious or unconscious intention of symbolic control expresses itself. 14 “Boredom, Eternal Return” is the title of a convolute in Benjamin’s Arcades Project. 15 Lukács, “Narrate or Describe?”

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much more by virtue of a peculiar exteriority, which remains to be more precisely described. If Kafka was – perhaps somewhat hastily – already referred to, one could just as well refer back to aspects of the Baroque.16 Among them belong, aside from the allegorical elements, conspicuously regular catalog-like enumerations, of which The Three Righteous Combmakers in particular is full: above all Züs Bünzlin’s chest with the mortgage letter (Gültbrief) 17 (to which we will return), her catalog of cities, her catalog of essays, of animals, of emblematic stones, etc. But other stories, too, are marked by this, for example the toilet articles, which the tailor in Clothes Make the Man (Kleider machen Leute) finds upon waking up, or the long catalog of the names of houses in the same story, which to a certain extent narrates a kind of city history. It is as if the universe had collapsed into an arbitrary pile of things and names. These enumerations are usually interpreted as an indirect characterization of certain figures, above all, Züs Bünzlin. However, this psychologizing tendency does not really grasp the matter at hand, just as it falls short as an explanation to understand the peculiar exteriority of figures like the three combmakers or Züs Bünzlin simply as caricatures of hollow people devoid of true inner substance. Such a satirical-caricaturing aspect indeed plays a role, but the way in which Keller plays with it goes far beyond manifest satire and opens cavernous spaces that no psychology can explain. If on the one hand, Keller’s stories are overarched by adages and sayings from the realm of old experiences, they are also undermined and enclosed by strange, not easily describable cellar vaults (or Keller vaults, as it were) which allow Keller’s lan16 In his Keller essay, Benjamin has already drawn our attention to this: “Nevertheless, even without this assistance [the scholarly apparatus of the Gesamtausgabe] his vocabulary and usage everywhere point to a Baroque strand in his homey fictional universe. The unique character of his prose is something he owes, as no other writer has since Grimmelshausen, to the fact that he knows so much about the margins of the language, and that he can use both the earthiest dialect expression and the most recent foreign loanword with the greatest facility.” (Benjamin, Walter. “Gottfried Keller.” Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings. Vol. 2. Part 1: 1927–1930. Ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2005. 51–61, here 56.) In his Keller biography, Emil Ermatinger speaks of a “Baroque ending” with respect to the three righteous combmakers (Ermatinger, Emil. Gottfried Kellers Leben. Zurich: Artemis-Verlag, 1950. 317). 17 While in German, the expansiveness of a Gültbrief in the sense of a letter or certificate of debt owed is clear, it may be worth emphasizing that with “mortgage” we refer not only to the now everyday meaning of the word as debt for a house but more emphatically to its broader sense: the conveyance of real or personal property by a debtor to a creditor as security for a debt. See the entries “Gültbrief.” Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Deutsches Wörterbuch. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1984. Vol. 9. 1082, and “mortgage.” The Oxford English Dictionary. Ed. John Simpson and Edmund Weiner. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Vol. 9. 1102–1103.

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guage and style to resonate. His sentences are rarely profound, skipping instead along the surface, which makes it so difficult to describe their peculiar effects. Only sometimes, when one of these sentences enters the scene a bit more severely, even stamping its way in, it resounds as if hollow and uncanny. And if such hollow figures, devoid of interiority, such as the three combmakers appear on the scene, all psychology proves inadequate, since precisely here the figures have become persons, in the most literal sense: masks from a different stage. And if later it is said of them that they lie next to one another in bed “as silent and compatible as three lead pencils,” 18 then their figuration as a writing tool that, guided by another hand, writes a story, becomes clear enough. Already the monstrous drop – or should one call it a steep escalation of pathos? –, which divides the beginning and end of the story of the three combmakers in tone, is astonishing. It begins harmlessly enough with a mundane sentence and the evocation of three righteous men, whose righteousness, detached at once from “divine” as well as from “natural” righteousness, appears only as “bloodless” righteousness, without guilt and without debts. Without guilt and without debts: that is to say, the three righteous combmakers are innocent as righteous men. But in Keller’s story, innocence becomes the most terrible thing thinkable. In a world where, as in Seldwyla, debt traffic comprises the structure of the world, innocence is the perverse par excellence. It is not the sentimentally evoked innocence of the Greeks and pagans or what one imputes to children, but rather, beyond all dogmatism, it is the experience of a world of sin that has been stamped with Christianity, a world in which innocence can only appear as the phantasmagoria of a radical forgetting of oneself and of the world. As secular and non-religious as Keller imagined himself to be, one could still say of his writing that it is – as Benjamin says of Baudelaire – if also yet so gently and inconspicuously, imprinted with a belief in original sin that has saved it from psychologism. Without guilt and without debts: that is to say, everything is equally valid (that is, indifferent). There are no gradients of value, just as Jobst would be completely indifferent about where he lives and dwells, if he had not coincidentally and without any motivation become obsessed with this place, where he has settled. And yet it is this coincidental obsession that ultimately tears all three out of their bed and seats, and drives them to a frenzied race. What binds these two extreme poles together – the harmless beginning, in which “an orderly and meek-mannered journeyman” arrives,19 and the grotesque ending, in which precisely this orderly and meek-mannered journey-

18 Keller, “The Three Righteous Combmakers,” 32. 19 Keller, “The Three Righteous Combmakers,” 16.

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man hangs himself – is not a psychological interiority but rather a network of signifiers that condense into one of the most enigmatic words of the story. In the long catalog of noteworthy things that fill Züs Bünzlin’s chest and surround the central object of desire, the mortgage letter, there is also a “Lord’s Prayer printed in gold letters on a tenuous, red, translucent glassy substance she [Züs Bünzlin] called ‘human skin’ [Menschenhaut].” 20 Not only the narrator but also the commentaries of literary critics pass over, without any commentary, this enigmatic “human skin.” A translucent but written-upon surface receives the name “human skin.” The name marks that surface of the human of which one can say that it is his deepest depth. What is under the skin – muscles, bones, and organs – are no less external than things in the so-called outside world: innards, but not interiority. Only through metaphorization can an organ like the heart become a signifier of interiority. Here, one could be tempted to account for this noteworthy appellation of a translucent but written-upon surface simply as the expression of the somewhat featherbrained Züs, who gives many things the wrong name, and thereby leave the matter at that. But the slip of tongue, if it really is one, speaks a truth, as slips of the tongue tend to do. To a certain extent, it becomes translucent itself and discloses the complete knotting of a text that weaves itself together from the Lord’s Prayer and out of guilt and debts: that is, out of that which the three combmakers either cut short or completely repress. In fact, according to the introductory foreword about Seldwyla, trade is above all “Schuldenverkehr” (debt traffic).21 So what is here called human skin, is the complement or manifestation of that which the three combmakers have expelled and repressed. For if their righteousness is so “bloodless,” this “human skin” is at least red and while this petition has been stricken from the Lord’s Prayer (“And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors!”),22 here, with Züs, the Lord’s Prayer is inscribed in full and even “in gold.” What this gold writes matters all the more because the gold itself, just as the many other things in this chest, lies in close proximity to a “mortgage worth seven hundred gulden.” 23 Linguistically, everything condenses together here around the semanti-

20 Keller, “The Three Righteous Combmakers,” 25. / Keller, Gottfried. “Die drei gerechten Kammmacher.” Gottfried Keller. Sämtliche Werke. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. Vol. 4: Die Leute von Seldwyla I. Ed. Peter Villwock et al. Basel, Frankfurt: Stroemfeld, 2000. 215–265, here 228. 21 Keller, Gottfried. “Die Leute von Seldwyla. Vorwort.” Gottfried Keller. Sämtliche Werke. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. Vol. 4: Die Leute von Seldwyla I. Ed. Peter Villwock et al. Basel, Frankfurt: Stroemfeld, 2000. 7–12, here 8. 22 Keller, “The Three Righteous Combmakers,” 15. 23 Keller, “The Three Righteous Combmakers,” 24.

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cally related words to apply or be valid (gelten), valid (gültig), gold (Gold), and gulden (Gulden). And even the father is not far off, for the mortgage letter is a paternal inheritance. Even more: Züs Bünzlin, stupid as she may be, takes the position of the father, not the mother, who, only once referred to, does not play any further role in the story. Thusly is Züs introduced: “This was Züs Bünzlin, a young lady of twenty-eight years, who lived with her mother, the laundress, but was sole mistress of her paternal inheritance.” 24 If the three combmakers idolize her and, in their own ways, for the sake of the mortgage letter worship her, then their prayer to her would really have to be called the ‘Lord’s Prayer’ (Vater unser). For in the name of the father and by means of the validity of the mortgage letter (Gültigkeit des Gültbriefs), she reigns supreme. That Jobst, on Sunday afternoons, regularly picks up from her and her mother not only his freshly washed shirt but also a “high starched collar” (Vatermörder: literally, “patricide”),25 is rooted in a linguistic misunderstanding that understands the French parasite as parricide. But here, this slip of tongue produces the objective irony of a wish that gets fulfilled as its opposite: it is not the caretaker of the paternal who is killed; instead, poor Jobst kills himself.26 What, however, collects around this ‘core,’ the mortgage letter, are the most heterogeneous things, devoid of a recognizable principle of configuration: She had the mortgage lying in a small lacquered chest, in which she also kept the accrued interest, her baptismal certificate, her certificate of confirmation and a painted and gilded Easter egg; further, a half-dozen silver teaspoons [and here is added the above-cited human skin], a cherry pit, in which a Crucifixion was engraved, and an ivory box covered with perforated red taffeta, in which there was a little mirror and a silver thimble; further, another cherry pit, wherein there rattled a tiny game of ninepines, a nut with a little image of the Virgin behind glass, which, when opened, was seen to hold a silver heart, in which was inserted a small perfumed sponge, and a bonbon box made of lemon peel, on whose lid a strawberry was painted and in which lay a golden pin on a piece of cotton in the shape of a forget-me-not, and a medallion with a monument of hair; further, a bundle of yellowed papers with recipes and secrets, a bottle of Hoffmann’s drops for fainting spells, another of eau de cologne and a box with musk; another box with a bit of licorice, and a little basket plaited of fragrant grasses as well as one made of glass beads and cloves; finally, a little book with silver edges bound in sky-blue ribbed paper and entitled Golden Rules of Life for a Young Woman as Bride, Wife and Mother; and a small dream-expounder, a guide to letter-writing, five or six love letters and a scarificator for letting blood; […].27

24 Keller, “The Three Righteous Combmakers,” 24–25. 25 Keller, “The Three Righteous Combmakers,” 17. / Keller, “Die drei gerechten Kammmacher,” 218. 26 Just as in Kafka’s The Judgment (Das Urteil), the son does not kill the father; instead, the son kills himself. 27 Keller, “The Three Righteous Combmakers,” 25.

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The enumeration begins with “baptismal certificate” and “certificate of confirmation,” through which the person is inscribed in the symbolic-religious order; at the same time one should not forget that the true core of the chest is the mundane-symbolic mortgage letter. And perhaps not entirely coincidentally, the enumeration ends with the “scarificator for letting blood,” of which we learn that it is the security deposit for a debt of one gulden and forty-eight kreuzers, withheld from a previous lover. What among these things still appears as a religious motif is displaced into the realm of the minute and kitschy: a cherry pit, “in which a Crucifixion was engraved.” Perhaps one can also count among these kitschy objects the “gilded Easter egg” and the nut “with a little image of the Virgin behind glass,” as well. But something else in this configuration is more striking. If one can view the mortgage letter as the symbolic core of the chest, this core is still surrounded by phenomenally visible cores and pits, which however, for their part, are either merely inscribed surfaces (“a cherry pit, in which a Crucifixion was engraved”) or the pit itself, a shell, in which something lies (“another cherry pit, wherein there rattled a tiny game of ninepins” or even “a nut with a little image of the Virgin behind glass”). L’écorce et le noyau – pit and shell become indistinguishable.28 The structure of this universe is that of things inside things inside things. And if one thinks one has arrived at the most interior thing, this is displaced and referred again to another one, like the golden pin on a piece of cotton in the bonbon box made of lemon peel that represents, however, something else, namely a forget-me-not. And all this meshing and interlocking is yet again inside something else: “All this was contained in the lacquered chest, well locked up, and the chest itself was shut up in an old walnut cabinet, the key to which Züs Bünzlin always carried in her pocket.” 29 Doubly locked, Züs Bünzlin’s chest emerges as an allegory of the deeply locked narrative world of Keller. This world’s enigmatic quality is dictated less by an inner world than it shows the quality of an underworld. But the chest is not quite the most interior or the lowest thing in this world. There is still a key to it that “Züs Bünzlin always carried in her pocket.” 28 On this point, see Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. L’écorce et le noyau. Paris: Flammarion, 2001. To what extent this fundamental theory of symbolization – first published in 1976 – can be made fruitful for literary scholarship remains to be determined. It is noteworthy that a 2009 book on allegory in the plastic arts from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century reverses the title without further ado, without even referring to the original book: Nativel, Colette. Le noyau et l’écorce: Les arts de l’allégorie XVe–XVII e siècles. [Colloquium Pictura et Philologica: les variations de l’allégorie à l’époque moderne. Rome, Villa Médicis, 24–26 May 2006.] Paris: Somogy, 2009. 29 Keller, “The Three Righteous Combmakers,” 26.

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Just as she reigns supreme over the paternal inheritance, she has unbounded access to the encasing of her chest. And so, one could perhaps say allegorically, there is a layer of Keller’s prose that remains cloaked in authorial secretiveness. But this too has its limits. And Keller, just as little as Züs Bünzlin, has access to all of Keller’s cellars, chambers, and vaults. For there are yet other levels of encasement. There is, namely, also a Chinese temple made for Züs Bünzlin by a young book binder who had fallen in love with her: This was a large Chinese temple made of pasteboard with innumerable containers and secret drawers, the whole of which could be taken apart in many pieces. Colored patches of fine pressed paper were pasted on it and all the edges were adorned with a gold stripe. Mirrored walls alternated with columns, and if one lifted out a section or opened a chamber, one saw other mirrors and tiny hidden pictures, bouquets of flowers and pairs of lovers. Everywhere on the scalloped points of the roof hung little bells. A casing for a woman’s watch was also mounted on the columns, together with pretty hooks on which to hang the golden chain […].30

Already in Züs Bünzlin’s chest there was “a box […] in which there was a little mirror.” 31 Here the mirrors are multiplied and produce a mise en abîme. This is all different from what theories of realism call ‘reflection.’ The mirrors hide as much as they reveal.32 And in the most interior part of this temple is that to which even the so gladly supremely reigning Züs has no access: In return, he also played a trick on her by placing in a double bottom in the most inner part of the temple a ravishingly beautiful letter, dampened with tears, in which he expressed his unutterable sadness, love, devotion and eternal fidelity in such appealing and innocent language as only true feeling caught in a labyrinthine alley [Vexiergasse] can find. Such lovely things he had never said, because she never let him get a word in edgewise. But since she had no inkling of this hidden treasure, it happened in this instance that fate was just and a deceitful beauty did not get to see what she was undeserving to behold.33

The moralizing gesture against Züs Bünzlin in the last sentence cannot hide the fact that with this inaccessibly hidden treasure, the encasements and

30 Keller, “The Three Righteous Combmakers,” 29. 31 Keller, “The Three Righteous Combmakers,” 25. 32 On this point, see the mirror effect in Benjamin’s description of the chess machine where it is a configuration of mirrors that make the dwarf invisible. The fact that in Benjamin’s allegory the dwarf represents the invisible and yet most powerful theology could be further analyzed with a view to the many religious motifs in Keller’s story. 33 Keller, “The Three Righteous Combmakers,” 29–30 (translation modified). / Keller, “Die drei gerechten Kammmacher,” 235.

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reflections of this temple case stage once again the impenetrability of Keller’s cellars and chambers. And here, where the subject is ‘true feelings,’ what is at stake is that most inaccessible, locked away secret, to which even the author has no key. For the true is the death of intention. The reader, too, cannot unlock it. Unsaid, it can at the most be rewritten in the traces that it leaves. That these traces in Keller’s story condense particularly thickly on the edge of a hidden and refused sexuality is not so much a resolution of the secret; rather, it surrounds and locks away the very area of the secret. In any case, in this novella there is a clearly evident turning point, just as traditional theory of the novella desires it. It is there, where the narration stylistically and thematically turns into the mad-grotesque, and it is a scene in a bed. The three journeymen have always slept together in the narrowest space, but they have never touched one another in the least: like “three lead pencils,” 34 it is said, they lay next to one another. But “now that a woman was in question,” who arouses completely unfamiliar feelings, whose specificities of course distract from the directly sexual, even though or precisely because they are particularly powerful in sexual relationships: “stirrings of jealousy, concern, fear and hope.” 35 A common, identical dream – this too a dictation from another stage – binds together the three stiff pencils. The dream’s meaning is manifestly the simple life plan of the three, but its content remains unexpressed. And so it happens: One and the same dream hovered nightly over this trio, until one night [once again the word “one” (einst) announces a fatal intrusion] it became so vivid that Jobst flung himself back from beside the wall and shoved Fridolin, whereupon there broke out in the hearts of the sleep-drunk journeymen wild resentment and in their bed a terrible struggle, so that for three minutes they kicked, stomped and struck out at each other so violently that all six legs got entangled in one another and the whole coil tumbled out of bed with a fearful yell. They thought, when fully awake, that the devil had come to fetch them […].36

A single touch, the touch of human skin, suffices to set everything in tumult. In this moment, and it is a moment almost in a Kierkegaardian sense, where temporality is touched by eternity – and this is also the moment in which one human skin touches another –, everything becomes radically unsettled. Only the instance of narration retains an almost mathematical quiet: the trio doubles itself into six legs that indeed get tangled up into a knot of people, but 34 Keller, “The Three Righteous Combmakers,” 32. 35 Keller, “The Three Righteous Combmakers,” 31. 36 Keller, “The Three Righteous Combmakers,” 32. / Keller, “Die drei gerechten Kammmacher,” 238.

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even this still occurs in the peculiar temporal exactness of “three minutes.” The mathematical calculation sets an infernal machine in motion that from now on races inexorably to the fatal end. The six legs, however, have unwrapped from one another and stand now once again in pairs on top of their respective hidden and yet known – but precisely because of this unrecognized – treasures, in an orderly triangle that of course all too soon breaks down into the most terrible disorder. Yet the moment at which, as it seems, the narration fully tips over into the fantastic and phantasmagorical is strangely also a moment of complete awakening: “They thought, fully waking up, that the devil had come to fetch them.” Fear and trembling befalls them in this moment in the presence of something that they believe to be the devil, which however tears the phantasmagorical veil of their miserable reality like an intrusion of the real. A specter tears apart the spectral cocoon-like tissue of what the three combmakers had taken to be their reality. Brecht later expressly theorized this effect when he attributed to film in the theater the role of ghostly apparitions in earlier times: Since film can represent reality in such an abstract way, it lends itself to confrontations with reality. It can confirm or dispute. It can recall or prophesy. It can assume the role of those spectral apparitions without which for a long time – and even at the best times – there were not great dramas. And yet here it plays a completely revolutionary role, for as specter it allows naked reality to appear, the good deity of the revolution.37

A phantom banishes the phantoms that would like to project the commodity fetish as reality. A second scene of awakening stages this paradox again. Only a few pages after this turning point of the novella, Jobst wakes up for the last time in his bed next to the two others: “Jobst woke up first, very early, and saw that a fine spring morning was shining into the room where he had now slept for six years.” 38 The phrase “where he had now slept for six years” now sounds peculiarly ambivalent; it departs from the common sense, so to say, that he has slept here every night for six years and associates the six more or less ‘normal’ years of familiar reality with sleep, all the more so since the six years correspond precisely to the knot of six entangled legs that tear the three combmakers from sleep.39

37 Brecht, Bertolt. “From the ABCs of the Epic Theatre.” Brecht on Film and Radio. Ed. and trans. Marc Silberman. London: Methuen, 2000. 6–8, here 7 (translation modified). 38 Keller, “The Three Righteous Combmakers,” 36. 39 In fact, it is even stated earlier that not only at night but even in the evening he already lay in bed.

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What now unfolds before the “sad, sleepy eyes” 40 of the awakening man seems now no less fantastic and phantasmagorical.41 Now, in the gaze of departure, everything becomes transfigured: “As poverty-stricken as it [the chamber] looked, it seemed to him a paradise that he now must leave – and so unjustly!” 42 The righteous man sees himself torn out of his indifference and apathy into difference, which can only appear to him as injustice.43 What now appears before the eye is different from what it sees; the wall becomes a region and landscape: Then he fixed his gaze on the place beside his face and observed the small objects he had already looked at a thousand times, when in the morning or in the evening when it was still light he would lie in bed and rejoice in his blessed, expense-free existence. There was a damaged spot on the plaster that looked like a country with cities and lakes, a pile of grains of sand represented a blissful group of islands; a bit farther on there extended a long hog bristle that had come out of the paint brush and remained stuck in the blue coating; […].44

In the middle of this fantasized landscape, a most prosaic thing emerges: the hog bristle that has lost its function as part of a paintbrush and crosses over paint and landscape. That it ‘stretches out,’ as one says of hills and mountain ranges, seems to locate it in the landscape, but only to remove it all the more ironically. It becomes a sheer line of difference between this life and the beyond: “Beyond the hog bristle there projected a slight unevenness, like a small blue mountain, which threw a delicate shadow over the bristle towards the blissful islands.” 45 A shadow falls from the “beyond” that constitutes the hog bristle on the fantasized “blissful islands,” as it also falls on the apparitional “paradise” in which Jobst believes himself to be situated. And the shadowing ‘mountain’ of

40 Keller, “The Three Righteous Combmakers,” 36. 41 If here in these two scenes, fantastic and phantasmagorical converge, this is not to be understood as a tautological redundancy: if, namely, the fantastic captures the singular thing, the phantasmagorical underlines the fact that the fantastic of the singular is structured by the agora, the marketplace, by the commodity fetish and its effects – that is, by what one normally calls ‘actuality’ or ‘reality.’ Thus in the first scene of awakening, the three combmakers also share one and the same dream and sleep, out of which they are torn. 42 Keller, “The Three Righteous Combmakers,” 36. 43 “Awake, the difference between myself and my other is posited; sleeping, it is suspended; dreaming, it is an intimated nothing.” (Kierkegaard, Søren. The Concept of Anxiety. Ed. and trans. Reidar Thomte and Albert B. Anderson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 41–42.) 44 Keller, “The Three Righteous Combmakers,” 36 (translation modified). 45 Keller, “The Three Righteous Combmakers,” 36 (translation modified).

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the beyond becomes the transfiguring real in this world, which, as everything real, can appear in the phenomenal order of reality only as a “blue” “miracle,” confusing the senses and reason: He now sought this projection with sad, sleepy eyes and suddenly couldn’t find it, and he could hardly believe his senses when instead of it he found a small bare spot, while a bit farther on the blue mountain seemed to be moving and seemed to transform. Astounded, Jobst abruptly sat up, as though he beheld a miracle, and saw that it was a bug which he had inattentively painted over last fall when it was already frozen with cold. But now the warmth of spring had reanimated it, and it had set out again and was just at this moment climbing up the wall, blue-backed and undaunted.46

Let it be remarked only in passing that this metamorphizing bug throws its shadows forward in time onto another figure in the process of waking up, who, in awakening, finds himself transformed into a monstrous vermin. All optical evidence, marking posts, and solid ground of realistic writing sways, is on the move, and transforms itself. And it does not in fantastic dreams – of Gregor in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, too, it is said expressly that he wakes up, not that he dreams – but rather with the intrusion of a caesura in the dreamed conditions of reality. If with Keller, reality here manifests itself as a hog bristle that, as already indicated, has withdrawn from its function of brushing and painting over, the real – which withdraws itself from every representation – gains, in any case, a recalcitrant conciseness. In Keller’s stories, ‘true feeling’ is also locked up in labyrinthine alleys and in picture puzzles (Vexiergassen und Vexierbilder). As it happens, the threedimensional dwelling is projected onto the legible, textual surface, and the labyrinthine alleys become a picture puzzle insofar as what is hidden is not inscribed somewhere behind or underneath the surface, but rather in the surface itself, as an open secret. The knotting of signifiers in Keller’s texts – as they were here referred to in a rudimentarily sketched form in the motifs of the Lord’s Prayer, patricide, the paternal inheritance of guilt as well as of debt traffic – corresponds to the multiplied reflections in the temple of the bookbinder. The net could be extended further. One could look into the chain of security deposits that Züs Bünzlin keeps from her lovers: the “scarificator for letting blood” (and its relation to the “bloodless” righteousness of the combmakers), the spice-mortar, all the way to the inaccessible love letter from the bookbinder in the hidden chamber of the temple cabinet. These objects are again enigmatically bound up with the manual for dyers that the Bavarian brings with him as a security deposit for three kreuzers that he loaned someone, as with the blue miracle of the metamorphizing bug. Everything here 46 Keller, “The Three Righteous Combmakers,” 36–37 (translation modified).

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hangs together so much that hanging itself becomes a fatal instance, from when Jobst seizes “the first accidental wisp of hope, hanging on to it,” 47 to the end, when he, beyond all hope, hangs himself. It is in this flatness of the figures where Keller’s similarity to Kafka, despite all difference, has objective justification. The flatter the figures are presented, the more unfathomable they become. Their depth is their surface: the textual surface is their human skin.

Bibliography Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. L’écorce et le noyau. Paris: Flammarion, 2001. Benjamin, Walter. “Gottfried Keller.” Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings. Vol. 2. Part 1: 1927–1930. Ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2005. 51–61. Brecht, Bertolt. “From the ABCs of the Epic Theatre.” Brecht on Film and Radio. Ed. and trans. Marc Silberman. London: Methuen, 2000. 6–8. Ermatinger, Emil. Gottfried Kellers Leben. Zurich: Artemis-Verlag, 1950. “Gültbrief.” Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Deutsches Wörterbuch. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1984. Vol. 9. 1082. Kafka, Franz. Oxforder Quartheft 2. Basel, Frankfurt: Stroemfeld, 2001. Keller, Gottfried. “The Three Righteous Combmakers.” Trans. Robert M. Browning. Gottfried Keller. Stories. Ed. Frank G. Ryder. New York: Continuum, 1982. 15–51. Keller, Gottfried. “Die Leute von Seldwyla. Vorwort.” Gottfried Keller. Sämtliche Werke. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. Vol. 4: Die Leute von Seldwyla I. Ed. Peter Villwock et al. Basel, Frankfurt: Stroemfeld, 2000. 7–12. Keller, Gottfried. “Die drei gerechten Kammmacher.” Gottfried Keller. Sämtliche Werke. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. Vol. 4: Die Leute von Seldwyla I. Ed. Peter Villwock et al. Basel, Frankfurt: Stroemfeld, 2000. 215–265. Kierkegaard, Søren. The Concept of Anxiety. Ed. and trans. Reidar Thomte and Albert B. Anderson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Lukács, Georg. “Narrate or Describe?” Georg Lukács. Writer and Critic and Other Essays. Ed. and trans. Arthur D. Kahn. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1970. 110–148. “Mortgage.” The Oxford English Dictionary. Ed. John Simpson and Edmund Weiner. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Vol. 9. 1102–1103. Nativel, Colette. Le noyau et l’écorce: Les arts de l’allégorie XV e–XVII e siècles. [Colloquium Pictura et Philologica: les variations de l’allégorie à l’époque moderne. Rome, Villa Médicis, 24–26 May 2006.] Paris: Somogy, 2009. Reichelt, Gregor. Literarische und gesellschaftliche Einbildungskraft bei Keller, Storm und Fontane. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001. Seifert, Walter. Theorie und Didaktik der Erzählprosa: Analyse und Transfer auf semiotischer Grundlage. Cologne, Vienna: Böhlau, 1982.

47 Keller, “The Three Righteous Combmakers,” 19 (translation modified).

Daniel Cuonz

Toward a Genealogy of the Internalized Human Being Nietzsche on the Emotion of Guilt 1 “No inner and outer in the world” 2 – such is the title of an aphorism from Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human, and it could just as well stand as a motto over those parts of his thinking and writing which explore the undeveloped borderlands between rationality and emotionality. For in Nietzsche’s view, such explorations include, first and foremost, the duty of getting rid of the conceptual obstacles that previous undertakings of this kind have put in their own way. The dichotomy of the inner and the outer seems to constitute such an obstacle, apparently even the prime obstacle in the way of Western thinking. Thus, in the above-mentioned aphorism, the magnitude of this conceptual nuisance is unmistakably illustrated by a reference to nothing less than the origins of philosophy: “As Democritus transferred the concepts Above and Below to infinite space, where they make no sense, so philosophers in general transfer the concept ‘inner and outer’ to the essence and phenomena of the world.” 3 This hyperbolic reference to the history of philosophy implies an ironic hint in the direction of the issues at stake in what follows; namely toward the fact that, according to Nietzsche, there is an intricate connection between the opposition of interiority and exteriority and the problem of historical consciousness. This assumption finds its first (and probably most polemical) expression in the second of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations, entitled “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” Here, the “profound antagonism” of the inner and the outer appears to be a symptom of what Nietzsche diagnoses as the “malady of history.” 4 The cause of this malady is repeatedly men-

1 All translations from the German and all modifications of published translations by the author, if not indicated otherwise. 2 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Trans. Reginald John Hollingdale. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. 19 (I, 15). In the German original, emphasis is indicated by spacing. According to the English translations, all such instances are given in italics; however, italicization has been implemented according to the original spacing – even in cases where the given English translation does not have italics. 3 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 19 (I, 15). 4 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Untimely Meditations. Ed. Daniel Breazeale. Trans. Reginald John Hollingdale. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 120 (II, 10).

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tioned throughout the treatise. It is the “oversaturation of an age with history,” 5 an engorgement with “a huge quantity of indigestible stones of knowledge, which then,” as Nietzsche humorously adds, “as in the fairy tale, can sometimes be heard rumbling.” 6 This rumbling, however, reveals what is at stake with the German Innerlichkeit (interiority) that Nietzsche has his sights on. It turns out to be nothing other than a life-hostile fixation on the past, a languorous gorging on history (Historie): Knowledge, consumed for the greater part without hunger for it and even counter to one’s needs, now no longer acts as an agent for transforming the outside world but remains concealed within a chaotic inner world which modern man describes with a curious pride as his uniquely characteristic inwardness [die ihm [dem modernen Menschen] eigenthümliche ‘Innerlichkeit’].7

Thus, already at an early stage, Nietzsche relates his polemic against the concept of interiority to his theories on the dangers of historical consciousness. Fourteen years later, in the second treatise of The Genealogy of Morals, he goes a step further and examines the discursive premises for the connection of his critique of interiority and his critique of history. In other words, he explores how interiority could itself become a privileged piece of history. Therefore, Nietzsche consequently shifts his interest from the notion of interiority (Innerlichkeit) to the notion of internalization (Verinnerlichung). Given the undisputed centrality of the second treatise in the Genealogy of Morals for modern cultural theory, a question that suggests itself is: To what extent has Nietzsche’s discussion of the internalized human being helped to shape our current understanding of interiority? And inversely: In what manner did Nietzsche’s critical reflection on this particular concept help to develop his more far-reaching idea of genealogy as a methodological alternative to history? However, the contours of these issues must necessarily remain underdeveloped so long as the relation between the genealogy of the internalized human being and the thematic and formal characteristics of the genealogical narrative in which it is enfolded is not taken into consideration. If it is true that much of what we today (critically) consider to be interiority goes back to the writing and thinking of Nietzsche, then a more thorough investigation into this intellectual legacy cannot but focus on the relation between the psychol5 Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 83 (II, 5). 6 Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 78 (II, 4). 7 Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 78 (II, 4). / Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen I–IV.” Friedrich Nietzsche. Kritische Studienausgabe. Vol. 1: Die Geburt der Tragödie. Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen I–IV. Nachgelassene Schriften 1870–1873. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988. 157–510, here 272–273 (II, 4).

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ogy of internalization, on the one hand, and the genealogy of guilt and the utopia of guilt relief, on the other. *** Nietzsche’s second treatise in the Genealogy of Morals is certainly one of the most remarkable expeditions of thought into the wide field that is opened by the question where the emotion of guilt stems from. To be sure, it is unknown how guilt came into the world. At least, there is no anthropological or culturalhistorical information about what initially caused human beings to conceptualize the taking place of the future on the basis of a coming to terms with the past. However, one can question how this qualification became so effective, or, in other words, under which circumstances religious, economic, legal, and psychological ways of dealing with guilt, debt, and indebtedness emerged and why they do not cease to become intricately entangled with each other. Yet, it is not only because of the striking originality of the arguments and speculations presented in the second treatise of the Genealogy of Morals that this study can be considered as a foundational text for a cultural theory of guilt, but especially because its response to the question of where guilt stems from at the same time reflects on what it actually means to pose the question in this way. By staging the conceptual interdependence of guilt and time and thereby exposing the obligation of all questions of origin to the scheme of indebtedness and retribution, Nietzsche makes it clear that the question of the origin of guilt is all but innocent, or as Werner Hamacher, in another context, has put it: “history is guilt and […] it is guilty: it is history only to the extent that it is guilt history, a history out of guilt and a history of guilt.” 8 From the perspective of Nietzsche’s guilt theory, however, it must be added that there is no guilt history that has not always already been an analysis of guilt relief. It is through the observation of strategies for dealing with guilt that guilt concepts become definable and the question of guilt becomes pertinent in the first place. At the beginning of the second treatise of the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche reconsiders, in this sense, the central claim of the second of his Untimely Meditations. There, as it is well known, he sharply and repeatedly critiques the life-hostile fixation on the past that is proper to history: “When the historical sense reigns without restraint, and all its consequences are realized, it uproots the future because it destroys illusions and robs the things that exist

8 Hamacher, Werner. “Guilt History: Benjamin’s Sketch Capitalism as Religion.” Diacritics 32.3/4 (2002): 81–106, here 83.

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of the atmosphere in which alone they can live.” 9 What is praised instead, is “the art and power of forgetting.” 10 In principle, the Genealogy of Morals adheres to the apology of an “active forgetfulness.” 11 However, Nietzsche now presents an important objection against the unreserved claim of the disadvantage of remembrance. No morality can be founded on the basis of forgetting, as the precondition for taking a moral point of view is the cognitive faculty of self-binding. According to Nietzsche, the achievement of this faculty was essential to the evolutionary survival of the species of mankind. And its paradigmatic case is the act of promising. The human being, “this animal which needs to be forgetful,” as Nietzsche puts it, “has bred in itself an opposing faculty, a memory, with the aid of which forgetfulness is abrogated in certain cases – namely in those cases where promises are made.” 12 The pivotal faculty of the promising human being is that it commits to be measured in the future by values that are put into action in the present, that it has the capability to remember someday that its present had once been a promised future. Already in the first sentence of the treatise, Nietzsche explains the acquisition of this faculty to be nothing less than the natural-historical determination of mankind: “To breed an animal that is entitled to make promises – is not this the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man? is it not the real problem regarding man?” 13 However, to be entitled to make promises (versprechen dürfen) is not the same as to be able to make promises (versprechen können). For Nietzsche, these are not only two different categories of ability, but also two different steps of development that have to be taken by the human species on the way to its natural-historical destination. And this destination, in Nietzsche’s view, is the achievement of morality and the overcoming of its life-hostile side effects. Long ago, human beings became cognitively able to make promises. Only later, much later, some day in a far future, might they also become entitled to make promises. But the question is, entitled by whom? In order to answer this question or better, to find out what it puts at stake, it is necessary first to take a closer look at this process of development. Already 9 Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 95 (II, 7). 10 Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 120 (II, 10). 11 Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On the Genealogy of Morals.” Trans. Walter Kaufmann and Reginald John Hollingdale. Friedrich Nietzsche. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1967. 14–200, here 58 (II, 1). 12 Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 58 (II, 1). 13 Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 57 (II, 1; translation modified). / Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Zur Genealogie der Moral. Eine Streitschrift.” Friedrich Nietzsche. Kritische Studienausgabe. Vol. 5: Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Zur Genealogie der Moral. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988. 245–412, here 291 (II, 1).

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in Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche makes it clear that he does not regard the emotion of guilt as a flaw of civilization, but as a necessary first stage on the way from a moralistic to a wise mankind: […] a new habit […] is gradually implanting itself in us on the same soil and will in thousands of years’ time perhaps be strong enough to bestow on mankind the power of bringing forth the wise, innocent (conscious of innocence) man as regularly as it now brings forth – not his antithesis but necessary preliminary – the unwise, unjust, guiltconscious man.14

In the first two paragraphs of the second treatise of the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche repeatedly mentions the precondition for the achievement of this ‘necessary first stage.’ Strikingly, he insists on the formulation that the human being must first of all become “calculable.” 15 In the further development of the argument, it becomes evident how literally this ‘becoming-calculable’ has to be taken. The reshaping of naturally accumulated forgetfulness through culture and civilization seems to have to be understood not in a general, but in a very specific sense. In Nietzsche’s opinion, human memory experiences its first exercise in the rudimentary forms of billing and balancing accounts: Setting prices, determining values, contriving equivalences, exchanging – these preoccupied the earliest thinking of man to so great an extent that in a certain sense they constitute thinking as such: here it was that the oldest kind of astuteness developed; here likewise, we may suppose, did human pride, the feeling of superiority in relation to other animals, have its first beginnings.16

It is the difference between measurable debt and immeasurable guilt, between unaccountable guilt (Schuld) and countable debts (Schulden) by which the ostentatiously oversized historical arc that is at stake in the second treatise of the Genealogy of Morals is spanned. Wherever Nietzsche discovers founding forms of interpersonal exchange, he happens upon the ancestral parents of the human being that has developed the ability of responsibility – the debtor and his creditor: No grade of civilization, however low, has yet been discovered in which something of this relationship has not been noticeable. […] Buying and selling, together with their psychological appurtenances, are older even than the beginnings of any kind of social forms of organization and alliances: it was rather out of the most rudimentary form of personal legal rights that the budding sense of exchange, contract, guilt, right, obligation,

14 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 59 (II, 107). 15 Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 58–59 (II, 1–2). 16 Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 70 (II, 8).

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settlement, first transferred itself to the coarsest and most elementary social complexes (in their relations with other similar complexes), together with the custom of comparing, measuring, and calculating power against power.17

In this sense, Nietzsche develops his main narrative about the origin of guilt out of debt by unfolding one side narrative after the other, the narrative about the origin of the state, the one about the origin of law, and finally the one about the origin of religion. And they all begin the same way: In the beginning there was the debtor and the creditor – and the principle that regulates their relation: “all things can be paid for.” 18 The second treatise of the Genealogy of Morals deals with the formalization and institutionalization of this basic principle – a process that, according to Nietzsche, is deeply rooted in what he calls “psychology of more primitive mankind.” 19 Its first step is the idea of equivalence between punishment and physical pain, as it is laid down in the Roman law of obligation. In the case of non-payment, the creditor is allowed to “inflict every kind of indignity and torture upon the body of the debtor.” 20 The compensation he gains by doing so is “a warrant for and title to cruelty.” 21 In a (more speculative) 22 second step, Nietzsche transfers the relation between the creditor and the debtor to the formation of the relation between the individual and the collective. In a way, he says, the criminal breaks an obligatory contract. He is “a debtor who has not merely failed to make good the advantages and advance payments bestowed upon him but has actually attacked his creditor.” 23 In this sense, Nietzsche interprets the original idea of the punishing justice as a logic of revenge and retribution, as the “the increasingly definite will to treat every crime as in some sense dischargeable.” 24 And finally, in a third step, Nietzsche’s genealogical narrative turns out to be, first of all, a challenge to those whom he suspects of trying to thwart the necessary second step of the civilization process because they have to find their fellow humans guilty ex officio. Therefore, “there is in our view no more

17 Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 70 (II, 8). 18 Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 70 (II, 8). 19 Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 63 (II, 4). 20 Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 64 (II, 5). 21 Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 65 (II, 5). 22 With the first step of his argument, Nietzsche is referring to a comparably well-investigated field of the history of law. For these contexts and for a discussion of Nietzsche’s probable sources, see Hartung, Gerald. Die Naturrechtsdebatte. Geschichte der Obligatio vom 17. bis 20. Jahrhundert. Freiburg: Alber, 1998. 256–291. 23 Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 71 (II, 9). 24 Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 72 (II, 10).

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radical opposition than that which comes from the theologians who, with their concept of the ‘moral world order,’ persist in plaguing the innocence of becoming with ‘punishment’ and ‘guilt.’” 25 In this sense and in the context of the question of how this bad conscience has reached its peak, Nietzsche presents the ultimate transformation of the debtor-creditor-relation: “the relationship between the present generation and its ancestors.” 26 It was exactly in this idea, Nietzsche assumes, that religion had its origin. The ancestor is necessarily transformed into a god and ultimately into the Christian ‘maximum god’: “The advent of the Christian God, as the maximum god attained so far, was therefore accompanied by the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness on earth.” 27 *** With this, Nietzsche has reached the preliminary ending of his genealogical narrative. And he leaves no doubt about the fact that this ending is a dead end – at least so long as humans are not able to critically question the fundamentals of their thinking. In Twilight of the Idols, he famously expressed the reason for this pessimistic view: “I am afraid we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar …” 28 With the polemic notion of a ‘belief in grammar’ Nietzsche refers to an effect of what he considers to be the human obsession with guilt. He who believes in grammar believes that each predicate has to be preceded by a subject, or, in other words, “that all doing presupposes a doer.” 29 For a particularly persistent form of this belief, Nietzsche has coined the polemic notion of “soul-superstition.” 30 In Beyond Good and Evil, he writes, “Formerly, in effect, one believed in ‘the soul’ as one believed in grammar and the grammatical subject.” 31 Nietzsche’s most significant consideration of the ‘soul,’ however, can be found in the second treatise in the Genealogy of Morals, more precisely in the context of a particular implication of what is described in the previous paragraphs as an institutionalization of the principle of debt and retribution. For

25 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols. Trans. Duncan Large. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. 31–32 (VI, 7). 26 Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 88 (II, 19). 27 Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 90 (II, 20). 28 Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 19 (III, 5). 29 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Writings from the Late Notebooks. Ed. Rüdiger Bittner. Trans. Kate Sturge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 74 (autumn 1885 – autumn 1886, 2 [83]). 30 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Helen Zimmern. Rockville: Serenity, 2008. “Preface,” 7. 31 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 50 (III, 54).

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Nietzsche stresses the fact that this economization of atrocity brings along with it the civilizing effect of a sublimation of drives, of a pacification of interpersonal relations. In paragraph sixteen of the treatise, he resumes the discussion of the economically constrained archaic rage and adds to it the hypothesis that the increasing socialization of the human being had curtailed the discharge of the genuine human lust for atrocity. This, however, has led to a change of direction of the respective instincts, as Nietzsche explains in a famous and, with regard to the issue at hand, decisive passage of his treatise: “All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward – this is what I call the internalization of man: thus first grows onto man what later has been called his ‘soul.’” 32 A closer look at these formulations shows that exactly in this context, Nietzsche is deliberately confusing basic concepts of spatiality that are crucial to the Western discourse of emotion. As opposed to what one would expect – and, interestingly, in contrast to how all English translations of this passage that I was able to consult have it 33 – the soul irritatingly does not grow in the human being. According to the exact wording of the passage, it grows on him or, even better, onto him – like an abscess or swelling. A brief note in a posthumous fragment makes this connotation explicit: “The internalization of man (as a disease).” 34

32 Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 84 (II, 16; translation modified). / Nietzsche, “Zur Genealogie der Moral,” 322 (II, 16): “Alle Instinkte, welche sich nicht nach Aussen entladen, w e n d e n s i c h n a c h I n n e n – dies ist das, was ich die Ve r i n n e r l i c h u n g des Menschen nenne: damit wächst erst das an den Menschen heran, was man später seine ‘Seele’ nennt.” 33 I am referring to the following translations: 1) On the Genealogy of Morality. Ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson. Trans. Carol Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 57: “[…] with it there now evolves in man, what will later be called his ‘soul.’” 2) On the Genealogy of Morals. Ed. and trans. Douglas Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. 65: “It is at this point that what is later called ‘the soul’ first develops in man.” 3) On the Genealogy of Morality. Ed. and trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998. 57: “[…] thus first grows in man that which he later calls his ‘soul.’” 4) The Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Horace Barnett Samuel. New York: Dover, 2003. 56: “[…] consequently we have the first growth in man, of what subsequently was called his soul.” 5) The ‘classic’ translation On the Genealogy of Morals (the one by Walter Kaufmann and Reginald John Hollingdale) proceeds more cautiously, yet it somehow avoids the problem by omitting the preposition: “[…] thus it was that man first developed what was later called his ‘soul.’” (“On the Genealogy of Morals,” 84 (II, 16).) 34 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Kritische Studienausgabe. Vol. 12: Nachgelassene Fragmente 1885– 1887. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988. 335 (summer 1887, 8 [4]).

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The major part of Nietzsche’s moral-philosophical late work is devoted, as it were, to the etiology of this malady. Strictly speaking, however, one should talk about an anti-etiology. For the internalized human being – that reflexive creature that has brought onto itself the obsession with feeling guilty, and has later invented the idea of free will in order to make this obsession retrospectively plausible 35 – is, according to Nietzsche, nothing but a particularly farreaching consequence of a general misconception of the principle of causality, a product of what he refers to, in another posthumous fragment, as a persistent ‘chronological reversal of cause and effect.’ And it is not for nothing that Nietzsche’s critique of causality finds expression in its most pregnant form as a critique of the opposition of the inner and the outer: The bit of outer world we become conscious of is born only after the effect exerted on us from outside, and is retrospectively projected as its ‘cause’ … In the phenomenalism of the ‘inner world’ we invert the chronology of cause and effect. The fundamental fact of ‘inner experience’ is that the cause is imagined after the effect has taken place …36

Thus, Nietzsche’s investigation into the specific origins of the human obsession with guilt leads him to a fundamental critique of causal thinking in a wider sense and of its psychological collateral damages in a narrower sense, or, in his own words, to a critique of the idea, “that all doing presupposes a doer.” 37 Even and above all the Cartesian cogito turns out to be a mere effect of the age-old human obsession of seeking guilt-relevant (that is to say causal) relations between the doing and the doer: “one said, ‘I’ is the condition, ‘think’ is the predicate and is conditioned – to think is an activity for which one must suppose a subject as cause.” 38 According to this logic, the notion of “Seelen35 In Twilight of the Idols (31 (VI, 7)), Nietzsche writes: “Becoming is stripped of its innocence once any state of affairs is traced back to a will, to intentions, to responsible acts: the doctrine of the will was fabricated essentially for the purpose of punishment, i.e. of wanting to find guilty.” 36 Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, 270 (spring 1888, 15 [90]). 37 Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, 74 (autumn 1885 – autumn 1886, 2 [83]). 38 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 50 (III, 54). – For a more explicit version of Nietzsche’s critique of Descartes, see the following posthumous note: “Let us be more careful than Descartes who was stuck in the pitfall of words. […] In that famous cogito hides 1) it thinks 2) and I believe that it I am the one who thinks, 3) but even assuming this second point remains in abeyance, as a matter of belief, the first ‘it thinks’ still contains a belief: namely, that ‘thinking’ is an activity for which a subject, at least an ‘it,’ must be supposed – the ergo sum means no more than this! But this is the belief in grammar; ‘things’ and their ‘activities’ are presupposed, and we are far from immediate certitude.” (Nietzsche, Friedrich. Kritische Studienausgabe. Vol. 11: Nachgelassene Fragmente 1884–1885. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino

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Aberglaube” reveals itself to be both a polemical attack on Western morality and on the groundwork of Western epistemology. But above all, it contains a critique of a concept by which these two targets are linked at their roots: the dichotomy of the inner and the outer. What can be observed here is thus the condensation of an idea that has obviously become central to our critical understanding of the concept of interiority. All critique of the seemingly self-evident difference between the inner and the outer is enabled in the first place by the consideration of what Nietzsche terms ‘internalization’ or, more precisely, by the genealogical approach to the internalized human being that finds itself enfolded in Nietzsche’s theory of guilt. Perhaps Nietzsche’s discussion of interiority and internalization in paragraph sixteen of the second treatise on the Genealogy of Morals can even be viewed as a germ cell for all later forms of theoretical skepticism toward bipolar explanations of cultural phenomena. What is not answered at this point, however, is the initially-posed, inverse question. It addresses, as stated above, the insights that can possibly be gathered from Nietzsche’s exemplary reflections on the problem of internalization for a better comprehension of the systematic uses and disadvantages of genealogical approaches to history. This question demands a consideration of the movement of thinking performed by the treatise as a whole, which mainly implies that the discussion of the origin of guilt has to be expanded to a consideration of the utopia of guilt-relief. *** At first sight, however, Nietzsche’s conclusion from his genealogical narrative – irritatingly – seems to reproduce the logic of what it criticized. His assumptions about the origin of the calculable human being seem to add up to a moral-philosophical cost-benefit-analysis. The proof of the origin of the human ability of self-binding presents itself as a calculation of the price for which these basics of morality are purchased. Yet, the question remains, whether and if yes how this calculation can be audited. Is it the task of the reader to charge the genealogist for deficits of truth? Or does the genealogist oblige the reader to compensate for what he himself cannot provide? What kind of scale can the hypothetical, speculative, and associative positions of the genealogical calculation be measured against? Or do questions like these, despite or exactly because of their scientific cautiousness, miss the very point of Nietzsche’s genealogical method? Montinari. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988. 639–640 (August–September 1885, 40 [23]).)

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What they certainly underestimate is the aspect of its presentation. Through the manner in which Nietzsche presents his hypotheses, he realizes a hyperbolic emphasis that goes far beyond the illustration and affirmation of an argument. He thereby adds something to his historical speculations from which their content cannot be clearly separated.39 The most important aspect of Nietzsche’s hyperbolic presentation of his genealogical narrative most certainly is the fact that it appears as a clearly arranged sequence of paradigmatic ‘primal scenes’ of humans settling accounts with each other – cut true to dimensions, glaringly illuminated and, above all, staging the always-identical protagonists: the debtor and his creditor, counting on their way to accountability. Moreover, the whole story is told with continuous reference to its ostentatiously oversized historical dimension. The treatise contains a large number of superlatives that are virtually chanted. No time span is just long, but always the longest, nothing is just old, but at least age-old, preferably the oldest: “during the largest part of the existence of the human race;” 40 “the longest and most ancient part of human history;” 41 “this is a main clause of the oldest (unhappily also the most enduring) psychology on earth;” 42 “this age-old problem;” 43 “this age-old, deeply rooted, perhaps by now ineradicable idea;” 44 “the past, the longest, deepest and sternest past;” 45 – the list could be considerably expanded. At a crucial point of the argument, Nietzsche even goes as far as using the logically excluded superlative ‘most original’: “the feeling of guilt, of personal obligation, had its origin, as we saw, in the oldest and most original personal relationship, that between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor.” 46 In short: The second treatise of the Genealogy of Morals stages a whole series of culturally important primal scenes of counting and accounting and,

39 Saar, Martin. “Die genealogische Form. Drastik und Rhetorik.” Martin Saar. Genealogie als Kritik. Geschichte und Theorie des Subjekts nach Nietzsche und Foucault. Frankfurt: CampusVerlag, 2007. 130–142. Saar has the merit of having underlined this aspect of the Genealogy of Morals as being a pivotal element of the practice of genealogy. Yet he leaves it at a comparably general inventory of the means of style which create what he calls “drastisch[e] Darstellung” (142). With regard to the questions at stake here, I try to describe more specifically how this “Kunst der Übertreibung” (139) proceeds and functions in a particular context of argumentation. 40 Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 59 (II, 2; translation modified). 41 Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 67 (II, 6). 42 Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 61 (II, 3). 43 Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 61 (II, 3; translation modified). 44 Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 63 (II, 4; translation modified). 45 Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 61 (II, 3). 46 Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 70 (II, 8; translation modified).

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moreover, seems to present itself as a moral-historical final account, balancing the achievement of civilization against its psychological costs. At the same time, though, a considerable amount of hyperbolic energy is used to make these hypotheses unaccountable and immeasurable. Nietzsche’s hypothetical claims might be intellectual hypothecary credits on a yet unknown truth.47 However, as far as their redemption is concerned, the genealogist does not let himself be thrust into the role of the reader’s debtor nor into the role of the reader’s creditor. Rather, it is through the manner in which the genealogist presents the long history of the relation between debtor and creditor that the reader seems to be trained to think in different terms than those of balancing and accounting. A remarkable philosophical self-portrait that Nietzsche presents at the beginning of Ecce Homo provides an accurate illustration of this reading: “the disproportion between the greatness of my task and the smallness of my contemporaries has found expression in the fact that one has neither heard nor even seen me. I live on my own credit.” 48 *** In the scenario of the second treatise of the Genealogy of Morals, the appearance of the ‘man living on his own credit’ is intended from the outset. At least, this figure is presented in the first paragraphs. Here, Nietzsche oscillates between two different viewpoints regarding his following explanations. On the one hand, he relentlessly prepares the reader for the fact that the verification of the origin of responsibility cannot help but unfold a long history of human beings settling accounts with each other, and that one “can well believe that the answers and methods for solving this age-old problem were not precisely gentle.” 49 On the other hand, he repeatedly announces what this whole process will have been good for: “If we place ourselves at the end of this tremendous process, where the tree at last brings forth fruit, where society and the

47 In this particular context, it is likely that Nietzsche’s insisting use of the notion of Hypothese contains a deliberate allusion to the etymologically familiar notion of Hypothek, and, thus, to the philosophical tradition of a metaphorical interplay between these two notions (already in Plato and above all in Hegel). For an account of this tradition, see Shell, Marc. “Money of the Mind: Dialectic and Monetary Form in Kant and Hegel.” Marc Shell. Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophic Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. 131–155, esp. 132. 48 Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Ecce Homo.” Friedrich Nietzsche. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1967. 217–344, here 217, “Preface.” 49 Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 61 (II, 3; translation modified).

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morality of custom at least reveal what they have simply been the means to: then we discover that the ripest fruit is the sovereign individual.” 50 For the characterization of the sovereign individual that is supposed to have its appearance at the climax of the long history of the origin of responsibility, Nietzsche coins two significant formulations. In the first three paragraphs of the treatise, he repeats them in an almost formulaic manner. The more general one has already been mentioned: the sovereign individual is entitled to make promises.51 The thematically more specific one, however, is this: the sovereign individual is entitled to guarantee for himself.52 The economic terminology of ‘guaranteeing-for-oneself’ evokes the institutional conditions from which the process of humans becoming cognitively and psychologically able to make promises is to be deduced. So what the genealogist can provide is a genealogy of the ‘Versprechen-Können’ (being able to make a promise) or, in other words, an explanation of ‘the necessary first stage’ of civilization. The specific morality of the ‘Versprechen-Dürfen’ (being entitled to make a promise), however, has its roots not in the past but in the future. In order to refer to this Dürfen (being allowed), the genealogist has to draw on the credit of the sovereign human, although or perhaps exactly because the genealogist has to owe to him his own genealogical deduction. Thus, in the last parts of the treatise, reliefs and redemptions are thematized in a remarkably redundant manner. Only in the very end of the treatise, however, does Nietzsche dare to sketch a prospect of a solution for the guilt problem. Here, he explicitly refers to a tentative reversal of what had been genealogically deduced in the previous chapters: “An attempt at the reverse would in itself be possible – but who is strong enough for it? […] To whom should one turn today with such hopes and demands?” 53 To none other, of course, than to the human being that is entitled make promises and to guarantee for itself. Significantly, Nietzsche now refers to it as the “redeeming man.” 54 Thus, the redemption of mankind, at least within the framework of Nietzsche’s guilt theory, can only be thought as an inner-worldly self-redemption – as a radical reversal from the fixation on the past to the aim of becoming fit for the future.

50 Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 59 (II, 2). 51 Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 58–60 (II, 1–2). 52 Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 57–60 (II, 1–2). / Nietzsche, “Zur Genealogie der Moral,” 291–294 (II, 1–2). The phrase that Nietzsche uses here – “für sich selbst gut sagen” – is hardly used anymore. The equivalent in modern German would be: ‘für sich selbst bürgen.’ 53 Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 95 (II, 24). 54 Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 96 (II, 24).

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Yet in order to finally consider the self-redeeming human being, the genealogist has to radically abandon his genealogical perspective: “some day, in a stronger age,” Nietzsche exclaims, “than this decaying, self-doubting present, he must yet come to us.” 55 This significant phrase is repeated at the end of the paragraph and constitutes – with the typographic emphasis of dash, spaced letters and points of suspension – one of the climatic moments of this text: “– e r m u s s e i n s t k o m m e n …” 56 In the insisting phrase of the ‘Kommen-Müssen’ one can hear a distorted echo of the ‘Versprechen-Dürfen.’ Thus, Nietzsche comes back to his announcement to not just leave it with the proof of the origin of the human guiltentanglement, but to also present an approach to its solution. The fact that, in the end, he seems to have to talk about a ‘Müssen,’ is not least a confession of the fact that he should never have talked about a ‘Dürfen.’ With the conversion of the genealogy of guilt into a utopia of self-redemption, the genealogist has thoroughly overdrawn his discursive credit. That is what he seems to be reflecting on in the very last paragraph: “But what am I saying? Enough! Enough! At this point it behooves me only to be silent; or I shall usurp that to which only one younger, ‘heavier with future,’ and stronger than I has a right – that to which only Zarathustra has a right, Zarathustra the godless. –” 57 To be sure, Nietzsche’s theory of guilt is clearly discharging itself from the duty of being a theory of guilt relief at the same time. And yet, in the role of the man who can guarantee for himself, with the mask of Zarathustra, the genealogist can transfer his genealogical undertaking, at least allusively, into a philosophical counter-manifestation which aims at opening up a time to come and which is repeatedly evoked throughout the treatise, but can apparently not (or not yet) be conceptualized. It is not for nothing, thus, that the second treatise of the Genealogy of Morals has an ostentatiously open ending – with points of suspension not only at the end of the last, but of the last five paragraphs. Ultimately, Nietzsche’s text stages the solution for the human obsession with guilt as a relief from the obsession with redemptions and solutions. *** 55 Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 96 (II, 24). 56 Nietzsche, “Zur Genealogie der Moral,” 336 (II, 24). / Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 96 (II, 24). Note that the points of suspension have not been included in the English translation: “– he must come one day. –” 57 Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 96 (II, 25). / Nietzsche, “Zur Genealogie der Moral,” 337 (II, 25): “[…] – was allein Z a r a t h u s t r a freisteht, Z a r a t h u s t r a d e m G o t t l o s e n …”

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Thus, the appearance of the human being who is entitled to guarantee for himself is not the climax of the genealogical series of scenes staged in the second treatise of the Genealogy of Morals, but rather the object of the aforesaid theoretical counter-manifestation included in the textual staging of the genealogical argument. It could be characterized as a conceptually advanced form of what Nietzsche once claimed to be the project of his moral-critical late work as a whole: “to regain the innocence of becoming.” 58 And it becomes manifest in the text in the form of a series of hints addressed to the reader regarding the side effects of making the genealogical point of view absolute. To be sure, adopting this standpoint is essential in order to understand the origin of guilt out of the long prehistory of the accounting of debts. However, to completely stick to it, to reduce the question of guilt to the aspect of its origin, means to continue the human obsession with guilt on the level of its philosophical analysis. In order to move on to the indirectly announced possibility of a solution for the human guilt problem, the genealogist seems to have to remind his reader of the future – and thereby turn his own method upside down. It is against this background that Michel Foucault’s momentous finding that Nietzsche’s genealogical method presents itself as a parody of history 59 could be extended to the point that under certain circumstances, genealogy can turn into self-parody. Into the parodist reversion of a cognitive attitude that is imputed to the reader interested in the origin of guilt, and from which none other than the genealogist himself promises to redeem him. This objective becomes particularly evident in paragraph sixteen of the second treatise of the Genealogy of Morals – notably in the immediate context of the hypothesis on the internalization of the human being. The explanation of a proof of origin interrupts itself with a sudden unleashing of retained expectations for the future: Let us add at once that, on the other hand, the existence on earth of an animal soul turned against itself, taking sides against itself, was something so new, profound, unheard of, enigmatic, contradictory, and pregnant with a future that the aspect of the earth was essentially altered. Indeed, divine spectators were needed to do justice to the spectacle that thus began and the end of which is not yet in sight – a spectacle too

58 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Kritische Studienausgabe. Vol. 13: Nachgelassene Fragmente 1887– 1889. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988. 426 (spring 1888, 15 [30]). 59 “Nietzsche accused this history […] of barring access to the actual intensities and creations of life. The parody of his last texts serves to emphasize that ‘monumental history’ is itself a parody. Genealogy is history in the form of a concerted carnival.” (Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. 76–100, here 94.)

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subtle, too marvelous, too paradoxical to be played senselessly unobserved on some ludicrous planet! […] man […] gives rise to an interest, a tension, a hope, almost a certainty, as if with him something were announcing and preparing itself, as if man were not a goal but only a way, an episode, a bridge, a great promise. – 60

Thus, the movement of thought that the text as a whole seems to encourage finds itself tentatively prefigured exactly in the context of the internalization of the human being. Thematically speaking, the dichotomy of interiority and exteriority might not be the main paradigm of Nietzsche’s genealogical undertaking, but it constitutes the touchstone for the examination of the uses and disadvantages of the practice of genealogy itself. What Nietzsche describes as ‘the internalization of the human being’ turns out to be both an enablement of and a redemption from history.

Bibliography Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. 76–100. Hamacher, Werner. “Guilt History: Benjamin’s Sketch Capitalism as Religion.” Diacritics 32.3/4 (2002): 81–106. Hartung, Gerald. Die Naturrechtsdebatte. Geschichte der Obligatio vom 17. bis 20. Jahrhundert. Freiburg: Alber, 1998. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On the Genealogy of Morals.” Trans. Walter Kaufmann and Reginald John Hollingdale. Friedrich Nietzsche. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1967. 14–200. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Ecce Homo.” Friedrich Nietzsche. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1967. 217–344. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Trans. Reginald John Hollingdale. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen I–IV.” Friedrich Nietzsche. Kritische Studienausgabe. Vol. 1: Die Geburt der Tragödie. Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen I–IV. Nachgelassene Schriften 1870–1873. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988. 157–510. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Zur Genealogie der Moral. Eine Streitschrift.” Friedrich Nietzsche. Kritische Studienausgabe. Vol. 5: Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Zur Genealogie der Moral. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988. 245–412. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Kritische Studienausgabe. Vol. 11: Nachgelassene Fragmente 1884– 1885. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988.

60 Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” 85 (II, 16).

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Nietzsche, Friedrich. Kritische Studienausgabe. Vol. 12: Nachgelassene Fragmente 1885– 1887. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Kritische Studienausgabe. Vol. 13: Nachgelassene Fragmente 1887– 1889. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality. Ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson. Trans. Carol Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Ed. and trans. Douglas Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Untimely Meditations. Ed. Daniel Breazeale. Trans. Reginald John Hollingdale. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morality. Ed. and trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols. Trans. Duncan Large. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Horace Barnett Samuel. New York: Dover, 2003. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Writings from the Late Notebooks. Ed. Rüdiger Bittner. Trans. Kate Sturge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Helen Zimmern. Rockville: Serenity, 2008. Saar, Martin. “Die genealogische Form. Drastik und Rhetorik.” Martin Saar. Genealogie als Kritik. Geschichte und Theorie des Subjekts nach Nietzsche und Foucault. Frankfurt: Campus-Verlag, 2007. 130–142. Shell, Marc. “Money of the Mind: Dialectic and Monetary Form in Kant and Hegel.” Marc Shell. Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophic Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. 131–155.

Claudia Brodsky

“The Real Horizon” (beyond Emotions) What Proust (Wordsworth, Rousseau, Diderot, and Hegel) Had ‘in’ Mind 1 The following analysis was composed for the most part on the occasion of an international conference held by the Yale University German Department in February 2010, entitled “Interiority/Exteriority.” The conference subtitle, “Rethinking Emotions,” oriented that announced topic – the abstract nominalization of a demonstrative spatial opposition – in another, quite distinct direction, one reflective instead of contemporary academic interest in affect and the specific aim, additionally stated by the conference organizers, of describing the, or a, “language of emotions.” Having taken some pains in recent work to describe the material, historical, and arbitrary – which is to say, conventional – processes of demarcating interiority from exteriority in actual space, and to distinguish spatially constructed notions of inside and outside from emotion especially, as well as from their converse, fictions of so-called “inner” “sensation” invented to circumvent the difficulty of theorizing the often conflicting internal processes and acts that – whether enabling and/or disabling, forming and/or deforming, recalling and/or blocking, abstracting and/or translating – in all events compare and mediate events of sensory “perception” in the first place, I wondered, in a sense, where any discussion of emotions conceived instead in alternately spatial and linguistic terms should or could begin. As if to demonstrate the unpredictability of the innumerable ways perception and intellection interact, what came to my mind uninvited at that time was a strange and enduringly unexplained phrase of Proust, whom I was then teaching: a simple but unfathomable noun phrase that seemed to provide an indication of what considerations of either interiority or exteriority – of either a pure, supposedly noncognitive emotionality or pure, supposedly noncognitive spatiality, no less than their identification or conflation – disfigure and miss. That phrase, “the real horizon,” is, of course, a contradiction in terms – all horizons being situational illusions, there is no such thing. Yet since there is no one, one could say, who knows this better than Proust – no one keener on the distinction, and devoted to telling the story of distinguishing, between mere appearances and the real, it seemed to me that it was neither inner nor

1 All translations from the French and all modifications of published translations by the author, if not indicated otherwise.

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outer space, no “here” nor “there,” just as it was no emotive affect or physical phenomenon Proust had “in mind.” Whatever he had in mind, when writing of a “horizon” to which our spatialization of space, as of experience, did not pertain, seemed instead, very much in the manner of Lukács’s rendering of the proleptic progress of literary history, the answer to a question I did not know yet how to ask.2 The program of the Yale conference bore as proviso or motto a single, memorable quote from Paul de Man which, standing in direct critical relation to its title while never directly discussed during the conference proceedings, hovered above it like an allegorical superscript: “[Literary] criticism stands under the aegis of an inside/outside metaphor that is never being seriously questioned.”3 Before exploring some of the descriptions of emotions, interiority, and exteriority that made some sense to him, I took the citation from de Man as an indication that it was with him that any consideration of a nonmetaphorical or “real horizon” might best begin. Simply if paradoxically put: Paul de Man hated talk of feelings, but he hated the use and promotion of bad metaphors, freshly minted or clichéd, even more. The reasons for this are no secret, and hardly mysterious. Simply, declaratively, and nonparadoxically put: talking about feelings debased both language and feeling, in his view, by missing the compelling reasons for and real consequences of each, while the bavardage of bad metaphors helped spread the mystification engendered by the former around, ultimately promoting one, thoroughly mystified and mystifying feeling in particular, that of personal ambition – what Rüdiger Campe described, in his talk at the conference, as an all-encompassing desire for personal superiority, a narcissism whose own gratification and self-perpetuation depends upon, fabricates, and enforces hierarchy; and that the incomparable Mme de Lafayette, writing about the fatal interdependence of personal self-preservation and enhancement promoted by the constantly shifting, opportunistic alliances formed within the huis clos of hierarchical court society, called “l’esprit glorieux.” The nearly inevitable phenomenological extension of such a personal “esprit glorieux” into interpersonal ambition is one manifestation of what de Man called ideology. Any notion of an objectified language of emotions would be an expression only of ideology and a prime candidate for de Man’s critique for two important reasons. First, it purports to

2 Lukács, György. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Trans. Anna Bostock. London: Merlin Press, 1971. 3 De Man, Paul. “Semiology and Rhetoric.” Paul de Man. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. 3–19, here 5.

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report and so justify the research of something that does not in fact exist, and, secondly, it obscures our understanding of the two terms it metaphorically relates: language, on the one hand, and emotions, on the other, or, in the partly deictic, partly abstract terms whose metaphoric use de Man questioned, the terms of the external – of language as manifest and thus perceivable sign or symbol, a sensorily rendered code of some kind – and of the internal, which is to say, whatever we do that is not immediately, phenomenally, and formally, manifested in and by the act, including thinking, imagining, remembering, supposing, understanding, deceiving, and discovering, to name a few such actions, as well as the full range of personal desires and feelings. Now the body presents some involuntary manifestations of these last – blushing, and shaking or trembling being among the most immediate of such bodily indications – but even such typical give-aways, perceptible betrayals of corporeal quickening, can, like any other, be brought under control, mastered, in time. Perhaps we did not need Mme de Lafayette, Racine, Rousseau, Diderot, Laclos, Kleist, Balzac, Baudelaire, Stendhal, or Proust to tell us this, but the French literary tradition in particular would hardly exist, let alone instruct and reflect every moment of our social lives, without its acknowledgement of that fact. The occurrence of the same give-aways, or unwilled indications of feeling, can, however, also be feigned – as all good and bad writing, good and bad acting, and good and bad social interactions remind us, making it hard if not impossible to tell “real” feeling from feigned, the presence from the absence of those “involuntary motions” – to paraphrase Samuel Richardson’s and Wordsworth’s words for a movement of mind as of body we do not control and that we metaphorically call movings outward, “e-motions.” This is not to say that there are no external indications of emotion that remain involuntary, including, not last of all, indications of one’s own anxiety as to whether one’s studied concealment of emotion will succeed. Professional gamblers call these “tells” – the physical “tics” that, upon repetition, are the recognizable signs that a player makes when he is bluffing, that is, lying about the real state and quality of the hand he is playing, “betting the house,” as they say, on a house of cards – on a paper evaluation, as they say on the market. Professional gamblers or not, we all know “tells” eventually – or should know them – when we see them; without them the so-called game of life would hardly be a game or be life, let alone of any vital interest to the players. Since without them, all social or interpersonal life would be replaced by the ideological pursuit of emotion always practically inseparable from the desire for absolute power, as well as its real-world corollary, the so-called natural law of appropriation and annihilation of the other otherwise known as war, luckily for us some tells just keep on telling – if we bother to look for

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them, to see instead of feeling. Even Paul de Man was subject to such a purely physical, in his case optical tell of involuntary motion, although, since this tell, or, in Diderot’s terms, this “external symptom” of feeling, was truly involuntary, one could never identify or objectify with certainty the emotion it signaled; and de Man, conscious of it, was even more conscious of the fact there was nothing he could do about it, and so instead took as much pleasure in calling attention to it – its implacable naturalism – as in citing its non-natural, or literary precedent. (The tell was an abrupt and total change in eye color; the literary prototype was a character narrated by Proust.) As subject to them as anyone – that is, as any of us not entirely hollowed out by the sole controlling motive of self-aggrandizement, the flattening process necessitated for the projection of the self on to the big, bigger, and biggest screen – even de Man recognized, and, in rare instances, went so far as to thematize, the fact that this particular variable in his particular corporeal composition would, upon a sudden, give him away, commenting on it with apparent happiness, which is to say, in full ironic mode and non-ironic relief that such involuntary signals, shorn of code and convention – of language – happen at all. Yet, constating so much – that our bodies can tell others that we feel something, something that affects our, properly amorphously termed, “state of mind;” and stating even, as de Man’s rare self-commentary suggested, thank goodness or givenness for that – we should also constate that neither such involuntary, physiological tells nor studied and fungible signs of emotion could ever constitute a language, or languages, not even for a single subject, let alone the infinite number of individual subjects to whom infinitely specific and fleeting experiences of feelings are given. It is not that feelings and language are not both terribly effective: they are, one could accurately say, inestimably effective. It is their metaphorical yoking together that papers over that effectivity, postponing the understanding of the effects of language and of feeling upon us until a scientistically reified language of language, or complacently reified feeling of feeling, is proposed to take its place, pushing the proverbial ball down the road to nowhere but the prolonged evasion of understanding again. The metaphoric combination of language and feeling into a language of feeling will indeed always subdivide into the language of language, posited as a scientifically constatable object, and the feeling of feeling, posited as a prelinguistic and postcritical object, yet one happily available to endless pronouncements on its behalf. These pure positings of objective positivity where there is no positive object to begin with, belong, of course, to a recognizable species of metaphor – catachresis – but with an added twist. They object-

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ify, through hyper-logical over-methodologization, or the belle-lettristic nonmethod of free association, an object that isn’t one by naming it for another object that isn’t one. Just to indicate how universally and pragmatically useful such double catachreses can be, how equally welcome, indeed vaunted, even by divergent political programs, it is worth noting that this procedure for compounding fiction with fiction, for making tautology seem not tautological, but defiant, indeed singularly courageous, has been used recently by successive, supposedly opposed American presidents – Obama as well as G. W. Bush – both of whom, with the same visible flash of self-satisfaction, have described their own course of action as the act of “doubling down.” Lifted from the parlance of professional gamblers, “to double down” does not mean to build upon strength, insight, or understanding, or even to hedge one’s bets or “cover” one’s – uncertain – “position,” but, rather, just the opposite, to compound one’s bluff by adding wager to wager, wedding fabrication with evasion in a single, indissoluble bond. Just as purely metaphoric ascriptions of language to emotions and emotions to language combine the two into one doubly non-existent, and so limitlessly exploitable, object of discourse, a verbal association, which, referable back only to the verba of which it is composed, is thus doubly shielded both from internal analytic scrutiny and external comparison with anything else, so the familiar opposition of internal to external is indeed one de Man questioned – not because it has no bearing on the life of the body and, part of and distinct from the body, the mind, but because it facilitates the mischaracterization and misunderstanding of these and their relation. Spatializing metaphors commemorating the “depths of interiority” do little if nothing to describe or follow out what happens when we think, and/or feel, and/or know. Instead they further conceal these, and will continue to, even as we develop their converse, the image-technology made to make externally visible, in attractive color-coded pictures, the working of every neural synapse and chemical reaction “in” the brain.4 Spatial images suggesting we have an inside that we can locate, track, and turn outside, and whose activity we may thus observe as we might observe the translucent bodies of single-cell organisms sub-divide, delude us not only in excluding from consideration our mind’s relentless invention of and reliance upon semiotic and graphic media – external forms that we, our minds and bodies, make – but in occluding, moreover, the way in which our “interiority” is intensely subject to all forms of exteriority, especially those we do not and could not make.

4 See Catherine Newmark’s contribution to this volume for another skeptical view of the epistemological value of these aesthetically pleasing image-producing procedures.

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There is an outside – Wordsworth made this clearest – and when we discover and know this, often at the very instigation of our internal selves, it does not stay “outside,” that is, as an object of perception and spur to classifiable emotion, but gets mixed up with, changes, disrupts, displaces, and so makes questionable whatever that inside keeps stored within it, including our conception that what “is” inside is our very own storage facility, or facilitator: an archive. Just as Wordsworth, conventionally considered a nature poet, makes nature stop appearing as the nature we know – the external world through which we, as feeling, cognizing, and desiring subjects, move – compelling it instead to seem to move through a subject, himself formerly directed internally toward an external goal, so inside and outside are as different as are “here” and “there,” when “there” is where life as we know it ends, and the “horizon” we can see before us is interrupted by another, unforseeable exteriority. When, in Book One of the Prelude (“Childhood and School-Time”), the boy narrated steals a rowboat so as to traverse a delimited expanse of water, keeping his “view” “fixed” upon “the horizon” visible before him, while rowing, phenomenologically speaking, backwards, toward a “point” lying in the opposite direction of that he faces, he suddenly sees that horizon vanish and something unknown come into view, something, furthermore, unknowable because inextricable, or unabstractable, from its own “motion”: But now, like one who rows, Proud of his skill, to reach a chosen point With an unswerving line, I fixed my view Upon the summit of a craggy ridge, The horizon’s utmost boundary […]; When, from behind that craggy steep till then The horizon’s bound, a huge peak, black and huge, As if with voluntary power instinct Upreared its head. I struck and struck again, And growing still in stature the grim shape Towered up between me and the stars, and still, For so it seemed, with purpose of its own And measured motion like a living thing Strode after me.5

After seeing “that spectacle,” a scene definitively outside him, the boy experiences the negation of all the “familiar” images and attributes of nature he had 5 Wordsworth, William. “The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind: An Autobiographical Poem.” William Wordsworth. Poetical Works. Ed. Thomas Hutchinson and Ernest de Selincourt. London, New York, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1946. 631–752, here 637–638 (I, ll. 367–385).

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maintained inside him: “[F]or many days, my brain / Worked with a dim and undetermined sense / […] No familiar shapes / Remained, no pleasant images of trees, / Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields.”6 These “images” of things and perceptions of and names for “colors” are not replaced by other, newly minted words and images but cancelled through and through, by “unknown modes of being”7 that, instead of serving to refurbish his mental archive, move “through” him, and do so unlike him, with neither horizon in sight nor the eyes to see one. A terrifying, because truly foreign, externality, one perceptible as “growing still” even as one moves away from it in space, destroys the fundamentally spatial model of perception on which the notions of a living, volitional or psychological “inside” and a dead, involuntary or empirical “outside” rests. A “living thing” perceived to “grow” and move toward its viewer cannot be perceived and cognized with the aid of consciousness as a finite object in space. No longer a demonstrable external object nor subject of internal apperception, the “thing” whose motion is as visibly as it is internally disorienting acts upon the boy as if to supplant the initial act of its external perception or render perception somehow external to itself, replacing both “familiar shapes” and the brief “spectacle” of their usurpation with something that succeeds them once that perception is out of sight. Unlike a stolen boat that can be returned to its proper place – “left” “[t]here in her mooring-place” after, “with trembling oars,” its self-appointed appropriator has “stole[n] [his] way” back to shore – that something is no longer a “living” “striding” “thing,” terrifying because at once both disorienting and perceptible, but something or things ongoing the boy does not see, “forms” of “modes of being” that he instead retains a mental “sense of,” and whose own landscape, scene or stage the boy’s mind now unwillingly provides: “[B]ut after I had seen / That spectacle, for many days, my brain / Worked with a dim and undetermined sense / Of unknown modes of being; [...] / But huge and mighty forms, that do not live / Like living men, moved slowly through the mind / By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.”8 The “horizon” the boy kept before his eye while rowing, back first, into the opposite direction – the coordination, in the visible shape of a line, of his motion through and position in space at any moment – epitomizes the view of exteriority by which we orient ourselves at all times. It is the line that delimits what is outside us, as far as the eye can see, until, using something not ours to begin with – a stolen or borrowed rowboat, as in this seemingly

6 Wordsworth, “The Prelude,” 638 (I, ll. 391–397). 7 Wordsworth, “The Prelude,” 638 (I, l. 393). 8 Wordsworth, “The Prelude,” 638 (I, ll. 390–400).

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pastoral context, or some other medium for extending motion – we move closer to a “chosen point” or goal, and our “horizon” of vision appears suddenly effaced by something before or behind it, something that had always been “there,” that is, outside us, but that we did not, indeed, could not see. What Wordsworth makes plain is that the “natural” ability to see an external “horizon” in front of and outside us is vulnerable not to its own ultimate exhaustion – there will always be another temporary field of vision, another delimitation of the external by an horizon whenever we look out and move at the same time – but, rather, to the passions that get us moving, or rowing, in the first place: the “troubled pleasure,” as Wordsworth calls it, with which, unknowingly, and by means not our own, we see not a new horizon but something whose motion brings with it the horizon’s demise, not only in the sense of what we can see before us, but in the sense of the line that demarcates in general that which is inside and outside the mind. In direct contrast to the graphic clarity, and abrupt conclusion, of Wordsworth’s vivid, brief narrative description of a visible “horizon” effaced, Proust’s enigmatic phrase, “the real horizon,” appears barely connected to the tightly interwoven threads of depiction and speculation that precede it, the well-known section of Du côté de chez Swann that contains the narrator’s observations on the Virtues and Vices of Giotto. Comprising one of the richest compositional sequences in the entire novel as it proceeds, as if seamlessly, from diachronic narration to mimetic description, to non-mimetic symbolic theory, hermeneutics and poetics, to theory of the prose novel and autobiographical reflection, this justly celebrated section begins, concretely enough, with the narrator’s recollection of the resemblance, first “pointed out to him” by Swann, between one in the “succession” of family kitchenmaids in Combray and one of the subjects of Giotto’s allegorical series in Padua. It describes what is depicted in the paintings themselves before proceeding to consider the appearance and effectiveness of painted as well as natural symbols; the materiality and “thought” content of symbols in general; the “impenetrable” “opaque sections” that are part of any “‘real’ person;” the “discovery” by novelists of a way to “substitute” for these; and finally, his own discovery that he himself has always been himself, every “moment” of his life, all of a piece, united immaterially “in a single, undeviating, irresistible outpouring of all the forces of my life”(un même et infléchissable jaillissement de toutes les forces de ma vie).9

9 Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past. Trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. 3 vols. New York: Random House, 1981. Vol. 1. 87–93. / Proust, Marcel. À la recherche du temps perdu. 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1954. Vol. 1. 80.

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Little could serve as a less fitting prelude to “the real horizon” the narrator then names,10 and perhaps it was exactly its own discrete divergence from the perfectly integrated “outpouring” of fiction and reflection after which it is casually named that made the notion of a “real,” as opposed to imputed, “horizon” cross my mind as I tried to imagine what – other than a compounded catachresis – a horizonless yet deictically indicated spatialization of emotion, let alone spatialized language of emotions, might be. Before turning to the question of what such a “real,” or nonperspectival “horizon” could possibly be or mean – a limit as independent of human narrative and reflection, as language is of space, and both language and space are of emotion – it is worth turning first to another putative, yet signally instructive horizon described in uneasy relation to language, the one before which Rousseau situates the first origin of language within “man.” In the posthumously published Essay on the Origin of Languages (Essai sur l’origine des langues, written in the 1740s? 1750s?), Rousseau asserts the two following propositions: 1) that language could only have arisen due to “moral” rather than “physical” “needs,” which, by contrast, can instead be expressed adequately by physical gestures and expressions alone; and 2), that the first language, in being motivated by moral needs or “passions,” had to be “figural,” while the “true name” and “proper meaning” of “objects” were “invented” after them.11 One assumes, Rousseau notes, that such a sequence of events is impossible, “since a figure consists only in the translation of the sense” or “idea” signified by a word – “otherwise,” he states correctly, “figural language would mean nothing” (autrement le langage figuré ne signifierait rien).12 In order to explain this unconventional sequencing of intellectual events, Rousseau offers, as he does throughout his political and social writings, a narrative “example.”13 Rather than attempt to demonstrate his assertion of the priority and figural expression of the passions logically, Rousseau refuses, quite properly, to confuse language with logic, or at least with logic as we know and use it. The logic of the sequence he narrates is lucid but not conventional, neither commonsensical nor abstract, but hypothetical and experiential. The succinct story he tells links language to ignorance and an empirical error originating not in empirical reality but the blinding effect of 10 Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, 87. 11 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music. Ed. and trans. John T. Scott. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1998. 293–295. 12 Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, 294 (translation modified). / Rousseau, JeanJacques. Essai sur l’origine des langues, où il est parlé de la mélodie et de l’imitation musicale. Ed. Jean Starobinski. Paris: Gallimard, 1990. 68. 13 Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, 294.

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passion upon the perception of real beings not yet known. Acknowledging the reasonable question of his “reader” as to “how an expression could be figurative before having a proper meaning,” Rousseau “respond[s] with an example”14 of how the internal rather than external determination of a word, the “idea” rather than the reality behind it, causes it to be articulated first: Upon encountering others, a savage man will at first be afraid. His fright will make him see those men as taller and stronger than himself. He will give them the name Giants. After many experiences he will recognize that as these supposed Giants are neither taller nor stronger than himself, their statue does not agree with the idea that he had first attached to the word Giant. He will therefore invent another name common to them and to him, such as the name man for example, and will leave that of Giant for the false object that had struck him during his illusion. That is how the figurative word arises before the proper word, when passion fascinates our eyes and the first idea it offers us is not the true one.15

Rousseau’s story of one man first seeing others may appear to offer strong support – if of a strictly narrative kind – for the notion that “language of emotions” is not only not a misnomer but the real and proper identity of language itself, as long as we consent to the notion that language is figural first, literal second. Yet the problem with even that enlightened view of what

14 Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, 294. 15 Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, 294–295. See the original French: “Un homme sauvage en rencontrant d’autres se sera d’abord effrayé. Sa frayeur lui aura fait voir ces hommes plus grands et plus forts que lui-même; il leur aura donné le nom de Géans. Après beaucoup d’expériences il aura reconnu que ces prétendus Géans n’étant ni plus grands ni plus forts que lui, leur stature ne convenoit point à l’idée qu’il avoit d’abord attachée au mot de Géant. Il inventera donc un autre nom commun à eux et à lui, tel, par exemple, que le nom d’homme, et laissera celui de Géant à l’objet faux qui l’avoit frappé durant son illusion. Voilà comment le mot figuré naît avant le mot propre, lorsque la passion nous fascine les yeux et que la première idée qu’elle nous offre n’est pas celle de la verité.” (Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, 68–69.) This particular passage from Rousseau “responds” not only to common literalist and logical positivist views of the basis and purpose of language but to the description of imaged-based “fascination” by Blanchot that is discussed in this volume by Brigitte Weingart. While Blanchot’s definition of fascination, as the passion for the image, ascribes the power to fascinate to the images we see, Rousseau’s “when passion fascinates our eyes,” locates the source of fascination not in the image but in the passion within us that colors our vision. Similarly, the object of our “fascinat[ing]” passion is the eye that sees images rather than those images themselves. This reversal of conventional cause and effect, typical, perhaps, for Rousseau, contradicts nearly all contemporary thinking about, indeed fascination with “the image.” To use Rousseau’s own term, such fascination with the image “transfers” a power (to fascinate) from its origin in the passions to inanimate pictures of dispassionate objects, imagining images themselves, rather than the powerful effects of our passions on our vision, to be the source of our fascination with them.

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Rousseau is describing has to do with his own version, in this “example,” of Wordsworth’s fictive but no less visible “horizon.” Rousseau does not explicitly spatialize his example, plotting it, as Wordsworth does, onto rectilinear axes – a line of vision approaching its delimitation in the perceived perpendicular of the horizon, an horizon soon proven a perspectival fiction by the perceived rising up of mighty forms, till then invisible. Neither are an “act of stealth” and progression toward “a chosen point” at the origin of Rousseau’s scene; its horizon is not a particular line but visible everywhere around it, the unthought limit of familiar surroundings interrupted suddenly by the appearance of the unknown. One can imagine that such a distinct appearance inaugurated not only the notion, “Giant,” but that of an horizon as well, the line of the familiar first distinguished as it is transgressed by the unfamiliar, the absence of any distinction between inside and outside, “here” and “there,” now overwritten and overridden by the notion of the other, the one now over there, who must have come from a newly discovered outside, the land of what I do not already know. On this view, the language of emotion that speaks the objective fiction “Giant” would simultaneously define its new-found horizon as the line dividing consciousness from all (it now knows) it does not know. Rousseau’s narrative, however, includes the passage of time that proves this language to be in error. The natural man who invents language as trope recognizes this error, Rousseau states “[a]fter many experiences” ([a]près beaucoup d’expériences).16 Alluding, by one of the most effective litotes in all of modern philosophy, to what may as well be considered all of human history, Rousseau leaves these “many” ensuing “experiences” undefined. Yet, given the lack of any already existent, common language to mediate between them, one can only imagine that the “experiences” these natural men had of each other were more likely to have been violently conflictual than coolly and deliberately comparative: to have been so impassioned, in other words, as to have culminated in the coolest and most concrete grounds for comparison (and inevitably delayed origin of literalism), that of comparing one’s own stature with that of a cold, immobile corpse. Whatever the content of those “many experiences” of the other, the error in perception they succeed results in the creation not of one but two literal terms: the trope “Giant” subdivides into “giant,” a remarkably or unnaturally big man, and “man,” meaning someone, an other, who is just like me after all. If we were to grant that this first language is indeed a language of emotion – of impassioned trope – which, with experience, is replaced by the literal

16 Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, 294. / Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, 68.

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language of rational designation, then the story line of language which would result is the traditional and superficial tale of enlightenment we all “know,” that of false beliefs disproven by empirical experiment or “experience,” and of empirical experience itself replaced by the nomenclature of science – and Rousseau would have had no call to be the paranoid he was. Yet, while literally reflective of the tale of the birth and development of language Rousseau tells, no account could be further from the relation of language to emotion it represents. For what neither the figural term, “Giant,” nor the mutually defining literal terms, “man” and “giant,” articulate, is the passion that produces them, “fear” – the motive emotion to which the false objectdesignation “Giant” first responded, and which, in Rousseau’s figural to literal account of the origin of language, and “illus[ory]” to “true” account of original experience, remains unnamed. Rousseau, unsurpassed theorist of the passions, situates passions at the origin of language, the origin of the unknown, in which a limit and horizon of knowledge first comes into view. But Rousseau, philosopher of language, arts and sciences, and society, knows that any language, figural or literal, can only be a language, a means of conveying “ideas,” if it names things and the attributes of things, objects and qualities outside the form and content of language itself. The progress from trope to proper designation keeps language and the new-found division between inside and outside intact. It is “moral needs” or “passions,” themselves triggered by immediate empirical ignorance, that result, first, in cognitive misnamings or tropes, and then, in historical, empirically-based corrections of tropes through the invention of scientific, proper or literal terms – in short, in the development of language as language, the articulate vehicle for the combination and comparison of ideas. To name the passion that necessitates this development would instead reveal all object-related designations to be in error, all visibility, in so far as it appears meaningful, to be a projection of what one feels. Instead of leading us to name what we see, either when “passion fascinates our eyes” or “after many experiences,” when analytic comparison clarifies our view of things, feelings, if recognized as the effective origin and subject of language, would be the end of any possible language. To talk about the feelings with which words, necessarily mistakenly, originate would be to do away with the “objectivity” of words and the possibility of talk. Shortcircuiting the attribution of sense to the objects that occasion it, the naming of the feeling, fear, as if it were itself an identifiable object, would, in addition, name only one’s own experience of fear and not another’s, and so not even name “fear” in general but what it is “I” feel right now. The conventional language that begins with ignorance, impassioned perceptual error, and trope must bury rather than

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name the passion with which it sees an object as an object, and the outside as delimited by an horizon, for the first time, if it is ever to take, however aberrantly, objectified, perceptible, comparable and thus historical sense-bearing form. If, following the analysis of the only “true,” because openly concealing, epistemologist of the passions, Rousseau, the language of emotion is not a language of emotion but a language of objects already misperceived, by a subject who can only perceive and name an object accurately when, that object now well within his horizon, his emotion has died, and knowledge, including theoretical knowledge, has replaced it, then the a priori impossibility of a language of emotion – that is, even as a language of emotion displaced and concealed in object-related tropes – is stated most unequivocally and literally by Rousseau’s own “other” and semblable, Diderot. The first modern art critic, whose Salons provided the model for Baudelaire’s, Diderot is a natural favorite among art historians who value his emphasis upon expressive physiognomy and gesture. His language theory, however, while directly related to that emphasis on external manifestations, reveals precisely what expressive physiognomy and even the notion of self-evident, synchronic painting conceals: the nonphenomenal, “metaphoric”17 transfers of meaning, caused by the “decomposition” of the senses, described to constitute language in its origin in Letter on the Blind, as Used by Those Who See (Lettre sur les aveugles à l’usage de ceux qui voient, 1749), and the “pile of hieroglyphs” left behind by poets attempting to “paint after the moving tableau of the soul” with which they, like Baudelaire’s modern painter, cannot keep pace, that is described in Letter on the Deaf and Mute, as Used by Those Who Hear and Speak (Lettre sur les sourds et muëts à l’usage de ceux qui entendent et qui parlent, 1751).18 Nothing could be less transparent and less synchronic than the relationship between interiority and expressive language Diderot describes throughout his writings, his overtly fictional as well as his overtly theoretical work, although, as in

17 Diderot, Denis. “Lettre sur les aveugles à l’usage de ceux qui voient.” Denis Diderot. Oeuvres complètes. Vol. 4: Idées. Part 2: Le nouveau Socrate. Ed. Yvon Belaval et al. 25 vols. Paris: Hermann, 1978. 15–72, here 41. For a full English translation, see Diderot, Denis. “Letter on the Blind, For the Use of Those Who See.” Denis Diderot. Selected Writings. Ed. Lester G. Crocker. Trans. Derek Coltman. London, New York: Macmillan, 1966. 14–30. 18 Diderot, Denis. “Lettre sur les sourds et muëts à l’usage de ceux qui entendent et qui parlent.” Denis Diderot. Oeuvres complètes. Vol. 4: Idées. Part 2: Le nouveau Socrate. Ed. Yvon Belaval et al. 25 vols. Paris: Hermann, 1978. 129–228, here 140, 169, 161. For a full English translation, see Diderot, Denis. “Letter on the Deaf and Dumb, For the Use of Those Who Hear and Speak.” Denis Diderot. Selected Writings. Ed. Lester G. Crocker. Trans. Derek Coltman. London, New York: Macmillan, 1966. 31–39.

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Rousseau, in Diderot these two categories must intersect.19 There is language and there are noncognitive emotions in Diderot, but for emotions to be conveyed by a language, for a language of emotions to be perceived to exist, that language and those emotions must be, he asserts, divorced completely. This must be so not so as to keep one’s interiority – one’s feelings – intact, but, rather, because no language could ever be formed and performed by someone who “has” feelings at all. The language of emotion must originate in an ability to look outside, and this ability is strongest in someone with no inside. That apparent paradox, of full expressivity attained and exercised when there is nothing imperceptible, nothing “inside” to express, renders the notion of the language of emotions an oxymoron – that is, as long as one conceives of emotions as actually occurring, as motions within the self moving outward from the self, rather than objectified externally, in observations, representations, books. The oxymoron of the language of emotion is what Diderot calls the “paradox of the actor.” As described in his great theoretical dialogue of the same name, The Paradox of the Actor (Paradoxe sur le comédien, first published 1770 in Correspondance littéraire),20 this is the paradox of an acting subject – ultimately any subject, acting on any stage – who does, with sufficient practice, hone the experience of emotion into a language, but only on condition that he or she feels nothing him- or herself. Commenting first that a French and an English actor, when playing in a tragedy by Shakespeare or Racine, respectively, would be so “bound” (enlacés) by their own disparate, culturally contingent understandings of the “same signs” (mêmes signes) as to resemble Laokoon and sons being squeezed to death by serpents, Diderot observes further that indeed any two actors, or even any single actor who plays a role more

19 For a more extensive discussion of the view, articulated throughout Diderot’s theoretical as well as fictional works, that it is precisely the non-coincidence, not to say mutual exclusion, of interiority and exteriority, or internal experience (whether of cognition, imagination, emotion, or the “soul”) and external experience (whether of the “body,” the “senses,” or the “sign”), that makes any effective “expression,” “language,” or “sign,” let alone the evocation and “representation” of “emotion” possible, see Brodsky, Claudia. “Whatever Moves You: ‘Experimental Philosophy’ and the Literature of Experience in Diderot and Kleist.” Traditions of Experiment from the Enlightenment to the Present: Essays in Honor of Peter Demetz. Ed. Nancy A. Kaiser and David E. Wellbery. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. 17– 44. The full version of that discussion, as it analyzes the Lettres especially, is forthcoming elsewhere. 20 Diderot, Denis. “Paradoxe sur le comédien.” Denis Diderot. Oeuvres esthétiques. Ed. Paul Vernière. Paris: Garnier, 1988. 229–381. For a full English translation, see Diderot, Denis. “Paradox on Acting.” Denis Diderot. Selected Writings. Ed. Lester G. Crocker. Trans. Derek Coltman. London, New York: Macmillan, 1966. 318–329.

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than once, would suffer the same dismal fate.21 For even when the “words” of his text are composed with greatest “clarity,” “precision,” and “energy,” they, like all “words, are only and can only be signs that approximate a thought, a feeling, an idea” (les mots ne sont et ne peuvent être que des signes approchés d’une pensée, d’un sentiment, d’une idée) – “signs whose value” must therefore be “completed” by additional external means: by “the movement, gesture, tone, face, eyes, and given circumstance” of their speaker (signes dont le mouvement, le geste, le ton, le visage, les yeux, la circonstance donnée complètent la valeur).22 Just when you believe such a speaker to be most moved by “actual sentiment” (le sentiment actuel), “all his talent consists not in feeling, as you suppose, but in rendering so scrupulously the external signs of the sentiment that you are deceived” (tout son talent consiste non pas à sentir, comme vous le supposez, mais à rendre si scrupuleusement les signes extérieures du sentiment, que vous vous y trompez).23 “Extreme sensibility makes for mediocre actors, mediocre sensibility makes for the multitude of bad actors” (c’est l’extrême sensibilité qui fait les acteurs médiocres; c’est la sensibilité médiocre qui fait la multitude des mauvais acteurs) but it is above all “the absolute absence of any sensibility that prepares sublime actors” (c’est le manque absolu de sensibilité qui prépare les acteurs sublimes); those who perform the external signs they have rehearsed over time “before a mirror” (répéter […] devant une glace) reproduce the visible evidence of emotion most effectively.24 Their tears, that so move us, “descend from the brain” (descendent du cerveau), rather than “rise from the heart” (montent du coeur), and “were this not the case” (s’il en était autrement), “the condition of the actor” (la condition du comédien), the practiced mimic of emotions, “would be the most unfortunate” (serait la plus malheureuse des conditions), and, one might add, the most improbable, since doomed to succeed in representing feelings by destroying the very presence of feelings, which, when most “profound” (profondes), are expressed by no language but “mute” (muëts).25 As demonstrated by his own dramatization of it in a dialogue of simulated spontaneity whose two speakers (“the first” and “the second”) play their opposing parts, of rational analyst and undiscerning sentimentalist, to the hilt, and in which the alternating absence and presence of a single exclamation mark across iterations of the “same sign” says nearly all that needs to be said

21 22 23 24 25

Diderot, Diderot, Diderot, Diderot, Diderot,

“Paradoxe “Paradoxe “Paradoxe “Paradoxe “Paradoxe

sur sur sur sur sur

le le le le le

comédien,” comédien,” comédien,” comédien,” comédien,”

305. 304. 312. 312–313. 313, 334.

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about the theory being enacted as it is described – in “the great actor,” the first states matter-of-factly, there must be “a cold and tranquil spectator […] and no sensibility” (un spectateur froid et tranquille […] et nulle sensibilité); “Nulle sensibilité!” exclaims the incredulous second in response; “Nulle,” the first reiterates coolly26 – Diderot understands the model of the effective observer and communicator of experience, and of a dramatic language of feeling developed and performed in the necessary absence of any actual feeling, to extend well beyond the enclosed space of the stage, attributing the sacrifice of actual internal experience to the general demands of, and demand for, linguistic representation itself. “Is it at the moment you lose your friend or your mistress,” the first speaker asks the second, that you compose a poem on his or her death? No […]. It is after the great pain is past, when extreme feeling has atrophied, when one is far from the catastrophe, that the soul is calm [… and] memory unites with imagination, the former to retrace, the latter to exaggerate the sweetness of a time now past, that one possesses oneself and speaks well […]; one says one cries, but only because one is busy trying to render one’s lines harmonious; otherwise, if tears flow, the pen falls from the hand.27

At the time of linguistic composition, it is not feeling, but the mimetic memory of it, exaggerated by imagination, that enables now atrophied emotion to be communicated in linguistic form. Diderot’s argument is that whether on the stage, in the street, in the boudoir, or “in” the brain, the external forms of expression and the experience of emotions as strong as any Rousseau ascribes to the savage man, may depart from a state of unreflective equilibrium, whose conventional horizon of movement is clearly in view, to enter, with Wordsworth’s boy, a heightened state of discontinuity without horizon, of familiar images emptied of content, of “forms” that pass “through” us without becoming “part” of us, without being “internalized,” experienced, known. In this the “sublime actor” has a natural advantage, in that discontinuity already defines his every horizon, his only home. “One says,” says Diderot’s first speaker,

26 Diderot, “Paradoxe sur le comédien,” 306. 27 “Est-ce au moment où vous venez de perdre votre ami ou votre maîtresse que vouz composerez un poème sur sa mort? Non. […] C’est lorsque la grande douleur est passée, quand l’extrême sensibilité est amortie, lorsqu’on est loin de la catastrophe, que l’âme est calme, qu’on se rappelle son bonheur éclipsé, qu’on est capable d’apprécier la perte qu’on a faite, que la mémoire se réunit à l’imagination, l’une pour retracer, l’autre pour exagérer la douceur d’un temps passé; qu’on se possède et qu’on parle bien […]; on dit qu’on pleure, mais on ne pleure pas lorsqu’on s’occupe à rendre son vers harmonieux: ou si les larmes coulent, la plume tombe des mains.” (Diderot, “Paradoxe sur le comédien,” 333–334.)

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that actors have no character because in playing all they lose that which nature gave them, that they become false, as the doctor, the surgeon, the butcher become hard. I believe that one has taken the cause for the effect, and that they are only fit to play all, because they have none to begin with.28

The subject who is most fit for the language of emotion – to compose it upon reflection and perform it meaningfully on the spot – is he whose so-called internal life never interferes with his truly external observation, in whom the external world never causes the experience of emotion, of irrational or incommensurate passion. Yet this is so not because he – like the rest of us living and acting off the boards – strives to control, regulate, and dissimulate such “involuntary movement,” but because he contains no “inside” whose movement could possibly come into conflict with any he encounters on the “outside,” not even in the experience of ignorance and incomprehension of the empirical of which, as told by Rousseau’s narrative example, passions and language are born. The actor – or any representer – composes emotion into a language of emotion just as he portrays human life in the form of characters, because nothing, no immediate experience of feeling or particularity of character, gets in “his” way. *** Beyond and before its narrator’s stated ambition to become a writer, during the research of lost time, the dead time of past experience its narrator recovers in writing, Proust’s Recherche describes how our experience of experience, the emotions that color our experience or affect us, relate to representation in the first place. In the justly celebrated pages devoted to the kitchenmaid at Combray – unwitting victim, we discover later, of the imperceptible tortures inflicted upon her by Françoise, first-in-command in the kitchen who, though in fact requiring someone to command, will not accept that the exercise of her own sovereignty be defined by its limitation to any real person – the narrator first describes the kitchenmaid not as a particular individual but a general concept, not as a real but rather “an abstract personality” whose “permanent institution” assured its “continuity and identity throughout the succession of transitory human shapes in which it was embodied” (une personne morale,

28 “On a dit que les comédiens n’avaient aucun caractère, parce qu’en les jouant tous ils perdaient celui que la nature leur avait donné, qu’ils devenaient faux, comme le médecin, le chirurgien et le boucher deviennent durs. Je crois qu’on a pris la cause pour l’effet, et qu’ils ne sont propres à les jouer tous que parce qu’ils n’en ont point.” (Diderot, “Paradoxe sur le comédien,” 350.)

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une institution permanente […] une sorte de continuité et d’identité, à travers la succession des formes passagères en lesquelles elle s’incarnait).29 The concept of “the kitchen-maid” is first attached to the particular, externally perceptible reality of one kitchenmaid when the narrator recalls that Swann called her by the name of one of the Virtues in the Giotto’s series of allegorical paintings in the Arena Chapel, of which Swann himself had given the narrator photographs.30 Interconnected as casually as they are causally, the crossovers between abstract and concrete, or internally and externally based conceptions of “the kitchen-maid” by means of which one kitchenmaid comes to be represented in the narrative, could be narrated in turn to run something like this: an abstract, “moral person” first manifests itself as a concrete or material person by being named for an abstract moral quality serving allegorically to name a concrete image. Stating that the visibly pregnant kitchenmaid did “in effect resemble” (ressemblait en effet)31 Giotto’s Charity physically, the narrator notes that they also resemble each other when considered intellectually, and, as it turns out, negatively, for both the real woman and allegorical painting do not convey in any way the idea they are supposed to symbolize: And I can see now that those Virtues and Vices of Padua resembled her in another respect as well. For just as the figure of this girl had been enlarged by the additional symbol which she carried before her, without appearing to understand its meaning, with no awareness in her facial expression of its beauty and spiritual significance, as if it were an ordinary, rather heavy burden, so it is without any apparent suspicion of what she is about that the powerfully built housewife who is portrayed in the Arena Chapel beneath the label “Caritas,” and a reproduction of whose portrait hung upon the wall of my schoolroom at Combray, embodies that virtue, for it seems impossible that any thought of charity can ever have found expression in her vulgar and energetic face.32

29 Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, 86. / Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 1, 80. 30 Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, 87. 31 Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 1, 80 (my translation). Cf. Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, 87. 32 Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, 87. / “Et je me rends compte maintenant que ces Vertus et ces Vices de Padoue lui ressemblaient encore d’une autre manière. De même que l’image de cette fille était accrue par le symbole ajouté qu’elle portait devant son ventre, sans avoir l’air d’en comprendre le sens, sans que rien dans son visage en traduisît la beauté et l’esprit, comme un simple et pesant fardeau, de même c’est sans paraître s’en douter que la puissante ménagère qui est représentée à l’Arena au-dessous du nom ‘Caritas’ […] incarne cette vertu […] sans qu’aucune pensée de charité semble avoir jamais pu être exprimée par son visage énergique et vulgaire.” (Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 1, 81.)

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Such, says the narrator, is the defining characteristic of all Giotto’s allegorical figures, their negation of, or at very least distraction from, the very vice or virtue they are said to represent through the presentation of the physical elements of which they are composed – a hand handing over a heart, feet stamping on treasure (“Charity”); a snake filling a mouth to the point of its distortion, like that of a child inflating a balloon (“Envy”) – and, even though Swann “professed” to admire them, the narrator admits that, at the time, he could not understand why. Only now, he states, “in later years,” does he understand the “arresting strangeness, the special beauty of these frescoes,” which derived from the great part played in them by symbolism, and the fact that this was represented not as a symbol (for the thought symbolised was nowhere expressed) but as a reality, actually felt or materially handled, added something more precise […]. There must have been a strong element of reality in those Virtues and Vices of Padua, since they appeared to me as alive as the pregnant serving-girl, while she herself seemed scarcely less allegorical than they. And, quite possibly, this lack (or seeming lack) of participation by a person’s soul in the virtue of which he or she is the agent has, apart from its aesthetic meaning, a reality which, if not strictly psychological, may at least be called physiognomical.33

This circuit of mimetic miscues – of an apparently obliviously pregnant kitchenmaid who looks like an allegorical figure who looks nothing like an allegory but rather a kitchenmaid who carries her pregnancy before and apart from her, like a physical load – based in the non-symbolic quality of the symbol, its failure to represent what it signifies, may have a certain aesthetic value and another we may call “physiognomic,” but, in that it leaves all internal psychology quite out of the picture, this physiognomy without psychology would be more like a death mask than an expression of anything, and it is indeed of “the thoughts of the dying” (la pensée des agonisants)34 that these non-symbolic symbols make the narrator think: “thinking” he describes as 33 Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, 88–89 (my emphasis). / “Mais plus tard j’ai compris que l’étrangeté saisissante, la beauté spéciale de ces fresques tenait à la grande place que le symbole y occupait, et que le fait qu’il fût représenté non comme un symbole puisque la pensée symbolisée n’était pas exprimée, mais comme réel, comme effectivement subi ou matiérellement manié, donnait à la signification de l’oeuvre quelque chose de plus littéral et de plus précis […]. Il fallait que ces Vertus et ces Vices de Padoue eussent en eux bien de la réalité puisqu’ils m’apparaissaient comme aussi vivants que la servante enceinte, et qu’elle même ne me semblait pas beaucoup moins allégorique. Et peut-être cette non-participation, du moins apparente, de l’âme d’un être à la vertu qui agit par lui, a aussi en dehors de sa valeur esthétique une réalité sinon psychologique, au moins, comme on dit, physiognomonique.” (Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 1, 82; my emphasis.) 34 Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, 88. / Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 1, 82.

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turned towards the practical, painful, obscure, visceral aspect, towards that underside of death which is, as it happens, the side that death actually presents to them […] and which far more closely resembles a crushing burden […] than the abstract idea to which we are accustomed to give the name of death.35

The nonsymbolic experience of the body of the symbol reminds the narrator of the nonsymbolic experience of any body whose “thoughts” are “turned,” by the actual experience of dying, to the “effective” rather than ideational “side” (vers le côté effectif ) 36 of death. Like the opacity of Giotto’s allegories, his “Charity devoid of charity,” 37 that “effective side” remains outside our minds, impervious to whatever else we might think: not expressive but inexpressive, an immutable and intellectually intransmutable weight. In this, Proust’s materially nonsymbolic symbol and its intimate equivalent, “thoughts” experienced in the material form of a “crushing burden,” describe, in narrative, mimetic terms, the “actual” (eigentliche) experience of the symbol theorized in Hegel’s Aesthetics. The “monstrous crystals” (ungeheure Kristalle) 38 that are the symbols that are the pyramids in the Aesthetics enclose individual embalmed bodies known only to be – and thus for the first time known really to be – dead, and this built architecture of “death” embodying for the first time the “firm distinction between the living and the dead as such” ([die] feste[ ] Unterscheidung der Lebendigen von den Toten),39 remains just as unenlightened by the “hieroglyphs” that “cover[ ]” its surfaces as do the bodies permanently concealed within its forms, “riddles” made to remain indecipherable, then as now.40 Whatever the specific historical and cultural truth

35 Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, 88 (translation modified). / “[…] bien souvent la pensée des agonisants est tournée vers le côté effectif, douloureux, obscure, viscéral, vers cet envers de la mort qui est précisément le côté qu’elle leur présente […] et qui ressemble beaucoup plus à un fardeau qui les écrase […] qu’à ce que nous appelons l’idée de la mort.” (Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 1, 82.) 36 Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 1, 82 (my translation). Cf. Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, 88. 37 Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, 88. 38 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Trans. Thomas Malcolm Knox. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Vol. 1. 356 (translation modified). / Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik. Ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. 3 vols. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970 (= Werke in zwanzig Bänden, vols. 13–15). Vol. 1. 459. 39 Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 2, 650. / Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, vol. 2, 291. 40 Commenting on the hieroglyphs, Hegel states: “the right solution of which is in part unattained not only by us, but generally by those who posed these riddles to themselves.” (Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 1, 360.) See the original German: “In diesem Sinne sehen wir es den ägyptischen Kunstwerken an, daß sie Rätsel enthalten, für welche zum Teil nicht nur uns, sondern

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value of what Hegel thought when his “thinking” “turned toward” the opaque, “effective” “side” that is, precisely, every “side” of the pyramids, and whatever we may think of his understanding of the pyramids and the symbol now, the crushing sensory load they present to the mind is also, according to Hegel, its origin as mind, one commensurate with the ability to experience, represent, and reflect upon incommensurability alone.41 For Hegel, as for Proust, such incommensurability does not stand for a depth of “interiority” but a real and permanent ignorance of the meaning of what one sees before one. What one sees may be a particular embodiment of an abstract idea that embodiment occludes – “kitchenmaid” or Charity or Envy – or it may be “Housings for the Dead” (Totenbehausungen)42 that remove their contents forever from view: symbols without entry points whose contents remain contents for that very reason, never exposed to the light of day; matter containing matter that remains material in being made “invisible” (unsichtbar),43 and so physically and intellectually untranslatable, inaccessible to being emoted, moved from inside to out. Or, on the other end of the experiential spectrum narrated by Rousseau, what one sees may be the obscured origin of an actual emotion – a passion brought to life by empirical ignorance – whose misdirected linguistic expression, mistaking an incommensurate feeling for an object, is then corrected, on the basis of empirical experience, by its division into two comparable objects, and so buried, by the very language it occasions, ever more thoroughly from view. In reality – or as Proust’s narrator describes them after his discussion of non-symbolic symbols – people appear to us, for the most part, just like pyramids: “A real person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, remains opaque, presents a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift.”44 “The novelist’s happy discovery,” the narrator continues, was am meisten denen, die sie sich selber aufgaben, die rechte Entzifferung nicht gelingt.” (Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, vol. 1, 465.) 41 I have treated Hegel’s analysis of the symbol in greater detail in: “From the Pyramids to Romantic Poetry: Housing the Spirit in Hegel.” Rereading Romanticism. Ed. Martha B. Helfer. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. 327–366; “Szondi and Hegel: ‘The Troubled Relationship of Literary Criticism to Philosophy.’” Telos 140 (2007), special issue Peter Szondi and Critical Hermeneutics: 45–64. 42 Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 2, 650. / Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, vol. 2, 290. 43 Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 1, 356. / Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, vol. 1, 460. 44 Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, 91. / “Un être réel, si profondément que nous sympathisions avec lui, pour une grande part est perçu par nos sens, c’est-à-dire nous reste opaque, offre un poids mort que notre sensibilité ne peut soulever.” (Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 1, 85.)

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to have the idea of replacing those parts that are impenetrable to the soul with an equal quantity of parts that are immaterial, which is to say, that our soul can assimilate to itself. What does it matter then that the actions, the emotions of these beings of a new genre appear to us as true, since we have made them ours, since it is in us that they are produced […] this state [in which the novelist has put us, in which], as in all purely interior states, all emotion is multiplied ten-fold.45

Proust’s narrator, then, appears to maintain Hegel’s notion of the impenetrable “real person” of the symbol even while praising pure fiction, inverting Diderot’s model of externally effective and internally vacuous representation by endorsing the notion of a full, but entirely fictive interiority, one which divides the “immaterial” “emotions and actions” it produces, as replacement for a reality it cannot assimilate, from any relationship whatsoever to the real it perceives outside it. This may be Proust’s narrator’s view, that of a selfdescribed novelist-in-the-making, of the pleasures of “states” that are “purely interior,” as limitless and deathless as pure fiction, “immaterial.” Yet the same narrator provides a view soon thereafter of something for which no novelist has discovered an assimilable replacement: “the real horizon” in which not only the production of fictive emotions – now defined, in a further decoupling from the real, as the “simple association” of things with “ideas” derived not from things but from books – but even the very movement of emotion, of inside to outside, is “enveloped”: “Finally, continuing to trace from the inside outwards these states simultaneously juxtaposed in my consciousness, and before reaching the real horizon which enveloped them, I discover pleasures of a different kind.”46 These latter are the habitual sensory pleasures provided empirically to him by life in Combray, and it is to these that the narrator next turns in loving detail, leaving the enigmatic “real horizon” enveloping emotion in every direction and thus beyond emotion unreached. Unlike Wordsworth’s optical horizon, a visual convention defined by looking forward from one’s position on the enveloping curvature of the earth, this horizon is not an ever-

45 Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, 91–92 (translation modified). / “La trouvaille du romancier a été d’avoir l’idée de remplacer ces parties impénétrables à l’âme par une quantité égale de parties immatérielles, c’est-à-dire que notre âme peut s’assimiler. Qu’importe dès lors que les actions, les émotions de ces êtres d’un nouveau genre nous apparaissent comme vraies, puisque nous les avons faites nôtres, puisque c’est en nous qu’elles se produisent […] dans cet état, où comme dans tous les états purement intérieurs toute émotion est décuplée.” (Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 1, 85.) 46 Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, 94 (translation modified, my emphasis). / “Enfin, en continuant à suivre du dedans au dehors les états simultanément juxtaposés dans ma conscience, et avant d’arriver jusqu’à l’horizon réel qui les enveloppait, je trouve des plaisirs d’un autre genre.” (Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 1, 87; my emphasis.)

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shifting source of self-orientation, a sensory limit that, unlike a pyramid, has no actual independence from its viewer and so cannot help but permit itself to be crossed. It is, instead, impossibly called “real,” that is, not the product either of internal emotion and tropological projection, or of fleeting sense perception alone. There can be, of course, no such “real horizon” in reality as far as we see and experience reality. Yet, we can think it, “in effect,” which is to say, “in” our minds, as something like Hegel’s pyramid, a “shell” or “husk” (Hülle)47 that we could well call the “real horizon” both with regard to the bodies who will never see out of it and those who will never see inside it, the “real horizon” of those “real being[s]” whose “unknown modes of being” we cannot assimilate or integrate into ourselves: a “huge and mighty form” or a “vulgar” embodiment of “charity;” another man just like us, but who appears nothing like us because we have never seen him before; or a man (an actor) who appears and acts just like us precisely because he is nothing like us at all. Paul de Man, who, with good reason, hated all talk of emotion and distrusted all inside/outside metaphors, viewing them, as Diderot or Rousseau might say, as taking the effect for the cause, and removing us ever further from the real being and significance of both their terms – of talk and emotion, of inside and outside, as of their “mises en scène” in literature – did not, in his writing on Proust, see beyond the narrator’s combined use of these, past his talking of emotion as of a passing from outside to inside and back, especially here, in his talking about reading. If ever one could really “think,” let alone “rethink emotion,” without continually misrepresenting either, it would have to be from the very line of “the real horizon” Proust’s narrator names but does not reach, which is to say, from the position without horizon, or no position at all, of a body without “involuntary motions,” without signs or tells of any kind. Like Proust, de Man did not go “there,” that is, talk about this place where inside and outside, and the language that denotes them, really no longer prevail. Yet like Proust also, he knew a false horizon, a bad metaphor, when he saw one, and that “the real horizon,” unlike these, defined the critical position that kept them in view.

47 Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 2, 651. / Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, vol. 2, 292.

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Bibliography Brodsky, Claudia. “Whatever Moves You: ‘Experimental Philosophy’ and the Literature of Experience in Diderot and Kleist.” Traditions of Experiment from the Enlightenment to the Present: Essays in Honor of Peter Demetz. Ed. Nancy A. Kaiser and David E. Wellbery. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. 17–44. Brodsky, Claudia. “From the Pyramids to Romantic Poetry: Housing the Spirit in Hegel.” Rereading Romanticism. Ed. Martha B. Helfer. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. 327–366. Brodsky, Claudia. “Szondi and Hegel: ‘The Troubled Relationship of Literary Criticism to Philosophy.’” Telos 140 (2007), special issue Peter Szondi and Critical Hermeneutics: 45–64. De Man, Paul. “Semiology and Rhetoric.” Paul de Man. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. 3–19. Diderot, Denis. “Letter on the Blind, For the Use of Those Who See.” Denis Diderot. Selected Writings. Ed. Lester G. Crocker. Trans. Derek Coltman. London, New York: Macmillan, 1966. 14–30. Diderot, Denis. “Letter on the Deaf and Dumb, For the Use of Those Who Hear and Speak.” Denis Diderot. Selected Writings. Ed. Lester G. Crocker. Trans. Derek Coltman. London, New York: Macmillan, 1966. 31–39. Diderot, Denis. “Paradox on Acting.” Denis Diderot. Selected Writings. Ed. Lester G. Crocker. Trans. Derek Coltman. London, New York: Macmillan, 1966. 318–329. Diderot, Denis. “Lettre sur les aveugles à l’usage de ceux qui voient.” Denis Diderot. Oeuvres complètes. Vol. 4: Idées. Part 2: Le nouveau Socrate. Ed. Yvon Belaval et al. 25 vols. Paris: Hermann, 1978. 15–72. Diderot, Denis. “Lettre sur les sourds et muëts à l’usage de ceux qui entendent et qui parlent.” Denis Diderot. Oeuvres complètes. Vol. 4: Idées. Part 2: Le nouveau Socrate. Ed. Yvon Belaval et al. 25 vols. Paris: Hermann, 1978. 129–228. Diderot, Denis. “Paradoxe sur le comédien.” Denis Diderot. Oeuvres esthétiques. Ed. Paul Vernière. Paris: Garnier, 1988. 229–381. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik. Ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. 3 vols. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970 (= Werke in zwanzig Bänden, vols. 13–15). Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Trans. Thomas Malcolm Knox. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Lukács, György. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Trans. Anna Bostock. London: Merlin Press, 1971. Proust, Marcel. À la recherche du temps perdu. 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1954. Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past. Trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. 3 vols. New York: Random House, 1981. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Essai sur l’origine des langues, où il est parlé de la mélodie et de l’imitation musicale. Ed. Jean Starobinski. Paris: Gallimard, 1990. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music. Ed. and trans. John T. Scott. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1998. Wordsworth, William. “The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind: An Autobiographical Poem.” William Wordsworth. Poetical Works. Ed. Thomas Hutchinson and Ernest de Selincourt. London, New York, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1946. 631–752.

III. Thinking beyond Interiority: Reconceptualizing Emotion after the Great Dichotomy

Bernhard Waldenfels

The Role of the Lived-Body in Feeling

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Feelings not only have a place, they also have a time. Today, one can speak of a multifaceted renaissance of feelings. This concerns philosophy itself, particularly, ethics. Every law-based morality comes up against its limits when morals cease to be only a question of legitimation and begin to be a question of motivation, since motives get no foothold without the feeling of self and feeling of the alien. As it is treated by various social theories and psychoanalysis, the self is not formed through the mere acquisition or change of roles, but rather through a process that is susceptible to crises, a process shaped by affective bonds and separations. Learning, which is the theme of pedagogy, loses its hold whenever it is confronted by disinterest and listlessness. In neurobiology, the increased significance of those zones of the brain that are connected with the realization of feelings makes the brain, accordingly, no mere apparatus that processes data, but a living organ that selects and “evaluates” what is “important.” Finally, cross-cultural comparison shows the extent to which the one-sided preference for understanding and willing, which is the mark of Western rationalism, arises from a typical, not to mention a highly masculine attitude toward the world and life, as many different studies on gender difference stress.2 The following reflections provide a historical orientation directed toward a new determination of feelings. This new determination of feelings is phenomenological and takes the pathetic character of experience, nourished by the corporeality of experience as its point of departure.

1 The original German text of this essay was first published as: “Der leibliche Sitz der Gefühle.” Ereignis und Affektivität. Zur Phänomenologie sich bildenden Sinnes. Ed. Michael Staudigl and Jürgen Trinks. Vienna: Turia & Kant, 2007. 161–178. It was republished in the author’s own book: Sinne und Künste im Wechselspiel. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010. Ch. 13. The translation of this essay by Christina M. Gould was previously published in Continental Philosophy Review 41 (2008): 127–142. It is reprinted with the kind permission of the author and the editors. All translations from the German and all modifications of published translations by Christina M. Gould, if not indicated otherwise. Translator’s acknowledgments: I wish to express my deepest gratitude to Dr. Anthony Steinbock for all of his help in revising this translation. I would also like to thank Dr. Douglas Berger for his comments on an earlier draft of this translation. 2 Meier-Seethaler, Carola. Gefühle und Urteilskraft. Ein Plädoyer für die emotionale Vernunft. Munich: Beck, 1997.

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The repression and the return of feelings Feelings occupy a precarious position in Modernity. Of course everyone knows that there are feelings, but how are they given and where? Our valuation of them fluctuates between disparagement and ardor. Whoever makes an appeal to feeling as “to an oracle within his breast […] tramples underfoot the roots of humanity” 3 as Hegel wrote in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit: “The anti-human, the merely animal, consists in staying within feeling and being able to communicate only at that level.” 4 Yes, there are feelings, but merely as an undeveloped, dim, and wordless beginning. At the same time, Faust – not without ulterior motives – sings to Gretchen the high praise of feelings: “[…] call it Bliss! Heart! Love! God! / I do not have a name / For this. Feeling is all; / Names are but sound and smoke befogging heaven’s blazes.” 5 Whenever such conflicting evaluations arise, it is obvious that there is a secret complicity; one blames or praises beyond all measure what one does not easily endure. Heinrich Heine pours water into the wine of German feelings. In one text, which he wrote in 1854 shortly before his death, he explains, “A certain characteristic sentimentality always clings to our German rascals. They are no cold, unfeeling rogues, but tender-hearted scounderls. They have emotional natures; they take a warm interest in the fate of those whom they rob, and they are not to be got rid of.” 6 The modern subjectivizing of feeling is reflected in the constant fluctuation between appreciation and devaluation of feeling. This process correlates precisely with being disenchanted with the cosmos. As the very quintessence of causally explainable and controllable mechanisms, nature is henceforth not only free of sense, but also free of feeling. The eternal silence of infinite space may trigger a shiver, but this is a mere remnant of feeling that throws the observer back on himself. As Husserl shows in his Crisis text, the reduction of the cosmic lifeworld to a physical external world is made up for with the “complementary abstraction” of a psychological inner world.7 From now on, everything that cannot be accounted for cognitively as material properties, or 3 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. Arnold Vincent Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. 43. 4 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 43. 5 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Anchor Books, 1961. 327. 6 Heine, Heinrich. “Confessions.” Heinrich Heine. Prose Miscellanies. Trans. S. L. Fleishman. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1876. 245–298, here 245. 7 Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970. 228.

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practically as expediency, belongs to the realm of feelings. In their elementary form, feelings are private states of a subject: “I have the feeling that …” how should I know that you feel something similar? Quasi-physical analysis leads to the acceptance of atomic “sense-data,” often called sensation, which wanders around seeking a connection. As Lichtenberg quizzically noticed, we treat affects like “blemish make-up” that deceives us about the rawness of sensations.8 As long as they are left to themselves, feelings are considered to be irrational, obeying no rules. Descartes’s separation of soul/spirit and body gives rise to a dual sphere of feeling in which mental feelings such as pride and grief are taken to be higher and are set off from base or low animal feelings such as lust or disgust. Also, the world of feeling has its part maudite. There are indeed social feelings but they are context-specific and can, if necessary, be set off against one’s own feelings. “Possessive individualism” extends to feelings. In this way, feelings gradually lose their worldliness. Initially, feeling begins only with one’s self. There is a truth in this, but only a half-truth. It is just this impoverishment of the affective world that Hegel campaigns against in his mediations. Of course, there is also the contrary, as in Sterne’s “Sentimental Journey” whereby sensation becomes the guidebook to an exciting journey. In this respect, literature and art often appear as agents of something dying away and as harbingers of something to come. Moral sense, which authors such as Shaftsbury hold in high esteem, is related to aesthetic taste. Even with Kant, feelings try to find their way in the form of refined taste, but this stands in the shadows of the laws of nature and law-based morality. This holds true even more so for the moral feeling of respect that comes into “actual practice” from reason itself.9 After all, a novel nobility of feeling grows from this moral feeling of respect; it is seldom regarded in the argumentative train of our discourses and in the patterns of our systems. There has not always been such a subjective impoverishment of feelings, and it has not always lasted. What in Greek is called pathos or in Latin affectus, affectio, emotio, and passio, is embedded in Classical thought in many different ways: in the perception that commences with sensation; in the striving from which one is attracted to pleasure and shuns displeasure; in the speech that takes into consideration the mood and the interests of the listener; in the fervor of passion in which the world is contracted into a single light or dark point. Eros, which is praised in Antigone as an unconquerable power that

8 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. Aphorisms. Trans. Reginald John Hollingdale. London: Penguin, 1990. 62. 9 Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. A. 134.

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“falls on property,” 10 is far from an economy of feeling that the individual governs. Even concordia and consensus, which belong to the basic foundations of political life, contain a lived-bodily sensuous undertone that is not exhausted in common objectives and rules. Nevertheless, pathos moves into the shadow of logos in Classical philosophy as well. Even pathos becomes the adversary of logos in the Stoics, whose influence is felt in Modernity in a special way. With the exception of Plato, who recognized a pathos of logos, pathos itself appears as something alogon or irrational, which has to bend itself to the hegemony of logos. The outlook already changes in the field of Classical rational philosophy with Rousseau, or in German Romanticism with Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche as the philosophical rebels of the nineteenth century, and completely changes with certain novel epistemic points of departure in the twentieth century. Indeed, even today there is no lack of attempts to create in feeling an esoteric homeland for the soul far from the strictures of a rationality that has been narrowly restricted in a mechanistic manner. But those attempts, which are concerned with giving feelings a new place and in many cases even a new name, are more convincing, and phenomenology has a special role to play in this. Husserl frees feelings from their subjective prison by conceptualizing experiences like being happy about something or being annoyed about something as an intentional feeling that plays a genuine part in sense disclosure and the formation of the self. We already find this in his Fifth Logical Investigation. To be sure, Husserl is initially satisfied with being able to dismiss everything that cannot be ordered among the cognitive and practical spheres as non-intentional feeling-states. Linguistically, this means that there is something that we encounter as joyful, sad, pleasant, dangerous, terrible or boring, but that it is pleasure and pain that throw us back on ourselves. I myself have the pain. The knife with which I cut myself does not have the pain nor does the dagger with which another confronts me. But, as is often the case, a negative definition does not take us very far. Even Husserl does not stop there when he later confers on sensuous hyle a unique valence, when he contrasts sensations (Empfindungen) with sensings (Empfindnisse),11 and allows intentions to arise out of affections. Nevertheless, one can hardly say that the relation between

10 Sophocles. “Antigone.” The Oedipus Plays of Sophocles. Trans. Paul Roche. New York: Mentor, 1991. 187–252, here 227. 11 See Husserl’s discussion in Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989. II, § 36.

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intentionality and affection in Husserl, and also later in Levinas or Henry, is clarified in a satisfactory way. Scheler, who develops his theory of feelings in the ethical context of his major work Formalism in Ethics and the Non-Formal Ethics of Value, leaves the Aristotelian hylomorphism behind from the outset; he does this by replacing sensations (Empfindungen) that still function as constitutive elements, with a sensing (Empfinden) that is to be characterized verbally, as a process that opens and closes. Intentional feeling is founded in an emotional a priori that is liberated from the dominance of the cognitive and the practical a priori. The theoretical background of value, nevertheless, remains problematic. Value appears as something perceptible and values are organized in a hierarchy that subordinates lived-bodily sensuous feelings to mental and spiritual feelings. The pathetic event of feeling is tracked according to a pregiven order of feeling.12 In Scheler’s later cosmological anthropology, in the essay The Human Place in the Cosmos, feelings participate in two movements that run contrary to each other, the movement toward spiritualization and toward vitalization; as the blind “feeling-urge,” they reach down into the deepest depths of life; and as “emotional acts” like good, love, repentance, or awe they soar to the highest heights of spirit.13 The erroneous “self-deification” characteristic of Spinoza and Hegel, a self-deification that has its place in human beings, eventually transforms all feelings into feelings of self. The medical anthropologist Erwin Straus has a more modest assessment. He borrows ideas from Scheler and also from Heidegger, but he works them out in his own way. He takes sensing as an event, which belongs neither to objectivity nor to subjectivity, since the process of sensing senses itself in and with the world.14 The programmatic title Vom Sinn der Sinne (About the Sense of the Senses) points to an internal connection between intentionality and affectivity, or as it is now called – between gnostic directedness-toward and pathetic beingstruck-by.15 In Heidegger’s Being and Time, sensing is transformed into the attunement of “Da-Sein,” a finding oneself-in-the-world that assumes a varying tonality in moods like fear, joy, or boredom. In French phenomenology the lived-bodily aspect of feelings is reinforced, as when Sartre emphasizes the magic of the emotions and the emotional enchantment of self, and when Merleau-Ponty describes sensing as an original, pre-objective and pre-subjective 12 In addition, see my critical position: “Wertqualitäten oder Erfahrungsansprüche?” Vom Umsturz der Werte in der modernen Gesellschaft. Ed. Gerhard Pfafferott. Bonn: Bouvier, 1997. 306–313. 13 Scheler, Max. The Human Place in the Cosmos. Trans. Manfred Frings. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008. 14 Straus, Erwin. Vom Sinn der Sinne. Berlin, Göttingen, Heidelberg: Springer, 1956. 372. 15 Straus, Vom Sinn der Sinne, 394.

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contact with the world, self, and other. An “it feels in such and such a way” or an “it touches me” would correspond to the “it perceives within me” that Merleau-Ponty juxtaposes with subjective perceptual acts. The re-determination of feelings already announces itself in this, namely, as something that comes to us. Through this we gain a critical distance from the newer variety of a hyletic phenomenology insofar as the latter grants self-affection a priority over every alien affection.16

Feeling as pathos Bruchlinien der Erfahrung 17 (Faultlines of Experience) is the title of the book that concerns a radicalization of experience. Radical experience means that there is nothing and no one – an, it, he, or she – that would precede the event of experience as a finished instance. It also means there are no ideal essences, no universal regulations, and no adequate grounds by which experience as an event of experience would be made possible or justified. In the “fertile bathos of experience” of which Kant already speaks in the Prolegomena,18 feelings find their place absolutely released from the province of the merely subjective. I characterize the foundation and the background against which all intentional and well-ordered behavior stands out as pathos or af-fection, literally, as doing. The Greek word pathos has a three-fold meaning. In the first instance, it means an experience that befalls us (Widerfahrnis). This experience that befalls us is an occurrence of a special kind. It is not a datum, not an objective occurrence, but even less is it a personal act or a subjective condition, like we still assume today.19 Pathos is something that happens; it happens by something nudging us, touching us, striking us, by something exerting an influence

16 See the entirely Francophonic debate that is carried out in the journal: Études Phénoménologiques 39/40 (2004): “Commencer par la phénoménologie hylétique?” 17 In Waldenfels, Bernhard. Bruchlinien der Erfahrung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002, I articulate what I can only suggest here. 18 Kant, Immanuel. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. Ed. and trans. Gary Hatfield. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. “Appendix,” 373, note. 19 See the definition that Hinrich Fink-Eitel suggests: “Affects are inner states that are shaped in a propositional-cognitive manner, that are mediated in a life-historical and psychical manner, and are founded in a bodily manner; moreover, they are subject to super-individual relations of social and cultural determinants.” (Fink-Eitel, Hinrich. “Angst und Freiheit. Überlegungen zur philosophischen Anthropologie.” Zur Philosophie der Gefühle. Ed. Hinrich FinkEitel and Georg Lohmann. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994. 57–88, here 57.)

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on us. It is not that pathos happens without our effort, but it goes beyond our doing by overcoming us. The grammatical form of the passive is related to pathos, only this must be understood as a primordial passive, not as a mitigated stage or as a reversal of the active. Furthermore, pathos means something adverse, something that is allied with suffering, but also something that admits of the proverbial learning through suffering (pathei mathos). The central theme of the experience of pain belongs here, including the inflicted pain that reaches its perverse apex in torture.20 Finally, pathos designates the exuberance of passion that leaves behind the habitual and leaves us like the platonic Eros that “stands outside human concerns and draws close to the divine.” 21 The pathos which overcomes us stands out from a pathetic background that points to a chronic character in relation to an acute occurrence.22 In a certain respect, we are attuned (eingestimmt) when something surprises us. This already applies to the bare impression; without even the slightest deviation from what is expected, without the development of an “affective relief,” 23 we would only resign ourselves to experiences, but not be complicit in having any new experiences. Affective dissonances arise when deviations from what is familiar get out of hand. It is these affective dissonances that first give cognitive dissonances their sharp focus – dissonances of which social psychology speaks. What is decisive for the emergence of pathos is that it is a matter of a genuine temporal displacement, “a jetlag of sorts,” a diastasis, that allows the alien influence to be separated out from one’s own initiative, and that binds them to one another in and through this rupture. Pathos is surprise par excellence. It always comes too early, as that which we could overlook; our answer always comes too late in order to be completely at the height of experience. This does not mean that something precedes one’s own experience in the manner that it presents itself for an outside observer; it does not mean that two events follow each other like stimulus and response in accordance with the

20 See more recently: Grüny, Christian. Zerstörung der Erfahrung. Eine Phänomenologie des Schmerzes. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004. 21 Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Christopher Rowe. London, New York: Penguin, 2005. 249 c–d. 22 The polarity of immediate emotion and habitual attitudes of feeling belongs to the basic tenets of the classical doctrine of affect. Paul Ricœur accordingly differentiates between emotion as surprise, emotion as shock, and emotion as passion in Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary. Trans. Erazim V. Kohák. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007. 250–280. 23 Husserl, Edmund. Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic. Trans. Anthony J. Steinbock. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001. 216.

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view of behaviorism. Rather, it means that the one experiencing precedes itself. Experience, which comes from that which befalls us, does not begin with itself, in the self-same, but from elsewhere, in the alien. Every deed and word that arises from a pathos is shaped by the essential feature of responsivity. It follows from this that I do not have a pathos in the way I “have” feelings; I am given over to a pathos. Further, in contrast to feelings peculiar to Modernity, pathos is no “accompanying phenomenon” that steps in as “third class” in addition to representing and willing, as Heidegger critically remarks.24 It is no mere component of experience; rather it is situated in the heart of the experience like the balance spring of a clock. Whoever believes he is “the master of his feelings” (an outspoken masculine expression) forgets his own origin. Finally, the pathetic separates itself from the pathological which can take on various and even completely opposite forms. In its being at the mercy of pathos, the possibility of one’s own response diminishes, while trying to shut oneself off from pathos, the response solidifies itself to a repertoire of responses. Shock and stereotypes mark the extremes of an event that finds its last stop neither in an outside nor an inside. The boundaries between normal and pathological feelings remain fluid as is shown again and again by the fact that this fluidity is not only accepted by Freudian psychoanalysis, but also by phenomenologically inspired doctors, including Ludwig Binswanger, Wolfgang Blankenburg, Henry Ey, Kurt Goldstein, Eugene Minkowski, Herbert Plügge, or Hubert Tellenbach.

Lived corporeality of feelings The place of the feelings that we think of as pathetic can be found neither in the soul nor in spirit. The place of feelings presupposes a nature that is neither completely outside itself, like extended things of nature, nor completely within itself, like pure spirit. Their place is the lived-body that senses itself in and through sensing something else and someone else. In the efficacy peculiar to itself, the lived body is unendingly exposed to foreign influences, and because of this remains vulnerable. Sensitivity and vulnerability are inseparable. This lived-body is of a lived-bodily-self; it refers to itself by at the same time withdrawing itself from itself, like seeing one’s own reflection in the mirror or hearing one’s own voice.25 The withdrawal of the self refers not only to the 24 Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. 178. 25 For more detail, see Waldenfels, Bernhard. Das leibliche Selbst. Ed. Regula Giuliani. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2000.

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functioning lived-body but also to the materiality of our physical body, binding us with nature and carrying with it the traces of a natural history. The enigma of “my brain” also belongs to this together with the neural zones of feeling of the limbic system, which functions as a “central system of evaluation.” 26 “My brain” is as puzzling as my “lived-body” which according to Descartes is only due to a “particular privilege” that is mine to name.27 Indeed, who should issue me this special authorization if it is not inscribed with indelible letters on my body? Even the feeling of the self participates in this material physicality that belongs to us without our ever being able to appropriate it. The foreignness of one’s own lived-body makes us receptive to the foreignness of others. We are only able to be approached, touched, affected, insofar as we are never totally with ourselves. Without this abyss in ourselves which – as Plato asserts – borders on madness, there would only remain a half-hearted contentment. The lived-body that we are and that we do not fully possess circumscribes a sphere of feeling that is opposed both to a dualistic split as well as to a univocal hierarchicalization. However, this sphere in no way presents itself as homogenous. We can differentiate between different ranges and polarities. Thus, there are peripheral sensations like pain that arise if I cut my finger and central complexes of sensation, such as heart trouble, that effect our entire state of health. We experience recurring feelings of satisfaction and feelings of happiness that radiate through life. Affects can appear with a greater or lesser intensity, for example, as a calm self-assurance or as a boundless egoism and as insatiable ambition. Active upsurges of feeling like anger, which erupt when the opportunity arises and again subside when the situation changes, are opposed to the enduring lust for revenge that poisons life or to a reconciliation that – as one so beautifully puts it – “looks the other way” (fünf gerade sein lässt). This corresponds to the dual character of the active and habitual lived-body, and it makes possible a culture of feeling that goes beyond the moment. Related to this dual character is the difference between a focal feeling that is affixed to certain events or experiences and a total feeling, like the global pain or the joy of life that spreads out atmospherically, and that for this reason are hard to produce and just as difficult to overcome. While the livedbodily self feels addressed in different ways, it is always only more or less

26 In addition, see Roth, Gerhard. Das Gehirn und seine Wirklichkeit. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997. 194. However, if meanings and evaluative activities are attributed to the brain directly, we end up with a neurological homunculus. 27 Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy. Trans. Laurence J. Lafleur. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1951. 72.

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involved. Similar to the case of intentionality, we are to distinguish different modes and qualities in the sphere of affects, only that these are by far more difficult to apprehend because they do not concern the way in which something as something is grasped or re-evaluated, but rather the way in which we are struck by something without replacing this “something” with its effect. One can place the affects under the aegis of an “objective correlate,” like T. S. Eliot suggested in his poetics; but this does not mean that our feelings are directed toward objects. The rationality of feelings, which are in vogue with authors such as Ronald de Sousa or Martha Nussbaum, can always be an indirect rationality; and this is not, for instance, because feelings are something especially dark or deep, but rather because they are not “something” at all that we, for our part, can comprehend or manage, but something that forestalls our own efforts.

Dimensions of feelings We encounter basic forms of a corporeal pathos in all aspects of our experience. Already the simplest sensuous experience goes beyond a mere registration and coding of data and beyond processing such data. Corresponding to the red or blue that radiates toward us or surrounds us, is a red or blue behavior that is characterized by changing forms of turning-toward or avoidance, through flexible or stiff movements, by faster or slower rhythms. Blue or green favor the muscular activity of flexing (adduction) that is associated with voluntary ego-related performance, while the color red allows the extension (abduction) and thus involuntary forms of world-relatedness to emerge. We can see a fundamental relationship with the world and the self in the behavior of colors, a relationship that precedes the representational and practical orientation.28 As Kurt Goldstein shows in his neuropathological studies by appealing at the same time to Goethe and Kandinsky, the physiology of color coincides with the symbolism of color. If we differentiate between warm and cold colors, we can see that when someone becomes red with anger or green with envy, it is no mere metaphor, as it would be if raw data were covered with an affective lacquer. There is an ethos of the senses that grows out of pathos before its systematic instructions are put into action. In this sense, Nietzsche’s physiol28 Goldstein, Kurt. Der Aufbau des Organismus. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1934. 167–170, 307–312. Merleau-Ponty resorts back to these studies repeatedly in his early work, for instance, in particular in his treatment of sensation in the Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. New York: Routledge, 1962.

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ogy of morality with its “sign language of the affects” 29 contains various antidotes to every kind of superstructure of morality that embellishes itself with its all too sublime feelings. Attention, without which there would be literally nothing noteworthy or desirable, does not begin with acts of observation that illuminate a dark area like a floodlight; they begin with what attracts our attention or strikes us, with something that awakens our sympathy and generates excitement. Everything new has an affective value, and not a mere informational value, and this even applies to neural processes. Paying attention, in which what is conspicuous takes shape, is already a kind of response.30 To cite again from Lichtenberg’s Aphorisms: “When sometimes I had drunk a lot of coffee, and was consequently startled by anything, I noticed quite distinctly that I was startled before I heard the noise: we thus hear as it were with other organs as well as with our ears.” 31 The current debates that were kindled by Benjamin Libet’s experiments and even had the presumption of denying freedom suffer from the fact that they subjected the neurologically indicated delay of consciousness to the conventional linear schema of time; pathetic experience is thereby reduced to a succession of moments.32 Furthermore, there are world-feelings or fundamental temperaments (Grundbefindlichkeiten) with whose disturbance the order of the world and our own existence becomes unstable. This holds for wonder and anxiety which have been counted among the basic motives of philosophy from the time of the ancients to our own. Wonder, as it is described in Plato’s Theatetus, is a pathos that befalls us, makes “our head spin,” and affects our entire body. Wonder is not a problem to be solved. It is, moreover, not something to be learned but, at most, something to be practiced like dealing with death. A situation in which I “do not know myself” to use Wittgenstein’s simple words, is not to be confounded with ignorance or with a defective knowledge. If it were only that one could confidently allow philosophy to play the role of a “General Problem Solver.” There is always something uncanny in the little “something is not right.” For philosophy, as well as for art, this means that

29 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. 100. 30 I refer to my recent work Phänomenologie der Aufmerksamkeit. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004 that is based entirely on the resonance between the process of something becoming noticed (Auffallen) and the process of taking notice of something (Aufmerken). 31 Lichtenberg, Aphorisms, 24. 32 Benjamin Libet, a convinced Neocartesian, is decidedly more careful in his conclusions. See his recent account in Mind Time: The Temporal Factor in Consciousness. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2004.

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they cross a threshold and are efficacious beyond their own field, unlike a trusty dogmatic philosophy or like merely academic art. Memory, which enjoys a special reputation as a remembrance of culture, is certainly dependent on repeatable structures, on the collective remembrance of places, on figures and rituals of memory. But these sources run dry if something does not continually awaken our memory. This surplus, which goes beyond the mere capacities for memory, cannot be thought without something affecting us and making a bodily impression on us. Nietzsche’s remark: “If something is to stay in the memory, it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory” 33 evokes a pathetic and deep event that cannot be fully culturalized or moralized. Not only thoughts, but also memories come whenever they want to and not whenever we want them to come. With the expression of feeling we enter an area where the experience of one’s own self and the experience of the alien are interwoven. Moreover, the expression is to be kept free and clear from a Cartesian split, a split for instance, that makes us think of anger as something that is already present on the inside and merely steps outside. When Scheler insists in his work The Nature of Sympathy that the red of anger not only indicates anger, the red of shame not only indicates shame, but that these feelings are realized in the gesture of expression, this refers to a peculiar body language which also plays an important role in Freud’s symptom-formation.34 Symptoms as they come to light in parapraxis, for example, in a slip of the tongue or in neurotic compulsions to wash or in the curiosities of a bedtime ritual, do not only mean something else, but they substitute for something else. A vicarious satisfaction is not limited to sending a coded message. Paralinguistic elements like intonation, tempo, and rhythm, which make up a pre-semantic and pre-pragmatic speech, also belong to body language that is marked in a pathetic manner. In the tone that makes music, what speaks to us, stimulates us, excites us, comes to expression before it is put into words or put into practice. In addition, extralinguistic body language is articulated in facial expressions, physiognomy, attitude, gait, clothes, and the way one adorns the body. We can see how someone is situated in self-presentation, in the manner of appearing, and in affected behavior. Wittgenstein’s dismantling of private language results in a sphere of expression in which there are indeed niches, angles, folds, and

33 Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. 61. 34 Scheler, Max. The Nature of Sympathy. Trans. Peter Heath. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979. 242.

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cracks, but which does not exhibit a protected interior or a bodily reserve that would admit of a pure feeling of self. Body language is carried forth in a body conversation. It begins with the affective dialogue between the infant and the maternal parent. Virgil’s risu cognoscere matrem, the early childlike smile of the mother that René Spitz cited in his study of infants, opens a sphere of intimacy that develops gradually – or even fails to develop, as in the case of hospitalism.35 Exploratory, motor, and affective moments are intertwined in the cultivation of trust and intimacy, but also in the absence of an enduring relationship of trust that finds its auto-erotic expression in the child who rocks himself in solitude.36 Becoming intimate, which at first allows a certain binary “sphere of ownness” to develop, has as its flipside a becoming alien, which usually manifests itself in the eighth month as an acute shyness of strangers. One could be tempted to speak of an original situation of embarrassment.37 In any case, brute or primitive feelings are out of the question. The early childlike conversation of the body is carried forward in adult life, a life that is never free from syncretistic elements of an interpenetration that belongs to the intercorporeality of feelings.38 All this goes far beyond intro-pathy or an em-pathy that continues to evoke a kind of Cartesian framework. Whoever is exposed to alien influences and appeals does not arrive at the other by putting himself in the place of the other and in his situation. Moreover, the interpenetration of a body-conversation is not to be equated with a sympathy that is extracted from antipathy. Experiences that befall us do not converge, and it is precisely for this reason that they surprise us. In his essay On the Gradual Formation of Thoughts While Speaking (Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden), Kleist refers to the look of a listener “that announces to us an incompletely expressed

35 Translator’s note: Hospitalism is a pediatric diagnosis that describes infants who wasted away while in the hospital. It is now thought that this wasting away was due to a lack of social contact since those infants in poorer hospitals that could not afford incubators did not die as often since they were held by the staff. 36 Spitz, René A. Dialogues from Infancy: Selected Papers. Ed. Robert N. Emde. New York: International Universities Press, 1983. Not only Sigmund Freud, but also the trained author Anna Freud regards the affective experiences from the early childhood period as “a pioneer” for the development within all other ranges. 37 I refer here to the remarks of Guy van Kerckhoven, who follows Hans Lipps, in “In Verlegenheit geraten. Die Befangenheit des Menschen als anthropologischer Leitfaden in Hans Lipps Die menschliche Natur.” Revista de filosofía 26 (2001): 55–84. 38 I am reminded of Merleau-Ponty’s idea of intercorporéité, a chiasmatic network, which is called also following Husserl interpenetration or intertwining (Ineinander). This interpenetration would not only be characterized as “intentional interpenetration” (see for instance Husserl, Crisis, 255–257), but also as a co-affective interpenetration.

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thought as already understood.” 39 With this, he recalls the continual birth of sense and of our self out of pathos. That there are miscarriages with this continual birth, that to this look also belongs the look of control and persecution, does not change anything about the way the experience of the alien emerges from experiences that befall us, experiences that go beyond every unity and discord directed toward sense and rule.

Normalization and mechanization of feelings Among many other questions, there remains the question of the normalization of feelings and their possible mechanization. Does the world of feelings consist of nothing but surprises? Presuming this would mean to mistake sensing for sensation. Normality invariably arises when expressions of feeling are given to iterable forms, regulated courses of events, and conventional rituals. We learn to clench our teeth in pain, to let sympathy run free, to express condolence or to conceal joy about another’s pain. But these modes of expression are distinguished by various degrees of participation that can be classified according to an affective temperature scale. When a congregation of mourners comes together for a funeral, one discovers substantial variations in temperature that do not become fully leveled out through etiquette and ritual. In the end, the funeral feast provides for a normalization of feelings that have been all too strained. Here everyone had the feeling of a mourning that was completely transformed, the feeling of a hearty appetite, and they sat down at the table full of anticipation. The meal was shared and because pain does not make for less conversation than joy, soon a lively conversation was under way.40

Uncle Peppi, the protagonist bearing the same name as the story by Ludwig Thoma who “had abandoned himself to grief most vehemently,” must then also “unburden his heart more strongly than the others.” 41 39 Kleist, Heinrich von. “Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden.” Heinrich von Kleist. Sämtliche Werke. Ed. Erwin Laaths. Munich: Droemer, 1952. 836–841, here 837. “But consider, rather, that, when speaking, we find a strange source of enthusiasm in the human face of the person standing before us; and from a look that signals comprehension of a half-formulated thought we may often draw the expression needed to find the other half.” (Kleist, Heinrich von. “On the Gradual Formation of Thoughts While Speaking.” Heinrich von Kleist. Selected Prose. Ed. Peter Wortsman. Brooklyn: Archipelago, 2010. 255–263, here 257.) 40 Thoma, Ludwig. “Onkel Peppi.” Ludwig Thoma. Onkel Peppi und andere Erzählungen. Munich: Paul List Verlag, 1962. 129–156, here 153. 41 Thoma, “Onkel Peppi,” 153.

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But there are also extremes that cannot be balanced out. We approach the cold pole if the mastery and control of feelings take the form of a diplomatic sense of tact or the form of a management of feelings. If we go so far as to operationalize human behavior and human experience, then the perceptible lack, not to mention the insatiable desire of others, turns into an objectively ascertainable need, and a need that can be mechanically regulated, like when a machine needs oil or the body lacks blood sugar. A feeling-machine like Dieter Dörner’s computer program EMO knows eruptions of feeling only as valves that open. Thus, where feelings are concerned, everything happens in a proper manner.42 Sudden shocks, enduring traumas, and surprises of every kind, which arise unexpectedly and unprogrammed, comprise the warm pole of the scale. It is not out of the question, therefore, that one uses extraordinary events as stimulants to increase functioning. Nothing prevents humanity from becoming confused by its own simulations. Were this not so, there would be no such thing as a fabricated pathos. Related to the changing intensity of feelings is the manner of their integration and disintegration. In his theory of affects, Freud separates the affective behaviors that are bound from those that are free moving. Similarly, we can differentiate between a bound pathos that forms the background of our habitual behavior, and thus can occur inconspicuously like an everyday greeting, and a released pathos that pulls us out of our habitual relations. Pathos itself would then only be indirectly graspable as a deviation from the usual, as a surplus of what is non-learnable in learning, as what is alien in one’s own self. If the pathetic surplus were leveled out by normalization, we would encounter the “normal man” of which Nietzsche warns, who is only acquainted with normal feelings. The human as “undetermined animal” would approach the status of an animal that is determined artificially. The “antihuman” that comes to expression here is not based on the fact that the human remains arrested by brute beginnings; rather, it stems from the fact that logos splits itself from pathos, to which it owes its momentum.

Philosophy of feelings For the philosopher and certainly for the phenomenologist, the question concerns how feelings can be grasped, how they can be described and conceptualized without compromising their status as feelings. Husserl’s well known 42 Let me refer here to my critical remarks in Grenzen der Normalisierung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998. 112, 247, or to my Bruchlinien der Erfahrung, 55, 382.

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demand, “to bring the pure and so to speak still mute […] experience to an expression of its own sense” 43 reaches its limits when we are confronted by experiences that befall us – experiences that rupture the coherence of sense and in this respect have no sense. Already in the natural-communicative attitude we must distinguish between the pathic expression, which comes from a pathos (for example, the expression of astonishment, uneasiness, indignation, affection, the cry that erupts in limit-situations), and the pathetic expression, which endeavors to give pathos itself an intensified expression. A cry is, in this sense, never pathetic. At most, what is pathetic is the cry that the actor lets out on stage, or the cry that Edvard Munch captures in his painting. In a diary entry from 1892, which directly refers to the origin of this well-known motif, the painter describes how while walking along the street with two friends at sunset, all of a sudden the sky was dyed a bloody red color and in the clouds, blood and swords flared up: “I stood there, trembling with fright. And I felt a loud, unending scream piercing nature.” 44 The bridge between the pathic eruptive expression and the intensified pathetic expression forms the uneasiness of the experience that increases up to the point of horror – an experience that finds its place in the painting and continues as the uneasiness of its gaze.45 To be sure, the artistic design of the painting leaves the ground of the natural attitude by putting out of play our habits of expression and our habits of seeing. In this way, the autobiographical note breaks open the framework of an ordinary autobiography just as in Plato’s anecdote of the philosopher who, while stargazing, loses the ground under his feet and falls into a pit. We are left here with our original question of how we as philosophers and phenomenologists can speak of feelings. Two extremes come up empty. The first extreme would consist of an immediate expression of feelings; here, we would not leave the perspective of direct participation. Whoever speaks anxiously about anxiety, boringly about boredom, contributes little to the clarification of anxiety or boredom. Here, the “how” of pathic experience is not disengaged from the “that.” So-called existentialism that promises to merge thinking with life draws nearer to such a short-circuiting pathetic experience. We cannot conceive of philosophy without a certain dégagement.

43 Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations. Trans. Dorian Cairns. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999. 38–39 (translation modified). 44 Edvard Munch, diary entry dated 22 January 1892, quoted after: Heller, Reinhold. Edvard Munch: The Scream. New York: Viking Press, 1973. 107. 45 I refer to my study “Der beunruhigte Blick.” Bernhard Waldenfels. Sinnesschwellen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998. 124–147.

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The other extreme would consist of a distancing discourse about feelings, which adopts the perspective of a disinterested observer or disinterested surgeon. Neutrality, as a form of apathy, has its own sense, but only as an artificial attitude that emerges from a process of neutralization. This applies to the impartiality of the judge or to the impartiality of the historian, just as it does to the calm hand of the surgeon. If one were to raise neutrality to a standard and then as a philosopher be content with dryly analyzing experiences of pain, the agony of torture, anxiety of war, as well as eagerness in research, joy in discovery, delight in love, agony in love, and outbreaks of despair as something that does not concern him or herself, then all we would get with this would be herbaria of feelings. A third possibility is offered in a speaking that speaks about feelings but at the same time from them. We encounter such a form of indirect participation at decisive places. One can think about the witness to whom something happens, and it is this that makes him a witness; the therapist who resists a direct reflection on feelings but, in addressing the conflicts, sets free new possibilities of response; the counselors who help the other person in an adverse situation without being directly affected. Just as Walter Benjamin demanded from a good translation that it allows the original text to shine through, one can conceive of an indirect speaking and writing that allows the experiences that befall us and feelings that deal with them to shine through. To this corresponds in phenomenology a certain kind of epoché, not the customary form of intentional and reflective epoché that reduces everything that shows itself to its sense, that is, to an as-what-something-is-meant-and-given, but an affectional and responsive epoché that goes beyond the “what” and the “goal” of the intentional act and brings to expression the “wherefrom” of being affected as well as the “direction” of response.46 This epoché would not provide us with an encompassing view, although it would permit a distancing lateral view, a view that does not lose sight of what is distanced or unfamiliar. If philosophy is born from wonder or anxiety then it is also born from pathos. A philosophy that would completely forget its pathetic origins would be nothing more than a dogmatic philosophy that becomes entangled in and bound by its own concepts and arguments, and, in the worst case, would serve as an ideological fortress.

46 I count such a responsive epoché among the apparatus of a responsive phenomenology. See my Antwortregister. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994. 195–197.

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Bibliography Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy. Trans. Laurence J. Lafleur. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1951. Fink-Eitel, Hinrich. “Angst und Freiheit. Überlegungen zur philosophischen Anthropologie.” Zur Philosophie der Gefühle. Ed. Hinrich Fink-Eitel and Georg Lohmann. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994. 57–88. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Anchor Books, 1961. Goldstein, Kurt. Der Aufbau des Organismus. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1934. Grüny, Christian. Zerstörung der Erfahrung. Eine Phänomenologie des Schmerzes. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. Arnold Vincent Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. Heine, Heinrich. “Confessions.” Heinrich Heine. Prose Miscellanies. Trans. S. L. Fleishman. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1876. 245–298. Heller, Reinhold. Edvard Munch: The Scream. New York: Viking Press, 1973. Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970. Husserl, Edmund. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989. Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations. Trans. Dorian Cairns. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999. Husserl, Edmund. Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic. Trans. Anthony J. Steinbock. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Kant, Immanuel. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. Ed. and trans. Gary Hatfield. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Kerckhoven, Guy van. “In Verlegenheit geraten. Die Befangenheit des Menschen als anthropologischer Leitfaden in Hans Lipps Die menschliche Natur.” Revista de filosofía 26 (2001): 55–84. Kleist, Heinrich von. “Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden.” Heinrich von Kleist. Sämtliche Werke. Ed. Erwin Laaths. Munich: Droemer, 1952. 836–841. Kleist, Heinrich von. “On the Gradual Formation of Thoughts While Speaking.” Heinrich von Kleist. Selected Prose. Ed. Peter Wortsman. Brooklyn: Archipelago, 2010. 255–263. Libet, Benjamin. Mind Time: The Temporal Factor in Consciousness. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2004. Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. Aphorisms. Trans. Reginald John Hollingdale. London: Penguin, 1990. Meier-Seethaler, Carola. Gefühle und Urteilskraft. Ein Plädoyer für die emotionale Vernunft. Munich: Beck, 1997. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. New York: Routledge, 1962. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.

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Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Christopher Rowe. London, New York: Penguin, 2005. Ricœur, Paul. Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary. Trans. Erazim V. Kohák. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007. Roth, Gerhard. Das Gehirn und seine Wirklichkeit. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997. Scheler, Max. The Nature of Sympathy. Trans. Peter Heath. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979. Scheler, Max. The Human Place in the Cosmos. Trans. Manfred Frings. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008. Sophocles. “Antigone.” The Oedipus Plays of Sophocles. Trans. Paul Roche. New York: Mentor, 1991. 187–252. Spitz, René A. Dialogues from Infancy: Selected Papers. Ed. Robert N. Emde. New York: International Universities Press, 1983. Straus, Erwin. Vom Sinn der Sinne. Berlin, Göttingen, Heidelberg: Springer, 1956. Thoma, Ludwig. “Onkel Peppi.” Ludwig Thoma. Onkel Peppi und andere Erzählungen. Munich: Paul List Verlag, 1962. 129–156. Waldenfels, Bernhard. Antwortregister. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994. Waldenfels, Bernhard. “Wertqualitäten oder Erfahrungsansprüche?” Vom Umsturz der Werte in der modernen Gesellschaft. Ed. Gerhard Pfafferott. Bonn: Bouvier, 1997. 306–313. Waldenfels, Bernhard. “Der beunruhigte Blick.” Bernhard Waldenfels. Sinnesschwellen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998. 124–147. Waldenfels, Bernhard. Grenzen der Normalisierung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998. Waldenfels, Bernhard. Das leibliche Selbst. Ed. Regula Giuliani. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2000. Waldenfels, Bernhard. Bruchlinien der Erfahrung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002. Waldenfels, Bernhard. Phänomenologie der Aufmerksamkeit. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004.

Hermann Kappelhoff

Artificial Emotions Melodramatic Practices of Shared Interiority

The space of animated feelings Unlike the case of the famous greylag geese of behavioral research, in the human species it is the adults rather than the child who are permanently marked by their first encounter with their offspring. In a happy human family, the newborn makes short work of its parents’ youthful egoisms and transforms them into loving, caring parents. This primal scene of the human capacity for love is the premise of A. I. – Artificial Intelligence, a film by Steven Spielberg from 2001. But here the child, little David (Haley Joel Osment), is already a big boy, and he is given to his mother only to comfort her over the loss of her biological son, still in a coma after an accident. David is a robot, a comfort machine, an automaton designed to awaken feelings. And he is so convincing as a child simulation that the mother soon falls into a hypnotic delirium of love. But when the real child unexpectedly wakes up from the coma, he finds he has lost his mother’s love to his mechanical rival – or almost lost it, for in the end, the reality principle wins out and the mother returns her affections to her son. At this point, rather than scrapping David as the rules require, the mother abandons him in a dark wood. And with this turn to the realm of the fairy-tale, little David now starts to confuse the feelings of the movie audience as well. Indeed, he is anything but a machine; he is the actor Haley Joel Osment, whose appearance in the film The Sixth Sense (USA, 1999) breathed new life into the type of the Hollywood child star. Here Osment plays a generically cute child with such mechanical precision that the audience is in fact left unsure about whether they are dealing with a living being. Still, we may assume that the feelings of the audience are moved as though at the sight of a stray, helpless child. What kind of audience is this, showing feelings for a young actor playing an automaton, without, strictly speaking, being deceived about his robotic nature? When the audience is finally brought to tears, these tears are no doubt physically real, and yet they are no less artificial than the intelligence of the protagonist. Seen in this way, the first part of the film reflects a basic question of bourgeois subjectivity: What is compassionate human feeling, if this feeling not only can be successfully simulated, but can even be grounded in simulation and illusion?

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The film poses the question of artificial intelligence as a question of artificial emotion. It is as if it were staging a clinical test: How does human inner life, the interior of the world of feelings, relate to the external quality of the objects of sentimental fantasy that it meets at every turn? This question concerns the a priori of the success, not only of many Spielberg films – from E. T. to The Color Purple or Schindler’s List – but also of a genre that is described so perfectly in popular language with the term “tearjerkers.” It concerns the tears of a world audience whose emotions are as real as they are artificially induced. After the short process of initializing maternal love comes the long history of the machine’s becoming human. How, through a series of reactions from the object of a more or less imposed love, does a sensate being emerge? Like many fairy tales, the film ultimately produces a parable of becoming adult. By the light of the full moon, David flees from dark men, finds his way through the creepy world of a heavy metal gothic party, journeys into the Las Vegas of monstrous sexual fantasies to look for a blue fairy who will transform him into a complete human being, capable of sentiment and interiority. In the end, he will find his fairy, a wooden puppet with a painted-on smile at the bottom of the sea, surrounded by a billowy haze of plankton. But even the blue fairy is only a dummy from the amusement park of a lost world that represents the interior of our fantasy world and the objects of contemporary sentimental culture. The artificial intelligence that finally grants David his wish and gives him a human inner life by granting him a loving mother for a couple of hours – this is the illusion of melodramatic cinema, the poetic logic of “sentimental fantasy.” 1 It can be understood as the attempt to create and form such an artificial interiority. The audience that is brought to tears gives us perhaps the most precise idea of this function, although western entertainment cinema has a whole series of comparable manifestations. In laughter and crying, in fear and compassion, in horror and thrills, their registers can be distinguished

1 This term is taken here from Laura Mulvey’s concept of melodramatic fantasy as a cultural activity. She speaks of the melodramatic as a “cultural activity of fantasy,” thus seeking to put a positive spin on the sentimental activity of fantasy as an object, without dissolving it in the representation of these fantasies (Mulvey, Laura. “‘It Will Be a Magnificent Obsession’: The Melodrama’s Role in the Development of Contemporary Film Theory.” Melodrama: Stage Picture Screen. Ed. Jacky Bratton et al. London: British Film Institute, 1994. 121–133, here 126– 128). In a similar vein, Teresa de Lauretis distinguishes between the “public fantasy” and the private (Lauretis, Teresa de. “Kino und Oper, öffentliche und private Phantasien (mit einer Lektüre von David Cronenbergs Madame Butterfly).” Inszenierung und Geltungsdrang. Interventionen. Ed. Jörg Huber and Martin Heller. Zurich: Museum für Gestaltung, 1998. 143–164).

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according to the types of affection.2 This is why we can speak of the different affect-poetics of genre cinema. In this distinction, the poetics of the melodrama have been singled out in a particular position within the theoretical discussion of cinema.

Melodrama and film theory In many ways, the discussion about melodrama has been paradigmatic for the development of film theory. Indeed, the examination of this genre was able to explain a number of fundamental problems that had arisen in the attempt to understand audiovisual art and sentimental entertainment culture in a comprehensive sense. On the one hand, the task was undertaken to develop a theory of audiovisual images that could be distinguished from the idea of realistic illustration. Measured against a realistic reproduction of external reality, the exalted representational forms of the melodrama seemed exaggeratedly expressive and artistically inferior. On the other hand, the melodrama showed that popular cinema, which, at least in Western popular culture, was heavily marked by the form of Hollywood films, could not be explained by the criteria of auteur films. What was needed instead was a notion of genre that might expand the various poetics of audiovisual entertainment culture. Finally, it was clear that it was precisely in melodrama that the mechanisms of meaning construction could not be grasped with conventional concepts – be they those of signs, the text, or narration. The obvious escapism, the hyperbolic excesses, and the platitudes of profound and unfathomable meaning, all these traits belong to a poetic logic that cannot be grasped in terms of narrative economy. The visuality, the music, the gestures and facial expressions of the actors were defined by too much meaning and expression. This is why critics spoke of excessive forms of expression in these films as compared to the logic of narration. In such forms, one could either identify a characteristic of kitsch or an index for the specific poetics of the melodrama.

2 Each of them manifests a different variation of pleasurable self-affection, a relation of the subject to its physical presence, which in recent research is thematized as the “entertainment of the sensational.” Cf. Singer, Ben. Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.

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Starting from Brooks’s theory of the melodramatic mode, Thomas Elsaesser developed a theory of the genre.3 Unlike Brooks, he did not emphasize the question of the moral legibility of external reality through all the stylistic overabundance. He argued that what is articulated in the excessive overabundance of expression is a subjective experience of sensation. Informed by the psychoanalytic concept of unconscious desire, film images themselves were understood in their hyperbolic overabundance as the expression of a subjective quality of sensation that could not be expressed in words. In the expressive excess that characterizes the melodrama’s style, a mute inner life is articulated. The poetic logic of the melodrama can be grasped along these lines and distinguished from other genres. In film melodrama, everything that appears as the external world is already an internally experienced world, a world reflected in the subjective experience of sensation. In every detail of melodramatic staging – light, colors, the rhythm of the montage as well as the music and the gestures and facial expressions of the actors – a subjective sensation is articulated, a feeling that only emerges, on the level of the action represented, in thoroughly mediated ways. What is at issue here, first of all, are the sensations of the spectator in front of the screen. The spectator must first realize the audiovisual composition itself as a process of feeling in order to then connect it up with the action represented and its protagonist. Seen this way, the melodrama refers to the calculated nature of the staging in which all the elements of expression in the filmic composition stimulate and modulate the spectator’s process of feeling. This is why the melodramatic can be understood as the fundamental aesthetic mode of the effect of cinema, and, indeed, the culture of Western entertainment in general.4 The melodrama, as a genre of its own, would then be defined by the fact that it highlights this mode of expression precisely because it is focused on the experience of the subjective sensation of the self in its tension with external reality. This is the reason for the profoundness, which is as redundant as

3 Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1976. Elsaesser’s essay “Tales of Sound and Fury,” which already appeared in 1972, proposes a film-theoretical approach that develops an idea similar to Brooks’s. Cf. Elsaesser, Thomas. “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama.” Monogram 4 (1972): 2–15. Slightly shortened and altered in: Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film. Ed. Christine Gledhill. London: British Film Institute, 1987. 43–69. 4 See Christine Gledhill’s notion of “the concept of modality as the sustaining medium in which the genre system operates.” (Gledhill, Christine. “Rethinking Genre.” Reinventing Film Studies. Ed. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams. London: Oxford University Press, 2000. 221–243, here 223.)

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it is ornamental, of a world that is meaningful through and through. Its theme is the question of the interior world of the individual. How is this world constituted, how can it be experienced, and how can and should we relate to it? What role does it play for our social reality? This is exactly why the protagonists of the melodrama suffer, not from their actions, but from their sensations; this is why they are also typically imagined as female: as self-sacrificing mothers, abandoned children, unhappy devoted women, or as men incapable of action. In the audience, the melodrama targets precisely this sensation of the self: the experience of a subjectivity that is rich in sensation and emotion. Its aesthetic pleasure consists in what little David wants so badly for himself, the personal experience of an interiority that is full of sensation. We will call this experience sentimental enjoyment. Such enjoyment concerns the film itself. It concerns the time of the unfolding of the filmic world in the process of watching. In no way does the spectator abandon himself to the illusion of a living character whose emotion he experiences in empathy, as if the character were someone he was confronting in everyday life. Rather, he appropriates the world represented in the film in its entirety as an audiovisual image of an interior world of feelings. The audience’s tears do not so much testify to the diminishing ability of the conscious self to distinguish between fictional and genuine reality as to the diminishing of the difference between the object and the subject of sensation, between the image of a sensation and the sensation of such image.

The “invention” of the melodrama From this perspective, Hollywood melodramas refer back to a long tradition of sentimental entertainment in which media practices were developed and established in order to produce and shape the sensation of one’s own interiority. The historical place where this practice was developed as an art form can be identified quite clearly. In the history of culture, it is documented as the ‘invention of the melodrama’ with Rousseau’s Scène lyrique ‘Pygmalion’ from 1762. This ‘invention’ can stand for the development of a new medial experiential modality, which was established in the theater of sensibility as a fundamental mode of western entertainment culture: the theater of the fourth wall, the theater of illusion. In the poetics of the theater of sensibility, and its theory of acting and staging, we can reconstruct a proposal for a new kind of watching and listening, a space of perception based on the opposition of the stage, with its illusion, and the auditorium. We can understand this space as the

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media dispositif of aesthetic practices which, over various layers of media transformations, aim to produce an interior space of sentimental subjectivity. The melodramatic cinema – divided into the play of light on screen and the darkness of the auditorium off screen – is a late media transformation of this cultural practice of training the audience in a shared interiority. In what follows, I will attempt to construct something like a primal scene of this practice by taking at its word the talk of the invention of the melodrama. Rousseau’s Scène lyrique ‘Pygmalion’ from 1762 had an effect that was as turbulent as it was profound. The form was widely imitated and could be developed further, above all in Germany, into a theatrical genre somewhere between Singspiel (musical comedy) and Sprechtheater (straight theater), a genre which caused its own sensation.5 The “small but epoch-making work,” 6 as Goethe called it, became the model for a new form of theater that experienced a brief heyday in Europe in the late eighteenth century. The musical-dramatic genre of the melodrama might have been a fashionable intermezzo in cultural history, but the conceptual arrangement of Pygmalion formulates the essence of a new theater. It compresses the poetics of a new theatrical means of representation into an ideal type, the synaesthesia of the mute language of gesture, the emotional rhetoric of music and dramatic speech. This ideal type was just as characteristic of the German Rührstück (sentimental comedy) as it was of popular melodrama that developed in the urban boulevards of London and Paris, and, ultimately, of the theater of sensibility. With the ‘stage of Pygmalion,’ Rousseau proposed the matrix of a new mediality of theater, the fabric of a medium that went well beyond the genre of the melodrama.

5 At the time, one spoke of monodrama and duodrama, according to the structure of the monologues, while the term melodrama only became established later. The first performance in France took place in 1770, the first German version in 1772; the premiere of the first German melodrama, Johann Christian Brandes’s Ariadne auf Naxos, then followed in 1775 in the musical version by Jiři Benda. On the history of the genre as term and the position of Rousseau’s Pygmalion, see the detailed work in Schimpf, Wolfgang. Lyrisches Theater. Das Melodrama des 18. Jahrhunderts. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988. 17–19. 6 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. From My Life. Ed. Jeffrey L. Sammons and Thomas P. Saine. Trans. Robert Heitner. New York: Suhrkamp, 1987. 363.

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The dramatic text If we start from the wording of the monologue, the play describes the transformation of the lyrical ego’s consciousness in the process of Galathea’s transformation from a statue to an object of living desire.7 The changing internal states of this ego, as articulated in its own words, appear as the steps in an alchemical process. Its sensation is split into separate elements that are detached and isolated from one another in order to meld in the apotheosis which occurs in a brief dialogic sequence at the end: the new, artificial unity of marble coming to life. Pygmalion’s last sentence puts its seal on the happy result of this alchemy of the sensitive soul: “Yes, lovely and beloved object: yes, worthy masterpiece of my hands, my heart and the Gods … It is you, you alone: I have given you my whole being; from now on I shall only live through you. [Music]” 8 This process of transformation makes up the drama, the ‘action’ of the ‘lyrical scene,’ which is cloaked in the mythical legend of the artist who falls in love with the work of his own creation. In the first sentences, this artist presents himself in the attitude of world-weary exhaustion and lost self-esteem; he suffers from the emptiness of the world of objects, the former fullness of which is now little more than a wistful memory. “Make no more Gods, Pygmalion, for you are only a common artist […] the monumental arts […] hold no more charms for me, the taste I once had for admiring them is gone. [Music] The

7 Pygmalion is much more of a philosophical reflection than a work for the stage. Cf. Starobinski, Jean. Rousseau: Eine Welt von Widerständen. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1993. 101–122; Warning, Rainer. “Rousseaus Pygmalion als Szenario des Imaginären.” Pygmalion. Die Geschichte des Mythos in der abendländischen Kultur. Ed. Mathias Mayer and Gerhard Neumann. Freiburg: Rombach, 1997. 225–251; Mülder-Bach, Inka. “Autobiographie und Poesie. Rousseaus Pygmalion und Goethes Prometheus.” Pygmalion. Die Geschichte des Mythos in der abendländischen Kultur. Ed. Mathias Mayer and Gerhard Neumann. Freiburg: Rombach, 1997. 271–298; MülderBach, Inka. Im Zeichen Pygmalions. Das Modell der Statue und die Entdeckung der ‘Darstellung’ im 18. Jahrhundert. Munich: Fink, 1998. 225–227. On the history of the effects of the myth, see Dinter, Annegret. Der Pygmalion-Stoff in der europäischen Literatur. Rezeptionsgeschichte einer Ovid-Fabel. Heidelberg: Winter, 1979. 8 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. “Pygmalion: A Lyrical Scene.” Trans. Patricia de Man. The Portable Rousseau. Ed. Paul de Man. 1983. 1224–1230, here 1230. Special Collections and Archives, UCI Libraries, University of California, Irvine. http://hdl.handle.net/10575/1094 (21 October 2013). The musical directions reproduced here are not part of the English translation by Patricia de Man (nor of the original French text), but were added by the prominent melodrama composer Jiři Benda for a German edition of the play. Cf. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. “Pygmalion. Musikalische Szene.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Musik und Sprache. Ausgewählte Schriften. Trans. Dorothea Gülke and Peter Gülke. Wilhelmshaven: Heinrichshofen, 1984. 169–179.

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company of artists and philosophers seems insipid. [Music]” 9 This condition is accompanied by the extinguishing of libidinal desire, which is nonetheless identified as the source of artistic creation: “And you, young objects, masterpieces of the nature my art once dared to imitate, upon whose footsteps endless pleasures drew me on, you, my lovely models, who with one breath kindled within me the fires of both love and genius.” 10 The desire for actual women, the real models, came to an end as the erotic ideal was detached from carnal interest with the creation of Galathea’s image: “since I have surpassed you, I am indifferent to you all. [Music]” 11 What in Ovid’s fable was still an external event is here the process of internal transformation. In Ovid we are told of the gifts that Pygmalion presents to his artistic creation; in Rousseau’s work, we hear of a lyrical ego that has utterly lost its powers of desiring to the object of its own longing. Pygmalion resembles the lover as Freud described him in Mourning and Melancholy: the powers of self-love are transferred to the object; their loss is reflected in the emptiness of the world surrounding it. Much like the melancholic consciousness of the unhappy lover, Pygmalion fluctuates back and forth between depressive self-abandonment and manic protest. His speech moves by way of the tension of opposing states, which at the same time represent the dramatic motivation, so that they allow the lyrical ego – step by step – to run through the process of its transformation. The melancholy resignation is directly confronted with its opposite, the fullness of passionate desire: (He rises impetuously.) All over, it is all over; I have lost my genius … Still so young, and I have outlived my talent. [Music] But what then is this inner burning that devours me? What thing is this within me that seems to set me all afire? 12

The perspective of the speech switches, and Pygmalion becomes aware of a new aspect of his interiority. This sudden turn is accompanied by his realization that he possesses hidden inner powers, which always emerge at the point where subjective desire encounters resistance. In terms of the dramatic development as a whole, we can speak of a process of self-realization, of a gaze that reveals itself little by little to a mirror of internal life, a mirror of the soul. Here, the turn is seen concretely in Pygmalion’s suddenly erupting admiration for his own work. As the speech circles around the veiled statue, its beauty

9 Rousseau, “Pygmalion,” 1224. 10 Rousseau, “Pygmalion,” 1224. 11 Rousseau, “Pygmalion,” 1224. 12 Rousseau, “Pygmalion,” 1225.

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emerges with the words. At the same time, its emergence is transposed through pantomime into an external event on the stage. His approach to the statue and its actual unveiling is carried out in a hesitant, delaying motion: “He approaches the tent,” “He starts to lift the veil and then lets it fall again as if afraid.” 13 The monologue culminates in a homage to Galathea, and at the same time it formulates a protest against the objective, material basis of the artwork: “I wanted to make a nymph, and I have made a Goddess: Venus herself is less beautiful than you. [Music]” 14 The elevation of the nymph above the goddess of sensibility, the statue over the actual woman, is a movement that structures the play as a whole. It is a process in which the ‘ideal of desire’ is detached from the real object of erotic fascination and its carnal roots, and an illusionary reification of subjective wishes takes the place of real person. Galathea’s beauty is not rooted in any tangible, sensually graspable being. It emerges entirely from the reflection of the interior life of her creator; it is radically subjective.15 Like Narcissus, Pygmalion identifies his ego with the beauty of the object, and thereby enters a state that is diametrically opposed to the devaluated ego of the unhappy lover, though it still only constitutes the reverse side of this ego. The forces of love for the object are turned back into the self, collecting in the euphoric fullness of the lyrical ego.16 It would seem obvious to regard this as a negation of the carnal, the body, or the feminine.17 But the narcissistic circle of reflection that Pygmalion engages in constitutes only the ‘dramatic process,’ not its outcome. Pygmalion passes once more through the stages of melancholic emptiness, the obeisance of being in love, and manic fullness, only to then return to the level of sensual

13 Rousseau, “Pygmalion,” 1225. 14 Rousseau, “Pygmalion,” 1226. 15 “In fact, Galathea, even before she procured a soul, was not just a thing like any other. She is perfection visualized, she represents the illusion of desire.” (Starobinski, Rousseau, 116.) 16 “‘I worship myself in that which I have made,’ proclaims Pygmalion. Enamored with his own face, just as Narcissus had been, he wants to embrace the beloved reflection of himself in his work.” (Starobinski, Rousseau, 109.) On the Narcissus motif, see also Warning, “Rousseaus Pygmalion,” 233. 17 Mülder-Bach speaks of the obliteration of the body, which only gains “entrance into the world of the sensitive cogito in the idealized shape of a hallucinated soma” (Mülder-Bach, “Autobiographie und Poesie,” 282). Warning speaks of the fantasy of femininity, which, “unthreatening, latently incestuous, narcissistic,” is due to anxiety-provoking misogynous male fantasy (Warning, “Rousseaus Pygmalion,” 233). Heeg speaks of the fetish of the dead statue, which is put in place of the living woman (Heeg, Günther. Das Phantasma der natürlichen Gestalt. Frankfurt: Stroemfeld, 2000. 376).

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desires and to attempt to take corporeal possession of the object. Once again the path of his fantasy is blocked – though not without revealing to him yet another aspect of his interiority. Pygmalion recognizes his self-love and turns back to admiring the object. Vanity, human frailty. I can never tire of admiring my work; I am drunk with self love; I worship myself in that which I have made … No, nothing so beautiful was ever found in nature; I have surpassed the very Gods … [Music] What, was so much beauty created by my hands? My hands therefore have touched it? My mouth therefore could … Pygmalion.18

Suddenly he becomes aware of a new impulse. “My hands therefore have […]? My mouth therefore could …” If the sense for Galathea’s beauty was sparked by a sexual predilection for the “young models,” then it is corporeal desire that gives rise to the artistic work, the sculptural act itself. The erotic impulse continues in the forming hand of the artist, and its shaping originates directly from carnal passion. This, too, is reminiscent of Ovid’s fable: the lover touches and kisses the object of his desire. He “defiles the boundary of art and life.” 19 As a memory, this process has become an internal event. For Pygmalion, the power of sexuality is disclosed in the act of artistic creation itself. The memory of the act of artistic generation, the ‘conception’ of the image, leads him back to his sensual desires. He wishes to make the statue “more naked;” he works to renaturalize the ideal image. “I see a defect. This robe hides too much of her body; I must cut it lower.” 20 However, the path taken by this sensation also runs up against a boundary that demands an immediate turnaround. Once again there is a reversal that initiates a further transformation of his inner state: “Gods on high, I feel the palpitating flesh resist my chisel! [Music]” 21 The dread of “palpitating flesh” – just before the point of completely fusing together – leads to the recognition that no further disrobing could possibly heighten the attraction. As an object of sensual desire, Galathea’s sensual,

18 Rousseau, “Pygmalion,” 1226. 19 “Pygmalion […] has the choice between two incomplete roles: being a fetishist who defiles the boundary between art and life, or a kind of eunuch who fails at this boundary.” (Koschorke, Albrecht. “Pygmalion als Kastrat – Grenzwertlogik der Mimesis.” Pygmalion. Die Geschichte des Mythos in der abendländischen Kultur. Ed. Mathias Mayer and Gerhard Neumann. Freiburg: Rombach, 1997. 299–322, here 316.) In his essay, Koschorke focuses on the fundamental problem of the Pygmalion myth, which thematizes the boundary between mythical oneness and the distance between signifier and signified, which is the basis of any semiosis. 20 Rousseau, “Pygmalion,” 1225. 21 Rousseau, “Pygmalion,” 1226.

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corporal beauty can no longer be improved through additional nudity. The process described before is now repeated at a higher level. The ideal of desire is detached from its sensual basis – but this process no longer occurs in the object, but in Pygmalion himself. In what follows, his artistic and creative ambitions are separated from the sensual desire in which they are rooted; the spiritual principle of Eros is severed from the carnal. In a physiognomic reversal, the desire for an undressed body changes into a longing for the inner beauty of the soul, which has found expression in this perfected corporeality. “How beautiful must be the soul made to give life to such a body!” 22 It is as though the path of sensual desire found itself at a barrier created by an incomplete undressing – the barrier before a total physical unification, the horror of which adds another dimension. Having reached this boundary, his longing is now directed at a higher object: the beautiful soul which opens up an infinite desire.23 While at first she herself was the product of the transformation of sensual desire into an ideal of desire – “the ideal beauty that has been embodied in an inanimate stone” 24 – now the statue becomes a medium of its own, transforming real erotic affection into the desire for the beautiful soul. The ideal image of the desirable body now creates an analogous ideality in Pygmalion, the desire for the beautiful soul. In the first step, Pygmalion raised the ideal image of desire above the charms of the “young models,” in the second this image transformed his own sexual interest into a desire for an ideal of love. The statue changes from an object of desire to an ideal of desire and vice versa; looking at it separates the “spirit” of erotic desire from sexual impulses. This division of elements forms the basis of a further level of transformation. The monologue calls it a further level of unveiling; “the veil of illusion drops and I dare not look into my heart.” 25 Shifting back and forth between a celebration of the beautiful soul through the beauty of the statue and the disillusioned consciousness that the ‘cold marble’ signals the soul’s radical absence, the lyrical ego once again runs through the circle of transformation. This transformation involves a desire that is split. Pygmalion experiences the division of desire into an ideal-spiritual and a material-sensual element as a painful disillusionment, a disillusionment

22 Rousseau, “Pygmalion,” 1227. 23 “The love of an artificial being, however, is inexhaustible. It enables an eternal semiotic productivity, an infinite self-generation of signs and feelings.” (Koschorke, “Pygmalion als Kastrat,” 319.) 24 Starobinski, Rousseau, 109. 25 Rousseau, “Pygmalion,” 1227.

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which nonetheless reveals to him the materiality of nature. “A block of marble, a stone, a hard and formless mass, fashioned by a piece of steel! [Music]” 26 “Passionately,” he rebels against the material reality of the statue, opposing it to his refined desire which seeks only the beauty of the soul. “No, I have not lost my mind; I am not raving; I have no cause for self-reproach. It is not this lifeless marble of which I am enamored, it is a living being which resembles it. [Music]” 27 All the spirituality of Eros is collected into the unrealizability of his desire, in the longing ego; all corporeality and materiality are concentrated in the marble of the statue. The metaphor implies that this process is literally an alchemical process of transformation. The fire of passion is concentrated in the heart as excessive fervor, leaving behind all the cold in the stone. “Where is your life giving warmth in the futility of my vain desires? [Music] All your fire is concentrated in my heart while the coldness of death still clings to this marble; I am perishing because of an excess of that life which it lacks.” 28 Once again, the desiring ego runs up against the boundary of the unrealizable; once again there is a turnaround. Pygmalion recognizes the price he paid for the statue’s beauty. He makes a request of Venus, the goddess from whose sphere of control he wrested Galathea in order to elevate her to marble beauty. He wants her to reverse the process of the separating ideality from the sensuality of desire. “Goddess of Beauty, do not insult nature by permitting such a perfect model to be the reflection of what is not.” 29 What Pygmalion is requesting is not some magical animation of his artwork, but the (re)fusing of the fire in him with the marble beauty, the reunification of spirituality and the corporeality of desire: Alas, I expect no miracle; it is, it should cease to be; order is disturbed, Nature is outraged, restore its laws to their rightful sovereignty, reestablish its beneficial course, and distribute your divine influence again in equal measure. Yes, two beings are missing from the full measure of things. Let them both share that devouring fire which consumes the one without warming the other.30

This melding of the elements that previously had been separated seems to be represented by the closing of melodrama, a moment which has been the subject of intensive critical attention.

26 27 28 29 30

Rousseau, Rousseau, Rousseau, Rousseau, Rousseau,

“Pygmalion,” “Pygmalion,” “Pygmalion,” “Pygmalion,” “Pygmalion,”

1227. 1227. 1228. 1228. 1228 (my emphasis).

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Galathea (she touches herself and says) I. Pygmalion (beside himself with joy) I! Galathea (touching herself again) This is I. […] Galathea (she takes a few steps and touches a piece of marble) This is not I. [Music] […] Galathea approaches and looks at him [Pygmalion]. […] She places a hand on him; he trembles, seizes the hand, presses it against his heart then covers it with passionate kisses. Galathea (with a sigh) Ah, this too is I! 31

Galathea’s life is no projection. Rather, it is Pygmalion’s sensation, engendered through the material reality and beauty of the marble body; it is his “soul,” an internal life of sensations beyond material and carnal intentions. If “the miracle of transformation lies in replacing an object with consciousness,” as Starobinski claims,32 then the consciousness that appears in place of the object is a consciousness of its own interiority. It is consciousness of a desire that is understood as the space of one’s own interiority. The beauty of the marble statue signifies the subjective as such; it is sensibility in stone.33 Pygmalion’s answer completes the transformation process in a last step. Much like an alchemical purification, it splits desire into its material and spiritual elements in order to unite them again in a renewed fusion. In the play’s last sentence, Pygmalion once again summarizes the steps of this transformation, the consciousness of the senses, sensibility, the spiritual, and finally their synthesis in the loving human being. Yes, lovely and beloved object: yes, worthy masterpiece of my hands [the erotic affection], my heart [sensibility] and the Gods [spirituality] … It is you, you alone: I have given you my whole being; from now on I shall only live through you [love as a higher form of unity].34

31 Rousseau, “Pygmalion,” 1230. 32 Starobinski, Rousseau, 111. 33 Above all, Galathea is an allegory: the tangible shape of something spiritual. Her ideal beauty would be an allegory of the good, according to Starobinski: “Evil consisted in the illusion of opinion; here, ideal beauty turns out to be an illusion of its own. Evil was a subjective appearance, but the good, beauty are equally subjective.” (Starobinski, Rousseau, 116.) 34 Rousseau, “Pygmalion,” 1230.

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The stage Rousseau’s ‘lyrical scene’ outlines a process of becoming conscious that can be read, in the entirety of the events on the stage, as an allegory of the sensitive human being. At the same time, however, it is also a model for the theatrical stage and a poetological reflection of the act of acting. The essence of theatricality is reflected onstage in the gradual shifts of Pygmalion’s consciousness, a process which allows the audience to follow the development of illusion in the theater. In fact, Rousseau’s Pygmalion is an experimental theatrical composition: the spoken part consists largely of musical sections and pantomime actions that are inserted into a single monologue, sometimes commenting on it, sometimes alternating with it, and in exceptional cases also underscoring it. The form is derived, apparently without further mediation, from the idea of an original language.35 The priority given to live voices, facial gestures, and the rhythmic movement of the music evokes a dance that cannot be distinguished from singing, thus reminding us of the language of origins which makes no distinction between singing and speaking. Gestures, music, costumes, and sets are joined up with the monologue into a lyrical figuration of expression. For the spectator, however, the dramatic process – the transformation of the consciousness of the lyrical ego – culminates in transforming the stage from a space for representation into a tableau of expression. The stage is presented as a space in which all the means of representation join together into a coherent structure of expression. The feelings of the protagonists can thus be represented in their temporal unfolding, that is, their living quality. However the ‘artist’s drama’ is understood in its individual elements: the transformation of the lyrical ego is achieved through the transformation of the stage as a whole. From a space for representation and declamation, the stage turns into a moving image of the interior of a soul; from a framework of artistic performance, it morphs into the expressive field of a psychic event. Even before the monologue’s first sentences, this transformation is established in the stage directions for the space:

35 See also Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 66–67. Brooks sees the idea of melodramatic expression in Rousseau’s Essai sur l’origine des langues, with the “text of muteness” sketched out in its “aesthetics of muteness.” Cf. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. “Essay on the Origin of Languages.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music. Ed. and trans. John T. Scott. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1998. 289–332.

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The stage represents a sculptor’s studio. Along the sides are blocks of marble together with rough outlines of single statues and groups of figures. At the back is another statue hidden beneath a tent of light colorful material decorated with garlands and fringes. [The overture begins half a minute before the curtain rises.] Pygmalion, seated with his elbows resting on his knees, dreams with the air of a man who is uneasy and dejected. Suddenly he rises and takes up his tools from a table. He taps a blow from time to time on one or another of the unfinished pieces, stepping back to look at them with an air of dissatisfaction and discouragement. [The first musical piece, which follows directly from the overture, also represents confusion, unease, anxiety, and discouragement.] 36

With these directions, the space of the stage is established as an overriding unity, in which the various representational levels are integrated and linked up with one another. How this was to occur was explained by Rousseau in the articles of the Dictionnaire de musique. There, under the heading Opera, we read: The constitutive parts of an opera, are the poem, the music, and the decorations. By poetry we speak to the mind; by music to the ear; and by painting to the eyes; and the whole ought to be reunited to move the heart, and convey to it, at the same time, the same impression through different organs.37

It is the function of the stage to connect together the discrete perceptual levels of music, declamation, and their pantomime in their changing relations. This is why the stage directions so clearly delimit the representational levels of the melodrama so that no organic blending of music, gestural action, and character speech can occur in the first place. The individual representational levels of pantomime and music are absolved from any connection to the declamation in order to form their own, independent figurations, and out of their mutual relations emerges a network of extensions of elements that cannot be traced back to one another. Taken on their own, all the representational elements remain rhetorical; they remain representation and message. But instead of merely restating what is already evident and trumping each other in the artistic virtuosity of the music, the declamation, and the dance, they form themselves within the unity of the stage, into a field of synaesthetic correspondences. In a certain sense, the ‘lyrical scene’ is an aria broken up into discrete parts, which are joined up in the space of the melodramatic stage into a new expressive unit. In Rousseau’s poetic logic, uninterrupted singing is always deceiving, 36 Rousseau, “Pygmalion,” 1224. 37 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. A Complete Dictionary of Music. Trans. William Waring. London: Murray, 1779. 289.

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only a false surrogate of original language. The network of corresponding expressive elements, however, is the echo of an original expressive language conscious of its own loss.38 Following from this thought, Rousseau proposes the melodrama literally as a rhetoric of silence, a structure of silences, a web of empty intervals. This principle is summarized in the term “recitative confin’d” as follows: Recitative confin’d. Is that which, being intermixt with rittornels and strokes of symphony, confines, as it were, the recitant and orchestra, one towards the other, so that they ought to be attentive in a mutual degree. These alternative passages of recitative and melody, clothed with all the eclat of the orchestra, are the most touching, most ravishing, and most energic parts of the modern measure. The actor agitated, transported with a passion which does not suffer him to go through his speech, is interrupted, breaks off, makes a stop, during which time the orchestra speaks for him; and these silences, thus filled, affect the audience infinitely more than if the actor himself spoke all that the music makes them understand.39

On the melodramatic stage, music does not fill the silences, it articulates them; they become a resounding silence, which sometimes interrupts the declamation and sometimes draws the boundaries of the gestures. And the pantomime also articulates “pauses of mutual agitation” (silences), breaks with no music and no declamation. Neither the music nor the gestures articulate the direct expression, neither the ‘actual’ nor the unspeakable of feelings. (In such a fullness, it would once again only be a false extension of expression.) Instead, they hem in the dramatic speech with silences, weaving a texture, sentence by sentence, out of silences, letting the web of a positively graspable silence arise within it: a text that consists of nothing more than the time of interruptions. The network of correspondences, singing, gestures, poetry, and décor joined together in the unity of the stage is a temporal texture.40 In the synaesthesia of gesture, decla-

38 Starobinski, Jean. Das Rettende in der Gefahr: Kunstgriffe der Aufklärung. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1992. 242–243. 39 Rousseau, A Complete Dictionary of Music, 338. Rousseau’s melodrama is thus also to be understood as an experiment with the recitative confin’d; cf. Istel, Edgar. Jean-Jacques Rousseau als Komponist seiner lyrischen Szene ‘Pygmalion.’ Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1901. 15–17. 40 This text of silence means something other than what melodrama theory has understood by this term: neither a hyperbolic expression that refers the realistic representation to a sphere of the morally occult, not the subtext of a desire that cannot be spoken because it is forbidden. It means the almost musical representational structure, the temporality of melodramatic representation. Starobinski sees this form of expression in the idea of the ‘accidental’ or ‘memorative sign;’ it is neither natural nor arbitrary designations, but ‘things’ that have a power of memory. Cf. Starobinski, Rousseau, 242–243.

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mation and music, intervals and interferences between the various levels of representation, the expression of a silent sensation emerges for the spectator, meaning the entirety of the staged representation in its temporal unfolding. Over the course of this process, none of the signifying levels and artistic languages of the stage is directly addressed to the audience; each of them remains alone in its changing relation to the others. Music answers the articulated speech, the word answers the melody, the pantomime answers the sound of the voice. Little by little, each isolated element is added into the network of temporal interferences and synaesthetic correspondences: a conversation which goes back and forth, and which the audience listens to in what appears to be a hidden, secret life. This is precisely what is meant by the fourth wall. The stage, the representation as a whole, is answered by the space of the spectator, by the emotional response and the ‘stirred hearts’ of the audience. Melodramatic representation is directly transferred into an inner state in which the audience is moved. The harmony of the stage is answered by “the approving murmuring that rises up to him [the artist] from the audience; a singular murmuring composed of all the feelings gathered together.” 41 No applause that would destroy the illusion; instead, an internal life of the audience, formed from a plethora of individual feelings. For this audience, the dramatic representation has literally become the illusion of an “original language,” in which it feels itself to be directly aware and connected in its interiority. It seems as if Rousseau, with Pygmalion, interpreted the Platonic hierarchy of beauty in a modern psychological sense and transferred it into an arrangement of media. The lowest level of the hierarchy is still heterosexual attraction, the highest, however, is now the empathizing heart – a language of love.42 But the drama not only reflects this process at the level of the action represented; it teaches it in the dramatic representation as a process that is completed only in the audience. The detachment of sexual desire from its commitment to the body and its transformation into a ‘higher form’ of sensuality also and above all designates the steps of a transformation, at the end of which is the commonality of an auditorium becoming aware of its interiority. Carnal attraction stands at the beginning of a transformation, and at the end the carnal sign of affective perceptual behavior has changed. The gaze, conceived of as male, at the object of desire, is transformed into the female-coded empa-

41 Starobinski, Das Rettende in der Gefahr, 244. 42 Müller, Lothar. “Herzblut und Maskenspiel. Über die empfindsame Seele, den Briefroman und das Papier.” Die Seele. Ihre Geschichte im Abendland. Ed. Gerd Jüttemann et al. Weinheim: Psychologie-Verlag-Union, 1991. 267–290, here 270–272.

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thy of the contemplative audience, sexual desire turned loving empathy. The pleasure in crying is the sure indication that the ‘masculine drives’ have been converted into ‘feminine sensibility.’ Therefore, there are innumerable mocking comments – even in serious critical literature – concerning the streams of tears of sensibility, as if it were necessary to wait a few centuries to be able to explain the ‘actual sexual nature’ of the emotionality of this time. But it is not difficult to recognize a model of an economy of drives that leads in a direct line to the modern concept of sublimation, as was developed by psychoanalysis. “Sublimation” establishes a model of the economy of drives, which seeks to describe all civilizing activity as the transfer of one and the same power into various aggregate states such as conversion, transformation, and branching out.43 From this perspective, Rousseau proposes the “theater of sensibility” as an energetic model of converting sexual impulses of perception into an interiority of directly shared sensations, which constitutes a new form of commonality in the audience. The heat in Pygmalion’s heart denotes just this life of the audience, while Galathea denotes the artful spectacle, which seeks to awaken this inner life. A spectacle is thus constituted that then could be presented time and again by innumerable melodramatic heroines. The miracle of Galathea is the illusion of the sensitive art of acting itself. The event of her being brought back to life signifies the process that the melodrama actress goes through over and over again, starting as the object of a desiring gaze and ending in the consciousness of a public that has become aware of itself in shared sensibility. With this dramaturgical schema, the lyrical scene Pygmalion becomes the starting point of an infinite series of reprises. But, with its first repetition, the scene turns into its own mirror-image. Not the triumph of the illusion, but the failure of an illusion, the experience of failed love is the centerpiece of the acting of the suffering heroine of the melodrama. This failure has been staged and restaged in innumerable variations – be it on the theatrical stage or the movie screen.

43 In this sense, Freud speaks of “love” as a “late” stage in the transformation of the drive, which represents the foundation of all cultural achievement and the basis of social ties. Cf. Freud, Sigmund. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Trans. James Strachey. London: International Psychoanalytic Press, 1959.

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“Higher feeling” and fleeting pleasure: high and low culture Rousseau’s melodrama targets the enjoying self-perception of the audience as a community directly connected in its sensibility. It targets the sentimental enjoyment of one’s own emotionality, without attaining any independent, objective reality of the artwork. This is the reason for the harsh judgment that Goethe passed on Pygmalion: And besides, I want to mention a small but epoch-making work, Rousseau’s Pygmalion. Much could be said about it, because this curious production is another that alternates between nature and art and misguidedly tries to reduce the latter to the former. We see an artist who has achieved perfection and yet is not satisfied with having given external form to his ideal and thus having lent it a higher life. No! it must also be dragged down into his earthly life. Through a most commonplace sensual action he wants to destroy the highest thing that thought and deed can produce.44

Goethe distinguishes between direct sensual enjoyment and the “higher life” of art, formulating an idea of art that is still valid today. Indeed, the selfsufficient pleasure in sentiment is still considered a sure criterion for distinguishing between ‘kitsch’ and art.45 The self-sufficient pleasure of an audience marks the difference between literarily stamped high culture and popular entertainment culture. In fact, the distinction concerns a quite different aspect, namely the question of whether an overriding truth of humanity comes into its own in the artwork, or whether the art work as a media practice serves concrete goals and needs, meaning specific ones in each present day. In the case of melodrama, this difference ultimately concerns the ideal contents of the dramatic text and its implicit performative logic as a model for the stage. This becomes clear when we think of the way Goethe treated his own lyrical scene Proserpina, conceived in 1778, in his work for the theater. Goethe’s Proserpina was one of many imitations of Rousseau’s extremely successful lyrical scene, which the author himself presented in a parodic reversal shortly after writing it in order to reveal the “shallow sentimentality” of the melodrama.46 Decades later, Goethe returned to this scene once again. In his reflections on theater and acting, there are detailed notes about what constitutes the effect of this little piece. In describing the theatrical means of the staging and the gestural action of the actress, it becomes clear that, in the practice of the stage show, Goethe was aiming for precisely the kind of effect 44 Goethe, From My Life, 363. 45 Giesz, Ludwig. Phänomenologie des Kitsches. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1994. 46 Schimpf, Lyrisches Theater, 28–30.

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on the audience that he had condemned in the example of Pygmalion as the idea of art. As Goethe describes the theatrical process of his staging of Proserpina, he also conveys a telling idea concerning the process of representation in melodrama. The transformation of the goddess of death into the nymph, and viceversa, is the “sensation” of this play, its theatrical visual event. Like in Pygmalion, the space of the stage as a whole becomes the object of a metamorphosis. The process of Proserpina’s increasing despair, the shift between hope and resignation, is articulated in the various attributions of the set; sometimes it is hell, sometimes the bright light of redemption. For the spectator of the stage of sensitivity, however, it is not only the represented world that is in a transitory state. Over the course of the performance, his own perceptual sensations, his feelings, and even his reason become part of a dynamic process of emergence, which is structured by this performance. Ultimately, it is the audience’s feelings that are modulated in the temporal unfolding of the melodramatic scene. In its transformations, it modulates the spectator’s sensations like successions of chords, in order to finally close them into a tableau. The metamorphoses of the image onstage that moves into itself still structures the transformation of the stage illusion into an inner reality of the audience. The audience’s tears also manifest the goal of the event in their effect. They are the corporeally graspable symptom of a successful transformation of aesthetic illusions into a self-enjoying sensitivity. This ‘spectator feeling’ is the centerpiece of every melodramatic performance. It should neither be confused with the feelings of the characters represented, nor can it be called empathy for these characters. What is at issue is the sensation of one’s own sensibility, the feeling of one’s own empathy, the experience of an interiority rich in sensation. This process is about the individuals in their sentimental subjectivity as individuals and, at the same time, it allows them to be part of the community of the audience. This idea of the audience – a community of sensitive individuals – characterizes the melodrama as a specific media practice aimed at forming such communities. Their communality emerges precisely to the degree that the media practices succeed in shaping the self-perception of the individuals gathered together as the incommensurable privacy of their own feelings, and in allowing each individual spectator to experience this sensation as an interiority that he shares with everyone else in the audience. The cultural-historical starting point of this practice can be identified as being exactly at the invention of the stage of illusion, just as its cultural variations can be narrated as the history of the technical innovations of this illusion, right up to the audiovisual image of the cinema. While one can trace the melodramatic monologue as a stable basic figuration (we see an actress, alone,

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performing despair and sorrow, we hear her speaking, we hear music) over two hundred years of the history of the melodrama, the sentimental expressive patterns are susceptible to the prevailing taste at any given time. This can be illustrated through the example of the fate of Goethe’s Proserpina as well as in any of the various re-releases of cinematic melodramas that we have seen in recent years. From this perspective, the cinematic melodrama refers back to the history of a media practice in which the inner aspect of sentimental subjectivity is first and foremost a history of the production of this interiority. This context could be addressed as the media history of the bourgeois psyche. At any rate, for Rousseau’s time, the “homme naturel” was much more than a fact of nature – rather it was a political reality that first had to be created in such media practices: the sentimental audience as a matrix for forming the political community. But the audience of the melodrama seems not to be defined so much by the often-discussed co-presence of actors and audience at the site of the theater, or by the transitory temporal character of the theatrical performance. It is much more the principle of the fourth wall, the illusionary character of the melodramatic scene, which constitutes the sentimental audience as a form of community. From the point of view of this conceptualization of the audience, the cinema is, as it were, the fulfillment of the ideal of the stage of illusion.

Postscript Recently, James Cameron’s Titanic (USA, 1997) has been re-released in a 3D version. We can leave aside the question of whether this is in fact the most loved and celebrated film of all time, as the advertising claims. Doubtlessly, when it was released the first time in 1997, it was the most successful melodrama in many years, and remained so for a long time. In retrospect, the film marks the end of this cultural practice. If today melodramas are reproduced as mini-series for HBO, bought as DVDs and watched on laptops, then this is not only associated with a completely different form of audience. This media practice is surely also targeted at a quite different form of interiority. The audience, at any rate, which was constituted through its distinction from the stage and the screen in order to experience itself as connected in the enjoyment of its sensitivity, seems to be disappearing. What is missing – as was already the case for every television melodrama – is the audience that comes together in public, which is what always seems to have provided Western theater with its relation to politics. What is missing is the community of

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individuals, emotionally focused on themselves, who are nonetheless connected to one another in speechless empathy. The melodramatic experience of the bourgeois subject – the self-perception of the viewer as a sensitive being, intimately tied to a sensed community embodied by the audience – is declining as the melodramatic genre emigrates more and more from the socio-spatial settings of the theater and the cinema. With the melodramatic form re-emerging in the format of the TV series, it enters the realm of audiovisual images that come to life on laptops, tablets, or even smartphones. As these technological devices stand for a media use that is characterized by individuality, the unity of sensibility and community appears to have been broken. Nonetheless, it is perhaps overly hasty to speak of disappearance, lack, and brokenness. For at the same time, we can watch the melodrama – as a specific mode of representation – traverse different media genres as well as new forms of media communities. Within cinema, we see melodramatic poetics emerging as one cinematic mode among others within postclassical genre hybrids. In turn, with this shift from the melodramatic movie to the melodramatic scene, the cinematic melodrama gains access to the so-called new media; it becomes tangible for the World Wide Web and its terms of use. The logic of the clip provides film scenes a second life within the web, leading to the endless reproduction of melodramatic scenes like the “plastic bag scene” from the movie American Beauty (USA, 1999) – showing a young hobby filmmaker who, accompanied by music and a sensitively intoned monologue, presents the home video of a floating plastic bag to his neighbor’s daughter – as YouTube hits. With these clips being commented on publicly by large numbers of users, widely discussing emotional impressions and aesthetic features, they become the object of new forms of community. Reposted and shared on social media profiles like Facebook, they become digital visiting cards, demonstrations of the poster’s aesthetic and emotional sensitivity. It is perhaps still too early for any substantial academic assessment of these new practices of using audiovisual media. In order to understand this development, it would first of all be necessary to clarify what exactly this disappearance is, what is breaking, and what seems to be missing. In his essay The Emancipated Spectator (Le spectateur émancipé), Jacques Rancière suggests taking the often evoked special status of the theater audience as a distribution of the sensible.47 According to this understanding, the (Western) theater distinguishes between and separates the positions of those who see only appearances, and those who can understand the truth associated 47 Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Trans. Gregory Elliot. London: Verso, 2009.

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with these appearances, and finally those who take directives for action from this understanding. This audience is constituted as a community of the unknowing, who, according to the poetological model at hand, would sometimes have to learn how to see, sometimes how to think, and sometimes how to act. The poetological transformation of the theater would merely take up new positions within these divisions. In this distribution of the sensible, they would represent nothing more than the a priori base of the reigning order. Rancière then suggests allowing for the idea that every audience is always already in the position to see, to think, and to act. With respect to the sentimental theater, his critique would be to counter the idea that the illusion of living interiority is opposed to the real obtuseness of the audience. Seen in this way, the melodramatic scene is a medium that breaks apart the sensitive subject’s capabilities and distributes them as separate positions in space, that is, the position of the theater and that of the rows of spectators: the blind and mute suffering of the melodramatic heroine and the clear-sightedness of the empathizing subject, the calculation of strategically feigned feeling and the sign of authentic sensation, the techniques of creating an illusion of living interiority and the capacity to reproduce the movements of others’ feelings in one’s own. In place of this distribution, a sentimental media practice has appeared today that can no longer be located in one of the existing positions; rather, it can assume any of these positions and can relate them to one another. It is a collection of scattered individuals, asynchronously acting, perceiving, feeling and empathizing, thinking. They convey to one another their observations and self-observations about what is touching and what is moving, and what is passed over because it is not touching. They know how to assume all of the positions, and relate them to one another. They are actors, directors, melodramatic heroines, and dramatic singers, while at the same time they are spectators, listeners, readers, and fans. From this perspective, it is not the physical presence of the attending audience that connects the spectators of the melodrama into a community of sensitive subjects. Rather, it is its position in relation to the entity of the melodramatic scene itself that brings about this link. The relation of the audience to the melodramatic scene functions as a projection surface, simultaneously concurrent to every individual, on which a life of feelings becomes visible, which resembles one’s own sensation of oneself and yet is strictly separate and distinct from that sensation. For the spectators of the melodrama, living interiority is an artfully arranged scene, a generally valid form of expressing true sensitivity in contrast to their diffuse and mute feelings.

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What disappears with the old audience of the melodrama, what is lacking with it, is therefore the illusion that the melodramatic scene brings together the forms of appearance (the gestures, images, and objects) of a unified and generally valid feeling and sensation. In the aftermath of contemporary media use (for instance, watching single scenes on a laptop), these scenes become forms of a sentimental culture, a means of representing a sensation that is as particular as it is ordinary, and one that at the same time can be added easily into endlessly diversifying communication. In the constant comparison with one’s own feelings, users discard or confirm these pre-existing forms of expression. They are amused by them, smiling or marveling at them, they are moved or struck by them and convey their judgments to the internet community by allowing the gestures and images – with or without commentary – to circulate further. The psychological phrase of the pre-prime-time serial suits this kind of communication as well as does a music video, a scene from a talk show as well as the poetry of a floating plastic bag. In a literally unlimited montage, these objects of sentimental desire are added into a network of scenes, gestures, and images that is constantly expanding, but which can never be grasped in the unity of a representative scene. Instead, the agents of this media practice are themselves part of a scene of sensibility, which is not visible in its unity from any one place. Still, the traces of this unity in the new media practices described here all together hint at a common ground: The history of our sentiments. The question remains as to whether the plastic bag on YouTube would fly quite so high if there were no media users who could still remember the feeling of seeing it in the cinema.

Bibliography Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1976. Dinter, Annegret. Der Pygmalion-Stoff in der europäischen Literatur. Rezeptionsgeschichte einer Ovid-Fabel. Heidelberg: Winter, 1979. Elsaesser, Thomas. “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama.” Monogram 4 (1972): 2–15. Elsaesser, Thomas. “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama.” Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film. Ed. Christine Gledhill. London: British Film Institute, 1987. 43–69. Freud, Sigmund. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Trans. James Strachey. London: International Psychoanalytic Press, 1959. Giesz, Ludwig. Phänomenologie des Kitsches. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1994.

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Gledhill, Christine. “Rethinking Genre.” Reinventing Film Studies. Ed. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams. London: Oxford University Press, 2000. 221–243. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. From My Life. Ed. Jeffrey L. Sammons and Thomas P. Saine. Trans. Robert Heitner. New York: Suhrkamp, 1987. Heeg, Günther. Das Phantasma der natürlichen Gestalt. Frankfurt: Stroemfeld, 2000. Istel, Edgar. Jean-Jacques Rousseau als Komponist seiner lyrischen Szene ‘Pygmalion.’ Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1901. Koschorke, Albrecht. “Pygmalion als Kastrat – Grenzwertlogik der Mimesis.” Pygmalion. Die Geschichte des Mythos in der abendländischen Kultur. Ed. Mathias Mayer and Gerhard Neumann. Freiburg: Rombach, 1997. 299–322. Lauretis, Teresa de. “Kino und Oper, öffentliche und private Phantasien (mit einer Lektüre von David Cronenbergs Madame Butterfly).” Inszenierung und Geltungsdrang. Interventionen. Ed. Jörg Huber and Martin Heller. Zurich: Museum für Gestaltung, 1998. 143–164. Mülder-Bach, Inka. “Autobiographie und Poesie. Rousseaus Pygmalion und Goethes Prometheus.” Pygmalion. Die Geschichte des Mythos in der abendländischen Kultur. Ed. Mathias Mayer and Gerhard Neumann. Freiburg: Rombach, 1997. 271–298. Mülder-Bach, Inka. Im Zeichen Pygmalions. Das Modell der Statue und die Entdeckung der ‘Darstellung’ im 18. Jahrhundert. Munich: Fink, 1998. Müller, Lothar. “Herzblut und Maskenspiel. Über die empfindsame Seele, den Briefroman und das Papier.” Die Seele. Ihre Geschichte im Abendland. Ed. Gerd Jüttemann et al. Weinheim: Psychologie-Verlag-Union, 1991. 267–290. Mulvey, Laura. “‘It Will Be a Magnificent Obsession’: The Melodrama’s Role in the Development of Contemporary Film Theory.” Melodrama: Stage Picture Screen. Ed. Jacky Bratton et al. London: British Film Institute, 1994. 121–133. Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Trans. Gregory Elliot. London: Verso, 2009. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. A Complete Dictionary of Music. Trans. William Waring. London: Murray, 1779. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. “Pygmalion: A Lyrical Scene.” Trans. Patricia de Man. The Portable Rousseau. Ed. Paul de Man. 1983. 1224–1230. Special Collections and Archives, UCI Libraries, University of California, Irvine. http://hdl.handle.net/10575/1094 (21 October 2013). Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. “Pygmalion. Musikalische Szene.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Musik und Sprache. Ausgewählte Schriften. Trans. Dorothea Gülke and Peter Gülke. Wilhelmshaven: Heinrichshofen, 1984. 169–179. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. “Essay on the Origin of Languages.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music. Ed. and trans. John T. Scott. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1998. 289–332. Schimpf, Wolfgang. Lyrisches Theater. Das Melodrama des 18. Jahrhunderts. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988. Singer, Ben. Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Starobinski, Jean. Das Rettende in der Gefahr: Kunstgriffe der Aufklärung. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1992. Starobinski, Jean. Rousseau: Eine Welt von Widerständen. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1993. Warning, Rainer. “Rousseaus Pygmalion als Szenario des Imaginären.” Pygmalion. Die Geschichte des Mythos in der abendländischen Kultur. Ed. Mathias Mayer and Gerhard Neumann. Freiburg: Rombach, 1997. 225–251.

David Freedberg

Feelings on Faces From Physiognomics to Neuroscience

Experiments and observations Of all the ways in which the outward signs of the body express inner feeling, physiognomy1 and gesture have been the most studied. In this essay, I will deal with physiognomy and its related form, pathognomy. Gesture must wait for another occasion. Both physiognomy and the study of gesture, at least in their traditional and historical forms, have generally been taken as the very type of disciplines that have ignored the pressures of culture and difference, failing to take into account the social construction both of interiority and of its outward manifestations. It is true that physiognomy and pathognomy, like the study of gesture, sought to establish fixed correlations between expression and emotion, when in fact the relationship between particular expressions and specific emotions are very often the product of cultural and contextual constraints, pressures, and circumstance. Or so the usual insistence runs. Hence, for example, the continuing high scepticism about projects like Charles Le Brun’s and the complete disdain of the physiognomic projects of Lavater.2 Even Darwin’s great work on the subject has only recently begun to return to favor (though only hesitantly amongst academic humanists), despite its clear articulation of the role of cultural constraints on emotional expression.3 In what follows, I will set out how, contrary to conventional views of the neurosciences as reductionist, the neuroscience of facial expression and its emotional recognition does not in fact impugn this role, but substantially enhances it. My aim is to suggest that the role of culture in the construction of both feeling and expression is considerably more complex than current views of cultural determinism seem to allow. ***

1 Some of the interdisciplinary manifestations are more plausible than others (for instance, pathognomy), and some are more improbable altogether (for instance, metoposcopy). 2 That there are other reasons for the rejection of such writers I discuss below, in my assessment of Willibald Sauerländer’s essay on physiognomy. Sauerländer’s assault is predicated on a fear of direct response rather than mediated ones. 3 Darwin, Charles. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Ed. Paul Ekman. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

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The face is fickle, variable and often untrustworthy (or so we think).4 We feel uncomfortable interpreting the emotions it seems to betray, partly because of the easy mobility of its features, partly because we think we know how good people are at dissimulating what they feel. But most people respond to facial expressiveness swiftly enough, and are quite good at reading the emotions on a face. Otherwise social relations would be even more difficult than they are.5 We jump to conclusions about the face and react to its expressions: we seem instantly to recognize the emotions it expresses. As guides to understanding the feelings of others, or to accurately judging the emotions expressed by faces in pictures, theories of facial expression have generally been regarded with scepticism. Criticism of such theories usually falls into two categories: they are too schematic (sometimes they indeed seem to verge on the laughable); and they take no account of the differences between the expression of emotions in different cultures. As if when we travel abroad we cannot recognize the emotions of others – but for the most part we do, even though sometimes we make mistakes. It is likely that there are gender differences in face-based emotion recognition.6 But how large or how basic these differences are is not yet clear. Whether they can be attributed to one or more of the notions that women, compared to men, rely more on facial feedback for emotion recognition; or that they rely more on embodied simulation for such recognition than in the case of the less embodied, more rule-based strategies of men; or that they look more at the

4 As often noted in the case of real or alleged criminals. “[…] our instincts about others, [when we judge from their faces], can be dangerously superficial,” as Ian Leslie wrote in The Guardian on 7 October 2011 about the acquittal of Amanda Knox in the now-famous Perugia murder trial of 2007–2011. 5 Very often a number of neurological deficits underlie difficulty in reading emotions off faces. Such difficulty is now often said to be a symptom of a number of syndromes, including autism, Asperger’s syndrome. For particular examples in the case of faces, see the work of Simon Baron-Cohen and now the very useful collection of essays edited by Niedenthal, Paula M., et al. “The Simulation of Smiles (SIMS) Model: Embodied Simulation and the Meaning of Facial Expression.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33.6 (2010): 417–433. 6 Some basic material can be found in Cahill, Larry. “Why Sex Matters for Neuroscience.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 7.6 (2006): 477–484, and in Vigil, Jacob Miguel. “A Socio-Relational Framework of Sex Differences in the Expression of Emotion.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32.5 (2009): 375–390. A good summary of the literature on these differences is now available in Simpson, Elizabeth, and Dorothy Fragaszy. “Can We Really Leave Gender out of It? Individual Differences and the Simulation of Smiles Model.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33.6 (2010): 459–460.

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eyes, or make swifter judgments about the expression of the eyes and mouth, or that they are better at distinguishing smiles, or that they have more activation in brain regions containing mirror neurons – all these proposals are moot.7 They are also (mostly) a matter of degree rather than of fundamental difference, of social learning and social context rather than of basic capacity. Many of the proposed differences may well be the result of top-down influence; without scanting the possibility of gender difference in emotional recognition, I will continue to consider the degree to which bottom-up responses play a basic role in such recognition. Once more the issue of correlation arises. In expression theory (or pathognomics) 8 this correlation is between inner feeling and outward expression; in physiognomics it is between inner character (however so defined; the problem stares one in the face, so to speak) and outward appearance, as indicated by the marks and features of the face (or of the hand in chironomics, and so on). Of course we tend to make swift (though coarse) physiognomic as well as pathognomic judgments too; but this does not make them respectable. The idea of correlation has come to be despised. But it need not be subverted by what is obvious: for example, that the recognition of an emotion may be enhanced by the visual context of the face. Although the nuances of emotional expression are particular, they are capable of being subsumed under the general.9 We shall return to the issue of classification. The question is whether correlations are subverted by context, or to what degree they are. A radical position would be that there are no broad correlations between emotions and their expression. This would fly in the face of common sense and common observation. 7 See the literature mentioned above (note 6). See also, amongst many possible examples, Biele, Cezary, and Anna Grabowska. “Sex Differences in Perception of Emotion Intensity in Dynamic and Static Facial Expressions.” Experimental Brain Research 171.1 (2006): 1–6; Krumhuber, Eva, et al. “Facial Dynamics as Indicators of Trustworthiness and Cooperative Behavior.” Emotion 7.4 (2007): 730–735; Stel, Mariëlle, and Ad van Knippenberg. “The Role of Facial Mimicry in the Recognition of Affect.” Psychological Science 19.10 (2008): 984–985; SchulteRüther, Martin, et al. “Gender Differences in Brain Networks Supporting Empathy.” Neuroimage 42.1 (2008): 393–403. 8 The distinction between physiognomy and pathognomy was clearly set out in the writings of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. “Über Physiognomik; wider die Physiognomen. Zu Beförderung der Menschenliebe und Menschenkenntnis.” Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Schriften und Briefe. Vol. 3: Aufsätze, Entwürfe, Gedichte, Erklärung der Hogarthischen Kupferstiche. Ed. Wolfgang Promies. Munich: Hanser, 1972. 256–295. 9 The allusion here is to Charles Le Brun’s 1668 Conférence sur l’expression générale et particulière; see below.

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That the process of emotional recognition through the movements of the face sometimes fails is no argument against it. It does so, often enough. We can distinguish between true and false emotion with relative ease; we can also see when emotion is caricatural. Sometimes we think an emotion is excessive and we become impatient with it, even when others do not think of it as melodramatic or as inappropriate or caricatural as we do. That sometimes we are puzzled by the expression of a figure in a visual work, by the emotional content of that expression, is not fatal to the possibility of a theory of correlation between emotion and expression. Such puzzlement arises often enough. Often it is precisely that imprecision that makes beholders pause, either to dismiss the representation as inadequate, or to consider it further. Such imprecision can be a social or an artistic strategy. Current fashion in the humanities insists that correlations are modifiable by context, and mediated by reflection. It is easy enough to admit that they can be – but with this caution: reflection does not always produce the most accurate results. It can (as we shall see) muddle them. In this case the issue of correlation firmly returns. Reservations about correlation and direct recognition of emotion are related to the fear of direct sensation, particularly with regard to aesthetic experience. What, in the end, is the threat that underlies such fear? It is clear enough: loss of self-control, diminution of our individuality, the danger of entering a realm in which experience does not adequately reflect our all-too human distinctiveness. But what might it really mean to say “all-too human?” *** Whose eyes do not dilate in terror, whose mouth does not gape, at the sight of a snake, or a large truck bearing down upon one? One’s eyes open wide, one’s mouth widens, one’s jaw drops when one sees a gigantic waterfall, a wonder of nature, any towering cliff, anything, in short, that falls under Kant’s category of the sublime. It could perhaps be claimed that there are gradations here: one’s mouth opens still wider, one’s jaw drops still lower, one’s eyebrows are raised even higher in the case of amazement than, say, terror; one could assert that in expressions of amazement the lower jaw actually locks, whereas in the case of terror it seems to go slack. But such borderlines are fine. Certainly one could establish, if one had a sensitive electromyograph, a scale of firmness of contraction of muscles around the mouth or eyes, going from fear to amazement to gross terror.

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Of course there are nuances of expression, sometimes small, sometimes substantial. These have not yet been thoroughly studied; but such a study would probably be too boring, too lost in minutiae, like Bulwer’s seventeenth century book of gestures (always cited as the perfect example of culturally and chronologically bound gesture).10 Superciliary muscles are critical when it comes to the expressive modulation of the opening of the eyes; so is rigidity of gaze. But one could never establish saccadic patterns in the case of fear in real life. One cannot, after all, attach eyetrackers to subjects when out walking in the field or forest; but one can certainly do so in the case of looking at pictures in a laboratory, or even in a museum (though the latter remains to be done). *** Clearly one’s perception of facial characteristics is influenced by the faces one has seen before, or to which one is regularly exposed. Webster et al. examined how judgments of characteristics such as gender and national identity, as well as of emotional expression, were affected by the kinds of faces viewers normally see. Observing that “variability among faces is a fundamentally important source of information about individual and group identities and the long term (e.g. age) and short-term (e.g. emotional) states of an individual [and that] we are all exposed to a different diet of faces,” they noted that their results suggested that “these natural stimulus variations are potentially large enough to induce different states of adaptation in observers that may influence strongly how faces are perceived and interpreted.” “Adaptation,” they continued, “is thought to facilitate efficient coding of low-level stimulus features by normalizing visual responses to the average stimulus levels in scenes, and aids perceptual constancy by discounting variations both in the environment and in the observer.” And they concluded that “adapting face perception to the average characteristics of the distribution of faces that an individual encounters may similarly be important for calibrating the visual process encoding faces.” 11

10 Bulwer, John. Chirologia: or, the naturall language of the hand. Composed of the speaking motions, and discoursing gestures thereof. Whereunto is added Chironomia: or, the art of manuall rhetoricke. Consisting of the naturall expressions, digested by art in the hand, as the chiefest instrument of eloquence, by historicall manifesto’s, exemplified out of the authentique registers of common life, and civill conversation. With types, or chyrograms: a long-wish’d for illustration of this argument. London, 1644. 11 Webster, Michael A., et al. “Adaptation to Natural Facial Categories.” Nature 428.6982 (2004): 557–561, here 560.

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All this seems logical enough. But the question is less that of adaptation to the faces one has seen than the speed and the frequent accuracy – and not just the mistakes – with which viewers identify the emotion on a face. Another question is the surprising consistency between particular kinds of facial expression and particular emotions, as now most notably claimed first by Darwin and then by Ekman. Of course, when it comes to seemingly instant identification of the emotion behind the expression, one’s immediate perceptions may be modified by reflection; but the chief point of interest for us are the first stages in the identification of an emotion, the kinds of response that are instantaneous and precognitive. That they may later be modified seems a less problematic issue altogether. *** While the facial fusiform area (FFA) fires in response to faces, other areas are involved in responses to their emotional expressions.12 Both amygdala and ventro-medial prefrontal cortex are activated in response to emotional faces. For some time now, a twofold model has been applied to this distinction. It posits separate functional routes for facial identity on the one hand and the expression of emotion on a face on the other. The first is concerned with responses to largely invariant and unchangeable features, the second with responses to changeable and dynamic elements in a face.13 The first is associated with the FFA, and the second not only with limbic areas such as the amygdala, as only stands to reason, but also with the STS, which is always activated, as we have seen, by human biological movement. One route is cortical, the other subcortical.14 Signals in the subcortical route are fast-processed via superior colliculus, pulvinar, and amygdala. This is a bottom-up system

12 See the many articles by Nancy Kanwisher, beginning with Kanwisher, Nancy, et al. “The Fusiform Face Area: A Module in Human Extrastriate Cortex Specialized for Face Perception.” The Journal of Neuroscience 17.11 (1997): 4302–4311. For reservations, see, for example, Gauthier, Isabel, et al. “The Fusiform ‘Face Area’ Is Part of a Network that Processes Faces at the Individual Level.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 12.3 (2000): 495–504. For the origins of her work and the opposition to it, see my forthcoming volume on art and neuroscience. 13 As, for example, in Haxby, James V., et al. “The Distributed Human Neural System for Face Perception.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4.6 (2000): 223–233. Earlier in the now classic Bruce, Vicki, and Andy Young. “Understanding Face Recognition.” British Journal of Psychology 77.3 (1986): 305–327. 14 Johnson, Mark H. “Subcortical Face Processing.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 6.10 (2005): 766–774; Calder, Andrew J., and Andrew W. Young. “Understanding the Recognition of Facial Identity and Facial Expression.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 6.8 (2005): 641–651.

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that may be modulated by prefrontal processing.15 ERP and MEG studies have shown that such subcortical processing occurs at much shorter latencies (less than 100 ms) than those associated with the structural coding of face recognition.16 But the standard model has been questioned by Calder and Young. They observed that STS may be activated in the course of the processing of facial identity as well, and so the supposedly clear distinction between infero-temporal activity on the one hand and STS on the other is not quite as clear as the two-tier model proposes. As so often, they also pointed to neuropsychological deficits in further support of their criticism of the standard model. One of their main examples was the case of prosopagnosic patients who have difficulty in recognizing both faces and emotional expression, and they reported studies showing that STS is involved not simply in the perception of biological motion, but in the integration of visual form with motion.17 For them, even facial identification involves a dynamic component, and the separation of identity and expression is relative not absolute. Even so, Calder and Young were unable to argue away the basic division between cortical and subcortical streams. It is both a pragmatic and an empirically clear model – for all the possibility of occasional overlap. And it usefully extends to a further set of findings that are directly relevant to viewers’ responses to faces and facial expressions. Over the course of the last decade, a number of researchers have examined responses to faces at high and low levels of spatial frequency resolution (images with tight versus large scale degrees of luminance variation). One of their most significant findings here has been that HSF information is processed by the cortical route, and LSF by the subcortical route respectively (fig. 1). The first is processed by parvocellular channels, the second by magnocellular ones. It is the latter, phylogenetically older route that provides rapid but coarse signals to the amygdala.18 15 For further references, see Vuilleumier, Patrik, et al. “Distinct Spatial Frequency Sensitivities for Processing Faces and Emotional Expressions.” Nature Neuroscience 6.6 (2003): 624– 631. 16 Eimer, Martin, and Amanda Holmes. “An ERP Study on the Time Course of Emotional Face Processing.” Neuroreport 13.4 (2002): 427–431; Streit, Marcus, et al. “Time Course of Regional Brain Activations during Facial Emotion Recognition in Humans.” Neuroscience Letters 342.1/2 (2003): 101–104; Johnson, “Subcortical Face Processing.” 17 All from Calder and Young, “Understanding the Recognition.” The usual clinical finding has been that prosopagnosic patients with cortical damage are poor at identifying faces, they can still detect emotional expressions. Cf. de Gelder, Beatrice, et al. “A Modulatory Role for Facial Expressions in Prosopagnosia.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 100.22 (2003): 13105–13110. 18 Vuilleumier et al., “Distinct Spatial Frequency Sensitivities.”

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So far so good. One might well suppose that swift responses to emotional expression is the result of the processing of LSF information, whereas the specificity of HSF information subserves the identification of facial features. But we all know how swiftly one sees a face in a picture. And indeed, holistic face perception has been shown to be largely supported by low spatial frequencies.19 Morever, in an important new article, Kumar and Srinivasan demonstrated that such global face processing facilitates the identification of faces with happy expressions, while local processing facilitates the identification of faces with sad expressions – so that the former is mediated by low SF resolution, and the latter by high SF content, particularly in the right hemisphere.20 But even if this is so (and some might think it improbable), the apparent inconsistencies disappear when one realizes that the issue here is the rapid perception of faces holistically, and that the identification of the details of expression – perhaps via a HSF route – represents a later stage of processing. Perhaps it takes less representational definition (of the kind represented by low spatial frequency) to evoke a happy than a sad response, and that happy expressions are thus perceived more swiftly than sad ones. The coarse LSF that is involved in processing happy expressions may well be engaged prior to the HSF that plays a more dominant role in the perception of sadness. But note that sadness is not to be conflated with fear, and that there can be no doubt of the fast amygdalic processing of fear responses on the basis of LSF information (see fig. 1). In either event, it is clear that the twofold-route model is further reinforced by these implications of the two spatial frequency bands, with the cortical route subtended largely by slower HSF levels, and the subcortical one by faster LSF ones. While the basic distinction between separate functional routes for responses to faces and to emotional expression corresponds to the traditional distinction between physiognomy and pathognomy, the updated model adds a plausible explanation for the seeming instantaneity of the recognition both of emotions and of faces. In their investigation of the cognitive modulation of emotional processing of visual stimuli in faces and pictures, Keightley et al. recalled earlier research

19 Goffaux, Valérie, and Bruno Rossion. “Faces Are ‘Spatial’: Holistic Face Perception Is Supported by Low Spatial Frequencies.” Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance 32.4 (2006): 1023–1039. 20 Kumar, Devpriya, and Narayanan Srinivasan. “Emotion Perception Is Mediated by Spatial Frequency Content.” Emotion 11.5 (2011): 1144–1151.

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Fig. 1: Faces with broad (full spectrum) frequency (on the left) filtered to contain only high spatial or low spatial frequencies (middle and right columns respectively). While gender judgments depend equally on HSF and LSF information, the latter plays a more crucial role in the processing of fearful expressions – that is, the amygdala is more responsive to low than to high spatial information. Source: Vuilleumier et al., “Distinct Spatial Frequency Sensitivities,” 625.

showing that affective responses to stimuli occur prior to cognitive processing of such stimuli. They emphasized that the amygdala responds not only to fear signals, but also to faces per se, and concluded that emotional faces activate the amygdala and other limbic regions “in an automatic or pre-attentive fashion.” 21 Indeed, Whalen et al. had already reported increased amygdalic

21 Keightley, Michelle L., et al. “An FMRI Study Investigating Cognitive Modulation of Brain Regions Associated with Emotional Processing of Visual Stimuli.” Neuropsychologia 41.5 (2003): 585–596, here 593.

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response to masked faces, to faces which viewers did not even report seeing.22 The amygdala has also been shown to respond to fearful faces presented outside the focus of attention, even though inattention leads to decreased activation of the face-selective regions of the fusiform cortex. In the understanding of the expressions of a face, the eyes play a central role. They are the most vivid signs of the life in an image, as well as in a person. As the old metaphors have it, they seem to provide direct access to the soul. If there is any element that attracts attention in a picture, or allows for initial detection of a face, it is the eyes that convey the greatest impression of the vitality – indeed the mobility – of a face. No wonder that one of the most frequent iconoclastic acts is the effort to delete the eyes of an image, as if by so doing, its imagined vitality, benign or malign, is eliminated. Tellingly, the facial fusiform area shows much greater functional connectivity with amygdala during direct gaze – that is, when there is direct contact between viewer and viewed face – than during averted gaze. Indeed, in one of his many fundamental contributions to the understanding of emotional responses to people and to pictures, Ralph Adolphs has shown that even patients with damage to the amygdala can successfully recognize fearful expressions if their attention is directed to the eyes.23 If you do not see the eyes, or your attention cannot be drawn to them, you will have difficulty in perceiving the kinds of signals that betoken emotion.

From the manuals of physiognomy Let us turn to the history of what has often seemed to be a failed chapter in the history of representation and of the understanding of emotion. In so doing, we will also return to the hard question of correlation. *** In 1586, the first edition of Giovanni Battista Della Porta’s On Human Physiognomy appeared. It was an instant success and was soon republished. Reprinted,

22 Whalen, Paul J., et al. “Masked Presentations of Emotional Facial Expressions Modulate Amygdala Activity without Explicit Knowledge.” The Journal of Neuroscience 18.1 (1998): 411– 418. 23 Adolphs, Ralph, et al. “A Mechanism for Impaired Fear Recognition after Amygdala Damage.” Nature 433.7021 (2005): 68–72.

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Fig. 2: Top: Comparison of heads of a man and a lion. Bottom: Comparison of heads of a man and a donkey. Source: Della Porta, Giovanni Battista. De humana physiognomonia. Libri IIII. Naples, 1598. 34, 86.

reedited, reduced, adapted, and modified, it appeared over and over again, all over Europe, for the next century and after. On Human Physiognomy was extensively illustrated with engravings (see, for example, fig. 2); it came out of a long physiognomic tradition, including, most famously, a treatise wrongly attributed to Aristotle, and the Greek, Latin, and Arabic versions of Polemon’s Physiognomy. To almost all modern readers, the illustrations of Della Porta’s book (and the principles behind them, articulated at great if clumsy length) seem absurd. The idea behind On Human Physiognomy was that the outward traits of a human face represent inner character; and that individual character is to be sought in the character supposedly possessed by the animal the face most closely resembled. The circularity of this notion is self-evident. You are sup-

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posed to be able to draw the appropriate parallels between the look of a man and a look of an animal – whose basic character is taken to be self-evident. In other words: a man who looks like a lion is strong like a lion; a man who looks like a pig is porcine: slow, fat, and greedy; a man who looks like a fox is, as we still say, foxy – so sly and underhand; a man who looks like a donkey is, as we still also say, an ass; and so on and so forth (fig. 2). We would give little credit to such views and such illustrations now. The illustrations are crude and caricatural, at least partly as a result of the need to force the evidence for similarity, and reinforce the wished-for comparison. Foucault famously noted – precisely in the context of Della Porta and his works – that the interpretation of natural phenomena in the Renaissance was based on similitudes: similitude (and very often forced or willed anthropomorphization) became explanation.24 The extreme version of such science was represented by the doctrine of signatures. This doctrine, in which the tell-tale visual sign was shared by both explanandum and explanans, underlay both physiognomy and its plant parallel, phytognomy. Semiotically speaking, the relationship between sign and signified in this doctrine was anything but arbitrary (or at least was not taken to be so). In Della Porta’s almost as popular Phytognomy (first published in 1588),25 the similarity of appearance, the look of a plant, offered the clue to its medicinal powers. Physiognomy had always brought in its train a number of other disciplines – even more so after Della Porta. They were all based on the similarity between outward appearance and alleged character. All these disciplines, from metoposcopy to celestial physiognomy and even chironomy, attributed a set of fixed correlations between outward appearance and inner character. *** In April and May of 1668, Charles Le Brun gave a lecture or conférence on the expression of the passions (as the emotions were called then) to the newlycreated French Academy of Painting. It was repeated at least once in 1681, but probably on another occasion as well.

24 Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London, New York: Routledge, 1989. For a fuller account, see Freedberg, David. The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 25 Della Porta, Giovanni Battista. Phytognomonica. Frankfurt: Nikolaus Hoffman, 1608.

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Fig. 3: Charles Le Brun. La Frayeur: deux têtes de face et une de profil. Black chalk, pen, and black ink, 19,5 × 25,6 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre, Cabinet des Dessins. Source: Le Brun, Charles. “Conférence de Monsieur Le Brun sur l’expression générale et particulière.” Charles Le Brun. L’Expression des passions & autres conférences. Correspondances. Ed. Julien Philipe. Paris: Édition Dédale, 1994. 47–109, here 77.

The passions of the soul constituted a system that could be read by signs expressing the fixed correlations between inner feeling and outward expression. Le Brun and his followers aimed to provide quick and easy guides to the identification of the emotions; but very soon the editions of these guides became little more than objects of fashion. Others in France in the seventeenth century had already been interested in the problem of physiognomy. For example, Marin Cureau de La Chambre published a series of works, whose titles alone tell the story: The Characters of the Passions (1640/1645); Treatise on the Knowledge of Animals (1648); The Art of Knowing Men (1660); The System of the Soul (1665); Discourse on Friendship and Hatred between Animals (1667). The possibility of correlation was also implied by Descartes’s 1649 Treatise on the Passions of the Soul. Precisely as one might not have expected from the great separator of mind and body, it implied that the soul was represented by,

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and readable through, the body. In this work he was very far from the error attributed to him by Damasio. When Le Brun’s lectures on The General and Particular Expression of the Emotions was reprinted afterwards (it appeared in over sixty editions and versions through the next century and a half), it showed faces with distinctly represented expressions that Le Brun insisted were codifiable. On the basis of particular configurations of the lines of muscular expression on a face – superciliary, zygomatic, and corrugator – you could always tell (or you should always be able to tell) what emotion was expressed (fig. 3). Such and such a configuration expressed anger, such and such fear, such and such astonishment, such and such disgust, and so on. The idea was to offer a definitive repertoire of the apposite marks on faces for the signs of inner emotion, and of the long sought-after correspondences between the feeling and the expression of the emotions. But this idea has often been dismissed, on the grounds that the correlations are too rigid, too mechanical even, and that the expression of emotions varies from culture to culture.26 *** The purely physiognomic tradition culminated in the late eighteenth century with the Physiognomical Fragments of work of the Zurich pastor Johann Caspar Lavater, published in 1775–1778. It remained fashionable for generations after it was published (the first English edition was published in 1789 and was illustrated by William Blake and other artists; Georg Christoph Lichtenberg commented on it pungently). The danger of caricature is apparent from the hundreds of illustrations in Lavater’s work (fig. 4). The difference between Lavater and Le Brun is striking. More often than not, their approaches are elided under the term of physiognomy. Lavater fitted into the more firmly traditional physiognomic mainstream from the ancients Aristotle and Polemon on to Della Porta. He sought to define character on the basis of physiognomic configuration. The presumption of the Pastor from Zurich, who (like Kant) never travelled beyond his native province, emerges clearly. Lacking in any deep knowledge of 26 Even the best modern study of Le Brun is sceptical about the possibility of universal correlations between emotional expressions and emotions (Montagu, Jennifer. Expression of the Passions: The Origin and Influence of Charles Le Brun’s ‘Conférence sur l’expression générale et particulière.’ New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1994): It still contents itself with the weak contextual position. It takes the easy way out by seeing only difference, as if difference were more difficult to describe than similarity.

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Fig. 4: Les quatre tempéramens. Source: Lavater, Johann Caspar. Essai sur la physiognomonie destiné à faire connoître l’homme et à la faire aimer. Première partie. La Haye: Jacobus van Karnebeek, 1781. 263.

human nature, he attempted to classify not emotional responses, but character types – choleric, melancholic, sensual, and so on – on the basis of physiognomic features: pointed noses, thick lips, drawn or swollen cheeks, fat or thin, and so on and so forth. From these he thought he could deduce general personality. No wonder it became popular.

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Lavater’s insistence on correlations between personality and configuration of facial features is unnuanced. “Obstinate, like enthusiastic persons, have perpendicular foreheads. […] Absolute perpendicularity, and absolute want of understanding, are the same,” and so on, absurdly.27 The fundamental difference between Lavater and Le Brun is this: Lavater drew his conclusions on the basis of physiognomic features; Le Brun drew his on the basis of the actions of the muscles of the face, and made correlations between coordinated groups of muscles and emotional feeling. Both Duchenne de Boulogne and Darwin would do better. The difference is profound. Permanent features of the face have little to do with cortical activity; the movement of the muscles of the face – like those of the rest of the body – have everything to do with them. (I exclude the obvious fact that over time temporary expressions, if used often enough, can begin to influence the look of a face; but this is not a step Lavater took. He mentioned muscle movement from time to time, but had little understanding of their effect on the morphology of the face.) *** In the nineteenth century, the pathognomic tradition was taken up by two distinguished exponents, Duchenne de Boulogne (who did experiments) and Charles Darwin (who did not). Like Duchenne, Darwin put the technique of photography to new illustrative use. In his Mechanism of Human Physiognomy (1862), Duchenne argued for clear correlations between particular contractions of facial muscles and particular emotional states. To him, this suggested the universality of such correlations. Duchenne showed that the spontaneous smile that results from genuine feelings of pleasure involves the contraction of two sets of muscles in particular: the zygomaticus major around the mouth, and the orbicularis oculi around the eyes (which also lifts the cheek). These are muscles that cannot be driven by will alone. Similarly in cases of distress or fear with the corrugator muscles on the forehead and between the eyes. Duchenne demonstrated the clear distinctions between spontaneous responses and consciously willed ones. If the descending pathway from the motor cortex to brainstem and spinal cord is damaged, voluntary facial movement is impossible, but spontaneous 27 Lavater, Johann Caspar. Essays on Physiognomy; for the Promotion of the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind. Trans. Thomas Holcroft. London: Whittingham, 1804. Vol. 3. 7.

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laughter and smiling remain possible; if pathways from the forebrain to the motor cortex are damaged, then spontaneous smiling becomes impossible (the more usual, though still rare, case occurs when smiling is prevented only in the half of the mouth contralateral to the lesion). For the most part, you can tell the difference between a spontaneous and a volitional smile. Only zygomaticus major is involved in the latter, whereas the orbicularis muscle, as noted, is also involved in the former.28 Obviously, you can sometimes smile to mask a feeling that would not normally be conveyed by a smile, such as sadness, mourning, grief – preparation, in other words, to deceive. This is called the non-Duchenne smile. Sometimes you can be taken in, sometimes not. There is a large literature on the degree to which non-Duchenne smiles elicit a correct or an incorrect response.29 The test for a painter would be to convey, through a smile, the emotion that is intended to be masked. In other words, could a good painter – or photographer – or sculptor – convey a feeling that is intentionally not consistent with the outward expression of an emotion (say displeasure conveyed by smile, rather than pleasure)? Duchenne referred to a “natural language” of instinctive emotional expression. “Once this language was created, it sufficed for him [God] to give all human beings the instinctive faculty of always expressing their sentiments by contracting the same muscles. This rendered the language universal and immutable.” 30 Duchenne implied that there was a syntax of muscular contraction corresponding to the relevant emotions: hence the language metaphor. You can read emotions and get meaning from them, just like language – in this case a universal language. But this would be misleading. To see is not to read (though to read – unlike to listen – is to see, and of course to touch). It is true that we have no other way of speaking about the interpretive relationship between sign and meaning (unless we clumsily use the word “decipher;” but generally that relationship, even if arbitrary, is more transparent than “decipher” suggests).

28 For a wide-ranging summary of recent work on the Duchenne smile, see Niedenthal et al., “The Simulation of Smiles (SIMS) Model.” 29 For a good discussion and illustrations, see again Niedenthal et al., “The Simulation of Smiles (SIMS) Model.” 30 Duchenne de Boulogne, Guillaume Benjamin. The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression. Ed. and trans. Andrew R. Cuthbertson. Cambridge, New York, Paris: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 19, cf. 229–230. The idea is not dissimilar to Augustine’s on the natural language of the emotions.

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We speak of reading the signs. But in the case of responses to facial expression, “seeing” does not imply interpretation (though of course it could and should). A verb for the correct way of expressing the correlations between visual signs and understanding is lacking. *** Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals appeared in 1872, a decade after Duchenne’s book. The theory that accompanied earlier accounts of the problem was thin or absent; Darwin’s was much more powerful and took into account the neurological dimensions, both of expression and of habituation. More clearly than anyone earlier, he set out what was cultural and what was consistent in the correlations between emotion and expression, both in humans and in animals. But Darwin nuanced the implications of strong correlation. He gave instances of the cultural modification and supplementation of basic body movements associated with the expression of certain sentiments (for example, tenderness toward a child or a beloved). Maoris rub noses, Westerners kiss. In both cultures the bringing of body close to body signified the provision of or search for physical warmth, solace, nutrition. Darwin remained firm about the constancy of the relationship between emotion and expression across the species, but did not exclude local modulation. Like Duchenne, he illustrated his work with photographs. *** From the late 1960s on, Paul Ekman renewed and revitalized the arguments for the correlations between particular emotions and particular expressions. He also showed how the possibility of distinguishing between voluntary and involuntary emotions supported the theory of strong correlation. He began by identifying six basic emotions, from which his correlations proceeded: anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise (Le Brun, for example, had love, rapture, veneration, jealousy as well, but he made no claim for basic versus complex emotions). Although it is easy to acknowledge that some emotions phase into others, that there may be other identifiable emotions (for instance, contempt), that some are basic and others complex, and that his list like others may be too crude, his division continues to form the basis of much research.31 31 In his study of emotional expression amongst the South Fore people of New Guinea, Ekman himself acknowledged that they may not have distinguished between surprise and

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To cleave to this classification (or an alternative one) need and should not detract from the essential issue of the modulation of whatever emotions we choose to call basic. Ekman’s ones are as good as (and perhaps better than) any. Some readers of Ekman find it less easy than his claims suggest to identify emotions from their allegedly particular expressions. They find they make mistakes of identification. They do not always recognize the emotions for what Ekman says they are. They feel that they need to be more expert than his arguments for the intuitive judgments of faces allow (or what Duchenne might have called natural judgments). But Ekman argued that one could train oneself – or be trained – to recognize emotions from facial expression pretty accurately. This is still not an argument that has won general acceptance. It seems to fly in the face of the possibilities of anthropological variation in the way in which emotion can be expressed. And what if someone put on, or faked an expression? Would you be able to see through it? Ekman himself raised the question; indeed, much of his work has had to deal with seeing through lies (note the way in which we use both a literal and metaphorical expression for dealing with dissimulation). There is a difference between a genuine smile of pleasure and a forced or even a willed smile. Though plenty of people may be taken in by it, you can learn to detect it. Some people are naturally good at detecting what is genuine and what is fake in the expression of an emotion, others are more easily taken in. In our own culture we generally recognize the emotions of others who share our culture. Some of us seem to be more skilled than others at doing so. But most of us are familiar with cases of expressive deceit, of the false expression of emotions. Some are more skilled than others at recognizing such deceit. Reflection may help arrive at the correct conclusions. The rest of the body often provides corroborative or contra-indicative signs. But too much deliberation over too much information causes confusion. Sometimes, as we know from much experience, reflection produces less accurate judgments than intuition. What is at stake is the accuracy of automatic and instantaneous response.

fear; and he added contempt as an emotion with universal recognition. Any number of attempts have of course been made to add other universal recognizable emotions – guilt, shame, interest even: but all of these seem too complex – and possibly too dissimulable – to qualify either as a basic emotion or as susceptible to cross-cultural recognition. Cf. Ekman, Paul, et al. “Pan-Cultural Elements in Facial Displays of Emotions.” Science 164.3875 (1969): 86–88. The photographs were shown in the exhibition The Search for Universals in Human Emotion: Photographs from the New Guinea Expedition, San Francisco, Exploratorium, 22 January – 11 May 2008.

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The question of representation Ekman’s evidence (like much of Darwin’s) comes in the form of photographs. Since so many falter in identifying the emotions behind these faces, the prospect of a ‘natural language’ of emotions is called into question. But this may be because the language is not so natural after all; that we have to learn it. We are not skilled enough at this task. We need more information than a still photograph can provide. Or is it because there is already too much in a photograph? For the fact is that photographs do not provide too few clues to identification. They provide too many. They belong to that class of images – engravings in herbals are another – that provide too much information for classification.32 To say that one recognizes the emotional expression on a face: surely this cannot require close representation of the features and muscles of a face? 33 You waver when you see even a small detail that suggests another emotion (emotion is always a great attractor of attention). But before you waver you have already grasped an emotion – probably the correct one. After all, you can detect a face and the expression on a face from a minimum of cues.34 You cannot identify unless you can classify. Correlation depends on the possibility of classification. Classification in turn depends on descriptive parsimony. Too much information leads to the crossing of the boundaries essential to classification. The beauties and descriptive richness of pictures (as always, broadly taken) become worse than superfluous; they mislead and cause mistakes. No wonder that Francesco Stelluti’s 1637 edition of Della Porta’s Physiognomy dispensed with illustrations altogether. So did Linnaeus. Both realized that visual illustrations were too misleading because they were too full, too dense with detail, too capable of making one think of alternative possibilities. They could not find a visual system that was abbreviated enough. But the exponents of line thought they had an advantage here. Line drawings are self-evidently more schematic than pictures or photographs. Correlations depend on schemata. Descriptive parsimony becomes the chief ingredient of any attempt to illustrate correlations between emotions and 32 For a further discussion of this issue, see Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx. 33 It goes without saying that the definition of close representation, dependent as it is on available schemata, is moot. 34 As also in Arnheim, Rudolf. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954. Cf. Biederman, Irving. “Recognition-By-Components: A Theory of Human Image Understanding.” Psychological Review 94.2 (1987): 115–147.

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their expression. Too much information leads to the crossing of the boundaries essential to classification. To cross the line is to make a mistake. Then the question becomes one of recognition. The issue extends beyond faces and facial expression to the correct identification of other bodily movements and their emotional dimensions. What are the minimal numbers of lines and dots necessary for such recognition? The question has still not gone away, and it occupies many researchers.35 How much does it take to recognize, or to imitate? In any case, one would not want recognition to depend on close or anything like complete description; this might be fatal, or at least evolutionarily illogical. Many of the forerunners of Darwin depended on schematic illustration, or on the elicitation of schematic viewing, by which I mean viewing underwritten by a mode that enables the (swift) selection of distinctive traits, undistracted by extraneity and superfluity. Already in 1883, Francis Galton had noted that a face stimulus is perceived at a glance rather than as a collection of independent features.36 But one cannot have guides to the reading of expressions without schemata, either for classification or for its representation. Abandoning the language metaphor, Duchenne wrote that one should be able “like nature herself, to paint the expressive lines of the emotions of the soul on the face of man.” 37 “Paint” of course is misleading; “line” generally is not. Le Brun and his many subsequent illustrators chose relatively parsimonious graphic means to show what muscles of the face – and what muscular configurations – conveyed particular emotions. He and his illustrators did not want the possibility of making a mistake, or using the wrong line to suggest another emotion. So the linear approach to illustration remained relatively concise. As always, however, effective schematization was misdirected by the drive to further aestheticize the line (this is not to say schematization is necessarily unaesthetic; on the contrary).

35 For important early work on detecting faces in “impoverished” images, especially under degraded viewing conditions (for example, low image resolution), see Torralba, Antonio, and Pawan Sinha. “Detecting Faces in Impoverished Images.” AI Memo 028 / CBCL Memo 208 (2001): 1–13. Similar questions may be raised about the identification of expression on the basis of high or low frequency images (that is, large scale versus tighter degrees of luminance variation). 36 Galton, Francis. Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. London: Macmillan, 1883. Cf. Goffaux and Rossion, “Faces Are ‘Spatial,’” 1023. 37 Duchenne de Boulogne, The Mechanism, 9.

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The principle was clear; but the danger was caricature, particularly in the hands of inept draughtsman. We see this in Lavater and in any numbers of the later editions of Le Brun’s heads. *** Two forms of possible correlation: first, the correlation between the feeling and the expression of the emotion; second, the correlation between the feelings of the person observed (or the picture of the person observed) and the feelings of the observer. We have already spoken of the first; let us turn to the second. When we see a work such as Rogier van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross, we have little doubt about most of the emotions the artist seeks to convey (figs. 5a–c). They speak (as we say) for themselves. We perceive the sadness and tensions of the actors in the scene immediately, with little if any reflection, because the same parts of our brain fire upon the recognition of their emotions as would in theirs if they were living actors. The artist is so expert at showing the lineaments of grief that we instantly recognize the emotions he wishes to convey. His success in this domain lies in his ability to represent the expression of the emotions in such a way as to activate the same emotions in the viewer. We do not just read them, as intellectuals habitually say, we feel them through the activation of motor responses in ourselves that are adequate to that particular emotion; and such responses, both corporeal and emotional, ensue automatically upon sight. Who does not know, who cannot instantly feel in the imagination, the gentle upturn of the ends of the mouth, the light tightening of zygomatic muscles, the sense of tenderness of gaze as one looks at a beloved child in a state of peace or happiness? Most of us are blessed in being able to recognize such states in others, from the expression on their faces. Blessed, because such empathy for expression offers pleasure in life, and pleasure from art. Some who have muscular deficits in the areas relevant to the expression of such states cannot recognize them in others. Some, who have cortical losses in the places where emotions have their neural substrate, cannot recognize such states either. Patients who have Moebius Syndrome, who are congenitally unable to move their facial muscles and move their eyes from side to side, are incapable of recognizing the emotions of others – and certainly not from their facial expressions. Part of being whole is to be able to recognize the emotions of others. It is to have the innate capacities to do so.

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Fig. 5a: Rogier van der Weyden. Descent from the Cross. C. 1435. Oil on oak panel, 220 cm × 262 cm. Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado. Detail, head of John the Evangelist. Source: Campbell, Lorne, and Jan van der Stock. Rogier van der Weyden 1400–1464: Master of Passions. Zwolle: Waanders, 2009. 18.

Fig. 5b: Rogier van der Weyden. Descent from the Cross. C. 1435. Oil on oak panel, 220 cm × 262 cm. Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado. Detail, head of Nicodemus. Source: Campbell and van der Stock, Rogier van der Weyden 1400–1464, 18.

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Fig. 5c: Rogier van der Weyden. Descent from the Cross. C. 1435. Oil on oak panel, 220 cm × 262 cm. Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado. Detail, head of Mary Salome. Source: Campbell and van der Stock, Rogier van der Weyden 1400–1464, 18.

Of course it is always possible to train to improve; and it is easier, in principle, to do so than one might think. And empathy, as Jonathan Cole once trenchantly put it, needs a face.38

Seeing emotion There is a matching system – to use Rizzolatti’s useful term – not only for motor actions, but for emotional stimuli too. “Common coding” is Wolfgang Prinz’s term for this process.39 Of course, as we have repeatedly observed, emotions are underwritten by movements, even small ones; so too for the expressions of emotions on the face. Others call this a shared representations mechanism, which also allows observers to “resonate,” as they put it (perhaps too vaguely), with the autonomic and visceral state of the other individual.40 38 Cole, Jonathan. “Empathy Needs a Face.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8.5/7 (2001): 51–68. 39 Prinz, Wolfgang. “Experimental Approaches to Action.” Agency and Self-Awareness. Ed. Johannes Roessler and Naomi Eilan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 165–187. 40 Decety, Jean, and Philip L. Jackson. “The Functional Architecture of Human Empathy.” Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews 3.2 (2004): 71–100. Much of the material on the

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As always, the role of the amygdala in fear responses offers the most graphic examples. The mere sight of an expression of fear activates viewer’s own amygdala too. The same for expressions of disgust and the corresponding activation of the anterior insula in viewer as well as in viewed.41 In the case of fear, amygdalic activation can occur even before the visual stimulus arrives at V1. This almost certainly happens with other emotions too. If one’s amygdala is damaged, both one’s recognition of fear and one’s feelings of fear are seriously impaired.42 Even when one imitates an expression of fear oneself, the amygdala is involved. The same for disgust and the insula. Indeed, the effect can appear to be stronger in the case of imitation than in that of observation.43 *** Similar networks are activated by the perception of facial emotional expression as in the generation 44 and expression of similar emotions.45 Observers simulate the observed emotions of others, whether consciously seen or not. A neonate imitates the buccal expression of a mother even though it has never seen itself do so in a mirror.46 following pages comes from this outstanding survey of research on human empathy in general. The concept is also clearly discussed in Adolphs, Ralph. “Neural Systems for Recognizing Emotion.” Current Opinion in Neurobiology 12.2 (2002): 169–177; Adolphs, Ralph, et al. “A Role for Somatosensory Cortices in the Visual Recognition of Emotion as Revealed by Three-Dimensional Lesion Mapping.” The Journal of Neuroscience 20.7 (2000): 2683–2690. 41 Wicker, Bruno, et al. “Both of Us Disgusted in My Insula: The Common Neural Basis of Seeing and Feeling Disgust.” Neuron 40.3 (2003): 655–664. 42 As in the case of 30 year-old patient S. M. examined by Adolphs, Ralph, et al. “Fear and the Human Amygdala.” The Journal of Neuroscience 15.9 (1995): 5879–5891. 43 Iacoboni, Marco, et al. “Cortical Mechanisms of Human Imitation.” Science 286.5449 (1999): 2526–2528; Carr, Laurie, et al. “Neural Mechanisms of Empathy in Humans: A Relay from Neural Systems for Imitation to Limbic Areas.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 100.9 (2003): 5497–5502. 44 As in much of the work of Ralph Adolphs; but see Adolphs, Ralph. “Recognizing Emotion from Facial Expressions: Psychological and Neurological Mechanisms.” Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews 1.1 (2002): 21–61. 45 Ekman, Paul, and Richard J. Davidson. “Voluntary Smiling Changes Regional Brain Activity.” Psychological Science 4 (1993): 342–345; Carr et al., “Neural Mechanisms of Empathy in Humans;” Leslie, Kenneth R., et al. “Functional Imaging of Face and Hand Imitation: Towards a Motor Theory of Empathy.” Neuroimage 21.2 (2004): 601–607. Carr et al. offer another good survey of research on empathy at that point. 46 Famously demonstrated in Meltzoff, Andrew N., and M. Keith Moore. “Imitation of Facial and Manual Gestures by Human Neonates.” Science 198.4312 (1977): 75–78; Meltzoff, Andrew N.,

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Ulf Dimberg showed how electromyographic responses in the facial muscles of observers are congruent with those involved in the observed person’s facial expressions. When we see someone else smiling the same muscles that contract in her, contract in us too; similarly with our brow muscles when we see someone angry.47 Ralph Adolphs later set out how the sight of facial expressions in others can trigger similar expressions on one’s own face, even in the absence of conscious recognition of the stimulus.48 In the case of affective blindsight, you do not see a danger signal, but you still respond to it. Indeed, if you see a positive signal and a danger signal at the same time, you may think you see only the positive signal; but your face will show the signs of fear.49 Why? Because the signal goes along the subcortical visual pathway that runs from retina to superior colliculus, to posterior thalamus and amygdala, even before it reaches the visual cortex itself.50 In some instances of affective blindsight, patients with V1 lesions are able to correctly distinguish between the affective valence of facial expressions projected in their blind field despite having no conscious perception of the stimuli.51 Hemianope patients, those with damage to one side of the visual cortex, making it impossible for them actually to see an emotional stimulus in their blind field, nevertheless register on their faces clear reactions to what they cannot see.52 and M. Keith Moore. “Newborn Infants Imitate Adult Facial Gestures.” Child Development 54.3 (1983): 702–709. 47 Dimberg, Ulf. “Facial Reactions to Facial Expressions.” Psychophysiology 19.6 (1982): 643–647. 48 Adolphs, Ralph, et al. “Dissociable Neural Systems for Recognizing Emotions.” Brain and Cognition 52.1 (2003): 61–69; Dimberg, Ulf, et al. “Unconscious Facial Reactions to Emotional Facial Expressions.” Psychological Science 11.1 (2000): 86–89; see also Wallbott, Harald G. “Recognition of Emotion from Facial Expression: Some Indirect Evidence for an Old Theory.” British Journal of Social Psychology 30.3 (1991): 207–219. 49 Tamietto, Marco, and Beatrice de Gelder. “Affective Blindsight in the Intact Brain: Neural Interhemispheric Summation for Unseen Fearful Expressions.” Neuropsychologia 46.3 (2008): 820–828. 50 See the summary by Tamietto, Marco, et al. “Collicular Vision Guides Nonconscious Behavior.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 22.5 (2009): 888–902. 51 De Gelder, Beatrice, et al. “Non-Conscious Recognition of Affect in the Absence of Striate Cortex.” Neuroreport 10.18 (1999): 3759–3763. For a good current overview of this effect, see also Tamietto, Marco, et al. “Unseen Facial and Bodily Expressions Trigger Fast Emotional Reactions.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 106.42 (2009): 17661–17666. 52 De Gelder, Beatrice, et al. “Unconscious Fear Influences Emotional Awareness of Faces and Voices.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

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The old term “emotional contagion” has been revived by researchers to describe “the spontaneous tendency to synchronize our facial expressions with those of another person.” 53 Observers who are exposed to smiling faces activate the same facial muscles involved in producing a smile – even when they do not consciously see the emotion on the face; and this creates a corresponding feeling of happiness.54 The distinctive contractions of upper and lower lip in expressions of disgust, the wrinkling of the nose when one sees something particularly repellent (especially in the implications of smell or taste), the tight downward contraction of the superciliaries: we recognize these movements of the face as hallmarks of disgust, and easily make them. To what degree does the mere production of such a configuration produce disgust? Probably very little, unless done with much more closeness than most of us can muster. It would seem to work better with anger and amazement (and certainly a smile): attend carefully to your autonomic responses – though they may seem slight – when you try this out. Often the making of a facial expression generates internal changes in the body. Ekman and his colleagues did a series of experiments in which they asked subjects to make the facial expressions for anger, surprise, sadness, happiness, disgust, and fear; and found that doing so brought about a clear sense of the subjective experience of associated emotions, as well as a series of relevant autonomic changes (for instance, heart rate, skin conductance, finger temperature, and other somatic activity).55 When we see emotions in others, we can be pretty sure that we recognize them for what they are, that these are indeed the feelings that lie behind their representation, precisely because of our capacity to reproduce them inwardly or outwardly.

102.51 (2005): 18682–18687; cf. de Gelder, Beatrice, and Nouchine Hadjikhani. “Non-Conscious Recognition of Emotional Body Language.” Neuroreport 17.6 (2006): 583–586. 53 Tamietto et al., “Unseen Facial and Bodily Expressions,” 17661; cf. de Gelder, Beatrice. “Towards the Neurobiology of Emotional Body Language.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 7.3 (2006): 242–249. Also much discussed in the work of Singer and de Vignemont. 54 Dimberg et al. used a backward-masking method, in which subjects were prevented from consciously perceiving 30-ms exposures of happy, neutral, and angry target faces by having them immediately followed and masked by neutral expressions. 55 Ekman, Paul, et al. “Autonomic Nervous System Activity Distinguishes among Emotions.” Science 221.4616 (1983): 1208–1210; Levenson, Robert W., et al. “Voluntary Facial Action Generates Emotion-Specific Autonomic Nervous System Activity.” Psychophysiology 27.4 (1990): 363– 384.

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“Pretty sure” because of the ever-present possibility of deception, and because the borderlines are so fine. For example, one might confuse fear and amazement from time to time – but for the most part, in normal life, we have little difficulty in separating one from the other. How would you recognize the emotions of others if a part of your body were not capable of registering in itself the corporeal expression of those emotions? Adolphs has shown that the integrity of the sensorimotor system is critical for the recognition of emotions displayed by others.56 It supports the reconstruction of what it would feel like to be in a particular emotion by means of simulation of the related body state. In other words, the recognition of emotions in others requires that the perceiver be able to reconstruct the somatic and motoric dimensions usually associated with producing and experiencing the emotion seen.57 Paula Niedenthal did an ingenious experiment in which she asked subjects to put a pencil in their mouths while looking at photographs of facial expressions. When you do this, you can neither smile nor frown; you are unable to move your facial muscles in the normal way. Niedenthal found that subjects keeping the pencils between teeth were much less able to detect changes in emotional facial expressions than the other participants, who could mimic the expressions if they so wished.58 The issue is not just that of the brain; it is of the capacity of the body to imitate, in some form, even inexplicit, the emotional expression of others. *** A still larger question arises – that of how to speak of the apparent automaticity of the involuntary imitation of observed expressions (and of many other bodily movements too). Associated with this question is the issue of non-conscious responses. Sometimes we are not aware that we have seen an emotional expression, yet still respond as if we had seen an emotion; we recognize it even if we do not see it. Such a response may more suitably be called unconscious than automatic. More and more research is being dedicated to automatic responses that are sometimes quite independent of awareness. Beatrice de Gelder, who has 56 Adolphs et al., “A Role for Somatosensory Cortices.” 57 Adolphs et al., “Dissociable Neural Systems.” 58 Niedenthal, Paula M., et al. “Embodiment in Attitudes, Social Perception, and Emotion.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 9.3 (2005): 184–211.

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done much work on affective blindsight and body responses, has described how fear recognition may be “mandatory and independent of awareness.” 59 Indeed, her research on non-conscious recognition of facial expression has shown that fear specific effects generated enhance neuronal activity not only in the amygdala (and pulvinar) but in the fusiform gyrus itself.60 Like other physical and felt responses to the sight of the bodies and movements of others, responses to faces and emotional facial expressions force assessment of what often seems to be automatic. If you were taking a rarefied position on aesthetic response, you might say that responses to faces hardly raise significant questions about art. But this would indeed be too rarefied. What are we to make – to put it bluntly – of the relationship between the biologically needful response and the aesthetic one? Between the need to sense the agony of another before we fall into the same situation ourselves, to run away from danger, to identify the disgust of an infant when it tastes rancid food, to calm the rising ire of a violent person and, say, the pleasure to be derived from the identification of the emotions of figures populating a picture, from the ways in which expression tells a story which we piece together, or simply from the mimetic skill of the artist? (I, for one, have never found the works of Franz-Xaver Messerschmitt particularly interesting aesthetically; many others have.) One might claim that physiognomic expression has nothing to do with aesthetic pleasure at all (though this would be a stretch, much as one might want to divorce traditional mimetic views from current views of aesthesis). Of course, in many pictures there are no physiognomies. Identification of the emotions of others is not in and of itself aesthetic. But the ways in which humans – and other animals too – identify the emotions of others offer insights into elements of cortical transmission that are essential for any form of aesthetic understanding. Forgetting – or perhaps not really noting – the difference between a Lavater and a Le Brun, Willibald Sauerländer denounced the whole physiognomic tradition, on the grounds that it paved the way for the legitimation of direct sensation in the understanding of works of art. His agenda was that the importance of art lies in the degree to which it enables reflection on what is seen in

59 In fact, “unconscious fear recognition remains robust even in the light of a concurrent incongruent happy facial expression or an emotional voice of which the observer is aware.” (De Gelder et al., “Unconscious Fear,” 18682.) 60 De Gelder et al., “Unconscious Fear.”

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an artwork; and that unmediated experience can have no role in the aesthetic understanding.61 Sauerländer would also have argued against all proposals à la Le Brun, on the grounds that no aesthetic response could be as automatic as Le Brun’s drawings implied (since correlation implies a certain degree of automaticity). Sauerländer might have acknowledged the possibility of making such instant judgments about the emotions that lie behind the expressions of others; but he would have said that such judgments have no place in responses to the work perceived as a work of art. The fear is of sensationalism and immediacy. The same disdain – better, the same fear – was shared by Ernst Gombrich in his well-known essays on physiognomy.62 He admitted that physiognomic perception (as he called it) carried “strong and immediate conviction.” Observing that the categories of “smiling” and “menacing” “are amongst our earliest and most basic responses,” he insisted, contrary to all the claims of this book, that “[t]here is no advantage in our remembering the early stages of our probings that have been superseded by a better fit.” 63 For Gombrich, such basic responses (as he himself put it) are regressive; and neither he nor Sauerländer believe that such regression plays a role in understanding art or culture. It would be hard to mistake Gombrich’s deep discomfort with what he believes to be regressive responses, in this case immediate and direct responses to emotional expression (as also in the case of human faces imagined in clouds and other natural phenomena). In the end, despite his claims for reflection as an element in understanding art, the exclusion of responses that are immediate, sensory, and involve the body does not leave much place for a fully-fledged aesthetic theory that will serve us, either now or in the future. No one would argue that aesthetics consists only of automatic or immediate responses. What is at stake is the problem of how and what we conceive of as preceding reflection, of what actually does precede reflection, and of how reflection modulates precognitive states of being prior to awareness. The task must now be to consider the ways in which bottom-up responses are modulated by prefrontal processes in the brain, and to better understand the inhibitory constraints on motor and bodily responses to visual stimuli in works of 61 Sauerländer, Willibald. “Überlegungen zu dem Thema Lavater und die Kunstgeschichte.” Idea. Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunsthalle 8 (1989): 15–30. 62 In particular in Gombrich, Ernst H. “On Physiognomic Perception.” Ernst H. Gombrich. Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art. London: Phaidon Press, 1963. 45–55. 63 Gombrich, “On Physiognomic Perception,” 48–49.

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art. These forms of cortical as well as subcortical inflection of automatic and immediate involvement with representation lie at the core of aesthetic experience. The point at which neural inhibition engenders reflection and contemplation is critical; but these are complex matters that require much unravelling and so must be set aside for another occasion. For authorities like Sauerländer – and the many philosophers and scholars who think like him – the pleasures of culture arise from the intellectual mediation of immediate responses. It would be impossible to deny that they often – perhaps mostly – do. But to exclude the kinds of bodily responses that Sauerländer and others call unmediated – and that may indeed align us with animals – would be to preclude an essential element in our involvement with images and with art. It would be to overlook the many ways in which responses to art cannot be thought of in terms of context alone, because the effects of art are necessarily and inevitably predicated on the dialectics of body and brain. Our reactions to what we see, and our estimate of the quality of what we see, depend as much on the impact of circumstance and on our individuality as on the schematic generality that underlies it. They depend on the relationship between our local and accidental particularity and the bodies that we are given from birth and that continue to dominate our lives until the grave.64 These are bodies whose structure we only understand through discovery of their similarities with others. The body, as Shaun Gallagher put it, may shape the mind, but it is also underpinned by a neural substrate that is itself able to be shaped. To overlook the role of bodily understanding and its neural underpinnings is not to vulgarize aesthetic understanding, but to impoverish it. To ignore the constitution of the body in the analysis of responses to what we see is to take the fundamental tension away from responses to art, and desiccate what it has to offer. The bodies we are given and cannot entirely remake, and the image we have of our bodies, may indeed be modified by circumstance, but the time has come to more fully admit what it means to talk about difference. It arises not only from distinctions between circumstances, but even more clearly from the modification of that which joins individuals to each other and of what is similar across human circumstance. It is this that offers us the richness and incommunicabilities of difference itself.

64 I allude here to the notion of body schema, clearly set out by Gallagher, Shaun. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

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Kanwisher, Nancy, et al. “The Fusiform Face Area: A Module in Human Extrastriate Cortex Specialized for Face Perception.” The Journal of Neuroscience 17.11 (1997): 4302–4311. Keightley, Michelle L., et al. “An FMRI Study Investigating Cognitive Modulation of Brain Regions Associated with Emotional Processing of Visual Stimuli.” Neuropsychologia 41.5 (2003): 585–596. Krumhuber, Eva, et al. “Facial Dynamics as Indicators of Trustworthiness and Cooperative Behavior.” Emotion 7.4 (2007): 730–735. Kumar, Devpriya, and Narayanan Srinivasan. “Emotion Perception Is Mediated by Spatial Frequency Content.” Emotion 11.5 (2011): 1144–1151. Lavater, Johann Caspar. Essai sur la physiognomonie destiné à faire connoître l’homme et à la faire aimer. Première partie. La Haye: Jacobus van Karnebeek, 1781. Lavater, Johann Caspar. Essays on Physiognomy; for the Promotion of the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind. Trans. Thomas Holcroft. London: Whittingham, 1804. Vol. 3. Le Brun, Charles. “Conférence de Monsieur Le Brun sur l’expression générale et particulière.” Charles Le Brun. L’Expression des passions & autres conférences. Correspondances. Ed. Julien Philipe. Paris: Édition Dédale, 1994. 47–109. Leslie, Kenneth R., et al. “Functional Imaging of Face and Hand Imitation: Towards a Motor Theory of Empathy.” Neuroimage 21.2 (2004): 601–607. Levenson, Robert W., et al. “Voluntary Facial Action Generates Emotion-Specific Autonomic Nervous System Activity.” Psychophysiology 27.4 (1990): 363–384. Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. “Über Physiognomik; wider die Physiognomen. Zu Beförderung der Menschenliebe und Menschenkenntnis.” Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Schriften und Briefe. Vol. 3: Aufsätze, Entwürfe, Gedichte, Erklärung der Hogarthischen Kupferstiche. Ed. Wolfgang Promies. Munich: Hanser, 1972. 256–295. Meltzoff, Andrew N., and M. Keith Moore. “Imitation of Facial and Manual Gestures by Human Neonates.” Science 198.4312 (1977): 75–78. Meltzoff, Andrew N., and M. Keith Moore. “Newborn Infants Imitate Adult Facial Gestures.” Child Development 54.3 (1983): 702–709. Montagu, Jennifer. Expression of the Passions: The Origin and Influence of Charles Le Brun’s ‘Conférence sur l’expression générale et particulière.’ New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1994. Niedenthal, Paula M., et al. “Embodiment in Attitudes, Social Perception, and Emotion.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 9.3 (2005): 184–211. Niedenthal, Paula M., et al. “The Simulation of Smiles (SIMS) Model: Embodied Simulation and the Meaning of Facial Expression.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33.6 (2010): 417–433. Prinz, Wolfgang. “Experimental Approaches to Action.” Agency and Self-Awareness. Ed. Johannes Roessler and Naomi Eilan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 165–187. Sauerländer, Willibald. “Überlegungen zu dem Thema Lavater und die Kunstgeschichte.” Idea. Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunsthalle 8 (1989): 15–30. Schulte-Rüther, Martin, et al. “Gender Differences in Brain Networks Supporting Empathy.” Neuroimage 42.1 (2008): 393–403. Simpson, Elizabeth, and Dorothy Fragaszy. “Can We Really Leave Gender out of It? Individual Differences and the Simulation of Smiles Model.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33.6 (2010): 459–460. Stel, Mariëlle, and Ad van Knippenberg. “The Role of Facial Mimicry in the Recognition of Affect.” Psychological Science 19.10 (2008): 984–985.

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Streit, Marcus, et al. “Time Course of Regional Brain Activations during Facial Emotion Recognition in Humans.” Neuroscience Letters 342.1/2 (2003): 101–104. Tamietto, Marco, and Beatrice de Gelder. “Affective Blindsight in the Intact Brain: Neural Interhemispheric Summation for Unseen Fearful Expressions.” Neuropsychologia 46.3 (2008): 820–828. Tamietto, Marco, et al. “Collicular Vision Guides Nonconscious Behavior.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 22.5 (2009): 888–902. Tamietto, Marco, et al. “Unseen Facial and Bodily Expressions Trigger Fast Emotional Reactions.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 106.42 (2009): 17661–17666. Torralba, Antonio, and Pawan Sinha. “Detecting Faces in Impoverished Images.” AI Memo 028 / CBCL Memo 208 (2001): 1–13. Vigil, Jacob Miguel. “A Socio-Relational Framework of Sex Differences in the Expression of Emotion.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32.5 (2009): 375–390. Vuilleumier, Patrik, et al. “Distinct Spatial Frequency Sensitivities for Processing Faces and Emotional Expressions.” Nature Neuroscience 6.6 (2003): 624–631. Wallbott, Harald G. “Recognition of Emotion from Facial Expression: Some Indirect Evidence for an Old Theory.” British Journal of Social Psychology 30.3 (1991): 207–219. Webster, Michael A., et al. “Adaptation to Natural Facial Categories.” Nature 428.6982 (2004): 557–561. Whalen, Paul J., et al. “Masked Presentations of Emotional Facial Expressions Modulate Amygdala Activity without Explicit Knowledge.” The Journal of Neuroscience 18.1 (1998): 411–418. Wicker, Bruno, et al. “Both of Us Disgusted in My Insula: The Common Neural Basis of Seeing and Feeling Disgust.” Neuron 40.3 (2003): 655–664.

Joel Krueger

Emotions and Other Minds Can we see emotions? Initially, at least, one is probably inclined to answer in the negative. Whatever their ontology, emotions are generally taken to be mental states. And mental states are generally assumed to occur inside the biological borders of the subject of the mental state. When I become sad after receiving news of a friend’s misfortune, it seems that my sadness is somehow located inside of me. It is my sadness; I have experiential access to it in a way that marks it as uniquely my own, and which makes it inaccessible to others. Yet emotions also seem to have a public face. My wife will say that she sees my sadness in my downturned shoulders, heavy posture, quiet speech, and the contours of my sorrowful facial expression; my demeanor betrays my sadness and makes it visible. The unrestrained laughter that makes a young child’s joy so infectious seems to externalize the child’s happiness itself. It is not as though the joy is confined behind the laughter; rather, it appears to somehow manifest itself precisely within the child’s expressive behavior. So, we seem stuck between competing intuitions. Are emotions private or public entities? I argue in what follows that they are in fact both. Put otherwise, emotions, I suggest, are primarily ways of engaging with the world, including the social world. As such, they are Janus-faced entities encompassing both public and private aspects. This might strike some as a relatively trivial thesis. I will further argue, however, that thinking of emotions this way helps make headway on a particularly stubborn philosophical problem: the epistemological problem of other minds. It does so by challenging the Cartesian assumption motivating this problem: the presumed split between an inner mental event (such as an emotional state) and its outer behavioral expression. Call this the “Unobservability Principle” (UP): the idea that the essence of mental phenomena (including emotional experiences) consist of intracranial events, states, or processes that are in principle unobservable and thus hidden from everyone but their owner. Drawing upon both philosophical and cognitive scientific approaches to emotion, this paper challenges UP. In so doing, it suggests a way for overcoming the epistemological problem of other minds.

Other minds: what’s the problem? The philosophical problem of other minds arises from the following dilemma: given that the mental life of others is hidden from view, things like thoughts, beliefs, intentions, emotions, etc., cannot be directly observed or known by

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anyone other than their owner – how can we hope to justify our persistent belief that other people have minds like ours? 1 This “stark asymmetry” 2 between how I know my own mental states versus those of others generates the epistemological problem of other minds – again, the question of how I am justified in my belief that others are also subjects of experience. A related but distinct question is the conceptual problem of other minds. This is the question of how I come to acquire concepts of another’s mental states in light of this stark asymmetry. If I only have direct knowledge of my own pain, for example, how do I extend my concept of pain to encompass that of others? This paper will not be concerned with addressing the conceptual problem of other minds. Its focus lies with the epistemological problem. Important for present concerns, however, is to first note that both problems rest on UP: again, the assumption that there exists an ontological distinction between unobservable experience (mind) and public behavior (body). This assumption is motivated by the fact that, whatever our reasons, we often successfully conceal our mental life from those around us. For example, I become angered by a colleague’s comment during a meeting but nevertheless maintain a stoic expression to mask this anger. Certain football players are notorious for taking dives and feigning injuries and pain behavior in the absence of any experienced pain; often, referees and spectators alike are taken in by their performance. The possibility of pretense shows us that behavior can be decoupled from experience. I can readily see the former but be mistaken about the latter. Therefore, it seems as though there is a distinction between patterns of behavior, which are available for public perception, and the private mental states standing behind them, which are not. If all I see are patterns of overt behavior, how can I be certain that there are in fact mental states behind them? Moreover, how can I be sure what sort of mental states they actually are? According to this way of thinking, behavior such as scowling, smiling, shaking my fists, shrinking back in fright, etc., carries information about the emotional phenomena the behavior expresses (its type, intensity, target, dura-

1 Fred Dretske states the problem this way: “Some philosophers think there is a special difficulty about other minds because, to put it roughly, we cannot see other minds. They are unobservable. You can see the smile (at least the upturned mouth), but not the thought ‘behind’ it. You can see the perspiration, the flushed face, the wrinkled forehead, the squint, the jerky motion of the arms, the hunched shoulders, the clenched fist, and the trembling lips, but you cannot see the fear, the embarrassment, the frustration, the desire, the pain, or the anger that the other person (presumably) feels.” (Dretske, Fred. “Perception and Other Minds.” Noûs 7.1 (1973): 34–44, here 36.) 2 Hyslop, Alec. “Other Minds.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward N. Zalta. Fall 2010. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2010/entries/other-minds/ (28 October 2013).

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tion, etc.) but is not a proper part of the emotional phenomena itself. Emotions and feelings, as internal states, are ontologically distinct from the expressive behavior that publically betrays them. What this means is that, even under ideal circumstances (my perceptual faculties are functioning properly, environmental conditions are optimal, etc.), I only have access to information about another’s mental states within their expressive behavior. I have no means of perceptually accessing the mental state itself. Accordingly, in order to be certain that there are in fact mental states motivating another’s behavior – and to begin to understand the various ways that different patterns of behavior express different sorts of mental states, which allows me to explain and predict further patterns of behavior and thus get on with others socially –, I must utilize some kind of extra-perceptual cognitive mechanism. Within philosophy and psychology, this mechanism is most commonly said to be a theory of mind – specifically, a theory about the relation between mental states and behavior.3 This theory can take different forms. The discussion here is complex, ranging across both philosophy and cognitive science; I set aside particulars for the sake of space. The salient point is that according to this widelyheld view, my belief in others’ mental states is grounded in a hypotheticodeduction: an inference from publically-perceivable behavior (scowling, laughter) to the private mental states that best explain it (anger, happiness). Since I can neither observe nor know another’s mental states directly, I must rely on inference both to ground my belief that others have minds as well as to sort out what they are thinking and feeling. One objection to this view is that long before they are capable of making inferential judgments purportedly at the root of our theory of mind, infants nevertheless seem capable of detecting, responding to, and even predicting the mental states of others.4 Infants therefore seem to have rudimentary perceptual knowledge of other minds without possessing a theory of mind. In other words, they seem to get it simply by observing the face-to-face behavior of their caregivers – behavior which is generally characterized by a hyper-

3 Baron-Cohen, Simon. Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995; Gopnik, Alison, and Henry M. Wellman. “Why the Child’s Theory of Mind Really Is a Theory.” Mind & Language 7.1/2 (1992): 145–171; Premack, David, and Guy Woodruff. “Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind?” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1 (1978): 515–526. 4 Gallagher, Shaun, and Dan Zahavi. The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. New York: Routledge, 2008; Hobson, Peter. The Cradle of Thought: Exploring the Origins of Thinking. London: MacMillan, 2002; Reddy, Vasudevi, and Paul Morris. “Participants Don’t Need Theories: Knowing Minds in Engagement.” Theory & Psychology 14.5 (2004): 647–665.

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expressivity intended to engage and refine the infant’s burgeoning social abilities.5 Hence, our primary access to others is perceptual, not theoretical. A response to this objection is that social inferences need not be explicit; the infant need not initiate, nor be consciously aware of, these inferences as they happen. Rather, the inferential processes at the root of social cognition are the result of innate mindreading modules hardwired in the infant’s brain from birth.6 They are subpersonal processes that occur beneath the threshold of consciousness. So, the fact that infants – or anyone else, for that matter – are not aware of these processes as they happen, or fail to initiate them (since infants lack the requisite conceptual capacities), is not an objection to the view. These mechanisms are both subpersonal and hardwired from birth. Moreover, they are necessary for social cognition since, once again, we can never observe another’s mental states but must therefore infer (explicitly or implicitly) their existence. This inference-based view of social cognition has in recent years faced a great deal of criticism from a number of fronts in philosophy and cognitive science. I will not rehearse it here. Instead, I want to consider the idea mentioned previously: namely, that our access to other minds is necessarily inferential since mental states, including emotions, are exclusively intracranial entities and thus ontologically distinct from the external behavior that expresses them. While UP, at first blush, appears a thoroughly commonsensical view, does it stand up to scrutiny? In what follows, I want to challenge UP and argue that this picture might be questioned in at least two ways. First, it might be the case that some bodily expressions of emotion are constitutive parts of the emotion itself; hence, part of the emotion is publically perceivable and not completely hidden. Second, it might be the case that some emotions are forms of engagement that essentially involve others. In other words, they are mutually negotiated; hence, part of the emotion is publically perceivable and not completely hidden.

Emotions and their bodily expression What happens when we experience an emotion? Generally speaking, we express it; the emotion is discharged in some sort of overt bodily action. When I am angry, I may frown, bare my teeth (if I am really angry), and gesture furtively. When I am happy, I might smile, raise my eyebrows, and assume a 5 Trehub, Sandra E. “Mothers Are Musical Mentors.” Zero to Three 23.1 (2002): 19–22. 6 Baron-Cohen, Mindblindness.

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more buoyant bodily posture; if I am especially elated, I may even jump for joy and pump my fists in the air. Bodily actions thus express felt emotions. However, as the previous discussion of pretense suggests – and as the inference-based approach to social cognition presumes –, the bodily expression of emotion is ontologically distinct from the emotion itself. A skilled actor can feign a wide range of emotions simply by adopting their associated facial expressions. But she can do this without actually feeling the associated emotion. So, once again, it appears that emotions can be decoupled from expression. The public expression of emotion is something distinct from its private inner core. While this is certainly a widely-held view – generally taken to be so obvious as to not require explicit argument –, there is by no means universal consensus on this point. Some thinkers, particularly within the phenomenological tradition, have challenged this view. They argue that to see the expression of emotion is to literally see the emotion itself (or at least part of it) and not merely an expression of the emotion.7 Before considering this challenge to UP more carefully, it is important to get clear about how the term “expression” is being used in this context. Peter Goldie argues that an overt piece of behavior is a genuine expression of emotion only if it is not performed as a means to some further end.8 There are three ways that an expression of emotion can fail to satisfy this condition. First, it can be done insincerely – such as, for example, when I smile (and thus feign happiness) upon shaking hands with someone I strongly dislike.9 There is no authentic emotion motivating this expression; rather, it is performed mechanically, perhaps out of respect for the social norms governing that encounter and is thus inauthentic. Second, an expression can be genuine (a frown expressing anger) but performed calculatingly, that is, to intentionally convey to others that one is experiencing this emotion (which then becomes the true end of the expressive act). This calculative performance removes the spontaneity at the heart of authentic emotional expression and thus trans-

7 Husserl, Edmund. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology: From the Lectures, Winter Semester, 1910–1911. Trans. Ingo Farin and James G. Hart. Dordrecht: Springer, 2006; Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. New York: Routledge, 2002; Scheler, Max. The Nature of Sympathy. Trans. Peter Heath. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954. See also Krueger, Joel. “Seeing Mind in Action.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 11.2 (2012): 149–173. 8 Goldie, Peter. The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 9 Williams, Bernard. “Morality and the Emotions.” Bernard Williams. Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers 1956–1972. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. 207–229.

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forms it from an end to a means. Third, an expression cannot be done simply for pleasure: for example, kicking a table leg out of anger to feel better. Again, this would transform the expressive act from an end to a means; that is, the goal of slightly alleviating one’s anger. So, for Goldie a genuine expression of emotion must be sincere, spontaneous, and self-contained (an end in itself).10 Even with this condition in place, the class of actions which are authentic expressions of emotion remains heterogeneous. It includes things like facial expressions (smiling, frowning, opening one’s eyes wide in surprise), gestures (both while speaking and when silent), whole-body movements 11 (jumping for joy, rearing back in anger or surprise, surging forward to escape a fearful object or event), and spontaneous touches (kissing or stroking the face of one’s beloved). Genuine expressions of emotion thus seem to inhabit a suggestive space between bodily changes (physiological changes such as responses of the autonomic nervous system, hormonal changes, muscular reactions, etc.) and reasoned actions that flow from emotions (actions made rationally intelligible by appealing to some combination of beliefs and desires).12 Expressions of emotion seem to have an experiential significance that makes them more meaningful than the former; yet they do not seem to lend themselves to beliefdesire rationalization quite like the latter.13 However, they seem to be a crucial aspect of emotional experience, and particularly its public face, and thus require explicit consideration. The salient point for our purposes is that these instances of behavior, whether voluntary actions or involuntary reactions, are generally taken to be causal expressions of the emotion and not a proper part of the emotion itself;14 the “real” emotion remains hidden behind its behavioral expression.15 As 10 I will argue in the following section that these conditions, particularly the second one, are overly-restrictive. For now, however, I will accept them to help demarcate the phenomena under consideration. 11 See Sheets-Johnstone for a discussion of why movement is central for understanding emotional experience: Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. “Emotion and Movement: A Beginning Empirical-Phenomenological Analysis of Their Relationship.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 6.11/ 12 (1999): 259–277. 12 Goldie, Peter. “Explaining Expressions of Emotion.” Mind 109.433 (2000): 25–38. 13 In “Explaining Expressions of Emotion,” Goldie further divides expressions of emotions into those which are actions (voluntary behavior like stroking the face of one’s beloved) and those which are not (involuntary behavior like facial expressions). For reasons I discuss later, within the context of emotional experience, this distinction is helpful but relatively fuzzy. 14 Dretske, “Perception and Other Minds;” Goldie, “Explaining Expressions of Emotion.” 15 This assumption informs two dominant approaches to emotion, cognitivist appraisal theories and neo-Jamesian approaches. According to the former, emotions consist of evaluative judgments; the latter, neurophysiological states of bodily arousal. Despite their many differences, both theories presume that the essence of emotion (evaluative judgments or physiological

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already indicated, a number of phenomenologists have challenged this idea. They claim that to see an emotional expression is to literally see the emotion itself. Consider first the following well-known remark by Max Scheler: For we certainly believe ourselves to be directly acquainted with another person’s joy in his laughter, with his sorrow and pain in his tears, with his shame in his blushing, with his entreaty in his outstretched hands, with his love in his look of affection, with his rage in his gnashing of his teeth, with his threats in the clenching of his fist, and with the tenor of this thoughts in the sound of his words. If anyone tells me that this is not ‘perception’ [of the emotion itself], for it cannot be so, in view of the fact that a perception is simply a ‘complex of physical sensations,’ and that there is certainly no sensation of another person’s mind nor any stimulus from such a source, I would beg him to turn aside from such questionable theories and address himself to the phenomenological facts.16

According to Scheler, we can in fact see the mental states of others within the dynamics of their expressive behavior. There is no need to posit an additional extra-perceptual cognitive mechanism (analogical inference, theory, etc.) as responsible for our detection of their mental states. Since mental states are observable, they can be directly perceived and engaged with. This sort of direct, non-inferential social perception is thus sufficient for accessing other minds directly and securing interpersonal understanding.17 Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues for a similar view. It is his position that I intend to look at more carefully. Though Merleau-Ponty does not say much about emotions explicitly – his discussions of emotions and affect are rather generally part of his larger treatments of themes such as aesthetics, infant cognition, intersubjectivity, and bodily expressivity 18 –, his persistent denial of UP in favor of a more integrative approach to embodied cognition makes him highly relevant to the present discussion. Like Scheler, Merleau-Ponty “affect programs”) is internal to the subject of the emotion, and therefore that emotions are best understood from either a cognitive perspective (Nussbaum, Martha. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001; Solomon, Robert. “Emotions and Choice.” Explaining Emotions. Ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980. 251–281) or from a physiological perspective (Damasio, Antonio. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Harper Collins, 1994; LeDoux, Joseph E. The Emotional Brain. New York: Simon & Shuster, 1996; Prinz, Jesse J. Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 16 Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, 260. 17 Gallagher, Shaun. “Direct Perception in the Intersubjective Context.” Consciousness and Cognition 17.2 (2008): 535–543; Krueger, Joel. “Extended Cognition and the Space of Social Interaction.” Consciousness and Cognition 20.3 (2011): 643–657. 18 Cataldi, Suzanne L. “Affect and Sensibility.” Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts. Ed. Rosalyn Diprose and Jack Reynolds. Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008. 163–173.

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insists that mental phenomena are often directly visible in another’s expressive behavior and manner of comportment. He writes that We must abandon the fundamental prejudice according to which the psyche is that which is accessible only to myself and cannot be seen from the outside. My “psyche” is not a series of “states of consciousness” that are rigorously closed in on themselves and inaccessible to anyone but me. My consciousness is turned primarily toward the world, turned toward things; it is above all a relation to the world. The other’s consciousness as well is chiefly a certain way of comporting himself toward the world. Thus it is in his conduct, in the manner in which the other deals with the world, that I will be able to discover his consciousness.19

I will say more of the idea of emotions as ways of comporting ourselves to the social world in the following section. For now, I want to consider MerleauPonty’s specific remarks on emotions and bodily expression. Not only is our body “our general medium for having a world,” according to Merleau-Ponty; additionally, “the body is essentially an expressive space.” 20 He writes elsewhere that I do not see anger or a threatening attitude as a psychic fact hidden behind the gesture, I read anger in it. The gesture does not make me think of anger, it is anger itself.21 I perceive the grief or anger of the other in his conduct, in the face or his hands, without recourse to any ‘inner’ experience of suffering or anger, and because grief and anger are variations of belonging to the world, undivided between the body and consciousness, and equally applicable to the other’s conduct, visible in his phenomenal body, as in my own conduct as it is presented to me.22

Precisely what sort of claim is Merleau-Ponty making here? By insisting that anger, for example, is not a psychic fact hidden behind the gesture but that it is, rather, the gesture itself – and that emotions such as anger and grief are thus “undivided between the body and consciousness” –, Merleau-Ponty seems to reject the very idea of an ontological split between the “inner” emotion and its “outer” behavioral expression. In other words, Merleau-Ponty denies that emotion and expression are merely causally related (in the sense that the former is causally antecedent to the latter) but instead insists that their relation is one of constitution. Bodily expressions of emotional phenomena constitute proper parts of (at least some) emotions; the expression is partly 19 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Nonsense. Trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. 116–117. 20 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 169. 21 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 214. 22 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 415.

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constitutive of what is expressed.23 Seeing another’s angry gestures is therefore to see part of their anger itself. And if this is so, the assumption that we require inference (or something else) to access another’s “hidden” mentality is mistaken. Since some mental phenomena are embodied within expressive behavior, we can quite literally see mind in action. Perception is therefore sufficient to give us direct access to at least part of another’s mind. While initially somewhat implausible, perhaps, this idea appears to receive support from several different streams of empirical research. Consider first cases where the ability to facially express emotions is removed or profoundly compromised. Moebius Syndrome, a congenital form of bilateral facial paralysis, is one such case. Due to their condition, people with Moebius Syndrome are unable to facially express emotion.24 As a result, many report a diminishment or flattening of their emotional lives. One person with Moebius reports that, as a result of his lack of expressivity, he is forced to intellectualize his emotions – “I sort of think happy or think sad, not really saying or recognizing actually feeling happy or feeling sad” – and that the qualitative character of his emotions, that is, their felt aspects, “are there but they are probably reduced.” 25 Another person with Moebius claims not to have had emotion as a child but that she only learned to express and thus truly feel her emotions after starting to mimic gestures observed while on holiday in Spain. She reports that the phenomenological component of her emotions only emerged once she became adept at “using the whole body to express [her] feelings.” 26 The narratives of others with Moebius are characterized by their adopting alternative strategies of embodied expression – prosody, gestures, vocalizations, painting, dancing, playing a musical instrument, etc. – in order to express, recalibrate, and share the qualitative character of their emotional experience.27 23 To be clear, Merleau-Ponty is not saying that one’s anger is identical to one’s gesture in the sense that it is wholly reducible to it. This would be a crude behaviorism; Merleau-Ponty’s view is more subtle than this, and readily concedes that interiority is an essential part of my own and others’ experience (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 415, 424). For a longer response to this objection, see Krueger, Joel, and Søren Overgaard. “Seeing Subjectivity: Defending a Perceptual Account of Other Minds.” ProtoSociology 47 (2012): 239–262. 24 Bogart, Kathleen, and David Matsumoto. “Living with Moebius Syndrome: Adjustment, Social Competence, and Satisfaction with Life.” The Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Journal 47.2 (2010): 134–142; Briegel, Wolfgang. “Neuropsychiatric Findings of Moebius Sequence: A Review.” Clinical Genetics 70.2 (2006): 91–97; Cole, Jonathan, and Henrietta Spalding. The Invisible Smile: Living without Facial Expression. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 25 Cole, Jonathan. “On ‘Being Faceless’: Selfhood and Facial Embodiment.” Models of the Self. Ed. Shaun Gallagher and Jonathan Shear. Charlottesville: Imprint Academic, 1999. 301– 318, here 308. 26 Cole and Spalding, The Invisible Smile, 154. 27 Bogart and Matsumoto, “Living with Moebius Syndrome.”

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Without the ability to spontaneously express their emotions via the face, part of the emotion appears to be missing, rendering it experientially incomplete. Not all facial paralysis is congenital.28 For example, patients who have voluntarily undergone Botox injections, which inhibit facial expressions, report a decrease in the felt intensity of emotional experience,29 along with increased difficulty in processing emotional language that refers to facial expressions requiring the paralyzed muscle.30 An individual with Bell’s Palsy, a progressive and potentially reversible form of facial paralysis, reports a similar experience.31 He describes himself as inhabiting an “emotional limbo” while the paralysis was at its strongest; however, as he gradually regained facial animation over several months, the phenomenology of his emotions was accordingly recalibrated. Individuals who have suffered severe spinal cord injuries likewise report less intense feelings of high-arousal emotions like fear, anger, or sexual arousal.32 Other studies suggest that manipulating facial expressions generates emotion-specific autonomic activity and produces a corresponding change in emotional phenomenology.33 To be clear, the point of the studies briefly canvassed is to motivate the idea that, at least at times, emotions may extend into the expressive dynamics

28 The following examples assist in responding to the objection that, since their facial paralysis is congenital, people with Moebius Syndrome have no benchmark against which to measure “proper” emotional phenomenology and thus are not in a position to make reliable judgments about its purported diminishment. 29 Davis, Joshua Ian, et al. “The Effects of BOTOX Injections on Emotional Experience.” Emotion 10.3 (2010): 433–440. 30 Havas, David, et al. “Cosmetic Use of Botulinum Toxin-A Affects Processing of Emotional Language.” Psychological Science 21.7 (2010): 895–900. 31 Cole, Jonathan. About Face. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998. 150. 32 Chwalisz, Kathleen, et al. “Autonomic Arousal Feedback and Emotional Experience: Evidence from the Spinal Cord Injured.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54.5 (1988): 820–828; Hohmann, George W. “Some Effects of Spinal Cord Lesions on Experienced Emotional Feelings.” Psychophysiology 3.2 (1966): 143–156; Mack, Herbert, et al. “Motion and Emotion: Emotion Processing in Quadriplegic Patients and Athletes.” Zeitschrift für Medizinische Psychologie 14.4 (2005): 159–166. James Laird discusses some competing studies that, while methodologically problematic, nevertheless seem to (happily) suggest that “the effects of spinal cord injuries on the intensity of emotional feelings are not dramatic, and after spinal cord injury, people can have quite normal and satisfactory emotional lives.” (Laird, James D. Feelings: The Perception of Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 76.) 33 See, for example, Davis, Joshua Ian, et al. “How Does Facial Feedback Modulate Emotional Experience?” Journal of Research in Personality 43.5 (2009): 822–829; Laird, Feelings; Levenson, Robert, et al. “Voluntary Facial Action Generates Emotion-Specific Autonomic Nervous System Activity.” Psychophysiology 27.4 (1990): 363–384; Niedenthal, Paula M. “Embodying Emotion.” Science 316 (2007): 1002–1005.

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of the visible, tangible body. In this sense are some emotions visible to others. To see another’s scowling and abrupt gesture is to literally see part of their anger itself; I can access it directly within their facial expressions and overt behavior. If the behavioral expression is removed or somehow inhibited, the qualitative character of the emotion is accordingly diminished. It is thus misleading to presuppose a tidy ontological division between the inner “core” of emotion and its outer behavioral expression; rather, the two are intimately linked.34 Moreover, since I have perceptual access to at least part of the emotion itself – again, I can directly see aspects of the emotion embodied within expressive behavior –, I do not need to resort to inference to figure out what the other person is thinking. Part of their emotion is publically present, ripe for perception. However, this is not to say that bodily states of physiological arousal – or even their public behavioral manifestations – are sufficient for emotional experience. This stronger claim overlooks, among other things, the fact that emotional expressions are always situated within various social contexts involving others (both real and imagined). In other words, because emotions are embodied within their behavioral expression and thus publically perceivable, they solicit interpersonal feedback from others. To express is to express for someone, even if (1) the expression is spontaneous (not intentionally oriented toward another), and (2) done in a solitary situation, that is, where the other is implicit or implied.35 In this way does the social context play a central role in shaping the character of the emotional process. In other words, many – perhaps most – emotions are public in that they involve both an expressive behavioral aspect as well as an aspect of negotiation between individuals.36 Exploring this latter idea is the topic of the next section.

34 See Krueger, “Seeing Mind in Action,” for a longer discussion of this idea. 35 Fridlund, Alan J. “Sociality of Solitary Smiling: Potentiation by an Implicit Audience.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60.2 (1991): 229–240. 36 Hinde, Robert A. “Was ‘The Expression of the Emotions’ a Misleading Phrase?” Animal Behaviour 33.3 (1985): 985–992.

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Emotions as engagements Characterizing emotions as mental states can be misleading. Not only can this sort of talk potentially over-intellectualize emotions, both by underplaying their felt bodily character as well as over-emphasizing the extent to which they are located exclusively in the head. Additionally, it can lead to a “snapshot” conception of emotions according to which emotions are decomposed into sequential chains of discrete physiological episodes (states) that intervene between environmental stimulus and behavioral response. This is misleading, however. More often than not, emotions are a much messier affair. They tend to be compositionally complex, evolve over time, generally emerge from reciprocal causal loops as opposed to linear causal chains, and are often tightly interwoven with one another. Attending carefully to the phenomenological character of emotions highlights the fact that emotions often blend into one another, making it difficult to neatly tease them apart experientially speaking. Consider the following example. Imagine that I am in the grip of an angry episode. Convinced that my wife has cheated on me with another man, my imagination swells with fleeting images of how, precisely, I imagine this betrayal to have unfolded. Each new image only intensifies my anger. But things are not quite that simple. For anger is rarely a free-standing state. Along with my anger, I actually experience an interwoven constellation of various other emotions: jealousy in the face of her betrayal; shame at my naïve (and unwarranted) trust; humiliation at the thought of others finding out; sadness at a long-term commitment undermined by this act of unfaithfulness; disgust at the thought of her being physically intimate with another, etc. Within the throes of this episode, any of these emotions may at any moment take precedence over the others – without, however, thereby cancelling out their phenomenal presence. The particular felt character of my anger in this context is thus conditioned by the simultaneous upwelling of a flurry of other emotions, making this instance of anger experientially distinct from, say, my anger that morning at (yet again) burning my toast. Not only does the intentional object of these distinct episodes differ: my wife’s unfaithfulness versus my burnt toast. Additionally, the phenomenal complexity or felt texture of this latter episode is vivified via the mutual occurrence of other conditioning emotions. Later, however, after some reflection and cooling off, my weary sadness may assume phenomenological prominence without completely effacing the anger that had previously burned so intensely. And when discussing the situation even later with friends, my shame and humiliation may then come to the fore, preserving the anger but modifying its felt texture by diminishing its intensity and introducing a more prominent shame-dimension.

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Emotions are thus complex and very often long-term – potentially “lasting even for years or a lifetime and occupying several levels or dimensions of consciousness.” 37 As the example above suggests, however, they are also social. Emotions emerge and fluctuate as we negotiate various social contexts. Additionally, emotions are often modulated by these social contexts as we negotiate them. In other words, as socially mediated, many emotions are interactively constituted in the sense that “our emotional states are often interwoven with those of one or more persons immediately present.” 38 My shame and humiliation when describing my wife’s unfaithfulness to friends takes on the character of their responses; their hurt becomes deeply interwoven with mine; their anger suddenly rekindles and interlaces with my own anger, which had diminished as it gave way to a more pervasive sadness. The above example harbors several lessons. First, contra a “snapshot” conception of emotions, it reaffirms the dynamic and process-oriented character of emotional experience – again, the idea that emotions are both structurally complex (interwoven with other emotions, and potentially consisting of different dimensions like physiological arousal, cognitive judgments, intentionality, felt affect, etc.) as well as essentially temporal (they evolve and develop over time).39 To return to the above example: when sharing my anger over my wife’s infidelity with friends, my visible anger itself – including my expressive behavior, and not merely the object of my anger (my wife’s infidelity) – solicits an angry response from them, which heightens my own anger, which in turn further animates theirs, etc. Merleau-Ponty describes this reciprocal link between an organism and its milieu as one of “circular causality.” He writes that the fate of an excitation (for instance, an emotion) is determined by its relation to the whole of the organic state and to the simultaneous or preceding excitations, and (there-

37 Solomon, Robert. “Emotions in Phenomenology and Existentialism.” A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism. Ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. 291–309, here 303. 38 Downing, George. “Emotion Theory Reconsidered.” Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, Volume 2. Ed. Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. 245–270, here 263. 39 This view stands in contrast, for example, to Carroll Izard’s characterization of emotions as brief responses (Izard, Carroll E. “Emotions, Human.” Encyclopedia Britannica. 15th ed. Chicago, 1974. Vol. 18. 248–256), and Joseph LeDoux’s characterization of emotions as rapid neurological (amygdala) responses, distinct from the cerebral activity that generally follows them (LeDoux, The Emotional Brain). See also Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999, and Panksepp, Jaak. Affective Neurology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

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fore) the relations between an organism and its milieu are not relations of linear causality but of circular causality.40

Since they generally unfold within interpersonal contexts, many emotions likewise emerge from reciprocal feedback loops coupling interactants – that is, sequences of mutually-modulating expressive signals (gestures, facial expressions, vocal cues, etc.) that ground basic levels of emotional coordination. These dynamic processes establish the emerging temporal structure and interpersonal context of our emotional experiences. In this sense, then, do some emotions seem to gradually emerge quite literally between interactants, within this ongoing mutual adjustment of action, emotion, and intention.41 Merleau-Ponty is similarly attuned to the coordinative bodily structures at the root of our social engagements. He notes that The communication or comprehension of gestures comes about through the reciprocity of my intentions and the gestures of others, of my gestures and intentions discernible in the conduct of other people. It is as if the other person’s intention inhabited my body and mine his.42

Much research indicates that we enact this bodily reciprocity Merleau-Ponty speaks of from birth. For example, newborns are capable of facial mimicry,43 including emotionally relevant facial expressions.44 Beyond facial expressions, they are also perceptually attuned to the temporal correspondence of facial movements to their own activities;45 infants become highly distressed when previously expressive interactants abruptly assume a non-expressive “still face” during a face-to-face interaction, or when the temporal rhythm of a facial and vocal exchange is noticeably disrupted.46 40 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Structure of Behavior. Trans. Alden L. Fisher. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1963. 40. 41 Fogel, Alan, and Andrea Garvey. “Alive Communication.” Infant Behavior and Development 30.2 (2007): 251–257. 42 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 215. 43 Meltzoff, Andrew N., and M. Keith Moore. “Imitation of Facial and Manual Gestures by Human Neonates.” Science 198 (1977): 75–78. 44 Haviland, Jeannette M., and Mary Lelwica. “The Induced Affect Response: 10-Week-Old Infants’ Responses to Three Emotion Expressions.” Developmental Psychology 23.1 (1987): 97– 104; Kugiumutzakis, Giannis. “Genesis and Development of Early Infant Mimesis to Facial and Vocal Models.” Imitation in Infancy. Ed. Jacqueline Nadel and George Butterworth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 36–59. 45 Parkinson, Brian, et al. Emotions in Social Relations. New York: Psychology Press, 2005. 46 Murray, Lynn, and Colwyn Trevarthen. “Emotional Regulation of Interactions between Two-Month-Olds and Their Mothers.” Social Perception in Infants. Ed. Tiffany M. Field and Nathan Fox. Norwood: Ablex, 1985. 101–125; Tronick, Edward, et al. “The Infant’s Response to

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Babies are already attuned to the natural rhythm and flow of interpersonal exchanges. Very young infants are also surprisingly skilled perceivers, able to reliably discriminate their mother’s face and voice47 and track the frequencies of adult utterances by changing their intonation with different speakers (higher with mother, lower with father).48 But this bodily coordination is not confined to infancy; it continues as we age, and assists in establishing emotional rapport and shared understanding.49 The salient point is that these shared patterns of expressive coordination provide the temporal structure for emerging emotions. Emotions are not pre-fabricated states but time-sensitive processes that “emerge as a result of specific interactions between […] individuals and inputs from a changing environment” – most immediately, the expressive inputs of fellow interactants.50 From birth, my emotions are largely mediated by the responses of others.51 They play a key role in shaping my emotional experience by, among other things, confirming or disrupting expectations, motivating or interrupting ongoing sequences, and arousing conflicting motivations.52 Bodily expressions are the vehicle by which these processes are enacted. The second important lesson drawn from the example at the start of this section is that emotions are forms of engagement, that is, “variations of belonging to the world,” as Merleau-Ponty puts it.53 They generally involve others, Entrapment between Contradictory Messages in Face-To-Face Interaction.” Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry 17.1 (1978): 1–13. 47 Field, Tiffany M., et al. “Mother-Stranger Face Discrimination by the Newborn.” Infant Behavior and Development 7.1 (1984): 19–25. 48 Lieberman, Philip. Intonation, Perception, and Language. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967. 49 Chartrand, Tanya, and John A. Bargh. “The Chameleon Effect: The Perception-Behavior Link and Social Interaction.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 76.6 (1999): 893– 910; Kendon, Adam. “Movement Coordination in Social Interaction: Some Examples Described.” Acta Psychologica 32 (1970): 101–125; Lakens, Daniel, and Mariëlle Stel. “If They Move in Sync, They Must Feel in Sync: Movement Synchrony Leads to Attributions of Rapport and Entitativity.” Social Cognition 29.1 (2011): 1–14. 50 Griffiths, Paul, and Andrea Scarantino. “Emotions in the Wild: The Situated Perspective on Emotion.” The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition. Ed. Philip Robbins and Murat Aydede. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 437–453, here 446. 51 Reddy, Vasudevi. How Infants Know Minds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. 52 Berscheid, Ellen, and Hilary Ammazzalorso. “Emotional Experience in Close Relationships.” Blackwell Handbook of Social Psychology: Interpersonal Processes. Ed. Garth J. O. Fletcher and Margaret S. Clark. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2007. 308–330. 53 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 415. Toward the end of his life, Robert Solomon argued for a similar view, which he suggested was consistent with his earlier well-known cognitivist approach to emotions but which nevertheless more prominently emphasized their nature as engagements, that is, ways of cognitively grappling with the world (Solomon, Robert. “Emotions, Thoughts, and Feelings: Emotions and Engagements with the World.” Thinking

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both real and imagined. We thus often use emotions to modify and negotiate various aspects of our relationships with other people.54 However, as the previous discussion indicates, since these processes involve others they are collaborative processes. Once more, many emotions emerge between interactants as part of these collaborative negotiations. To look at just one example of this phenomenon, consider the influence of audience effects on emotional experience. In a well-known study, ten-pin bowling players were found to smile significantly more after producing a positive event (bowling a strike or spare) when they turned to face their friends than when they were still facing the pins.55 Beyond simply expressing an inner state (happiness at having bowled a strike), the smiles indicated a strong social motivation: to share one’s happiness and to relish the development of this experience as mediated by the affiliative displays of others. A similar effect was observed in ten-month-old prelinguistic infants left in a room where they could direct attention either toward their mother or an attractive toy.56 Significantly more smiles were directed toward the mother than the toys when mothers were interacting with the child; but when mothers were disengaged, such as when reading a magazine, smiling was equally directed at both mothers and toys. Another study found that the availability of an attentive social partner – whether the infant’s mother or a complete stranger – resulted in significantly more smiling in eighteen-month-old infants.57 Spanish soccer fans issue authentic smiles (“Duchenne smiles”) in response to goals only when facing one another.58

about Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions. Ed. Robert Solomon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 76–88; Solomon, “Emotions in Phenomenology and Existentialism”). However, Solomon was primarily interested in establishing how emotions, as judgments, can be (at times) nonpropositional and bodily, in addition to, at other times, propositional and articulate, whereas my emphasis is on emotions as social engagements or ways of negotiating interpersonal contexts. Despite this difference in emphasis, the present discussion is clearly indebted to Solomon’s analysis. 54 Hinde, “Was ‘The Expression of the Emotions’ a Misleading Phrase;” Maclaren, Kym. “Emotional Clichés and Authentic Passions: A Phenomenological Revision of a Cognitive Theory of Emotion.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 10.1 (2011): 45–65. 55 Kraut, Robert E., and Robert E. Johnston. “Social and Emotional Messages of Smiling: An Ethological Approach.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37.9 (1979): 1539–1553. 56 Jones, Susan Scanlon, et al. “An Audience Effect on Smile Production in 10-Month-Old Infants.” Psychological Science 2.1 (1991): 45–49. 57 Jones, Susan Scanlon, and Tarja Raag. “Smile Production in Older Infants: The Importance of a Social Recipient for the Facial Signal.” Child Development 60.4 (1989): 811–818. 58 Fernández-Dols, José Miguel, and María Angeles Ruiz-Belda. “Spontaneous Facial Behavior during Intense Emotional Episodes: Artistic Truth and Optical Truth.” The Psychology of

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This was even the case for Olympic athletes, who tended to smile during medal ceremonies almost exclusively when actually receiving their gold medal – and thus interacting with officials and the public – as opposed to non-interactive contexts, for example before the ceremony (by themselves in the tunnel, away from TV cameras) or while facing their country’s flag during the playing of the national anthem.59 Winning a gold medal is, presumably, the highlight of an athlete’s professional career and surely one of the most satisfying achievements of their entire lives. It is safe to assume, therefore, that gold-medal winners are exceedingly happy during this ceremony, overflowing with positive affect.60 But if behavioral expression is sufficient for emotional experience, one would expect to see fairly consisting smiling throughout the ceremony. There is little incentive to inhibit or suppress the emotion in this context; on the contrary, one would assume that they could barely hide their supreme happiness. Yet, like the smiles in the previous studies, Olympians’ smiles seem to be affiliative gestures that are part of social signaling strategies. They are offered to motivate interaction and to establish a particular sort of relationship with others – they are an emotional tool for negotiating that social context, in other words – and not simply the expressive aspect of an intensely felt “inner” emotion. Studies of audience effects on emotional experience thus suggest that facial displays and other bodily expressions of emotion are mediated by the extent to which individuals can fully interact in social situations.61 It often takes the presence of others to draw an Facial Expression. Ed. James A. Russell and José Miguel Fernández-Dols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 255–294. 59 Fernández-Dols, José Miguel, and María Angeles Ruiz-Belda. “Are Smiles a Sign of Happiness? Gold Medal Winners at the Olympic Games.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69.6 (1995): 1113–1119. 60 An independent panel of gold medal winners rated levels of happiness during the gold medal ceremony at more than nine on a ten-point scale. Cf. Fernández-Dols and Ruiz-Belda, “Are Smiles a Sign of Happiness,” 1115. 61 Chovil, Nicole. “Social Determinants of Facial Displays.” Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 15.3 (1991): 141–154. This is not to deny, of course, that we never smile or feel happy, for example, when alone. But audience effects are also present in these “solitary” contexts, which are shaped by an implicit sociality (Fridlund, “Sociality of Solitary Smiling”). Even when alone, we interact with others via imagination or memory (reliving a past exchange with a good friend), anticipation or forecast (smiling before entering a room; rehearsing an anticipated conversation) – or we might even take ourselves as an interactant (talking to or hitting ourselves), or anthropomorphize animate or inanimate objects (pets, stuffed animals, etc.). A similar idea of implicit sociality is behind Merleau-Ponty’s insistence that we experience the social world “not as an object or sum of objects, but as a permanent field or dimension of existence. I may well turn away from it, but not cease to be situated relatively to it. Our relation to the social is, like our relationship to the world, deeper than any express perception

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emotion out of us and help us complete it, as it were. And in enacting these processes, we are participating in collaborative processes of creating and modifying interpersonal relationships. These studies also suggest an alternative understanding of the emotional deficits reported by individuals with Moebius Syndrome and severe spinal cord injuries.62 While part of their diminished emotional phenomenology may in fact result from an inability to facially or bodily express the emotion, it is also likely that these individuals regularly receive diminished social feedback from others. Many people are simply ill-equipped to deal with facial difference.63 Perhaps not surprisingly, Moebius patients routinely report feeling socially impaired, and experience adjustment difficulties as well as a lack of empathy from others.64 Children and adults with severe spinal cord injuries offer similar narratives.65 But it is possible that these social struggles are as much a function of an impaired interpersonal context as they are an impaired ability to physically express. Because their respective disabilities modulate the way that others interact with them – this is especially so for MS subjects since their condition is congenital, unlike those with severe spinal cord injuries who may acquire their disability much later in life –, these individuals may lack the repertoire of embodied-expressive social skills that most of us take for granted: things like coordinating eye gaze patterns, generating and responding to expressive contingencies (facial expressions, movement, touch, etc.), and modulating our own and others’ affective responses. From birth, the bodily character of the social milieu in which most of us learn these skills – face-toface interaction – is fundamentally altered.

or any judgment […]. The social is already there when we come to know or judge it.” (MerleauPonty, Phenomenology of Perception, 421–422.) 62 I am grateful to Kathleen Rives Bogart (personal communication) for pressing this point. 63 Cooke Macgregor observes: “Because we rely so much on feedback by way of facial expression and the transitory movements of muscles (there are some 100 of them) that indicate agreement, surprise, interest, and other nonverbal messages to which we in turn respond, we are disconcerted when these modes of communication are impaired. Unable to ‘read’ the other person and frustrated by the ambiguity that is created, we become hesitant and awkward. While some impairments lead to false clues and interpretations, others provide no clue at all […]. Since there is little to no feedback, attempts at interchange [with Moebius subjects] have been likened to ‘talking with a statue.’” (Cooke Macgregor, Frances. “Facial Disfigurement: Problems and Management of Social Interaction and Implications for Mental Health.” Aesthetic Plastic Surgery 14.1 (1990): 249–257, here 253–254.) 64 Bogart and Matsumoto, “Living with Moebius Syndrome.” 65 Cole, Jonathan. Still Lives: Narratives of Spinal Cord Injury. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004; Klaas, Sara J., et al. “Assessing Patterns of Participation and Enjoyment in Children with Spinal Cord Injury.” Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology 52.5 (2009): 468–474.

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For example, some young children with Moebius Syndrome are assumed to be retarded because of difficulty in feeding, drooling, and dysarthric speech.66 And for those whose faces do not conform to the norm, the negatively altered character of this circular social causality (a history of being looked at strangely, taunted, or generally ignored) becomes a source of stress, anxiety, and anguish, which negatively affects the development of these bodily skills, as well as both personality functioning and mental health.67 The lesson, simply put, is that the social disabilities are shared: they are not simply located in the physical deficit itself (an unexpressive face or impairment of mobility). This latter view ignores the circular causality at the heart of our social development, and overlooks the extent to which social interaction and emotional experience is a collaborative process that emerges over time, between interactants. A final thought before concluding this section. The previous discussion requires that we now qualify Davies’s constraint on what counts as a genuine emotional expression. Recall that, for Davies, an emotional expression must be spontaneous – it cannot be performed calculatingly, in the sense that a genuine expression of anger, for example, is performed not to express anger but rather to make it clear to others that one is in fact angry. For Davies, this transforms the expression from an end to a means and thus compromises the spontaneity required for authentic expressions of emotions. But the previous discussion highlights a way in which this requirement is too strict. First, Davies’s discussion presupposes UP: the core of the emotion is the unobservable inner affect, while the behavioral expression is a secondary public manifestation.68 But for various reasons, we have seen that this presupposition is suspect. Second, Davies seems to be working with a “snapshot” conception of emotions, understood as involuntary, fleeting responses sandwiched between environmental stimulus and behavioral response. But many expressions lie somewhere in the middle of the continuum between voluntary and involuntary responses. And taking seriously their social dimension highlights how emotional experiences can simultaneously be composed of both. So, for example, while a certain emotional experience might begin as an involuntary reaction – I become flushed, my heartbeat quickens, and I spontaneously frown in anger –, voluntary aspects can enter into, and thus extend, deepen, and per-

66 Meyerson, Marion D. “Resiliency and Success in Adults with Moebius Syndrome.” The Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Journal 38.3 (2001): 231–235. 67 Cooke Macgregor, “Facial Disfigurement.” 68 Goldie, “Explaining Expressions of Emotion.”

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haps modulate the emotion. The feeling of making a face (frowning), along with the associated physiological and neurological responses, as well as certain events in the social situation, might ‘start’ the emotion, as it were; but conscious and reflective posturing (assuming a more aggressive stance, frowning more deeply) extends the emotional process and gives it a more explicit social texture and communicative function.69 Both voluntary and involuntary aspects of emotional experience have significant phenomenological consequences. Together, they shape and bring texture to our emotional experiences as they emerge and develop over time – and crucially, as we engage with the world and with others. Davies’s insistence that emotional expressions must be spontaneous thus neglects the fundamentally process-oriented character of emotional experience, and the way that both voluntary and involuntary aspects are unified within emotional experiences. Additionally, it is a relatively static model in that it fails to do justice to the various ways, some of which were discussed above, that emotions emerge and are modulated by the interactive dynamics of our social world. In sum: contra Davies, it is not clear why an emotion cannot start as an involuntary expression (an end in itself) but then take on a communicative-collaborative character as it develops over time (a means to a further social end) without becoming something other than an emotion.

Emotions and other minds I want to conclude by briefly returning to the question of other minds. Recall that the epistemological problem of other minds as traditionally formulated in philosophy assumes an ontological split between inner mental states, including emotions, and their outer behavioral expression. Since only the subject of the state has direct access to this inner state, it is assumed, the rest of us on the outside are forced to infer the existence of another’s mentality. According to Alec Hyslop, “what is striking is that we never have direct knowledge that other human beings are in whatever mental state they are in. It is this stark asymmetry that generates the epistemological problem of other minds.” 70 How might the above discussion of emotions help make headway on this issue? In two ways, I think, both of which have already been suggested. First, as should now be clear, it offers reasons for doubting UP, which generates the problem of other minds. Second, in challenging UP, it indicates that we can, 69 Solomon, “Emotions, Thoughts, and Feelings.” 70 Hyslop, “Other Minds.”

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at least at times, attain direct (non-inferential) knowledge of others’ mental states, including their emotions – and it does so, crucially, without having to implausibly deny the kernel of truth in the observation about the asymmetry between how I access my own versus others’ mental states. To begin with the first point: the various strands of empirical research discussed above offer reasons for rejecting the ontological split between mind and behavior UP presupposes. Emotions, it seems, can be distributed across the expressiveness of the visible, tangible body. Again, this is not a crude behaviorism; the idea that publically available expressive aspects are proper parts of some emotions does not entail that this is all there is to emotions. Individuals with Moebius Syndrome, Bell’s Palsy, or severe spinal cord injury, for example – all of whom have lost the ability to behaviorally express emotions in some important sense – do not thereby lose all affect. Rather, the lesson from these studies is that some emotions (and possibly other mental processes) are hybrid: they are composed of both internal (neural, psychological, and phenomenological) and external (bodily) aspects or processes that together form an integrated unity. So, by acknowledging the latter’s role in driving some emotional processes we are by no means committed to rejecting the simultaneous presence of the former. Removing an individual’s brain will have clear effects on their emotional life. Having a working brain thus appears to be a necessary condition for having emotions. In certain cases, however, it appears that so, too, is being able to bodily express them. By removing the physical vehicle of expression, such as facial mobility, part of what is expressed likewise disappears. It thus appears that emotions are dynamically unfolding processes which, in addition to their neural and physiological basis, involve “interaction with the world around and responsiveness to feedback from the world” – including, crucially, the expressive feedback of others.71 Second, if we do directly perceive (at least at times) aspects of others’ mental life directly, this view seems to relegate inference to a secondary way of knowing others, parasitic on a more fundamental and primary perceptual access. Again, if aspects of some mental states are observable within overt behavior, we do not have to infer what we can directly see. To deal with the epistemological problem of other minds, we do not have to see everything about another’s mental life; nor do we have to see every mental state or emotion another person has. Again, all that is needed is that, in principle, we can see another’s experience, including their emotions. If so, we do not have to rely fundamentally on inference to get us (indirect) access to their mental life. Rather, we can get direct access simply by looking. 71 Stout, Rowland. “Seeing the Anger in Someone’s Face.” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 84.1 (2010): 29–43, here 40.

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With respect to the point about the asymmetry of access, it is certainly true that the sort of access I enjoy with respect to my own emotional experiences, say, differs from the access I have to the emotional experiences of others. Merleau-Ponty, for instance, does not seem to deny the stark asymmetry between how I access my own mind versus those of others.72 For clearly, “[t]he grief and anger of another have never quite the same significance for him as they have for me. For him these situations are lived through, for me they are displayed.” 73 When I am angry, I generally feel that anger immediately (even if the responses of others are often crucial for helping me grasp the extent of my anger, say); when another is angry, I do not feel it (at least in the way I feel my own) – rather, I see it. So, I cannot assume the same first-person perspective another subject enjoys with respect to their mental states; I instead access them from an external vantage point, insofar as they are embodied in another’s expressive behavior. Yet the crucial point, once again, is simply put: in both cases the anger – whether my own or another’s – is directly known. Since aspects of another’s expressive behavior constitute a proper part of their anger themselves, and since I have direct perceptual access to this embodied aspect, I can come to know (see) their anger directly, immediately, without having to fall back on inference or imaginative projection.74 Moreover, since many emotions are collaborative processes of interpersonal negotiation, both interactants have direct perceptual access to the expressive and collaborative dynamics of this process (its circular causality) and the emotions that emerge from it. Additionally, Merleau-Ponty does not claim that the totality of another’s mental life becomes available within their expressive behavior. Clearly, the possibility of pretense suggests otherwise. But it does not follow from these observations that my way of knowing my own anger versus that of another is somehow more direct. When I feel my anger or introspect it, I access my anger 72 It is easy to overstate this, however. While introspection often yields self-knowledge, it is neither infallible nor exhaustive. We sometimes access our own minds via others in the sense that they disclose things about us to ourselves, things that we did not perhaps previously know (or care to admit), such as my being infatuated with a coworker – my colleague might tell me out of exasperation: “Look, we all see it. It’s high time you admit it to yourself!” – or my insisting loudly that “I am not angry!” as my wife nods in solemn faux-agreement. Our motives, desires, preferences, emotions, etc., are often hidden from ourselves and thus require the mediation of another to come to light. Cf. Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, 238–264. 73 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 415. 74 Of course, I might be deceived in my perception of their anger. I might be subject to hallucination, illusion, or make an error of judgment and mistake the angry behavior of my friend on the other side of the street for excitement, but this is a problem for all forms of perception and not just cases where I directly perceive another’s mentality.

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directly; likewise, when I perceive another’s angry gesture, I access their anger (or at least part of it) directly. So, while the mode of direct access might differ in these cases (introspection or direct feeling of my own emotions versus perceiving those of others), the directness of knowing is nevertheless the same. And this is ultimately what matters in resolving the epistemological problem of other minds.75 It therefore appears that, at least on some occasions, I can in fact secure direct knowledge of aspects of another’s mental states. I do not have to know everything they are thinking and feeling; nor do I have to be correct on every occasion. Rather, it is sufficient that parts of these mental states are perceptually present, available to be known directly within embodied patterns of expressive behavior. Thinking of the relation between emotions and expression this way helps make sense of Merleau-Ponty’s suggestive remark that “[i]nside and outside are inseparable. The world is wholly inside and I am wholly outside myself.” 76

Bibliography Baron-Cohen, Simon. Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995. Berscheid, Ellen, and Hilary Ammazzalorso. “Emotional Experience in Close Relationships.” Blackwell Handbook of Social Psychology: Interpersonal Processes. Ed. Garth J. O. Fletcher and Margaret S. Clark. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2007. 308–330. Bogart, Kathleen, and David Matsumoto. “Living with Moebius Syndrome: Adjustment, Social Competence, and Satisfaction with Life.” The Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Journal 47.2 (2010): 134–142. Briegel, Wolfgang. “Neuropsychiatric Findings of Moebius Sequence: A Review.” Clinical Genetics 70.2 (2006): 91–97. Cataldi, Suzanne L. “Affect and Sensibility.” Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts. Ed. Rosalyn Diprose and Jack Reynolds. Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008. 163–173. Chartrand, Tanya, and John A. Bargh. “The Chameleon Effect: The Perception-Behavior Link and Social Interaction.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 76.6 (1999): 893–910. Chovil, Nicole. “Social Determinants of Facial Displays.” Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 15.3 (1991): 141–154.

75 This is not to deny the obvious point that we do sometimes need to infer, guess, or imagine what another person is up to, in cases, for instance, of pretense or sorting out another’s hidden motives. But all that is needed is to dissolve the epistemological problem of other minds, once again, is to establish that, at least sometimes, we do enjoy direct, non-inferential access to the mental life of others. 76 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 474.

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Chwalisz, Kathleen, et al. “Autonomic Arousal Feedback and Emotional Experience: Evidence from the Spinal Cord Injured.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54.5 (1988): 820–828. Cole, Jonathan. About Face. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998. Cole, Jonathan. “On ‘Being Faceless’: Selfhood and Facial Embodiment.” Models of the Self. Ed. Shaun Gallagher and Jonathan Shear. Charlottesville: Imprint Academic, 1999. 301–318. Cole, Jonathan. Still Lives: Narratives of Spinal Cord Injury. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. Cole, Jonathan, and Henrietta Spalding. The Invisible Smile: Living without Facial Expression. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Cooke Macgregor, Frances. “Facial Disfigurement: Problems and Management of Social Interaction and Implications for Mental Health.” Aesthetic Plastic Surgery 14.1 (1990): 249–257. Damasio, Antonio. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Harper Collins, 1994. Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999. Davis, Joshua Ian, et al. “How Does Facial Feedback Modulate Emotional Experience?” Journal of Research in Personality 43.5 (2009): 822–829. Davis, Joshua Ian, et al. “The Effects of BOTOX Injections on Emotional Experience.” Emotion 10.3 (2010): 433–440. Downing, George. “Emotion Theory Reconsidered.” Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, Volume 2. Ed. Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. 245–270. Dretske, Fred. “Perception and Other Minds.” Noûs 7.1 (1973): 34–44. Fernández-Dols, José Miguel, and María Angeles Ruiz-Belda. “Are Smiles a Sign of Happiness? Gold Medal Winners at the Olympic Games.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69.6 (1995): 1113–1119. Fernández-Dols, José Miguel, and María Angeles Ruiz-Belda. “Spontaneous Facial Behavior during Intense Emotional Episodes: Artistic Truth and Optical Truth.” The Psychology of Facial Expression. Ed. James A. Russell and José Miguel Fernández-Dols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 255–294. Field, Tiffany M., et al. “Mother-Stranger Face Discrimination by the Newborn.” Infant Behavior and Development 7.1 (1984): 19–25. Fogel, Alan, and Andrea Garvey. “Alive Communication.” Infant Behavior and Development 30.2 (2007): 251–257. Fridlund, Alan J. “Sociality of Solitary Smiling: Potentiation by an Implicit Audience.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60.2 (1991): 229–240. Gallagher, Shaun. “Direct Perception in the Intersubjective Context.” Consciousness and Cognition 17.2 (2008): 535–543. Gallagher, Shaun, and Dan Zahavi. The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. New York: Routledge, 2008. Goldie, Peter. “Explaining Expressions of Emotion.” Mind 109.433 (2000): 25–38. Goldie, Peter. The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Gopnik, Alison, and Henry M. Wellman. “Why the Child’s Theory of Mind Really Is a Theory.” Mind & Language 7.1/2 (1992): 145–171.

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Griffiths, Paul, and Andrea Scarantino. “Emotions in the Wild: The Situated Perspective on Emotion.” The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition. Ed. Philip Robbins and Murat Aydede. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 437–453. Havas, David, et al. “Cosmetic Use of Botulinum Toxin-A Affects Processing of Emotional Language.” Psychological Science 21.7 (2010): 895–900. Haviland, Jeannette M., and Mary Lelwica. “The Induced Affect Response: 10-Week-Old Infants’ Responses to Three Emotion Expressions.” Developmental Psychology 23.1 (1987): 97–104. Hinde, Robert A. “Was ‘The Expression of the Emotions’ a Misleading Phrase?” Animal Behaviour 33.3 (1985): 985–992. Hobson, Peter. The Cradle of Thought: Exploring the Origins of Thinking. London: MacMillan, 2002. Hohmann, George W. “Some Effects of Spinal Cord Lesions on Experienced Emotional Feelings.” Psychophysiology 3.2 (1966): 143–156. Husserl, Edmund. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology: From the Lectures, Winter Semester, 1910–1911. Trans. Ingo Farin and James G. Hart. Dordrecht: Springer, 2006. Hyslop, Alec. “Other Minds.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward N. Zalta. Fall 2010. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2010/entries/other-minds/ (28 October 2013). Izard, Carroll E. “Emotions, Human.” Encyclopedia Britannica. 15th ed. Chicago, 1974. Vol. 18. 248–256. Jones, Susan Scanlon, and Tarja Raag. “Smile Production in Older Infants: The Importance of a Social Recipient for the Facial Signal.” Child Development 60.4 (1989): 811–818. Jones, Susan Scanlon, et al. “An Audience Effect on Smile Production in 10-Month-Old Infants.” Psychological Science 2.1 (1991): 45–49. Kendon, Adam. “Movement Coordination in Social Interaction: Some Examples Described.” Acta Psychologica 32 (1970): 101–125. Klaas, Sara J., et al. “Assessing Patterns of Participation and Enjoyment in Children with Spinal Cord Injury.” Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology 52.5 (2009): 468–474. Kraut, Robert E., and Robert E. Johnston. “Social and Emotional Messages of Smiling: An Ethological Approach.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37.9 (1979): 1539–1553. Krueger, Joel. “Extended Cognition and the Space of Social Interaction.” Consciousness and Cognition 20.3 (2011): 643–657. Krueger, Joel. “Seeing Mind in Action.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 11.2 (2012): 149–173. Krueger, Joel, and Søren Overgaard. “Seeing Subjectivity: Defending a Perceptual Account of Other Minds.” ProtoSociology 47 (2012): 239–262. Kugiumutzakis, Giannis. “Genesis and Development of Early Infant Mimesis to Facial and Vocal Models.” Imitation in Infancy. Ed. Jacqueline Nadel and George Butterworth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 36–59. Laird, James D. Feelings: The Perception of Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Lakens, Daniel, and Mariëlle Stel. “If They Move in Sync, They Must Feel in Sync: Movement Synchrony Leads to Attributions of Rapport and Entitativity.” Social Cognition 29.1 (2011): 1–14. LeDoux, Joseph E. The Emotional Brain. New York: Simon & Shuster, 1996. Levenson, Robert, et al. “Voluntary Facial Action Generates Emotion-Specific Autonomic Nervous System Activity.” Psychophysiology 27.4 (1990): 363–384.

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Lieberman, Philip. Intonation, Perception, and Language. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967. Mack, Herbert, et al. “Motion and Emotion: Emotion Processing in Quadriplegic Patients and Athletes.” Zeitschrift für Medizinische Psychologie 14.4 (2005): 159–166. Maclaren, Kym. “Emotional Clichés and Authentic Passions: A Phenomenological Revision of a Cognitive Theory of Emotion.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 10.1 (2011): 45–65. Meltzoff, Andrew N., and M. Keith Moore. “Imitation of Facial and Manual Gestures by Human Neonates.” Science 198 (1977): 75–78. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Structure of Behavior. Trans. Alden L. Fisher. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1963. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Nonsense. Trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. New York: Routledge, 2002. Meyerson, Marion D. “Resiliency and Success in Adults with Moebius Syndrome.” The Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Journal 38.3 (2001): 231–235. Murray, Lynn, and Colwyn Trevarthen. “Emotional Regulation of Interactions between TwoMonth-Olds and Their Mothers.” Social Perception in Infants. Ed. Tiffany M. Field and Nathan Fox. Norwood: Ablex, 1985. 101–125. Niedenthal, Paula M. “Embodying Emotion.” Science 316 (2007): 1002–1005. Nussbaum, Martha. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Panksepp, Jaak. Affective Neurology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Parkinson, Brian, et al. Emotions in Social Relations. New York: Psychology Press, 2005. Premack, David, and Guy Woodruff. “Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind?” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1 (1978): 515–526. Prinz, Jesse J. Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Reddy, Vasudevi, and Paul Morris. “Participants Don’t Need Theories: Knowing Minds in Engagement.” Theory & Psychology 14.5 (2004): 647–665. Reddy, Vasudevi. How Infants Know Minds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. Scheler, Max. The Nature of Sympathy. Trans. Peter Heath. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954. Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. “Emotion and Movement: A Beginning Empirical-Phenomenological Analysis of Their Relationship.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 6.11/12 (1999): 259–277. Solomon, Robert. “Emotions and Choice.” Explaining Emotions. Ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980. 251–281. Solomon, Robert. “Emotions, Thoughts, and Feelings: Emotions and Engagements with the World.” Thinking about Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions. Ed. Robert Solomon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 76–88. Solomon, Robert. “Emotions in Phenomenology and Existentialism.” A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism. Ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. 291–309. Stout, Rowland. “Seeing the Anger in Someone’s Face.” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 84.1 (2010): 29–43. Trehub, Sandra E. “Mothers Are Musical Mentors.” Zero to Three 23.1 (2002): 19–22.

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Tronick, Edward, et al. “The Infant’s Response to Entrapment between Contradictory Messages in Face-To-Face Interaction.” Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry 17.1 (1978): 1–13. Williams, Bernard. “Morality and the Emotions.” Bernard Williams. Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers 1956–1972. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. 207–229.

Rebekka Hufendiek

Whereabouts Locating Emotions between Body, Mind, and World

1

Where are emotions? While philosophical theories tended to “internalize” emotions at least from the eighteenth century on by characterizing them as private subjective feelings,2 twentieth century philosophy and psychology came up with two radical and rather contrary claims about the location of emotions:3 Behaviorists like John Watson, who believed that scientific reasoning about the mind should confine itself to observable and measurable inputoutput relations, characterized emotions as behavioral reaction patterns that respond to certain stimuli: We tremor and shiver in response to unexpected loud noises or a loss of balance, and our muscles tense and we turn red when we are restricted in our aims.4 Such a characterization of emotions like fear and rage is probably the most radical rejection of the inner dimension of emotions to be found among contemporary approaches. It restricts the definition of emotions to certain external triggers like loud noises or loss of balance and bodily reaction patterns such as trembling, sweating, crying, and running away. Emotions, according to behaviorism, can be explained without making reference to any kind of inner realm containing feelings, thoughts, or judgments that could only be accessed from a first person point of view. Behaviorism has been severely criticized for its reductionism from the sixties on, when psychology made a turn back to the interior, assuming all kinds of complex cognitive structures to be at work in realizing intelligent behavior: Most prominently, the linguist Noam Chomsky claimed that language could only be real-

1 The author would like to acknowledge financial support from the SNSF (SNSF professorship grant PP00P1_139037). 2 See Dixon, Thomas. From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, and Newmark, Catherine. “From Moving the Soul to Moving into the Soul: On Interiorization in the Philosophy of the Passions,” in this volume. 3 There are, of course, other approaches that locate emotions differently, like the James-Lange theory that sees emotions as inner bodily feelings and has been very prominent in twentieth century psychology or the phenomenological tradition that in many respects resembles the view I will defend in the following (cf. Krueger, Joel. “Emotions and Other Minds,” in this volume). I have picked these two approaches because they mark two extremes in the twentieth century’s attempts at explaining psychological phenomena in general and emotions in particular in ways that fit into frameworks of scientific explanations. 4 Watson, John B. Behaviorism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930.

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ized by an inborn language of thought and thereby assumed a complex syntactical structure to be necessary for the realization of our ability to speak and entertain linguistic thoughts.5 Emotions, in a similar vein, have been explained as kinds of inner cognitive states, as judgments or appraisals have also been explained.6 According to a cognitivist position, to be afraid means to evaluate a situation as dangerous, while to be angry means to evaluate a situation as an offense against oneself. Emotions understood like this have a meaning that is the result of an inner cognitive evaluation represented in one’s mind: one judges oneself to be in a dangerous situation; the emotion fear basically consists in the inner representation that one is in danger. Neither external stimuli nor bodily reactions, according to cognitivism, are central to emotions. Rather, they appear to be contingent triggers and byproducts of a cognitive evaluation that takes place inside the mind. To illustrate where behaviorism and cognitivism locate emotions, one could say that, regarding the traditional Cartesian distinction between the rational mind and the mechanical body, behaviorists reduce emotions to scientifically measurable bodily reactions while cognitivists assume that emotions are cognitive representations and as such part of an inner mental realm. I will argue in the following that emotions should neither be reduced to meaningless behavioral reactions that are external insofar as they can fully be described from a third person perspective, nor to cognitive evaluations that take place inside one’s mind. Emotions, I hold, unfold in dynamic processes, of which brain, body, and world form constitutive parts. The kind of meaning that emotions have should be described as a nonconceptual know-how or as realized by the skillful bodily interaction with a structured social environment. The content of emotions is localized outside in the social world, and we grasp these contents through reactions realized by the body and the brain alike in their ongoing interaction with this environment. Such an account relies heavily on the explanatory framework offered by embodied or situated cognition. The approaches united under these umbrella terms develop an understanding of the mind and human intelligence as extended to the body and the outer world. They criticize the kind of cognitivism and neocartesianism that became popular with the rise of classical cognitive science. Reasoning, according to embodied and situated cognition, is not done by the brain alone but rather by living agents that gesture while talking, use material symbols to engage in abstract reasoning and directly interact with

5 Chomsky, Noam. Cartesian Linguistics. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. 6 For an overview, see De Sousa, Ronald. “Emotion.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward N. Zalta. Spring 2013. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/emotion/ (23 October 2013).

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the world around them instead of developing complex internal representations. A great amount of literature around the embodiment-debate has focused on (visual) perception. Although emotions seem to be a paradigm for many of the central claims various authors hold with regard to perception, there is relatively little work on emotions; one of the main aims of this paper is therefore to apply certain insights from perceptual theories to emotions. In the third section, Embodying and situating cognition, I will introduce the most important notions related to the embodied-cognition paradigm, namely those of embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended cognition and I will give an idea of what it could mean to apply them to emotions. The three following sections (Embodied emotions, Embedded emotions, and Enactive emotions) will then develop the claims that emotions are embodied, embedded, and enactive in more detail. The picture that should arise is that the framework of embodied and situated cognition allows for an understanding of emotions as neither behavioral reactions nor inner judgments, but rather skillful bodily engagements with the social world.7 The answer to the question of where emotions are thus also gives rise to a new understanding of what emotions are: Emotions are not in the head alone, they unfold, rather, in dynamic processes, of which the body and the world form constitutive parts. Emotions are a practical nonconceptual knowledge through which we directly respond to social rules and norms. But before developing this approach I will say a little more about the historical background in cognitive science and cognitivist approaches in the next section, Mind machines and emotional processing. Behaviorism never managed to come up with a satisfying theory of emotions and its methodological approach to psychology has been harshly criticized ever since the sixties. Cognitivist approaches to emotions, on the other hand, have been dominant in psychology, anthropology, and analytic philosophy until very recently. I will therefore leave behaviorist approaches aside and start with a detailed discus7 That social interaction plays a constitutive role for emotions, which is overlooked by the majority of current psychological approaches, is shown by Fisher, Agneta, and Anthony Manstead. “Social Functions of Emotion.” Handbook of Emotions. Ed. Michael Lewis et al. New York: The Guilford Press, 2010. 456–468. Yet, a complete account would have to say something about the roots of emotions in evolutionary history and their biological functions, too. But here I will restrict the focus to the social environment (see, however, Hufendiek, Rebekka. Enactive Emotions: An Embodied Functionalist Account. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Berlin, 2012). That an account of embedded or situated cognition has to focus on the social environment into which emotions are situated has already been highlighted by Griffiths, Paul, and Andrea Scarantino. “Emotions in the Wild: The Situated Perspective on Emotion.” The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition. Ed. Philip Robbins and Murat Aydede. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 437–453.

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sion of the insights and blindspots of cognitivist approaches, firstly, because I think it is important to understand the historical background against which current approaches like my own argue and, second, because I think that the current critique of cognitivism and the turn back to the bodily and behavioral dimension of emotions tends to forget what the insights of cognitivism have been, since precisely those features of emotions highlighted by cognitivists are difficult to explain in a behaviorist, naturalist, or any kind of non-cognitivist framework.

Mind machines and emotional processing Classical cognitive science was based on the critique of behaviorism and on the idea that all understanding consists in forming and using appropriate symbolic representations inside the mind and that the mind is a kind of formal symbol processor. The shift of cognitive science from symbol processing to embodiment can best be illustrated in AI. Early AI research was largely dedicated to the project of translating common sense understanding into huge data structures by providing a system with all the information relevant for its task and the rules for relating and applying these facts.8 The roboticist Rodney Brooks gives a slightly ironic yet very pointed description of the conception of intelligence that guided research in classical cognitive sciences: Judging by the projects chosen in the early days of AI, intelligence was thought to be best characterized as the things that highly educated male scientists found challenging. Projects included having a computer play chess, carry out integration problems […], prove mathematical theorems, and solve very complicated word algebra problems. The things that children of four or five years could do effortlessly, such as visually distinguishing between a coffee cup and a chair, or walking around on two legs, or finding their way from their bedroom to the living room were not thought of as activities requiring intelligence, nor were any aesthetic judgments included in the repertoire of intelligence-based skills.9

In the 1960s, cognitivist views of emotions came up with the general claim that emotions are meaningful states rather than mere bodily feelings or forms 8 For detailed overviews and critic of classical cognitive science and early research in AI, see Dreyfus, Hubert. What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993, and Clark, Andy. Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997. 9 Brooks, Rodney. Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us. New York: Pantheon Books, 2002. 36.

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of behavior.10 As we will see, such cognitivist approaches share the general spirit of classical cognitive science and can be criticized for much the same reasons as these approaches. Yet the most central aim of cognitivist theories has not been to translate emotional processing into a symbolic machine code but rather to show that emotions are more than irrational feelings. Two claims guide cognitivist reasoning about emotions: First, emotions have a kind of meaning that cannot be ascribed to bodily feelings or behaviors. “Feelings do not have ‘directions.’ But I am angry ‘about something.’ The relationship between my being angry and what I am angry about is not the contingent relation between a feeling and an object.” 11 Instead, it must be a representational relation, for the simple reason that emotions are about something. Second, emotions are normatively assessable; they can be appropriate or inappropriate. While we would not say about bodily feelings such as a headache or fatigue that they are appropriate or inappropriate, Solomon argues that to have an emotion is to understand a situation rationally and hold a normative judgment, since “If I do not find my situation awkward, I cannot be ashamed or embarrassed. If I do not judge that I have suffered a loss, I cannot be sad or jealous.” 12 An approach that develops these claims in detail and ascribes an evaluative process that leads to a normatively assessable judgment to each kind of emotion is the one developed by Richard Lazarus.13 Lazarus was an American psychologist whose work has been highly influential with regard to its criticism of behaviorism and the new focus on inner cognitive processes that became prominent in psychology from the sixties on. Lazarus’s account is at the same time a prime example of an approach in the vein of classical cognitive sciences that aims to describe emotional processing as a kind of symbolic processing of a certain logical format. It is therefore also a prime example of the overintellectualization of emotions typical for cognitivist approaches. The claim that emotions have a meaning, that they are about something, is captured by Lazarus’s claim that emotions represent core relational themes. Emotions seem to be about things that fundamentally concern us, that are relevant for our goals or our well-being: When we are afraid, we represent that

10 Cognitivists usually argue against behaviorism and the James-Lange-theory which characterizes emotions as inner bodily feelings as two different reductionist conceptions. I think that many of William James’s ideas can be defended against the cognitivist critique, which will become clearer in the fourth section (Embodied emotions). 11 Solomon, Robert C. “Emotions and Choice.” Robert C. Solomon. Not Passion’s Slave: Emotions and Choice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. 3–24, here 4. 12 Solomon, “Emotions and Choice,” 8. 13 Lazarus, Richard. Emotion and Adaptation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

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we are in danger, when we are sad, we represent an irrevocable loss. It could be said that the term “core relational themes” is meant to express three things: (1) the fact that emotions always represent things that matter or that are of core relevance, (2) the fact that emotions always represent things that matter to us or that their meaning is relational, (3) the fact that every type of emotion has a different theme that is always represented when the emotion in question is present: I might be afraid of many different things and in many different situations but no matter whether I am afraid of a spider, a possibly coming war, or an upcoming oral exam, whenever I am afraid I represent a situation as dangerous. Yet according to Lazarus, representing a situation as dangerous is, cognitively, a highly ambitious affair. Being emotional means representing a core relational theme and representing a core relational theme is the result of a long and complex evaluative process: One cannot simply perceive that one is in danger just as one can perceive a spider hanging right above one’s head. Representing that one is in danger, just as representing any core relational theme, is the result of an evaluative process that involves several appraisal dimensions: First, one has to judge whether the current situation has any relevance for one’s goals and only if it does can an emotion occur. Second, one has to judge whether the situation is congruent or incongruent with regard to one’s goals. If it is congruent, any positive emotion can be elicited; if it is incongruent with one’s goals, any negative emotion can be elicited. The further evaluations further distinguish which kind of emotion is present: if an emotion is directed to the self it will be pride, guilt, or shame. Several other emotions, such as anger and envy, are directed to other persons. If an emotion involves blame it will be either anger or guilt depending on whether the emotion is directed at another person or oneself. With such a schema of the various appraisals involved in emotional processing, Lazarus is able to explain what differentiates various types of emotions: they are the result of different evaluations and they have different meanings. He can also make sense of the normative assessability of emotions: just as rational judgments regarding social rules, norms, and values are subject to logical constraints and can be morally appropriate or inappropriate, so can the content of emotions be more or less appropriate, simply because it is the result of a complex evaluation. Yet, on the other hand, precisely this description of emotions provoked the objection against cognitivism that it overintellectualizes the phenomenon.14 Being seen as states that are embedded in holistic reasoning processes, 14 Goldie, Peter. Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000; Prinz, Jesse. Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

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emotions, in this view, appeared to contain language-like judgments. Emotions do, however, not seem to be language-like judgments, and this for the following reasons: 1.

Emotions apparently occur in infants and animals, but surely infants and animals do not form language-like judgments. 2. Emotions often appear to be cognitively impenetrable which means that they do not vanish when we judge their content to be wrong. Judgments, on the other hand, simply disappear if proven wrong. 3. Emotions have a distinct phenomenology which judgments lack. 4. Emotions are highly motivational, whereas judgments just purport to state matters of fact. 5. Emotions are fast and frugal; in contrast to judgments they are not the result of complex and time-consuming reasoning processes.15 This last point is worth some elaboration. It is eye-catching how much Lazarus’s decision-tree-structure resembles models developed for all kinds of cognition in classical cognitive science, with the idea in the background that such formalizations of what we seem to be doing, for example, when we see something and decide to go and get it, or when we see something and decide rather to run and avoid it, could help to build intelligent machines able to fulfill such tasks. The critique of these approaches, which I will sketch in the next paragraph, started from the problem that early robots that were meant, for example, to see something and then go and get it would instead sit still for hours, reckoning, before deciding to make one step in the right direction and then sit and reckon again. One could see a robot with an emotion decisiontree-structure, such as the one just sketched, sitting still for hours, just to find out whether the object in front of it is of any relevance for its goals, as well.

15 More recent versions of cognitivist approaches have suggested solutions to these problems. I think that at least strong versions of cognitivism fail to meet them in principle, but I am not going to argue for this in detail here. For further discussion, see Scarantino, Andrea. “Insights and Blindspots of the Cognitivist Theory of Emotions.” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 64.4 (2010): 729–768, and Hufendiek, Enactive Emotions.

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Embodying and situating cognition A starting point for the turn to embodiment in cognitive science has been the philosophical critique of the narrow concept of intelligence as symbol processing that guided research in the field from the sixties on. This critique was articulated by philosophers such as Hubert Dreyfus16 and John Haugeland,17 and has been inspired by pragmatistic ideas as developed by Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, as much as by the phenomenological tradition and its questioning of the relation between subject and object and its focus on the practical relation to the environment as it can be found in the works of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.18 Intelligence, Haugeland and Dreyfus argued, refers not only to conceptual or inferential reasoning, but rather to all the strategies we might come up with to successfully interact with the environment that are not simply reflex-like but rather entail spontaneous reactions to all kinds of problems we might be facing. While Dreyfus and Haugeland were articulating a theoretical critique of classical cognitive science from a pragmatist and phenomenological background, many of the groundbreaking ideas at the core of the embodied cognition paradigm stem from a shift in view in research on infant development,19 animal behavior, and, as we have seen, artificial intelligence,20 where it became obvious that modeling the mind as something constituted by abstract symbolic processing alone leads to problems on the simplest levels of interaction with the real world and that biology obviously came up with solutions rather different from those of early AI research. It could be said that at the heart of embodied and situated cognition approaches lies the aim to shift the explanatory weight from inside the head to the interaction between body and world: What makes intelligent behavior complex is not necessarily the neural program underlying it, but rather the unfolding interaction between a skillful

16 Dreyfus, What Computers Still Can’t Do. 17 Haugeland, John. “Mind Embodied and Embedded.” John Haugeland. Having Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. 207–240. 18 Many embodiment approaches do indeed refer to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty and they also share the radical anti-representationalism that can be found in the works of these authors. Yet there are other approaches that develop less demanding and more action-oriented notions of the term “representation.” My own account belongs to the latter. 19 Thelen, Esther, and Linda Smith. A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994. 20 Brooks, Rodney. “Intelligence without Representation.” Artificial Intelligence 47 (1991): 139–159.

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body and a structured environment in itself.21 Rodney Brooks’s robots are able to fulfill certain tasks such as collecting cans not by constructing complex internal representations of their surroundings and developing cognitively demanding plans of how to act, but rather by executing very simple perception-action cycles. Their bodily implementation, the movements they are able to make, and the kinds of information they are able to grasp all play constitutive roles that enable the robot to fulfill certain tasks in certain environments without the need to “think,” that is, to form and process complex inner representations. To flesh out these general remarks I will explain and differentiate the notions of “embodied,” “embedded,” and “enactive cognition” in the following, since an understanding of emotions as being realized in the interplay between brain, body, and world rests on these concepts. The claim that a cognitive process is embodied basically means that the body or some part of the body forms a constitutive part of the cognitive process in question. This claim is not to be confused with the somewhat trivial claim that the body plays some causal role in the generation of cognition. Neither Descartes nor any hardliner in the heydays of early classical cognitivism would have doubted, for example, that the way our sense organs are built influences what kind of information we can grasp through perception or that the brain needs to be nourished by the rest of the body. Such wisdom is already captured in the Latin saying mens sana in corpore sano and certainly would not do as the foundation of a new paradigm in cognitive science. A better example for an actual case of embodiment might be the role that gesturing with the hands plays for the constitution of cognitive processes. Andy Clark, who is among the most prominent philosophers in the embodied cognition debate, argues that gesturing can be a part of online cognitive processing by serving as a kind of “material carrier” in an ongoing feedback loop between brain, world, and body, where “by materializing thought in physical gesture we create a stable physical presence that may productively impact and constrain the neural elements of thought and reason.” 22 Contrary to classical cognitivist explanations, Clark would argue that (1) seemingly complex intelligent behavior can often do without complex inner representations and (2) that bodily processes such as gesturing play an important role in the realization of such 21 For more general overviews of the approaches hosted under the umbrella-terms “embodied” and “situated,” see Wilson, Margaret. “Six Views of Embodied Cognition.” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 9 (2002): 625–636, and Robbins, Philip, and Murat Aydede. “A Short Primer on Situated Cognition.” The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition. Ed. Philip Robbins and Murat Aydede. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 3–10. 22 Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 128.

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intelligent behavior. I will suggest, in this vein, that emotions are not merely accompanied by bodily processes such as inner arousal or facial expressions but that these bodily reactions let us see certain aspects of the world and thereby co-constitute an intelligent access to the world. The claim that cognition is embedded means that cognition takes place in a structured environment and that the cognizer makes use of this environment in a way that co-constitutes ongoing cognitive processes. Again, this means more than the trivial claim that cognition usually takes place somewhere and that the surrounding might have some influence on one’s thought, as when the rhythm of the raindrops on my window inspires my thinking, for example. The idea of cognition being embedded is rather that a cognizer is adapted to an environment and permanently relies on its structure instead of building complex internal representations of it. An example from psychological studies meant to show how much we rely on the present situation instead of using internal memory is the block-copying study done by Dana Ballard et al.23 In this study, people were given a model of colored blocks and were asked to copy it by moving similar blocks from a reserve area to a new workspace. The tasks were performed using mouseclicks and drags on a computer screen. During performance, an eye-tracker monitored where and when people were looking at different bits of the puzzle. One might guess that the problem-solving strategy that people use here is to remember the color and the position of one block and copy it into the new workspace. But this is not the strategy used by most human subjects. The results of the study show instead that people keep on looking back and forth between the models, apparently storing only one bit of information – color or positions – at a time. The conclusion that Ballard et al. draw is that the gaze plays an identifiable computational role that we would intuitively contribute to working memory. Furthermore, the study allows for the more general hypothesis that the brain tends to create programs so as to minimize the amount of working memory required, by relying heavily on the eye movements (another example of embodied cognition) and the environment (a case of embedded cognition). As the example shows, claims about the embeddedness of the mind are usually closely intertwined with claims about the embodiment of the mind. The former further highlights the enabling role of the body while the latter highlights the structuring role of the environment. I will argue that emotions are another example of mental states that are not constituted by an internal reasoning process but rather embodied reactions that directly react to aspects present in the environment.

23 Ballard, Dana H., et al. “Deictic Codes for the Embodiment of Cognition.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 20 (1997): 723–767. For discussion, see also Clark, Supersizing the Mind, 11–12.

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An early take on enactivism was put forward by the philosopher Evan Thompson, the biologist Francisco Varela, and the linguist Eleanor Rosch in the early nineties. The central claim of enactive cognition is that cognitive processes depend on the interaction between the cognizer and the environment so that the content of mental states is determined by an ongoing loop of sensory and motor processes. Perceptual experience, according to this view, is not simply the result of retinal input and neural processing but rather of a sensorimotor process that involves an active agent exploring its environment. Alva Noë, another prominent proponent of enactive cognition, paradigmatically puts this claim in the following way: [P]erceiving is a way of acting. Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us. It is something we do. Think of a blind person tap-tapping her way around a cluttered space, perceiving that space by touch, not all at once, but through time, by skillful probing and movement. This is, or at least ought to be, our paradigm of what perceiving is. The world makes itself available to the perceiver through physical movement and interaction.24

Traditional accounts of perception take perception to begin with a stimulation of the sense organs resulting in a retinal image that has to be followed by various information-processing operations for perception to occur. The enactive view instead claims that perception is an act of the whole agent that cannot be properly understood as being initiated by passive sensation. This results in a new picture of the architecture of the entire mind. While classical models of cognition tend to see the mind as a ‘sandwich’ with action and perception being two separate and peripheral slices, and cognition being the hearty filling, Susan Hurley suggests viewing perception and action as closely intertwined such that perceptual contents are established not only through passive input but rather through the ongoing interaction of sensory and motor activity.25 Claims about enactivism are usually closely related to claims about embodiment. The idea that sensorimotor skills guide perceptual processing 24 Noë, Alva. Action in Perception. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. 25 Hurley, Susan. Consciousness in Action. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. A similar view can already be found in John Deweys’s essay “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology.” Psychological Review 3 (1896): 357–370, where he argues that action and perception are closely intertwined; they “have been so often bound together to reinforce each other, to help each other out, that each may be considered practically a subordinate member of a bigger coordination” (359). While the hand permanently depends on the control and stimulation of the visual information, vision in turn must be stimulated and controlled by the body’s movements. If the eye is not kept fixed on the goal of grasping, if there is no proprioceptive feedback about the body’s posture, the task cannot be fulfilled.

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and thereby (co-)constitute perceptual content is a claim that could be seen as being nearly interchangeable with the claim that bodily processes (co-)constitute cognitive processes. The whole point of enactive approaches is that sensorimotor skills are a kind of bodily nonconceptual yet intelligent way of actively accessing the world. Indeed, with their term “enaction,” Varela et al. mean a kind of ‘embodied action.’ Embodiment for these authors not only means that any kind of bodily process can (co-)constitute cognition, but rather that “cognition depends upon the kinds of experience that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities.” 26 A word on what sensorimotor skills are might be in order to clarify what the core claim of enactivism is. The notion of a skill can be used interchangeably with know-how. A skill is a kind of practical non-conceptual knowledge. Skills are abilities but not all abilities are skills. The ability to blink, digest, or breathe for example is not skillful; it is just some kind of automatic processing that the agent performs because it serves a biological purpose. Skillful knowledge on the other hand is usually defined as the result of a training process. While breathing and digesting are abilities that need not be learned, playing the violin or cooking chilli con carne are skillful abilities that presuppose a training process. The kind of sensorimotor skills that people have in mind when suggesting that perception is based on them are, however, much simpler, and the kind of training that we need to acquire them is a sensorimotor trial-and-error process in itself: we have to learn how to move our eyes to grasp information and we have to learn how the incoming information varies with movement to be able to make sense of sensory data. To compare: breathing, blinking, and digesting are abilities, not skills. Although breathing is not a skill in itself there are skillful ways of breathing ranging from panic-induction to the breathing-techniques mastered by divers and opera singers. The interesting claim enactivism makes is that perception is not only an automatic input-generating process, but also a way of gaining practical, non-conceptual knowledge. To process sensory information we have to know how things look from a certain angle and how their size might change when we move closer. This is not a kind of propositional knowledge that we entertain in the form of beliefs or judgments and then apply to the raw sense data; it is a practical embodied knowledge that guides the way we act during perception and (co-) constitutes perceptual content. In this sense, I will argue that emotions are skillful abilities, too. While embodied, embedded, and enactive approaches to the mind largely focused

26 Varela, Francisco, et al. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991. 172 (my emphasis).

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on (visual) perception, I think that the most central claims of the debate can fruitfully be applied to emotions; it is therefore surprising that there is so little systematic literature on embodied, enactive, embedded emotions to date.27 Emotions entail biologically established bodily responses with a certain purpose. Yet at the same time emotions are shaped by a learning process, in which infants learn through the permanent interaction with a social environment how to negotiate their needs and intentions in terms of emotional behavior. What is acquired in such a learning process is not conceptual knowledge or the ability to make the right evaluations in the right situations. It is rather a practical embodied knowledge about what matters in a social context. Emotions are a non-conceptual way to grasp social rules and norms. Instead of talking about embodied or situated cognition in general, people sometimes refer to the “4 E” – namely the claims that cognition is embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended. I have introduced the first three notions and will apply them to emotions in the following. For the sake of completeness let me also say a word on what extended cognition is and why I will not speak of emotions as being extended. In their famous paper The Extended Mind,28 the philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers argue that we should think of the mind or cognitive processes as being literally extended into the environment. When an Alzheimer’s patient relies on her notebook where other people would use their memory, the notebook can be seen as part of the cognitive system that enables intelligent behavior. When an accountant in her everyday working routine uses pen and paper for certain multiplications, pen and paper are part of the cognitive system as well. The extended mind hypothesis can be seen as a more radical version of the claim that cognition is embedded into the environment, since it not only claims that we heavily rely on the environment but makes the stronger metaphysical claim that parts of the environment can come to be part of the mind. While I am highly sympathetic to the extended mind-hypothesis, when it comes to cognitive processes such as memorizing, reckoning, or imagining things,29 I do not think that it makes 27 See Prinz, Gut Reactions, Griffiths and Scarantino, “Emotions in the Wild,” and Giovanna Colombetti (forthcoming) for the most prominent approaches to emotions understanding them as either embodied or enactive; for the claim that emotions are extended, see Slaby, Jan. “Emotions and the Extended Mind.” Collective Emotions. Ed. Mikko Salmela and Christian von Scheve. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 32–46. What is lacking, to my knowledge, is an approach that applies the reasoning of Noë and the affordance theory of perception to emotions and a developed account of emotions being embedded into a social environment. 28 Clark, Andy, and David Chalmers. “The Extended Mind.” Analysis 58.1 (1998): 7–19. 29 Hufendiek, Rebekka. “Draw a Distinction. Die vielfältigen Funktionen des Zeichnens als Formen des Extended Mind.” Et in imagine ego: Facetten von Bildakt und Verkörperung. Ed. Ulrike Feist and Markus Rath. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2012. 441–465.

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sense to speak of extended emotions insofar as this would imply that emotional feelings would be realized not by the body and brain alone but would be co-constituted by parts of the external world.30

Embodied emotions A primary motivation for an embodied approach comes from the phenomenological observation that emotions obviously do involve bodily feelings. This is an aspect of emotions which has been largely ignored by cognitivist approaches but is already captured in the work of William James: “What kind of an emotion of fear would be left,” James notably asked, “if the feelings neither of quickened heart-beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose-flesh nor of visceral stirrings, were present, it is quite impossible to think.” 31 The claim that James develops out of this phenomenological observation is that emotional feelings are constituted by bodily reactions so that there would be no emotional feelings left without bodily arousal and furthermore that different types of bodily arousal allow us to distinguish between different types of emotions. The kind of bodily arousal that constitutes anger differs from the kind of bodily arousal that constitutes sadness. As we have seen above, James has been criticized by a whole tradition of philosophers and psychologists arguing that emotions are meaningful states while bodily feelings are meaningless and that the bodily arousal involved in emotions is rather a vague and arbitrary byproduct of emotions than the essential constituent of them.32 My aim in suggesting that emotions are embodied will therefore be twofold. First, I will sketch the theoretical claim that the bodily reactions involved in emotions are constitutive for their meaning and, second, I will discuss some empirical studies suggesting that the bodily arousal involved in emotions is far from being just arbitrary. With regard to the first point, the decisive shift from cognitivism to an embodied account is to describe the bodily reactions in themselves as realizing 30 Andy Clark would probably agree that emotional feelings should not be described as extended (cf. Clark, Andy. “Spreading the Joy? Why the Machinery of Consciousness Is (Probably) Still in the Head.” Mind 118.4 (2009): 963–993). Yet, Jan Slaby (“Emotions and the Extended Mind”) makes an interesting case for emotions being extended relying on the phenomenology of Hermann Schmitz. 31 James, William. “What Is an Emotion?” Mind 9.34 (1884): 188–205, here 194–195. 32 For a more recent approach, see, for example, Solomon, “Emotions and Choice,” and Nussbaum, Martha. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

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a kind of intelligent behavior. Bodily reactions such as trembling, sweating, being on the verge of tears, having a lump in the throat, blushing, having ‘butterflies in the stomach,’ having ‘one’s legs turn to jelly,’ and so on form complex reaction patterns through which we grasp certain aspects of the world that matter.33 When we are afraid, we do not judge that we are in danger, instead the pattern of bodily arousal, that is, our hearts beating faster, our muscles tense, and the rise of adrenaline co-constitute a non-conceptual access to the world that represents a situation as being dangerous in a non-conceptual format. Emotions certainly do have a meaning and Lazarus is certainly right in claiming that their meaning is always relational and that emotions always represent something that matters to us. Yet Lazarus simply equates this kind of meaning with conceptual knowledge, while I think that emotions are non-conceptual representations that are mainly constituted by bodily reaction-patterns. Conceptual knowledge is a kind of abstract and situation-independent knowledge, whereas the term non-conceptual knowledge or content was coined to highlight how perception differs from judgments or other propositional states. A person who has the concept of pain, for example, is probably able to explain what pain is and what it is not. She can use the concept in all kinds of contexts, thinking, for example, that she would prefer not to be in pain, while she actually has a headache. Perceiving that one is in pain might be seen as a state that has some kind of content or meaning, too, but the content appears to be rather different. It is situation-dependent in a way that conceptual content is not. It occurs only when a person actually is in pain, and cannot be used for further reasoning about pain. We might say that it has the function of informing the person in question about the pain’s cause while the concept has the function to reason, as it were, about the nature of pain, tell other people about one’s pain, compare different forms of pain, and many other things. What I want to suggest is that emotions, with regard to their type of content, are much more like pain-perceptions than like pain-concepts. This

33 An important forerunner of this account is the approach developed by Jesse Prinz (Gut Reactions). Prinz’s theory is problematic with regard to the details, though. Prinz uses Fred Dretske’s theory of representation to make sense of the claim that emotions are biologically established mechanisms with the function of representing core relational themes or urgent situations to us. Along with the adoptation of Dretske’s approach comes a view of emotional representations as being passive input states and a strict separation between certain emotions such as fear with a biological function and other emotions such as guilt that only get set up once we acquire language (for a detailed critique of Prinz’s view, see Hufendiek, Enactive Emotions). In the following, I will aim to avoid these problems by describing emotions as enactive and embedded.

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might be most plausible when thinking about emotional reactions in infants: From very early on, infants react with fear when they hear an unexpected loud noise, show joyful reactions when they are stroked, and react angrily when captured in an embrace that is too tight. These appear to be reactions that have a certain kind of meaning. But this kind of meaning is realized by the whole body, it is bound to the situation in which it occurs, and the infant certainly does not conceptually understand the character of the situation in question. Bodily reactions do not simply accompany emotions but rather (co-)constitute an intelligent access to the world. This is the crucial move for a theory of embodied emotions that really meets the core claim of the embodied cognition paradigm.34 Such a view shifts the explanatory weight from internal cognitive processing to the direct interaction between body and world. As I will argue in the next section (Embedded Emotions), what makes emotions more complex states than bodily feelings such as pain is the way they are embedded into the social context rather than the inner processing they involve. The implication of such a view is that all emotions do involve bodily arousal and that the bodily arousal differs between different kinds of emotions. This brings me to the second point, namely the question of whether it is empirically plausible to make such a claim. It has been objected that this is not the case, since the bodily arousal involved in emotions is rather vague or arbitrary. While, as we have seen, James considers the reactions of the nervous system in fear and rage to be distinct, according to the philosopher Martha Nussbaum the feeling of bodily arousal involved in an emotion can vary and should therefore not be regarded as an essential aspect of the emotion. While “many men report experiencing anger in connection with a boiling feeling,” Nussbaum states, “my own experience of anger is that it is associated with tension at the back of the neck, or a headache that appears the next day.” 35 This little phenomenological self-observation is meant to deny that every type of emotion is associated with a certain kind of bodily arousal. Whether rage is associated with boiling blood, or tensed muscles around the neck, or another bodily reaction, or no bodily reaction at all, can vary from person to person and is therefore no criterion by which to individuate emotions, that is, by which to distinguish different types of emotions. Since Nussbaum’s phenomenological

34 Wendy Wilutzky et al. have pointed out what the precise criteria for an embodied – and also an embedded and enactive – account of emotions should be. Cf. Wilutzky, Wendy, et al. “Situierte Affektivität.” Affektive Intentionalität. Beiträge zur welterschließenden Funktion des Gefühls. Ed. Jan Slaby et al. Paderborn: Mentis, 2011. 283–320. 35 Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 61.

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description thwarts the Jamesian description of the phenomenon, I will bring some empirical data into the discussion. The possible sources for empirical evidence of bodily reactions involved in emotions are numerous and even today many studies are far from issuing clear and stable results. Instead of discussing the evidence for distinct bodily reactions of distinct types of emotions in detail, I just want to highlight two points here: 36 First, the picture that people have in mind when arguing that bodily feedback is vague and cannot constitute different emotional feelings is often far too narrow. The place to look for bodily reactions is not only the inner organs and the visceral feedback stemming from them, but also the endocrine system and the somatic nervous system that innervates skeletal muscles, including those of the face. One can get an idea of the role that facial muscles play in the determination of emotional feelings simply by observing the grim feelings that correspond to a contraction of the corrugator muscle between the eyebrows and of the pleasant feeling stemming from a relaxation of them.37 An embodied account of emotions can include fine-grained changes in facial expression, bodily posture, endocrine level, respiration patterns, and so on.38 The second point I want to make concerns Nussbaum’s objection that bodily reactions differ from person to person and can therefore not be useful to differentiate between emotions. I think that Nussbaum indeed makes a point here against the Jamesian view, as far as this can be interpreted as claiming that there is something like a ‘common essence’ of bodily arousal that has to be present in precisely the same form in each token of a certain emotional kind like fear or rage. This appears to be not very likely since the whole nervous system is highly plastic and we should not expect to find the same reactions, for example, in the endocrine system, in the same person over several years, just as one can have doubts about whether we find the same reactions 36 For a more detailed discussion, see Hufendiek, Enactive Emotions. 37 For facial EMG studies of the role of the corrugator muscle in emotional processing, see Schwartz, Gary E., et al. “Lateralized Facial Muscle Response to Positive and Negative Emotional Stimuli.” Psychophysiology 16 (1979): 561–571. For the finding that different kinds of emotions are associated with different facial expressions across cultures, see Ekman, Paul. “Universals and Cultural Differences in Facial Expressions of Emotion.” Nebraska Symposium on Motivation. Ed. Jonathan Cole. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971. 207–282. For a similar suggestion with regard to the bodily posture associated with pride, see Tracy, Jessica, and Robert Robbins. “The Prototypical Pride-Expression: Development of a Nonverbal Behavior Coding Scheme.” Emotion 7.4 (2007): 789–801. 38 With such a broadened concept of bodily reactions in the background, the observations that animals with a cut vagus nerve and patients with a spinal cord lesion still have feelings can be explained (see, for example, Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: The Ecco Press, 1999. 290–291).

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in the endocrine system when observing fear in a young and an old person. This assumption also explains why research on the physiological reactions accompanying emotions until now remains somewhat blurry.39 In an overview of recent studies in the psychophysiology of emotions, Margaret Bradley suggests that many of the differences that occur among various studies are the result of studies’ having neglected the importance of context-dependent aspects of emotional reactions.40 A problem has been that different studies compared, for example, the physiology of fear in situations as different as hearing a loud noise, looking at a picture of an amputated leg, giving a public speech, or imagining an intruder in one’s house. Yet cardiac reactions tend to differ when test persons process affectively similar events in different types of tasks. Therefore, what I want to suggest is that emotions do not have common essential bodily ingredients but are rather realized by complex patterns of bodily reactions that recur in similar situations because they are set up to fulfill this function. I would therefore agree with Nussbaum as long as the claim is that emotions cannot be individuated with regard to the bodily arousal they involve alone. But this does not mean that the bodily arousal is simply arbitrary and certainly not that emotions can only be individuated with regard to their cognitive content. Consider Nussbaum’s example of rage again. Nussbaum reports that while many men say that they associate rage with a boiling feeling, she associates rage with a tense feeling around the neck and sometimes a headache occurring the next day. With regard to the studies discussed above, there might be several reasons for these differences: gender reasons might be important, but there is also evidence that people have different abilities when it comes to sensing their own heart rate,41 and the same might prove to be true for sensing ones own body temperature. Yet tensed muscles, increased heart rate, and elevated body temperature all fit into the prototypical pattern of bodily arousal that is generally associated with rage. What would be disturbing is if Nussbaum reported feeling her heart beat slow down whenever she is angry, or if she associated it with a relaxation of her muscles from the currogator all the way down to the belly and the toes. My guess is that in such a case we would doubt whether the feeling that Nussbaum describes could be labelled as a case of anger at all. This intuition together with the 39 For an overview, see Larsen, Jeff T., et al. “The Psychophysiology of Emotion.” Handbook of Emotions. Ed. Michael Lewis et al. New York, London: The Guilford Press, 2008. 180–196. 40 Bradley, Margaret. “Emotion and Motivation.” Handbook of Psychophysiology. Ed. John T. Cacioppo et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 602–642. 41 Barrett, Lisa Feldman. “Interoceptive Sensitivity and Self-Reports of Emotional Experience.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 87.5 (2004): 684–697.

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evidence discussed above should suffice to exclude an approach that denies any significant functional role of the bodily changes involved in emotions altogether.

Embedded emotions To see what an account of embedded emotions could look like, we have to focus on the role that the world and its particular structure play for emotions. Wherever the environment comes to play a (co-)constitutive role in emotional processing, in the sense that it is the interaction with the structured environment rather than complex internal representations that explain the intelligence of an emotional reaction, we can reasonably speak of emotions being embedded. Lazarus suggested that emotions are the results of internal inferences because he thought emotions to represent rather complex affairs: In anger we seem to evaluate something as being incongruent with our goals and furthermore a kind of demeaning offense against me or mine. An embodied embedded approach demands an explanation of how such a seemingly complex cognitive process can be described as an interaction between the body and the world. A first step could be to describe emotions in analogy to pain or fatigue as homeostatic reactions, that is, non-cognitive bodily reactions in which a neural ‘evaluation’ concerning the body’s well-being and bodily processing together constitute a sensation that has the function of guiding the organism’s behavior. Yet this seems to be an account much too simple with regard to emotions, since emotions steadily react to social scenarios and their core relational themes involve normative vocabulary such as “being offended” in the case of anger or “being deceived” in the case of jealousy. People tend to get angry upon being insulted, jealous upon being betrayed, and feel guilty when they think that they mistreated somebody. Also, when we talk about emotions, we notoriously treat them as being normatively assessable by speaking about just anger, inadequate jealousy, or the maddening pride of somebody too full of herself. Such a continuous evaluation of our emotional reactions wouldn’t make much sense if emotions weren’t different from sensations such as pain or fatigue. This seems to speak in favor of a cognitivist approach since it is difficult to see how bodily feelings could be meaningful reactions to social rules and norms of which we could reasonably speak as being appropriate or inappropriate.42 42 That emotions are primarily reactions to social scenarios and that with regard to emotions such as anger, guilt, and jealousy we would simply not know what they are about – if not

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My aim in the following will be twofold: Relying on results from developmental psychology, I suggest that the content or core relational theme of an emotion could be simpler or more fundamental than Lazarus claims. Yet I will not deny that the content of emotions is normative. Instead, I will take Rodney Brooks’s famous statement that “the world is its own best model” 43 as a guideline and suggest that the social norms that we grasp while we are emotional are external and we can come to directly respond to them without entertaining complex inner models of the rules and norms in question. The ontological structure of the social world in which we are situated is normative in itself and emotions are a non-conceptual skillful way to grasp these social norms. Consider anger again. The feeling of anger typically arises in certain social scenarios. Lazarus would say that it reacts to an offense and that to represent an offense we have to understand that we have been blamed by somebody first. Yet this is a complex evaluation that we should not expect in infants younger than three. If you think of the earliest anger reactions in infancy, though, you might wonder whether this is an appropriate characterization. Infants of only a few weeks’ age frequently react aggressively when being caught in an embrace that is too tight.44 This is certainly a social scenario but one where the infant is restricted and not literally offended. My suggestion is, therefore, to broaden and simplify the content of anger. In anger, on a basic level, certain situations are identified as restrictions-to-be-fought. The bodily reactions involved in anger prepare for an aggressive response and at the same time highlight a certain aspect of the world, namely the restriction. In reacting to such scenarios and incrementally applying anger reactions to more complex scenarios, infants learn to negotiate their needs and intentions with the social environment and they come to understand what offenses are on a fundamental, perceptual level, where they learn to deal with offensive scenarios that are communicated primarily through facial expressions or bodily gestures by the others. The bodily side of an anger reaction – the “boiling of the blood,” the about social scenarios – is nicely shown by Fischer and Manstead, “Social Functions of Emotion.” 43 Brooks, Rodney. “Intelligence without Reason.” A. I. Memo 1293 (1991): 1–27, here 15. 44 Parkinson, Brian, et al. Emotions in Social Relations, Cultural, Group, and Interpersonal Processes. New York: Psychology Press, 2005. A cognitivist might respond that starting with emotional reactions as they can be observed in infants simply begs the question, since it is by no means clear whether these reactions deserve to be called full-fledged cases of emotional states. A very brief response to this might say that first, what we learn from recent studies in developmental psychology is that emotional reactions in infants are much more differentiated than we used to think and second, an approach that can include these examples without on the other hand reducing emotions to meaningless bodily feelings seems to be far more integrative and plausible than one that has nothing to say on early emotional reactions at all.

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tension of the muscles, and the grim facial expression – is very similar to a homeostatic reaction such as pain or fatigue. Yet emotions very quickly develop from such basic reactions to immediate threats – such as an embrace that is too tight – to social scenarios, such as being blamed or offended. My main claim is that to represent something as an offense when angry does not presuppose that an infant has an explicit understanding of what it means to be blamed or offended. I rather think our abstract concepts of restrictions and offenses are derived from the non-conceptual knowledge that we gain in the direct interaction with the others while we are emotional. Somebody who has the concept of an offense but has never actually been angry, ready to react aggressively, to defend her territory, her bodily well-being, her close relatives, or her honor can be compared to a blind person thinking about colors. Of course such a person could be able to use the concept in a reasonable way; it is just that the person lacks what normally constitutes our non-conceptual understanding of what that concept is all about.45 Yet even if this approach sounds more plausible with regard to anger reactions in infants, one could still argue that to represent something as a restriction-to-be-fought means to evaluate something as something that is bad and should be avoided. How can such a normative evaluation be understood as a non-conceptual embodied reaction? Here is where the description of the structure of our social environment and the way we are adapted to it comes in. What Lazarus calls core relational themes should, in my view, be understood as relational properties of a socially constructed environment. They steadily reoccur in our social environments and we come to grasp and react to them. In a nutshell, this is to say that the social world we are surrounded by is a human construction that is real and can have certain causal effects on its inhabitants, even if they are not able to conceptually understand the rules and norms they are affected by and react to. One way to unpack this would be to say that our social world is a huge, historically developed construct of entities that are reproduced because they serve a certain function. These entities include, among others, artifacts, institutions, contracts, forms of behavior, and communication. The radical ontological claim is that these entities are what they are independently of a single subject that ascribes a certain function to them.46 Social rules and norms do not depend upon any individual recogniz45 A similar claim can be found in Prinz’s neosentimentalist approach, where he argues, relying on Hume and Hutcheson, that emotions constitute our moral concepts. Cf. Prinz, Jesse. “The Emotional Basis of Moral Judgement.” Philosophical Explorations 9.1 (2006): 29–43. 46 The latter account is the one entertained by Searle, John. The Construction of Social Reality. New York: Free Press, 1995; the one I am arguing for here can be developed out of the works of Ruth Millikan (mainly out of Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories: New Foun-

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ing that they are in place. We make up these rules as we go along in our social interactions. Rules can be established as conventions that the members of a social group follow without these rules being explicitly represented beforehand. It is not a necessary criterion of a rule that somebody represents it and then purposefully establishes it. It is a criterion for a rule that it is followed and can be violated by more than one member of a social group. People can establish these rules without the intention of doing so and might or might not come to explicitly represent these rules later on. Jealousy, to take another example, represents cases of being left out.47 In a setting where people live in certain constant relations with each other, interact with each other, and depend on each other, those relations are governed by a huge number of explicit and implicit rules. Occurrences of jealousy in early infancy could be seen as such cases where an infant detects the violation of a rule on the side of the caregiver. The rule is established through the normal amount of attention and care that the infant is used to receiving and has to be negotiated with the infant’s needs.48 If you take attention and caring to be types of behavior that get reproduced in the relation between infants and caregivers because they serve a certain function, you can also reasonably speak of cases where these behaviors fail to be performed by the caregiver and this is what the infant’s reaction is set up to detect. An infant, when responding distressed to its caregiver paying attention to another infant, represents and communicates its being left out of a social context without explicitly understanding that a norm has been violated.49 Yet from an outside perspective, we can find the infant’s reaction appropriate or inappropriate since it takes place in a social context that is governed by rules and norms. This is what makes emotions normatively assessable: the fact that they are embedded into a social context

dations for Realism. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984) as has been suggested by Markus Wild (Biosemantik. Repräsentation, Intentionalität, Norm. Unpublished habilitation thesis. Berlin, 2010). 47 Lazarus and many others would think of jealousy as an emotion that represents one’s having been deceived. Again, relying on developmental psychology, I suggest that we should think of jealousy as a simpler reaction since it can be observed in infants of a few months of age already (cf. Parkinson et al., Emotions in Social Relations). 48 The claim that infants act as competent agents in social scenarios from early on, for example, by picking up on their caregivers’ facial expressions and responding to them, is fundamental for the approach of embedded emotions that I am sketching, but cannot be developed here in detail. For further discussion, see Meltzoff, Andrew N., and M. Keith Moore. “Imitation of Facial and Manual Gestures by Human Neonates.” Science 198.4312 (1977): 75–78, Trevarthen, Colin. “Communication and Cooperation in Early Infancy: A Description of Primary Intersubjectivity.” Before Speech. Ed. Marta Bullowa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. 321–348, and Hufendiek, Enactive Emotions. 49 Parkinson et al., Emotions in Social Relations.

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and are treated as appropriate or inappropriate reactions to conventions, habits, rules, and norms. We do not have to claim that emotions are inner evaluations of normative affairs to make sense of the claim that they are normatively assessable. The norms are out there; they are constituted through our social practices. Externalizing emotions basically means to relocate their constitutive elements, and normativity is certainly a constitutive component of emotional content. The picture we are left with is that in emotions we respond to external rules and norms via bodily reactions. I will develop the idea of emotions as such a dynamically unfolding process between brain, body, and world in the following.

Enactive emotions As I have sketched above, traditional views of perception have usually thought of perceptions as starting with an input – a retinal image – and then proceed with cognitive processing, which turns the retinal image into a full-blown perception. With a similar model of passive reception of information, evaluation of the information, and finally a behavioral reaction, traditional approaches to emotions have described emotions as having an input and an output side, where the input was thought to be some sort of cognitive or neural appraisal and the output the physiological reactions and feelings caused by this appraisal.50 With regard to perceptions, enactive theories have challenged the traditional picture, arguing that perception is not the passive reception of data but rather an active exploration of the environment, and that perceptual content should not be thought of as a snapshot generated out of retinal input and further cognitive processing but rather that it is an ongoing loop of sensorimotor processes that constitutes what we see. When we think about emotions, the trouble already starts on the phenomenological level: one might wonder whether emotions present a fact, such as that one is in danger, or whether they motivate for an action, such as to flee. It seems that emotions do both of these things at once. In this vein, I have suggested that being angry does not simply represent something as an offense or a restriction or as something to be fought, but as a restriction-to-be-fought. What we represent in emotions is a kind of content that is descriptive and motivating at the same time. While this is an observation mainly established from a phenomenological perspective, a look at psychophysiological studies 50 See, for example, Griffiths, Paul. What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

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can substantiate the suspicion that what is sensory input and what motor output is notoriously unclear with regard to emotional processing. Several studies suggest that emotional behavior (that is, bodily postures, facial and vocal expressions) commonly regarded as mere output can modulate emotions and sometimes even trigger them.51 To test the influence of facial feedback on emotions and emotional feelings, for example, participants were given non-emotional tasks to guide the production of facial expressions without cueing the emotional meaning of the expression. Participants then had to evaluate certain stimuli like cartoons with regard to the question of whether they are funny or not. Findings suggest that the intensity and quality of the participants’ manipulated facial expression affected the intensity of their selfreported emotional feelings as well as their autonomic responses. Facial expressions modulate emotions and sometimes even trigger them.52 Bodily postures seem to impact emotional experience in a similar way: in a study conducted by Stepper and Strack,53 the participants’ bodily posture was manipulated by asking them to adopt one of two conventional working positions, one of which induced an upright and the other a slumped posture. Participants then received positive feedback concerning their performance on an achievement task. Those who received success-feedback in the slumped posture felt less proud and reported being in a worse mood than participants in the upright position.54 Furthermore, an emotion-specific tone of voice has been found to amplify emotional experience as well.55 Taken together, these studies suggest a picture of expressive behaviors facilitating, modulating, and producing corresponding emotional reactions and feelings. This suggests that in emotional processing input and output processing pathways are not clearly separated. Rather, emotional processing seems to work in feedback loops: the agent produces output that affects its input in a systematic way. It not only

51 Niedenthal, Paula M., et al. “Embodiment in Attitudes, Social Perception, and Emotion.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 9.3 (2005): 184–211. See also Krueger, “Emotions and Other Minds,” in this volume. 52 Stepper, Sabine, and Fritz Strack. “Proprioceptive Determinants of Emotional and Nonemotional Feelings.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 64.2 (1993): 211–220; Adelmann, Pamela, and Robert Zajonc. “Facial Efference and the Experience of Emotion.” Annual Review of Psychology 40 (1989): 249–280; Laird, James. Feelings: The Perception of Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 53 Stepper and Strack, “Proprioceptive Determinants.” 54 For similar results, see Duclos, Sandra E., et al. “Emotion-Specific Effects of Facial Expressions and Postures on Emotional Experience.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 57.1 (1989): 100–108. 55 Hatfield, Elaine. “The Impact of Vocal Feedback on Emotional Experience and Expression.” Journal of Social Behavior and Personality 10.2 (1995): 293–312.

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receives stimuli from the world but also is a source of stimulation to itself. Getting angry in a certain situation might not depend on the input received from the external world alone. The agent’s entire situation, including bodily posture and current facial expression, plays a role as well. The traditional claim that emotional processing starts with a cognitive evaluation or a neural appraisal (for instance, in the amygdala) and triggers bodily arousal which is then felt ignores the multiple feedback sources in an emotional process. How can this observation be brought together with the claim that emotions are embodied reactions to a structured environment? The finding is actually more of a missing link than a challenge to what I have been suggesting so far. I have described emotions as bodily reactions to a structured environment, where the interaction between body and world is meant to substitute for an inner appraisal process such as the one developed by Lazarus. We can now replace Lazarus’s inner decision tree model by an interplay between what the world affords to the agent and the agent’s skillful embodied reactions: Consider the example of anger again. Anger, I suggested, detects restrictions, or rather restrictions-to-be-fought. This description of the content already contains a bodily and a worldly component: The restriction is an element of the world and the motivation to fight it is a skillful bodily reaction. My claim is that anger, just like any other type of emotion, is constituted through an ongoing loop where we might perceive something as a restriction and prepare to fight it – but being in a tensed posture, on the other hand, might also facilitate seeing something as a restriction. This claim can be developed by understanding emotions as representing affordances in a Gibsonian sense, although Gibson only applied the term to perceptions.56 For Gibson, perception always involves proprioception and thereby has a kind of content that is fundamentally observer-relative, although the kind of external information that is picked up through perception is taken to be real.57 Such a description is a good starting point for further exploring the sensorimotor abilities and the motivating potential involved in emotions: The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, but the noun

56 Furthermore, Gibson avoided the notion of “representation” entirely, since it evokes the picture of an internal image of the world. I think that it suffices to redefine the notion as a kind of action-oriented representation that is realized in the interplay of the skillful agent and the structured environment. I cannot develop this view in detail here; for further discussion, see Hufendiek, Enactive Emotions. 57 In Gibson’s own words: “Egoreception accompanies exteroception, like the other side of a coin.” (Gibson, James. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. New York: Psychology Press, 1986. 126.)

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affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment.58

Affordances are properties of the environment that have to be seen relative to the animal: for certain animals, certain fruits look eat-able, for persons of a certain size and shape, certain objects look sit-upon-able, others stand-uponable, and so on. An affordance is an objective external feature of the environment, yet it only exists with its specific value for a certain animal. A certain mushroom might be poisonous for one animal and nutritious for another. A lion might be a possible mate for a lioness but a predator for a zebra, and so on. As Lazarus already remarked, emotions are always concerned with the relations between the individual and the environment; they have a relational meaning as well. Yet Lazarus further argued that the individual can only grasp these relations through a complex process of cognitive evaluation, while in Gibson’s view affordances themselves have a value for the organism and that this value can be directly perceived: The perceiving of an affordance is not a process of perceiving a value-free physical object to which meaning is somehow added in a way that no one has been able to agree upon; it is a process of perceiving a value-rich ecological object. Any substance, any surface, any layout has some affordance for benefit or injury to someone. Physics may be valuefree, but ecology is not.59

The perception of the environment is therefore always laden with the representation of values concerning the organism’s well-being. With regard to emotions, this claim has to be extended such that emotions can also represent social rules and norms through reoccurring forms of behavior, facial expressions, and so on. I have suggested that this is the case since emotions are embedded into a well-structured social niche. Yet it does not explain in what sense emotions are directly motivating and why we only react to some instances of core relational themes and not to others. This is what the notion of affordance can add to the story. Relational properties exist independently of whether a single agent actually perceives them, and also independently of the whole species in question being able to detect them at all. While the former is true for affordances as well, the latter is not. Affordances cannot be specified independently of the abilities of the agent to detect and react to a feature. While something can be a restriction for an agent even if the agent is not able to detect this property, something can 58 Gibson, The Ecological Approach, 127. 59 Gibson, The Ecological Approach, 140.

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only be a-restriction-to-be-fought if the organism has the ability to detect and react to the affordance. Affordances belong to animal-environment systems, including the abilities of the organism to detect and interact with the environment. The notion of affordance therefore makes it possible to see emotions as skillful reactions to things that matter in our social environment, such as restrictions or rule-violations. *** Affordances allow for an enactive account of emotions, externalized social norms allow for an embedded account of emotions, and embodied reactions constitute the skillful knowledge through which we grasp the social rules and norms that form emotional content. Taken together, this leaves us with a picture of emotional reactions that do not exist in the head alone but are rather constituted by the structured environment and the skillful embodied agent. This picture seems to give a substantially more adequate description of the phenomenon than the behaviorist picture that radically externalizes emotions and the cognitive picture that takes emotions to be cognitively demanding judgments inside the head. That emotions fundamentally involve the body does not mean that they are meaningless. That emotions are complex does not mean that they are “in the head” alone. Their complexity unfolds between brain, body, and world.

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Notes on Contributors Claudia Brodsky is Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, where she teaches and writes on German, French, and English literature and philosophy from the seventeenth to twentieth century. She is the author of several books and articles focusing on Kant, Hegel, Goethe, Lessing, Hölderlin, Racine, Diderot, Balzac, Proust, Austen, and Wordsworth, among others, and a contributor to the volume of contemporary social criticism she co-edited with Toni Morrison. She is a recipient of DAAD and Humboldt Fellowships and has served as invited International Fellow at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris, and Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies. Rüdiger Campe is Professor and Chair of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. He received the Aby Warburg Research Award in 2002 and the Humboldt Research Award in 2011. His areas of research include the history of knowledge of literature since the early modern era, the history of rhetoric and aesthetics of the eighteenth century, and baroque theater. He has published extensively on techniques of writing, the theory of the novel, and authors such as Heinrich von Kleist, Georg Büchner, and Franz Kafka. Daniel Cuonz holds a Ph.D. in Modern German Literature. He teaches at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of St. Gallen and has been a visiting fellow at Yale University in 2008–2010. His research interests include eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetics, the literature of the Age of Goethe, the relations between literature and religion as well as between literature and economy, and narratology. David Freedberg is Pierre Matisse Professor of the History of Art and Director of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at the Columbia University. He is best known for his work on psychological responses to art and particularly for his studies on iconoclasm and censorship. His current research concentrates on the relations between art and cognitive neuroscience; other areas include Dutch, Flemish, French, and Italian painting of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the history of science. Bernhard Greiner is Professor Emeritus for German Literature at the University of Tübingen. He has been a guest professor at various universities in the U.S., Australia, China, and Israel (Walter Benjamin Professor at the Hebrew University, 2000–2002). His publications and research focus on comedy, tragedy, and theater, German Classical and Romantic literature, on law and literature, and German-Jewish literature.

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Rebekka Hufendiek is a lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Basel. She obtained her Ph.D. at the Humboldt University of Berlin with a thesis on “Enactive Emotions. An Embodied Functionalist Approach” (2012). Her research interests include the philosophy of the mind and cognitive science, especially embodied and situated cognition, naturalist theories of the mind, and theories of emotion. Hermann Kappelhoff is Professor of Film Studies and Director and Principal Investigator of the Cluster of Excellence “Languages of Emotion” at the Free University of Berlin. He has been a Max Kade Visiting Professor at the Vanderbilt University in 2009–2010. His research explores cinema and politics, media theories of emotion, and the history, theory, and analysis of audiovisual images. Joel Krueger is a lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Exeter. He has been a research fellow at the Department of Philosophy at Durham University and at the Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen. He works on various issues in phenomenology, the philosophy of mind, and cognitive science, with a particular focus on empathy and social cognition. Niklaus Largier is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard University in 2006 and a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin in 2010– 2011. He is in particular known for his work on mysticism and Meister Eckhart as well as the spiritual practices of flagellation. Currently, he is working on a book on imagination, practices of figuration, aesthetic experience, and notions of possibility. He has written and co-edited essays and books on medieval philosophy and literature. Rainer Nägele is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Yale University. Previously, he has been Professor of German at the John Hopkins University. His areas of research encompass literary theory, aesthetics, philosophy, and psychoanalysis and he has published numerous books and articles on authors such as Friedrich Hölderlin, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Franz Kafka or Heiner Müller. Catherine Newmark was a lecturer at the Department of Philosophy at the Free University of Berlin from 2007–2013 and currently works as a journalist for the German National Radio (Deutschlandradio Kultur). Her research interests include the history of philosophy (with emphasis on antiquity and the seventeenth century), psychology and psychoanalysis, political philosophy, feminist theory, and ethics. Her dissertation examined philosophical theories of the emotions from Aristotle to Kant.

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Beate Söntgen is Professor and Chair of Art History as well as Vice President for Research and Humanities at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg. She has been a fellow at the research group “BildEvidenz” at the Free University of Berlin in 2013. She works on art from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, especially on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French and German painting, the cultural history and theories of the image, aesthetics of reception, and the history and theory of perception, affects, and the Intérieur. Bernhard Waldenfels is a German philosopher and Professor Emeritus at the Ruhr University of Bochum. He has held several guest professorships, in Paris, New York, Rome, Prague, and Vienna, amongst others, and has received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Freiburg and Rostock in 2012. He is known for his work on the phenomenological tradition in modern philosophy and has published numerous books on phenomenological issues, such as otherness, dialog theory, order, and normativity. Julia Weber is leader of the research group “Building Imagination: Literature and Architecture in Modernity” at the Peter Szondi-Institute of Comparative Literature at the Free University of Berlin. In her dissertation (2008) she analyzed aesthetic forms of multiple subjectivity in Pessoa, Beckett, and Mayröcker. She has been a Feodor Lynen Humboldt Fellow at Yale University in 2008–2010. Currently, she is working on a book project that focuses on the representation of emotion, spatiality, and architecture across different time periods. Brigitte Weingart is Professor of Media Studies at Cologne University. She taught German Literature and Media/Film at Bonn University in 2004–2010, where she held a research fellowship in 2011–2012. In 2007–2009, she was a Feodor Lynen Humboldt Fellow at the Columbia University of New York. Her dissertation dealt with representations of AIDS in literature, film, and medicine. Currently, she is finishing a book length study on the genealogy, media aesthetics, and poetics of fascination from antiquity to the present.