A philosophical take on the self and its nature
Part I: The evidence from contemporary psychology and neurology
Contemporary psychology has a somewhat different perspective on the passions (emotions) than Stoicism of antiquity, focusing not so much on their origin through systems of belief, but through their phenomenology. Emphasis is also placed on their development as explained by biology and evolutionary psychology.
Part Iwill examine the findings of contemporary psychology on the nature of the self (as an agent) and the relationship of the self to its emotions and desires. These findings are as presented by William B. Irvine in his work On Desire (relevant pages being pp. 60–170).
Desires are the fundamental basis of emotion
In his very rudimentary sketch of desire, and so of emotion, Irvine classifies desires in four broad categories: as hedonicor non hedonic , and as terminalor instrumental.
Hedonicand nonhedonicare in reference to pleasure, meaning to say, whether or not the desire itself fulfills pleasure or alleviates pain (e.g. relieving anxiety).
Terminaland instrumentalrefer to means and ends, terminal meaning that the thing desired is wanted for its own sake (e.g. to eat to relieve hunger), as opposed to being wanted for the sake of something else, being instrumental(e.g., to purchase food so as to eat).
Fundamental to desires is that they are discovered, rather than known – meaning to say, they just “happen”, or are formed somewhere deep within us and simply come to our conscious attention (e.g. with hunger).
As Irvine claims, taking a note from David Hume, our desires are the result of our emotions, in that our emotions create terminal desires (things desired for themselves, hedonic in nature). Emotions, however, have difficulty with fulfilling these desires, in that they have difficulty devising means by which these ends will be achieved. Thus the intellect (which Hume calls “reason”), creates intermediate desires, so that these terminal desires might be fulfilled. These two aspects of the self work in tandem, and yet seem often to conflict; in times of conflict, emotions will often win, given their relentless and incessant nature.
The self in conflict and the question of agency
Neurological work on corpus callosotomies: Michael Gazzaniga and Joseph LeDoux
Conflict occurs in subjective experience due to the conflict of multiple desire-creating modules in the human brain. This has been illustrated, for instance, by neuroscientists Michael Gazzaniga and Joseph LeDoux in their research on corpus callosotomies.
The corpus callosum is a piece of tissue which connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain, allowing them to communicate with one another. These patients (those having undergone corpus callosotomies) underwent procedures in which this tissue was cute, thus severing the connection between the two hemispheres – the result being that the hemispheres continued to process information, and come to conclusions independent of one another. One particular experiment is worth noting in full.
Patients were seated in front of an apparatus with a monitor, on which words would appear. Words appearing on the left side of the monitor would be filtered (by the optic nerve) in through to the right hemisphere, and vice versa. In one instance, the word “laugh” appeared on the left side of the screen, thus filtering into the right hemisphere; the patient laughed, but when asked why,justified the laughter (with a false reason). The supposition here is that, the left hemisphere, where the speech is processed, could not communicate with the right hemisphere, thus remaining ignorant of what the right hemisphere had seen (i.e. the word “laugh”), and, in the absence of any feedback, came up with its own response to present stimuli (i.e. the patient’s laughter). Gazzaniga and LeDoux concluded, somewhat humorously, that “people don’t routinely know why they do what they do… the behavior… is caused by brain systems that operate without their conscious knowledge” (Irvine 97).
In addition to this, Gazzaniga and LeDoux argue that the main purpose of consciousness is to confabulate, to create a cohesive narrative of the various mechanisms of different brain systems. One then, becomes not an actor, but an observer of one’s own desires.
This conflict, which manifests as a painful mental and physical state, is the result of these discordant desires, generated, as aforementioned, by different parts of the brain. Gazzaniga and LeDoux, on the basis of their research, also posit a theory as to why this conflict arises.
There are, they state, different functional modules (desiring-generating systems) in the brain, some working under the domain of, and in conjunction with, the brain’s main verbal system (thus being “rational” desires), some working outside of this domain, and thus not in conjunction with it (thus being “irrational”). These other desires, outside of the control of the verbal system, only become apparent when they create desires found to be objectionable by the verbal system (e.g. having an affair).
This basic notion, that our desires are initially unknown to us, and are later justified when we become conscious of them, is corroborated by several other psychologists and philosophers, as presented by Irvine. The rational self, which seems to make decisions in a very cogitative and logical manner, then, is a sort of sham; decisions are made in the unconscious mind, and bubbling to the surface, are implemented or reinforced.
What this means for the Stoic account of agency, as well as the injunction to alter the contents of our emotions (e.g., anger, grief, sadness, etc.) will be discussed in the following parts.
Bibliography:
- Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
- William Irvine, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Works Cited:
- William Irvine, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).[pp. 60–170 are the relevant pages]