At first glance, he appears to be an ordinary, motile protozoan,
remarkable chiefly for the speed and directness with which he swims
from place to place, engulfing fragments of wood finely chewed by his
termite host. In the termite ecosystem, an arrangement of Byzantine
complexity, he stands at the epicenter. Without him, the wood,
however finely chewed, would never get digested; he supplies the
enzymes that break down cellulose to edible carbohydrate, leaving
only the nondegradable lignin, which the termite then excretes
in geometrically tidy pellets and uses as building blocks for the
erection of arches and vaults in the termite nest. Without him there
would be no termites, no farms of the fungi that are cultivated by
termites and will grow nowhere else . . . [7]
But this tiny creature inside the termite's digestive tracts turns out to consist of whole populations of even tinier creatures living in symbiosis with each other, yet retaining their autonomous individuality. Thus . . .
. . . the flagellae that beat in synchrony to propel myxotricha
with such directness turn out, on closer scrutiny with the electron
microscope, not to be flagellae at all. They are outsiders, in
to help with the business: fully formed, perfect spirochetes that
have attached themselves at regularly spaced intervals all over the
surface of the protozoan. [8]
Thomas then enumerates the various types of other organelles and bacteria which form a kind of cooperative zoo inside myxotricha, and cites evidence that the cells which constitute the human body evolved by a similar process 'of being made up, part by part, by the coming together of just such prokaryotic animals'. Thus the lowly myxotricha becomes a paradigm for our integrative tendency.
The whole animal, or ecosystem, stuck for the time being halfway along in evolution, appears to be a model for the development of cells like our own. . . . There is an underlying force that drives together the several creatures comprising myxotricha, and, then drives the assemblage into union with the termite. If we could understand this tendency, we would catch a glimpse of the process that brought single separate cells together for the construction of metazoans, culminating in the invention of roses, dolphins, and, of course, ourselves. It might turn out that the same tendency underlies the joining of organisms into communities, communities into ecosystems, and ecosystems into the biosphere. If this is, in fact, the drift of things, the way of the world, we may come to view immune reactions, genes for the chemical marking of self, and perhaps all reflexive responses of aggression and defense as secondary developments in evolution, necessary for the regulation and modulation of symbiosis, not designed to break into the process, only to keep it from getting out of hand.
If it is in the nature of living things to pool resources, to fuse when possible, we would have a new way of accounting for the progressive enrichment and complexity of form in living things. [9]
III
THE THREE DIMENSIONS OF EMOTION
1
Emotions can be described as mental states accompanied by intense feelings and associated with bodily changes of a widespread character -- in breathing, pulse, muscle tone, glandular secretion of hormones such as adrenalin, etc. They have also been described as 'over-heated' drives. They can be classified, in the first place, according to the nature of the drive which gives rise to them: hunger, sex, curiosity (the 'exploratory drive'), conviviality, protection of the offspring, and so on.
In the second place, a conspicuous feature of all emotions is the feeling of pleasureableness or unpleasureableness, the 'hedonic tone', attached to them. In the third place, there is the polarity between the self-assertive and self-transcending tendencies which enter into every emotion.
We thus arrive at a three-dimensional conception of human emotions. I have proposed* a coarse but homely analogy for it: imagine your mental scenery transformed into the saloon bar of a tavern, equipped with a variety of taps, each serving a different kind of brew; these are turned on and off as the need arises. Then each tap would represent a different drive, while the pleasure-unpleasure rating would depend on the rate of flow through the tap -- whether it is nice and smooth, or gurgles and splutters because there is too little or too much pressure behind it. Lastly, the ratio of self-assertive to self-transcending impulses in emotive behaviour could be represented by the acid-alkaline scale. This is not a very engaging metaphor, but it may help to visualize the three variables (or parameters) of emotion which the present theory suggests. Let us take a closer look at each, and particularly at those features which distinguish it from other theories.
* In The Ghost in the Machine, Ch. XV.
2
One of the difficulties inherent in the subject is that we rarely experience a pure emotion. The barman tends to mix the liquids from the various taps: sex may be combined with curiosity and with virtually any other drive. The point is too obvious to need further discussion.
The second variable, the pleasure-unpleasure scale or 'hedonic tone', also gives rise to ambiguous, 'mixed feelings'. Earlier on (in Chapter II) I quoted Freud's dictum that pleasure is always derived from 'the diminution, lowering or extinction of psychic excitation and unpleasure from an increase of it'. This view (which was held throughout the first half of our century by the major schools in psychology, including American behaviourism* and Continental psychoanalysis) is no doubt true for the frustration of 'over-heated' primitive drives which arise, for instance, from the pangs of starvation; but it is palpably untrue for that class of complex emotions encountered in everyday life, which we call pleasurable excitement, thrill, arousal, suspense. Reading an erotic passage in a book leads, in Freud's words, to an 'increase in psychic excitation' and should therefore be unpleasant; in fact it arouses a complex emotion in which frustration is combined with pleasure.
* Where Thorndike's 'Law of Effect', which asserted the same fallacy,
reigned as supreme dogma.
The answer to this paradox lies in the important part played by imagination in human emotions. Just as an imagined stimulus in an erotic reverie is sufficient to arouse physiological impulses, so, vice versa, imagined satisfaction may lead to a pleasurable experience -- the 'internalized' consummation of those components in the complex drive which can be lived out in fantasy.
Another gateway through which imagination enters into the emotional drive is anticipation of its reward. In the previous example the reward was fictional, yet emotionally real, i.e., pleasurable; now we are talking of the imagined anticipation of the factual reward. When one is thirsty, the sight of the publican pouring beer into one's glass is pleasurable, although it 'increases psychic excitation'. The same applies to the preliminaries of love-making, or watching a thriller: the anticipation of the happy ending mediates the 'internal consummation' of some components of the emotive drive while the excitation of other components increases; we are impatient to get over the preliminaries which at the same time we enjoy.
Although the 'internalization' and 'internal consummation' of emotive drives are triggered by acts of imagination, they have their physiological concomitants in visceral and glandular processes, and are as 'real' as the muscular activities of 'external' or overt behaviour. The memory of a French thee-star meal can be sufficient to re-activate one's gastric juices.
The more sublimated the drive (i.e., the closer the coordination between the higher, cortical, and the lower, visceral levels of the hierarchy) the more it is amenable to internalization. This sounds rather abstract, but consider two players in a chess competition facing each other across the board. The simplest way of defeating the opponent is to club him over the head. A player may occasionally experience this urge (particularly if this opponent is Bobby Fischer), but he will never seriously entertain the idea: the competitive drive can express itself only according to the 'rules of
the game'. Instead of resorting to violence, the player visualizes in his imagination the possibilities of deriving an advantage from his next move, and this mental activity provides him with a series of pleasurable anticipatory, partial satisfactions, even if in the end victory is not achieved. Hence the sporting pleasure in competitive games, regardless -- up to a point -- of the final outcome. Stevenson saw deeper than Freud when he wrote that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.
Romantic lovers have always been aware of this. Longing is a bitter-sweet emotion with painful and pleasurable components. Sometimes the imagined presence of the beloved person can be more gratifying than the real one. Emotions have a many-coloured spectrum of components, each with its own hedonic tone. To ask whether to love is pleasurable or not is as meaningless as to ask whether a Rembrandt painting is bright or dark.
We can now turn to the third source of ambivalence in our emotions. The first, we remember, was the biological origin of the drive, the second the pleasure-unpleasure tone attached to it, the third is the polarity of self-assertion versus self-transcendence which is manifested in all our emotions.
Take love first -- an ill-defined but heady cocktail of emotions with countless variations. (Sexual, platonic, parental, oedipal, narcissistic, patriotic, botanistic, canine-directed or feline-orientated, as the textbooks would say.) But whatever its target and method of wooing, there is always present an element of self-transcending devotion in varying proportions. In sexual relationships, domination and aggression are blended with empathy and identification; the outcome ranges from rape to platonic worship. Parental love reflects, on the one hand, a biological bond with 'one's own flesh and blood' which transcends the boundaries of the self; while domineering fathers and over-protective mothers are classic examples of self-assertiveness. Less obvious is the fact that even hunger, an apparently simple and straightforward biological drive, can contain a self-transcending component. Everyday experience tells us that appetite is enhanced by congenial company and surroundings. On a less trivial level, ritual commensality is intimately related to magic and religion among primitive people. By partaking of the flesh of the sacrificed animal, man or god, a process of transubstantiation takes place; the virtues of the victim are ingested and a kind of mystic communion is established which includes all who participated in the rite. Transmitted through the Orphic mystery cult, the tradition of sharing the slain god's flesh and blood, entered in a symbolic guise into the rites of Christianity. To the devout, Holy Communion is the supreme experience of self-transcendence; and no blasphemy is intended by pointing to the continuous tradition which connects ritual feeding with transubstantiation as a means of breaking down the ego's boundaries.
Other echoes of this ancient communion survive in such rites as baptismal and funeral meals, symbolic offerings of bread and salt, or the blood-brother ceremony among some Arab tribes, performed by drinking a few drops of the elected brother's blood.
We can only conclude that even while eating, man does not live by bread alone: that even the apparently simplest act of self-preservation may contain an element of self-transcendence.
And vice versa, such admirably altruistic pursuits as caring for the sick or poor, protecting animals against cruelty, serving on committees and joining protest marches, can serve as wonderful outlets for bossy self-assertion, even if unconscious. Professional do-gooders, charity tigresses, hospital matrons, missionaries and social workers are indispensable to society, and to inquire into their motives, often hidden to themselves, would be ungrateful and churlish.
3
Thus leaving apart the extremes of blind rage and mystic trance at opposite ends of the spectrum, all our emotional states show combinations of the two basic tendencies: one reflecting the individual holon's wholeness, the other his partness, with a mutually restraining influence on one another. But it may also happen that the integrative tendency, instead of restraining its antagonist, acts as a trigger or catalyst for it. We shall discuss in Chapter IV the disastrous consequences of self-transcending identification of the individual with the group-mind, its leaders, slogans and beliefs. For the moment we shall turn to the happier aspects of the self-same catalysing process, when it serves to generate the magic of illusion in art.
How does the process work? Let us consider a simple situation with only two people involved: Mrs A. and her friend, Mrs B. whose little daughter has recently been killed in an accident. Mrs A. sheds tears of sympathy, participating in Mrs B.'s sorrow, partially identifying herself with her friend by an act of empathy, projection or introjection -- whatever you like to call it. The same might happen if the 'other person' is merely a heroine on the screen or in the pages of a novel.
But it is essential to distinguish here between two distinct emotional processes involved in the event, although they combine in the lived experience. The first is the spontaneous act of identification itself, characterized by the fact that Mrs A. has for the moment more or less forgotten her own existence by participating in the experiences of another person, real or imagined. This is clearly a self-transcending and cathartic experience; while it lasts, Mrs A. is prevented from thinking of her own worries, jealousies and grudges against her husband. In other words, the process of identification temporarily inhibits the self-assertive tendencies.
But now we come to the second process which may have the opposite effect. The act of identification may lead to the arousal of vicarious emotions experienced, as it were, on the other person's behalf. In Mrs A.'s case the vicarious emotion was one of sadness and bereavement. But it can also be anxiety or anger. You commiserate with Desdemona; as a result, the perfidy of Iago makes your blood boil. The anxiety which grips the spectator of a Hitchcock thriller, though vicarious, is physiologically real, accompanied by palpitations, increased pulse rate, sudden jumps of alarm. And the anger aroused by the ruthless gangster on the screen -- which Mexican audiences have occasionally riddled with bullets -- is real anger, marked by a flow of adrenalin. Here, then, is the core of the paradox, which is basic to the understanding of both the delusions of History -- and the illusions of Art. Both derive from man's nature as a belief-accepting animal (as Waddington called it). Both require a -- temporary or permanent -- suspension of disbelief.
To recapitulate: we are faced with a process in two steps. At the first step, the self-transcending impulses of projection, participation, identification inhibit the self-assertive tendencies, purge us of the dross of our self-centred worries and desires. This leads to the second step: the process of loving identification may stimulate -- or trigger off -- the surge of hatred, fear, vengefulness, which, though experienced on behalf of another person, or group of persons, nevertheless increases the pulse rate. The physiological processes which these vicarious emotions activate are essentially the same whether the threat or insult is directed at oneself or at the person or group with whom one identifies. They belong to the self-assertive category, although the self has momentarily changed its address -- by being, for instance, projected into the guileless heroine on the stage; or the local soccer team; or 'my country, right or wrong'.
It is a triumph of the imaginative powers of the human mind that we are capable of shedding tears over the death of Anna Karenina, who only exists as printer's ink on paper, or as a shadow on the screen. Children and primitive audiences who, forgetting the present, completely accept the reality of events on the stage, are experiencing a kind of hypnotic trance, with its ultimate origin in the sympathetic magic practised in primitive cultures, where the masked dancer becomes identified with the god or demon he mimes, and the carved idol is invested with divine powers. At a more advanced stage of cultural sophistication we are still capable of perceiving Laurence Olivier as himself and as Prince Hamlet of Denmark at one and the same time, and of manufacturing large quantities of adrenalin to provide him with the required vigour to fight his adversaries. It is the same magic at work, but in a more sublimated form: the process of identification (of spectator via actor with
the hero) is transitory and partial, confined to certain climactic moments, a suspension of disbelief which does not entirely abolish the critical faculties or undermine personal identity.
Art is a school of self-transcendence. So is a voodoo session or a Nazi rally. But our responses to the various forms of illusion created by art have undergone a process of sublimation on the road from childhood to maturity and from the worship of icons to their aesthetic appreciation. No comparable process of sublimation can be observed in those forms of behaviour where the urge towards self-transcendence finds its expression in social and political group-formation. In this respect, the stage on which the tragedies of history are played is still populated by heroes and villains, and the vicarious emotions which they arouse are still capable of turning the peaceful audience into homicidal fanatics. This may serve as an illustration of the ambiguous role played by the integrative tendency in man -- which may manifest itself in primitive forms of identification, as distinct from mature integration. Social history is dominated by the former, the history of art by the latter.
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