That Interesting State of Nature

Not so curiously (when I think about it) gloomy, coldish, and wet weather brings to my mind that interesting seventeenth, eighteenth century concept of “the State of Nature.” One doesn’t hear much about it these days—although one ought to; we may be headed back in that direction.

The thought tends to arise early in the morning when (in this house anyway), getting the morning paper takes a fair walk; I have to dress for it, and bundling up is even better. Sleet, remnants of snow lie (and often are just then falling) on the ground; wind that sometimes shatters my half-asleep balance with its gusts, and never mind its distant majestic roaring in the sky—together these phenomena make me think, for the two minutes I’m outside, that I am in the State of Nature; I do so even when the temperature is almost warm, 20° to 32° F, say. I’m in that state just long enough to realize that (thank the Lord) I’m not permanently there. Physical discomfort, to be sure, was not what Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Hume had in mind. These luminaries of the Enlightenment were using the lens of Reason, with variable application of actual observation, to illuminate how organized societies came about. But “state of nature” may also be understood my way, thus as exposure to it; and then I’m also reminded of the philosophical meaning of the phrase.

There was no TV back in the seventeenth century—and no endless choice between programs eager to show us how monkeys, penguins, elephants, and countless other species still live (if they are lucky), in the state of nature. Thus Hobbes could speak of man as an isolated creature at war with all other men, his life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and [thankfully during my short paper-walk] short.” Hobbes represents one pole of State of Nature—the negative; the cure for which was Leviathan, the mortal god. The other pole is represented by Rousseau; for him the State of Nature was a kind of mundane paradise; the State then becomes something oppressive by introducing, applying, and exploiting the dangerous concept of property. Hume’s stand on the subject is closest to mine; which makes sense: he is the youngest of those luminaries, born in 1711 (versus Hobbes born in 1588). Hume in effect dismisses the State of Nature as a fiction; but he grants it a minor status as a philosophical concept to think about.

Observation of Nature and its creatures—not least anthropological studies of remnants of primitive cultures—show that humans have never really lived in the State of Nature, at least as philosophically understood, whether negatively or positively. But all people who’ve ever lived have reacted to weather like we have had lately with my rather jaundiced view of it. Hence tents, huts, settlements. Hence interaction with helpful others. Hence the State—which is just a function of population density—always at least potentially present, its rudiments always visible.

Those rudiments of the State, of course, include cooperation, voluntary self-limitation, and obedience to rules held in common. Hobbes' solitary man could do anything he pleased; the stamp on his forehead said libertarian. But that way lies chaos—which we’ve never found in actuality except in times when the State begins to wither and, in the process, a return to a much more decentralized state of affairs is in process. Chaos observed? Yes. In Syria for instance. And in a milder variety here at home as well. The parts are separating, hence things seem chaotic; let’s hope that that situation is only temporarily. Let’s hope that the center will too hold.

That hopeful note because, this morning, the sun is bright; it’s lovely out there in Nature, especially when viewed though a window looking at the trees in the distance while listening to the crackling in the walls as the radiators are getting a nice supply of hot, hot water to keep this micro-Leviathan cozy.

The Culture of Emotion

We speak not strictly and philosophically, when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. [David Hume, Of the Passions]

This well-known passage by Hume (1711-1776) should be read in its full context to bring out its full bouquet. That context may be perused here, but I will try to give the highlights. As Hume understands emotions, they are basic and prior to reasoning. They are produced by the prospect of pain or pleasure; they are comprehensive intuitions of the totality of a situation in which reasoning is summoned only to illuminate causes and effects. “A passion is an original existence,” as he puts it, thus not a concept; it is akin to facts like feeling thirsty, sick, or being more than five feet high. Reasoning, by contrast, rests on concepts; these Hume considers as mere representations, “copies” of authentic reality—like (as we might say) photographs rather than flesh and blood. Let me sharpen this. Hume arranges reality in such a fashion that conscious reasoning becomes a secondary activity, subservient to raw reality. The last, the raw, he considers authentic. After a lengthy elaboration of this point, he concludes this passage by saying:

In short, a passion must be accompanied with some false judgment, in order to its being unreasonable; and even then, ’tis not the passion, properly speaking,which is unreasonable, but the judgment.

Welcome to Modernity. I discovered the quotations cited, and read the richer context in which they are embedded, in trying to understand what may be the roots of our modern “culture of emotion.” I have something of an aversion to the Enlightenment and have not studied its luminaries, least not Hobbes and Hume, but one is sometimes obliged to look. I came this way because, in another context, I was again reminded of pop culture’s favorite question, especially when it wishes to signal sensitivity. That question is “How do you feel about that.” Feeling is authentic. Thought and feeling are opposed. And the implication of the question, almost always, is that in some way the gruffy hero, doing his usual insensitive rampaging, is not “in touch with his feelings” and needs to be—gently—reminded.

As I encountered Hume’s views on passion, I thought: Well, well, well! Wouldn’t you know it! What philosophers scribble gradually soaks into the soil and becomes reflexive wisdom two, three hundred years later. Not surprisingly, the entry on “Emotion” I found in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, while it mentions Plato’s and Aristotle’s views (barely), relies entirely on figures from the Enlightenment—and their modern elaborators. Not a single prominent thinker of Christendom is so much as mentioned. These are the experiences which cause me to agree with writers like Pitirim Sorokin and, more generally, with the cyclic historians.

Not that, mind you, the modern analysis of emotion is “all wrong,” or anything like that. This is a vast and complex subject, almost permanently vexing because the body-soul duality is so effectively resistant to conceptual parsing. My point here is cultural. In spiritual (ideational) periods, the higher aspects of soul-function are stressed, in materialistic (sensate) times those closer to the physical and sensuous get the nod. If the two were absolute equals, this wouldn’t matter, but if a hierarchical order places one above the other, demoting the higher will have tangible consequences for social well-being.

But the most ironic and meaningful aspect of this modern tendency—this emphasis on emotions—is that in many, many cases the motive behind this invocation of emotions in popular art is nobler than its expression. It has become impossible to appeal to the spiritual ranges in humanity; the impulse to do so, however, is still present. Therefore a word like “feelings” is used to point at something that really transcends mere feelings. Conversely, in media commentary we also encounter frequently characterizations of events or performances as “spiritual” when, in actuality, they are just emotional. My sense of discomfort arises, I think, because I’d just as soon hear a spade called a spade.