The Delusions of Certainty

by Siri Hustvedt

  Simone de Beauvoir’s description of the body as situation, although in line with other phenomenologists, is more nuanced because in The Second Sex she is acutely aware of the fact that despite the similarities human beings share as a species, there are differences among us. Each of us is a different situation. Some feminists have criticized Merleau-Ponty because the universal body he continually refers to is rather obviously male.325 In this, he is no different from most philosophers. The norm is still masculine, not feminine. I will always have a different perspective from you, if only because I am standing in a different spot and see what you cannot see. And my sex, race, class, age, my sexual desires and idiosyncratic habits, the language I speak, and my particular past experiences all affect my view of things. The world is seen from my perspective, but that view has not been shaped by me alone. It is dependent on and all mixed up with other people. It is not just subjective; it is intersubjective. No one invents herself. Everyone is a creature of learned habits that have become unconscious but that infect our modes of perceiving, acting, and thinking. And habit is a kind of bodily memory. Once established, it becomes automatic. Soft is womanly, not manly. It is Democratic, not Republican. It is of the humanities, not the sciences. But beyond these clichés, one might think of the ways women and men walk or cross their legs or throw a ball or sit on the subway. These movements and gestures are not purely the result of men’s and women’s different genitals and bodies; they are also conventions we learn and enact. They become parts of a person’s bodily movements, vary from place to place, and have political and cultural meanings, most deeply, in fact, when we take them for granted because in some important way they have become “natural.”

  I do not believe the “mind” is a jigsaw puzzle of rigid problem-solving mental modules independent of the brain and body. I don’t believe the “body” is a discrete machinery of operating parts that can be described without a relation to what lies beyond its skin, which includes objects, other people, culture, and language. Human beings are mammals with an evolutionary history, and we share much with those other creatures. I don’t believe people are wholly the result of social construction either, beings assembled by the languages of a culture, although they certainly shape us. Whether the mental exists at the level of particle physics I have no idea. What I do know is that subtle thinking requires embracing ambiguity, admitting gaps in knowledge, and posing questions that do not have ready answers.

  Empathy, Imagination, and Babies

  I have often wondered what it would be like to be someone else. Of course, if I were someone else, I would lose my own subjective view. I would have to keep both my view and the other person’s view at the same time to know how I am different from the other person. When I have a conversation with someone, especially someone I like, that person’s animated face and gestures both act as a reflection of my face and influence my own facial expressions and hand gestures. Without thinking, I find myself attuned to my friend’s eyes and mouth and to her voice and its inflections, as well as to the meanings of the words that fly between us. I know I am not my friend, but I lose all sense of me from the outside. I don’t watch myself talk or gesture unless the flowing conversation is interrupted—if she tells me I have a bit of tuna lodged in my teeth, for example—and I am suddenly forced to a mirror to remove the offending fragment of fish. Reading is as close as we get to being two conscious people at once. We borrow another person’s consciousness during the time of reading, but we can also pause, think, and wonder about that alien consciousness, its voice, its opinions, and its stories. We can ask ourselves whether we believe that person’s thoughts, admire them, or feel sad when we are living inside them. Reading is an ordinary form of human plurality.

  As a novelist, I spend a lot of time imagining that I am other people. I have written from the points of view of women and men with different personalities and backgrounds and troubles and sympathies. Once I hear and feel the imaginary person, even if he or she is unlike me, I can write the character. I do not calculate my way into these people. I do not make lists of their qualities and decide consciously how someone will speak. They take up residence inside me and begin to speak. Rhythm is important, essential. Different characters have different cadences. Where does that come from? If I had not heard many people speak or read books in which characters speak, I would not be able to write them, but writing is not just remembering; it is remembering, combining memories, and inventing something new through the faculty of memory. This is, in fact, Vico’s theory of memory. He believed memory could be divided into three parts: memoria, recalling things in the past; fantasia or imagination, which alters or imitates those same things; and ingegno, ingenuity, which gives the things a new spin or reorders them in new relationships. Vico, Freud, and a number of contemporary neuroscientists view memory and imagination not as distinct but as related faculties. The fact that neurological patients with hippocampal damage (a part of the brain that has been related to both autobiographical memory and navigation) also have difficulties imagining fictional events is vivid testimony to the commonality of the two.

  The imagination has been mystified with blather about creativity and genius, as if it were the property of a few anointed men and women and not a universal faculty of human beings. As John Dewey pointed out in Art as Experience: “ ‘Imagination’ shares with ‘beauty’ the doubtful honor of being the chief theme in esthetic writings of enthusiastic ignorance.”326 Without imaginative empathy, however, there would be no art of the novel. Inventing characters is a form of empathy, of not just looking at him or her but actually feeling with the invented person. But what is empathy, really? Nagel thought an objective phenomenology might proceed without empathy or imagination. I wonder what such a phenomenology would be like.

  In her book On the Problem of Empathy, the philosopher Edith Stein describes the mental states of other people as “foreign experiences.”327 She wants to explain empathy as the experience of the foreign, the not-me, but which I nevertheless feel in and through me. Empathy is the experience of a foreign consciousness, but it does not mean I lose myself. If I confused you and me (a confusion that can happen in schizophrenia), it wouldn’t be empathy. Empathy comes from the German word Einfühlung, which had its origins in aesthetics. It originally described a way to feel one’s way into a work of art. The German philosopher Karl Groos envisioned empathy in aesthetic experiences as a form of “inner imitation.”328 Vernon Lee (pseudonym for Violet Paget), a novelist and a writer on aesthetics, proposed a theory of motor empathy or “empathetic movement.” In 1912, many years before Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By, Lee, in collaboration with Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, wrote,

  Einfühlung . . . is at the bottom of numberless words and expressions, whose daily use had made us overlook this special peculiarity. We say, for instance, that hills roll and mountains rise . . . Nay, we attribute movement to motionless lines and surfaces; they move, spread out, flow, bend, twist, etc. They do, to quote M. Souriais’s ingenious formula, what we should feel ourselves doing if we were inside them. For we are inside them; we have felt ourselves, projected our own experience into them.329

  Lee’s “empathetic movement” is an immediate apprehension of a work of art through our bodily experiences, a way for people to enter and feel a foreign object.

  How do we understand works of art or other people, for that matter? Many contemporary thinkers in various fields have seized on the discovery of mirror neurons in the premotor cortex of the macaque monkey and the analogous system in the human being to explain everything from language to empathy. As is the case with many scientific discoveries, this one happened by accident. While doing single-cell recordings via electrodes attached directly to the monkey’s brain, a member of Giacomo Rizzolatti’s team at the University of Parma noticed that the same neuron fired when a monkey grabbed an object and when it just watched another monkey grab an object. They discovered a striking correspondence between an action and the perception of an a
ction.

  Although the existence of mirror systems in human beings is rarely disputed anymore, our knowledge of them is more opaque than our knowledge of those in the macaque because human brains are not studied in the same invasive way, and what these systems mean for how we relate to other people continues to create lively controversy. Research has suggested that this mirroring process is not only for intentional actions—reaching for a banana—but for sensation and emotion as well. If I watch you being touched, the somatosensory cortex of my brain is activated, as it is when you touch me. It is also activated when I read a passage in a book about touching or in some cases by a tactile metaphor—“rough day.” Other studies have shown similar results for the way human beings experience other people in pain or when they watch others drink a disgusting liquid, read about someone drinking a disgusting liquid, or just imagine drinking a disgusting liquid. A form of embodied imaginative identification with other people is happening to us even when we aren’t consciously aware of it. No words or symbols are required.

  Vittorio Gallese, who was on the team that discovered mirror neurons, has proposed the term “embodied simulation” for these unconscious resonant systems that take place between people and also between people and works of art. Gallese’s theory is a direct assault on a purely mental and disembodied view of social understanding. In the book he coauthored with Massimo Ammaniti, The Birth of Intersubjectivity, Gallese refers to the leading view of the human mind since Descartes as “solipsistic.”330 He means that in this tradition the individual is seen as stuck or locked in his own mind and that to understand another person I have to consciously work out what it might be like to be you. Gallese takes a strong stand against what he regards as a wrong direction in science. “The picture of the mind conveyed by classic cognitive science and by many quarters in analytic philosophy is that of a functional system whose processes can be described in terms of manipulations of informational symbols according to a set of formal syntactic rules.”331 He does not believe that the way we understand other people’s minds is purely through elaborate mental gymnastics, through inference by analogy—I remember when I fell on the ice and cut open my chin and now, as I see you slip and tumble to the ground, I project that known feeling onto you and therefore understand what you are going through. Gallese argues that we have an immediate relation to other people through the dynamic neural processes of our motor-sensory systems. This does not mean that when you fall down, I might not think about my own fall in the past, but rather that the mirroring system provides the underground, an unconscious vicarious connection to the movements, sensations, and emotions of other people.

  Gallese, who draws on phenomenology to ground his neuroscience, uses Merleau-Ponty’s term “intercorporeality” to describe my vicarious connection to your movements, sensations, and emotions. You and I have a shared body state. “We should abandon the Cartesian view of the primacy of the ego,” Gallese writes, “and adopt a perspective emphasizing that the other is [as] co-originally given as the self.”332 This is radically different from the ideas that animate classical computational theory of mind. After all, before a human being is born, he is bound up in the living, moving world of another person in an umbilical connection, which is literally a lifeline. This fact not only has been lost in the quasi-Cartesian computational model, I would argue, it has been suppressed. If pattern or form takes precedence over the material, the entangled cellular realities of mammalian life get lost in the abstractions of information processing and feedback. Further, in these theories, the mysteries of self and consciousness are construed as properties of isolated beings. Mammals do not start out as autonomous, however. They originate inside, are dependent on the body of another, and develop over time.

  If “the other” is not understood as an impenetrable alien but rather as a being without which a self cannot exist, then the philosophical ground has shifted. Aren’t the sensual, emotional lives of infants important to an understanding of adults? The root of the word “emotion” is the Latin emovere, which literally means to move out. Emotions are not still. They fluctuate continually. Sometimes changes in mood are barely perceptible, but none of our thoughts or actions in the world is accompanied by no emotion or feeling, even if what we feel is merely the dull drumbeat of our own aliveness. And although it seems that human beings are social and emotional at birth, our affective responses develop in relation to others. It is not clear whether infants are born with mirror systems or not.333 One study found that when pianists listened to recordings of piano pieces, they showed significantly higher activation in their primary motor cortices than did musically trained singers who were not pianists. A specific skill therefore appears to intensify the mirroring response.334

  Mirror systems give us access to other people and to animals that are somehow like us. This vicarious action plays a part in our bonds with other people, but a full understanding of self-other dynamics remains elusive. Newborns actively imitate the faces of adults. Infants only eighteen hours old cry when they hear another baby crying. Toddlers regularly burst into tears when they see another child fall down. In adults, imitation responses are suppressed but by no means eliminated.335 Neurological patients with bilateral orbitofrontal lesions sometimes compulsively imitate the faces and gestures of the doctor examining them. They seem to have lost the powers of suppressing an impulse to imitate.336 We all know yawning is contagious, but what about emotional contagions that have been reported in different parts of the world and in different circumstances for centuries? During the First World War, whole German companies fighting in the trenches were afflicted with uncontrollable vomiting and crying.337 This is not empathy, surely, but a kind of traveling sickness and emotion, a collapse of boundaries among people in close quarters. It is as if in circumstances of grotesque vulnerability and helplessness, the soldiers, strained to their limits, were unable to suppress an unconscious, possibly infantile, impulse to imitate. How are we to understand this kind of contagion?

  When my daughter was just weeks old, I used to take her into bed with me so she could nurse in the middle of the night. Sometimes I would wake up to find her also awake, and we would look at each other in silence. She fixed her eyes on mine in a gaze of such intense earnestness and apparent fascination that I had to ask myself what was going on in this tiny person. What did she know, and what didn’t she know? We spent a lot of time just staring at each other in those early days. At times I found it hard to turn away. It was as if I couldn’t stop looking at her. Well before I read about infant imitation, I experienced it with Sophie, as did her father. We spent the first months of her life in intense face-to-face communication with her, talking to her in those exaggerated melodies people seem to use with babies and waiting for the sounds she made in return. We smiled, nodded, cooed, and sang, and she did her best to respond in kind.

  But we were also on a continuous mission of soothing, lulling, and bouncing, sometimes such vigorous bouncing that our friends gave us alarmed looks, but as a small infant, Sophie craved nonstop motion. When we stopped, she cried. My husband and I took turns energetically jiggling her carriage while we ate dinner. It was a period of life dictated by the rhythms she craved, some fast, some slow. It was not a time of leisure, but it was a passionate, surprising, close-up view of early human development. When I was pregnant, I used to refer to the fetus inside me as “the naked stranger.” A naked stranger, I would say to my husband, will arrive soon and demand we take care of him or her for the next eighteen or so years.

  What is life like for the naked stranger? Daniel Stern referred to infant experiences as “forms of vitality” or “vitality affects.” These are feelings, which Stern explains do not fit into neat categories of emotion. Paul Ekman maintains that there are six basic (or universal) human emotions: happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, anger, and disgust.338 Breazeal designed Kismet accordingly—to simulate these six emotions in its facial expressions. Not everyone believes in six basic emotions. Some say there are four.339 Others
argue that there is only a pain-pleasure spectrum that cannot be neatly parsed into discrete emotions.340 Jaak Panksepp has located various emotional systems in brain areas. He emphasizes that in mammals social bonds are essential, and when social comfort is withdrawn, the PANIC system is activated.341

  Stern argues for another vocabulary to describe early human life: “These elusive qualities are better captured by dynamic, kinetic terms, such as ‘surging,’ ‘fading away,’ ‘fleeting,’ ‘explosive,’ ‘crescendo,’ ‘decrescendo,’ ‘bursting,’ ‘drawn out,’ and so on.”342 Vernon Lee’s kinetic terms “move, spread out, bend,” and “twist” serve a similar purpose. Stern mentions Susanne Langer in his book, and her work clearly provided him with a descriptive terminology beyond the conventional taxonomies of emotion, one akin to music. In Philosophy in a New Key, Langer aligned musical structures with the dynamic patterns of felt human experience. In Problems of Art, she defined art:

  A work of art is an expressive form created for our perception through sense or imagination, and what it expresses is human feeling. The word “feeling” must be taken here in its broadest sense, meaning everything that can be felt, from physical sensation, pain and comfort, excitement and repose, to the most complex emotions, intellectual tensions, or the steady feeling-tones of a conscious human life.343