How Emotions Penetrate the ‘Soul’, Essay Example

It is near-impossible to discuss the manner in which emotions enter the ‘soul’ without a definition of what the soul is.  As a social construct, the soul is something that humans use to define themselves as thinking and feeling entities.  Indeed, our ability to define the soul–and to question its very existence–marks us as ensouled creatures.  As Dr. Marsden writes in the introduction to Unit Five, “the mind is the spiritual aspect of our being, the true mark of humanity that distinguishes us from animals” (2011).  The mind and the soul are intricately connected, and attempts to understand this relationship permeate all aspects of academic thought, including philosophy, religion, literature, and psychology.  For the purposes of this essay, however, it is most useful to consider the soul as a component of all individuals that contains “the heart, the thoughts, the will, the inclinations” (Foucault, 1995, p.17)–indeed, everything that makes us unique people separate from animals and each other.   According to Dr. Marsden, in discussing the human soul Foucault is referring to “what others might call psyche, subjectivity, personality, or consciousness.  A more scientific perspective might call it the limbic system, the neural spectral, or the emotional makeup of a person” (2011).  In effect, the soul is inseparable from our sense of self, the emotions that we experience, and the bodies that we inhabit.  The connection between our emotions and our physical responses to these emotions is not dissimilar from the relationship between our internal bodily environment and our external social world, both pairings presuppose our ability to understand and evaluate our experiences, giving them greater depth and meaning.

In The Subtlety of Emotions (2001), Aaron Ben-Ze’ev writes that “an emotion involves an ongoing activity in which we are constantly evaluating new information and acting accordingly” (p. 5).  Although he is referencing our conscious ability to consider our emotions in relation to our experiences, the evaluative component of emotions also takes place on a deeply physical, and often unconscious level.  Thus, the connection between our mind and our soul takes place, in part, in our brains.  As Thomas Lewis and his coauthors point out in A General Theory of Love, more than a basic brain is required to experience emotions and define our humanity, for “a reptilian brain can plug away for years, despite the death of what makes a brain human” (p. 23).  These components of humanness do not belong to the realm of the reptilian brain, which is concerned with only the basic factors of survival.  Instead, the “seat of emotions” (Marsden, 2011), or of the ‘soul’, is found in the limbic brain, which acts as a “social sense organ” (Lewis, et al., 2000, p. 53) in order to “monitor the external world and the internal bodily environment, and to orchestrate their congruence” (p. 53).  This allows for human beings to experience a wide range of emotions that are highly dependent on context and circumstance while also relying on physical parameters such as body temperature, heart rate, and other gut feelings–or “somatic markers” (Damasio, 2006, p.  165) in neurologist Antonio Damasio’s parlance–that would be impossible without the mediation and input of the limbic brain.

Damasio (2006) argues, in part, that our emotions and feelings “provide the bridge between rational and nonrational processes, between cortical and subcortical structures” (p. 128).  The connection that he draws between these two distinct facets of human experience illustrates the crucial role played by the brain in our ability to reason and feel.  As he writes in Descartes’ Error, “emotions and feelings may not be intruders in the bastion of reason at all” (2006, p. xii).  Instead, the interconnectedness of reason and emotion has allowed for the development of what may be our most uniquely human element–the ‘soul’.  Because “the strategies of human reason probably did not develop, in either evolution or any single individual, without the guiding force of the mechanisms of biological regulation, of which emotion and feeling are notable expressions” (Damasio, 2006, p. xii), it is impossible to understand emotions in a context entirely divorced from our physical body.  To do so would be to eliminate the physical senses that make up much of what we know as emotion and feelings.  As Lowen states, “it is through the body that we experience the world and by the body that we act on the world” (as cited in Marsden, 2011).

Our emotions play an important part in our survival, both as individuals and as a species, possessing the physiological capacity to spur on the fight-or-flight response in times of danger, halt the growth of virus-ridden cells, and improve the immune system (Ben-Ze’ev, 2001).  As well, our ability to express nurturing emotions such as pride, love, and compassion are not solely the territory of humans, given that all “mammals form close-knit, mutually nurturant social groups–families–in which members spend time touching and caring for one another.  Parents nourish and safeguard their young, and each other, from the hostile world outside the group” (Lewis, et al., 2001, p. 25).  Given that animals do not experience the world in the same manner as humans, though they may form social groups, this suggests that the emotions we feel and the manner in which we express them are not inherently socially or culturally driven, but are part of a multifaceted system in which biological factors work in conjunction with our social selves to ensure that we survive and thrive[1].

According to Dr. Marsden, our historical understanding of emotions has been hindered by the “spiritualizing of the person” (2011), an intellectual and philosophical approach that has allowed for the body to become overlooked or minimized.  This stems from the academic inclination to treat rationality and reason as separate from feeling and emotion, so as to demonstrate humans’ ability to “control [our] animal inclinations” (Marsden, 2011), base elements that have been seen to detract from our intellectual abilities and capacity to engage in moral judgement (Damasio, 2006).  The Judeo-Christian approach to sinfulness, suffering, and morality has also led to this “missing body” (Marsden, 2011) by denying our ability to recognize the power of our own emotions and physical feelings to both determine our actions and explain our motivations.

The brain is neither stagnant nor static.  Instead, it is modified, shaped, and molded by our internal and external experiences (Damasio, 2006).  This interface between social and biological phenomena demonstrates the pliability of the human mind and the manner in which social and cultural events and experiences play a pivotal role in determining the sense of self that can otherwise be understood as our ‘soul’.  As Damasio writes, as we develop from infancy to adulthood, the design of brain circuitries that represent our evolving body and its interaction with the world seems to depend on the activities in which the organism engages, and on the action of innate bioregulatory circuitries, as the latter react to such activities. (2006, p. 111).

This illustrates the need to approach our understanding of the human brain and the emotions experienced by every individual in a variety of ways.  It is not enough to look at “brain, behavior, and mind in terms of nature versus nurture, or genes versus experience” (Damasio, 2006, p. 111).  Instead we must take into account the complicated manner in which emotions interact with our physical selves, which also are impacted by the rules and expectation of our particular society or culture, in order to understand how emotions enter the ‘soul’, or self.

Antonio Damasio organizes his discussion of emotions into two categories:  primary and secondary emotions.  The categories are innately connected to our physical and emotional development, with primary emotions being those associated with childhood and the “Jamesian ‘preorganized mechanism'” (Damasio, 2006, p. 131) and secondary emotions  used as a term to describe the adult experience of emotions, “whose scaffolding has been built gradually on the foundation of those ‘early’ emotions” (Damasio, 2006, p. 131).  Thus, the very framework Damasio uses to explore emotions demonstrates the manner in which emotions are shaped by experience as a child who has not yet encountered complex emotions and feelings cannot yet access their secondary emotions.  Marsden writes that “we learn to associate goodness with pleasure and badness with pain. The mechanism facilitating moral education lies in the plasticity of the brain; this allows social and biological realities to interact and, indeed, fuse” (2011).  This, indeed, can result in an over-complication of the senses wherein our intellectual understanding of experiences can interfere with our ability to feel the emotional component of the moment and properly ‘see’ the details of the event itself.

In the Unit Five Study Guide, Marsden (2011) discusses the unreliability of eye witnesses, whose recounting of the event is impacted by the individual’s own personal perceptions and desire to build a reconstructive narrative.  Thus, children are superior witnesses to adults because their limited experience of the world allows them to focus on ‘the moment’ in question with a minimum of sensory and intellectual distractions.  This holds true, too, with an animal’s response to events that pose an immediate threat to their well-being.  As Marsden writes, “animals alone, these days, have the gift of unreflective spontaneity” (2011, emphasis mine).  The implication in Marsden’s use of the dependent clause “these days” (2011) suggests that modern men and women are no longer able to experience emotions and feelings without engaging in the act of excessive intellectualization.  This may pose a problem as it can curtail our ability to remain receptive to the penetration of the emotions which are necessary for our very humanity.  The existentialist writer Frederik Nietzsche pinpoints the ennui of modern society in his assessment that “all of our senses have become somewhat dulled because they immediately enquire for the reason, that is, for what ‘it means’, and no longer for what ‘it is'” (as cited in Marsden, 2011).

It has become common in the pop psychology of the Twenty-first Century to encourage individuals to seek out their inner-child in order to live a more authentic life that values simple pleasures over high thought and material goods.  Arlie Russell Hochschild (2003) suggests that our response to the commodification of emotions and emotional exchanges has been “to place an unprecedented value on spontaneous, ‘natural’ feeling” (p. 190).  This includes tapping into that reserve of childishness that all of us retain, however deeply buried those memories and primary emotions may be.  This is not to suggest that the “unmanaged feelings” (Hochschild, 2006, p. 193) of childhood are not helpful in allowing the adult to gain greater access to his or her emotions and soul.  However, the popularity of re-experiencing our childhood experiences of spontaneity, imagination, and artlessness has become as commercialized as every other social and commercial experience that represents a potential money-making enterprise.  This is seen in the proliferation of self-help books, Oprah Winfrey-style talk shows, and other media-driven trends that ostensibly seek to connect disconnected individuals with a slower-paced, less-artificial way of life while it may in fact be just another way in to commercialize our emotional lives by selling us things that we already possess (Hochschild, 2006).  The solution may be to acknowledge that our physical body and mind seem to know what our spirit (or ‘soul’) needs.  As Marsden writes in his analysis of Nietzsche and the human senses, “what truly ‘knows’ is not the mind, it is one’s multiple sensory powers.  However, we trust in concepts and mistrust our senses” (2011).

Indeed, a connection can be drawn between Hochschild’s evaluation of emotional labor and the commodification of human experience and Nietzsche’s discussion of guilt and economic debt wherein he addresses the “primitive” (as cited in Marsden, 2011) relationship between creditor and debtor as one where “for the first time person stepped up against person, here for the first time a person measured himself by another person” (as cited in Marsden, 2011).  The comparative aspect of this relationship mimics the disconnected nature of modern relationships in which things replace feelings and “our emotions are created by comparing, measuring, and calculating our relative position” (Marsden, 2011).  One reason why we may have allowed ourselves to become so distracted by the frivolities and accoutrements of modern North American life is because to focus on unimportant things allows us to block out the pain of thinking about what really matters–that the world is an often cruel place in which the suffering and successes of the individual means little, if anything, to those around him.

Lynne Arnault writes that “how we respond to the suffering of others, especially suffering as serious as that of shattered selves, is significant in terms of the moral content of our character and of our communities” (2003).  Perhaps this statement holds a clue as to how we can allow (or prevent) emotions from penetrating our ‘souls’.  For those of us who wish to remain oblivious, there is a never ending stream of unreal reality television and shopping malls full of unnecessary items available for purchase to fill our souls with a false sense of self that blocks out all manner of reality.  However, “widespread cruelty is a sad fact of life” (Arnault, 2003), and our attempts to avoid or ignore such cruelties, while understandable, represent a turning away from that which makes us human.  There is very little that we can do to constrain the biological and physiological aspects of our humanity.  We cannot stop our brains from adapting to new circumstance and experience.  Neither can we prevent our bodies from responding physically to external stimuli.  And, while we may indeed be able to block out the worst that the world has to offer by immersing ourselves in the artificial world of commercialized feeling, we would be doing ourselves a great disservice, for only by encountering pain can we truly appreciate, and embrace, the pleasures the world has to offer.

References

Arnault, L.S. (2003). Cruelty, horror, and the will to redemption. Hypatia, 18 (2): 155-188. doi: 10.1353/hyp.2003.0023.

Ben-Ze’ev, A. (2001). The subtlety of emotions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Damasio, A.R. (2006). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York, NY: Vintage.

Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York, NY: Vintage.

Hochschild, A.R. (2003). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Lewis, T., Amini, F. & Lannon, R. (2001). A general theory of love. New York, NY: Vintage.

Marsden, R. (2011)  Unit 5:  Emotions, Bodies, Societies.  The Business of Emotions Study Guide.

Moussaieff Mason, J. (1996). When elephants weep: The emotional lives of animals. Surrey, UK: Delta.

Von Scheve, C. & von Luede, R. (2005). Emotion and social structures: Towards an interdisciplinary approach. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 35 (3). Retrieved from http://www.informatik.unihamburg.de/TGI/forschung/projekte/emotion/Scheve_Luede_ EmotionSocialStructures.pdf

[1] It is perhaps worth speculating whether humans are are the only creatures able to possess ‘souls’, given that emotions and feelings are one way in which we define the human soul.  Some animals have been documented to have emotional lives of their own, as discussed in Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (1996).