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The Aesthetic Dimension of Passion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 August 2019
Abstract
This paper is stimulated by and indebted to a study by Charles Altieri of the ways in which affect is present and articulated in art and literature, which, he argues, hold significance for the philosophy of emotion. I focus on Altieri's thesis that affective states may have aesthetic qualities and value. I pursue this notion first with reference to Nietzsche's attempt to recruit affect as a means of countering Schopenhauer's pessimism. I then attempt to show the coherence of the (on the face of it problematic) notion that passion may exhibit an aesthetic dimension, drawing on Richard Wollheim's account of certain ideas in psychoanalytic theory, for which I suggest precedents in the history of philosophy.
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- Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 85: Passions and the Emotions , July 2019 , pp. 111 - 133
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2019
References
1 I employ throughout the familiar distinction of ‘passions’ or ‘emotions’ (terms used interchangeably) from ‘episodes of feeling’. When full generality is required I talk or ‘affect’ or ‘affective state’. What needs to be said regarding the other key term, viz., ‘aesthetic’, will emerge in due course.
2 Altieri's first chapter is titled accordingly: ‘The Arts as a Challenge to Dominant Philosophical Theories of the Affects’.
3 Henri Bergson makes a closely similar claim – that our affective taxonomies are crude, because they are guided by extraneous social and practical concerns, congealed in our common language – in Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (trans.) Pogson, F. L. (London: Allen & Unwin, 1913), 128–133Google Scholar.
4 Altieri's further motive has to do with critical practice: he favours a type of criticism at odds with prevailing tendencies in literary and art theory, which at best fail to register the presence of affect and at worst blind us to what matters in artworks.
5 Since in this paper I make claims about emotion in general, it is is appropriate to say something about method in this area. One approach, prominent in early analytic discussion, is to begin by attempting to divide up the field of affect conceptually. Another is to start with a substantive thesis or specific theoretical proposal, invited by some particular form or aspect of emotion, leaving it to be seen how much territory has been either covered or left unaccounted for. There are reasons, some of which will emerge, for doubting that beginning with a conceptual taxonomy can avoid begging substantive questions, as there are also for thinking that the criteria for individuating affects are inherently fluid. A glance at Parts III and IV of Spinoza's Ethics confirms the heterogeneity of what may be subsumed under the heading of affect, and in Part III (Proposition 56, Proof) Spinoza asserts that ‘there are necessarily as many kinds of pleasure, pain, love, hatred, etc. as there are kinds of objects by which we are affected’ (Complete Works (trans.) Shirley, S., (ed.) Morgan, M. L. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), 308Google Scholar). As Richard Wollheim puts it, the life of the emotions has a ‘chaotic, overgrown, vegetal character’ (On the Emotions (New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press, 1999), 117Google Scholar). One fundamental point concerns the extraordinary peculiarity of affect as a mental kind, given that its forms can vary so greatly as to embrace things as hugely different as, say, Othello's jealousy on the one hand and, on the other, the barely perceptible feelings of satisfaction that inflect the sight of a tidy desk or the hearing of cadence. It is hard to know how one might broach directly the question of what makes it possible for one mental kind – assuming there to be such – to be so protean. William James recognizes explicitly the way in which feeling functions as, at a stroke, the matter, substance, medium, framework, colouring, and glue of mental life, in The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I (London: Macmillan, 1890), chs 6–9Google Scholar.
6 Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture, 20–21.
7 Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture, 21.
8 Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture, 22.
9 Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture, 25.
10 Writings from the Late Notebooks (ed.) Bittner, R., (trans.) Sturge, K. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), no. 9[102], 159–160Google Scholar (‘Aesthetica’).
11 See ‘The Dionysiac World View’, in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings (trans.) Speirs, R., (eds) Geuss, R. and Speirs, R. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 131Google Scholar, regarding Aeschylus’ unification of happiness with divinity and justice, and 132 regarding the ‘peace of happiness in misfortune’ in Sophocles. And BT §17: in Dionysiac ecstasy, ‘this delight is indestructible and eternal. Despite fear and pity, we are happily alive [Trotz Furcht und Mitleid sind wir die glücklich-Lebendigen], not as individuals, but as the one living being, with whose procreative lust we have become one’ (The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings (trans.) Speirs, R., (eds) Geuss, R. and Speirs, R. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 81Google Scholar). Thereafter in BT (§18, 86) – as in his mature writings – the concept of happiness is associated derogatorily with Socratic optimism.
12 Belief or at any rate ideation does enter on Nietzsche's account – Aeschylus and Sophocles each had a moral metaphysics, and the Greeks conceived themselves as viewed from Olympus – but as a precipitant and vehicle for the realization of an existential strategy without any doxastic foundation.
13 Schopenhauer, A., The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I, (trans. and eds) Norman, J., Welchman, A. and Janaway, C. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), Bk. 1, §16, 111–112Google Scholar.
14 The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I, Bk. 2, §17, 119, 123.
15 See BT, §1, 15–16, and The Gay Science (ed.) Williams, B., (trans.) Nauckhoff, J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), §59, 70Google Scholar.
16 That the state of mind is irrational is, of course, beside the point. We are seeking a solution to the problem posed by an irrational situation; no solution that was not irrational could be life-affirmative.
17 BT, §7, 40. See also Ecce Homo, ‘Why I am So Clever’, §4, and Nietzsche Contra Wagner, ‘The Psychologist’, §3, in The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols: And Other Writings (eds) Ridley, A. and Norman, J., (trans.) Norman, J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 91 and 279–280Google Scholar. Some remarks, however, characterize Hamlet as a mere modern: see Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 25 vols., (eds) Colli, G. and Montinari, M. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1967–2006), III–3.293, V-2.516, VII–1.625, and VII–2.153Google Scholar.
18 Coleridge, S. T., Complete Works, Vol. IV, Lectures upon Shakespeare and Other Dramatists (New York: Harper, 1858), 154Google Scholar. It is of note (and speaks in Nietzsche's favour) that Coleridge strains to integrate Hamlet's intellectuality with his ‘overbalance of the imaginative power’, that is, to explain why Hamlet's ‘meditations on the workings of our minds’ – his interest in ‘mental philosophy’ – should produce a lack of ‘equilibrium between the real and the imaginary worlds’ (136–137).
19 See Stern, T., ‘Schopenhauer's Shakespeare: The Genius on the World Stage’, in Shakespeare and Continental Philosophy (eds) Bates, J. and Wilson, R. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 56–75Google Scholar. Nietzsche is, one might say, stealing Hamlet from Schopenhauer, turning against Schopenhauer what he held up as conclusive proof.
20 Hesitation is due in claiming that what follows tracks Nietzsche's thought, but some supporting evidence can be found in the references to Hamlet given above and in a passage on Macbeth which I come to below.
21 From ‘Lapis Lazuli’, in Last Poems.
22 Nietzsche, Daybreak, §240 (eds) Clark, M. and Leiter, B., (trans.) Hollingdale, R. J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 140–141Google Scholar.
23 I owe these observations concerning Phèdre to Anthony O'Hear.
24 See Irvin, S., ‘Scratching an Itch’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66 (2008), 25–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
25 The point is well made by Findlay, J. N. in ‘The Perspicuous and the Poignant: Two Aesthetic Fundamentals’, The British Journal of Aesthetics 7 (1967), 14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
26 Though an attempt at elucidation is certainly made: see Collingwood, R. G., The Principles of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 229–233, 238–239, 274–275, 281–283Google Scholar. The problem lies in Collingwood's concentration on the idea that it is only by means of their artistic expression that the emotions which constitute artworks can be known, as if this cognition sufficed to account for artistic value, without elucidating the ‘knowledge’ in question.
27 What follows resumes and extends my argument in ‘The Nature and Source of Emotion’, in Art, Mind and Psychoanalysis: Essays in Honour of Richard Wollheim (eds) Hopkins, J. and Savile, A. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 35–54Google Scholar.
28 Wollheim, R., ‘The Mind and the Mind's Image of Itself’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 50 (1969), 209–220Google Scholar; repr. Wollheim, R., On Art and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 31–53Google Scholar.
29 See Wollheim, R., ‘The Bodily Ego’, in Wollheim, R. and Hopkins, J. (eds), Philosophical Essays on Freud (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 124–135CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
30 Wollheim, ‘The Mind and the Mind's Image of Itself’, 219 (On Art and the Mind, 53).
31 What follows coheres with much of the extended account that Wollheim gives in On the Emotions. Two differences worth pointing out are that Wollheim puts weight on the notion of an ‘attitude’ or ‘orientation’, distinguished by its aetiology, whereas I instead talk of ‘content’; and that Wollheim makes it a necessary condition of emotion that it should originate in an experience of frustration or satisfaction of a desire, whereas I leave it open that emotion might be an original mental formation that is independent from and may even antedate desire.
32 Even where no movement-inducing object can be located, still we regularly conceive a passionate subject as in some way ‘off centre’ or displaced. We say: He didn't mean it, he was emotional: he was not himself. (‘If Hamlet from himself be ta'en away, … Then Hamlet does it not.’)
33 We ‘participate’ the very moment we identify the emotion as being of a certain kind: to recognize it as such and such is to self-ascribe the relevant thoughts.
34 Nussbaum, M., Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)Google Scholar, leans strongly in this direction, claiming that emotions are above all appraisals of value which comprise an essential part of human intelligence.
35 The connection is emphasized by Wollheim throughout his On the Emotions, and is also highlighted in well-known, R. Moran's ‘The Expression of Feeling in Imagination’, Philosophical Review 103 (1994), 75–106Google Scholar.
36 See for example Redding, P., The Logic of Affect (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.
37 As I hope to have intimated: to recognize this fact, and even to accord it value, is not to endorse the thesis of an actual alternative rationality.
38 Ethics, Part III, Proposition 56, Proof, 307.
39 Part III, Proposition 35, Scholium, 295–296.
40 Bergson, Time and Free Will, 132–133. The way I have cited Bergson is intended to show how he supposes emotion to exemplify an interpenetrative, qualitative, non-numerical multiplicity, reaching down to ‘the deeper strata of the self’ (136), but that edits out his repudiation of all quasi-spatial analysis of mental content. In so far as Bergson holds that the organic unity of emotion subsists exclusively in the dimension of ‘duration’, he must reject the psychoanalytic-Spinozistic model I describe. (That said, it is worth noting Bergson's concession that a novelist might employ pseudo-spatial juxtaposition of the constituents of emotion indirectly, in order to bring ‘us back into our own presence’, 134.)
41 There are a great many others. I have said, for instance, nothing about what special conditions are required, what specific types of passion might especially lend themselves to aesthetic exploitation, nor about the different ways in which its aesthetic aspect may be taken up. They are among the questions with which Altieri's book grapples and, it is plausible to suggest, issues with which many major novelists – inclusive of Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, and Proust – are self-consciously concerned.
42 For good measure, there is a third possibility, which is simply that there is value in our being so constituted as to be capable of having such states.
43 Though in fact formal properties of intensity and distance are also invoked by Altieri.
44 In this connection, see Wollheim, R., The Thread of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), chs 8–9Google Scholar, regarding the primitiveness of self-concern. Also relevant is Wollheim's suggestion that one reason why death may be considered a misfortune is that it involves the extinction of phenomenology, for which our appetite is ‘insatiable’ (282; to be read in light of Wollheim's broad understanding of phenomenology, 239–240).
45 More exactly: that at least shows why Schopenhauer's case for life-denial cannot strictly take the form of a practical argument to that conclusion.
46 I am grateful to respondents in the audience at the Royal Institute of Philosophy, and at a conference on Ethics and Emotion in the Post-Kantian Tradition at the University of Southampton where an earlier version was presented, for questions and comments, and especially to Sarah Richmond and Anthony O'Hear for extremely helpful suggestions.