Читать книгу Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling - Hiram Miner Stanley - Страница 9

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“I feel cold,” and “I feel afraid of cold,” are expressions which denote two tolerably distinct feelings. The main characteristic which distinguishes the second feeling as an emotion is obviously representation. In the first case, I have pain with presentation of the cold, in the second, pain with the mere representation of the cold. If I feel cold, I have direct and immediate experience; if I fear the cold, I have an experience in view of experience, pain at pain. When one says, “I have a violent pain in my head,” and a friend answers, “I am deeply pained to hear it,” we recognise at once the fundamental distinction between sensation and emotion. We have in this chapter to discuss some points as to the rise and nature of emotion in its relation to representation.

The theory which we have been elaborating is that pure pleasure and pain are the original and causative elements in the whole realm of mind. Pure feeling is the most direct and necessary, and so the first response in conscious form, to all stimuli, and it is the incitement to all cognitive activity in its inception and growth. The harm and good to organism, are at once, and most quickly realized in terms of pure feeling, and the painful necessities in the struggle for existence, lead to a continuous development from this point. Dominant pleasure and pain, with the different presentation forms, constitute different feelings, as of warmth, hunger, cold, etc., to which some fuller objectification may be added. Adjustment is thereby made manifold, but only with present stimulus. There is no appreciation of the experienceable. All that is attained is immediate present apprehension which in no wise suggests or interprets, but which is strictly self-contained.

We must, indeed, acknowledge that no consciousness, save, of course, the very first, can exist in perfect isolation totally unaffected by any other. The second conscious activity was not a perfect facsimile of the first, and its variation is due at least in the main to the precedent mentality. What is, is determined by what has been, and this universal law is in mind the inductive nature of all experience. The solidarity of all mentality and of all materiality is a scientific postulate, a principle which we must assume, or deny all scientific investigation. The movement of a molecule in the sun, millions of years since, influences the condition of my body to-day, and the flush of pain in some protozoan millions of years since, has had an infinitesimal share in determining my present state of mind. Yet this fact that every psychosis is what it is by reason of the whole line of previous psychoses, does not lead us to suppose that experience cognizes itself from the beginning, and consciously builds itself up. There is for a long time no consciousness of process of mental integration. The whole universe of mind is the necessary prius of each individual manifestation, yet the particular phenomenon in consciousness does not include a sense of, or reaching out to, these conditioning agencies. No sense of dependence is generated. But we ask, How can one conscious state unconsciously effect or determine another? How can consciousness be affected without consciousness of affection? Yet, difficult as it may appear to set clearly before us the nature of this relation of a consciousness to all the preconsciousness, it is still obvious that the intricate nexus of cause and effect in mind does not need to be known of mind or realized in the individual consciousness, and is not, and cannot be. Every consciousness is the derivative resultant of innumerable pre-consciousnesses, and it goes to the determining and qualifying of innumerable post-consciousnesses, yet it is neither consciousness of the future or the past, though it involves both.

The early phase of mind where consciousnesses are wholly un-unified from within by any central or continuous consciousness, and whose solidarity is wholly in an unconscious integration is so foreign to us who have minds where experience of experience is continually in process, that it is with the utmost difficulty we can in any wise conceive it. It is evident that a very low organism may have consciousnesses, but no mind, that is, no self-unifying whole of consciousnesses. It does not possess a mind, but during its whole life it attains psychoses which are merely disjecta reached to help an immediate necessity of existence, and then fading completely away. Each psychosis is achieved more easily than the former by reason of the former, though there is no consciousness of connection with it. The increment and qualifying of a given experience by past experience is not reached by it. Some differentiation is attained under pressure of struggle for existence, and experience is constituted, but is wholly unknowing of itself and in no wise self-formative.

We have now, however, to consider the problem, how experience came to itself, and how and why representation and emotion should arise in the struggle of existence.

At the first, as we have seen, organisms responded in conscious form only in pleasure and pain, and this only when the actual damage or benefit to the individual was very considerable. When the hurt was critical, then only was pain accomplished as a function to secure self-preservative action, but gradually through survival of the fittest the greater susceptibility was attained, so that minor lesions are felt in pain terms, and some general sensing and objectifying lead to some differentiation in adjustment. The external parts of the body become specially sensitive, and ciliate extensions are formed. Injury to these results in pain and consequent reactions, and in this wise by injury to a small part great harm to the organism as a whole is prevented. The low forms of life are thus enabled to avoid the hurtful before they meet it in full annihilatory force. These practically anticipatory reactions—though there is no real anticipation in consciousness, no real experience of experience—I term the method of incipiency. Pain reactions are thus reached with less and less actual harm until the very slightest injury to a minute tentacle will suffice to awaken pain.

This tentacular experience, however, is obviously very limited, and has incidental disadvantages. Further, that pain should be attained when there is little actual harm, is good, but to attain pain, and self-conservative action before any injury is done, but only about to be done is better. Reaction to potential harm is a most important advantageous step. In the earlier form of mentality, the animal must actually be in the process of being devoured by an enemy before a pain reaction is achieved, but in the later representative form of reaction there is complete anticipation, and the animal can come off with an absolutely whole skin. Ideal pains, as fear, anger, and other emotions, are gradually substituted for pains which are real in the sense that they arise in a positive hurt to the life of the organism. The saving which is effected through emotion is most important, and this economy is reason for the rise of emotion in the struggle of existence. Those animals who are able, not merely to react on slight injuries to themselves, but also through fear, etc., to avoid all actual injury, have a very manifest advantage.

If now the rationale of the rise of emotion is apparent, let us next proceed to some analysis of emotional process in general. The mental mechanism by which anticipatory function is secured is certainly complex, and a complete analysis presents many difficulties.

In the incipiency stage, which we have just discussed, the organism was enabled to avoid the full force of the injurious by meeting it half-way with extensions from its own body, but we cannot suppose that this was purposely accomplished, or that the lesser pain conveyed in any form sense of the greater pain. There was no fear, no anger, not any experience at experience in consciousness. There is simply pain on less and less injury, but no anticipation of pain.

In early consciousness there is, of course, frequent return of a given object which becomes the occasion of a large number of objectifyings which are identical in nature yet do not contain sense of identity. There is repeated reaction to the same objective stimulus, yet with no sense of sameness, there is frequent cognition of the same thing yet no recognition. With primitive consciousness, no matter how often a thing is experienced, it is equally new; revival of the past is not stimulated, nor sense of identity attained. Mere return of a state is not sense of return, and no amount of re-occurrence or combinations thereof will make sense of re-occurrence. Re-occurrence of a psychosis is nothing more subjectively than occurrence unless there arise sense of re-occurrence or revival. The pure feeling states in primitive consciousness are perfectly identical in nature, and they arise on occasions which are the same, yet there is of course no sense of identity. A young child may see a thing a hundred times without recognising it; there are a hundred re-occurrences of state yet no sense of re-occurrence. The hundredth perception does not differ materially from the first, does not include any true representative element. The immediate image does not stand for the past, the mind does not revive previous presentation on the strength of it.

Mind is regarded by many as consisting fundamentally of vivid sense presentations and their faint reproductions, of sense impressions and their representations. That which has been repeatedly experienced has a tendency to re-occur without the particular objective stimulus, but merely indirectly by some connected stimulus, through an association of states. But this revival, however attained, does not constitute real representation, it does not really differ from the presentation simply because it re-occurs without the original particular objective stimulus. Representation in true sense of term is representation with sense of re-presentation. A representation is a repetition of a presentation with no consciousness of repetition or any added nature. Repetition is a fact in consciousness before it is a fact for consciousness. All presentations and re-presentations have mere immediate validity and value, they point to nothing, and mean nothing, there is no going beyond what is immediately given, no prescience of a possible experience.

Revival often occurs in mind without sense of revival, and so is not true representation. In disordered states of the nerves we frequently see objects which have no real existence, the states are revival states as objectively interpreted, yet there being no sense of revival they stand in consciousness for real presentations. When I see a person sitting in a chair but afterwards find that no one was there, I characterize the state very naturally as a mere imagination, a representation; yet in fact it was in subjective quality a presentation. We are not to psychologically classify, as is too often done, psychical states according to presence or absence of object, but as to sense of presence or absence of object. It is only as consciousness takes note with reference to object that there is differentiation in consciousness to make presentation and representation.

We must consider it probable that the earliest revivals by consciousness were solely of the unconscious sort, or, objectively speaking, were hallucinatory. A sense order is formed, which attends to a series of objective realities; let now, on some occasion, one of these objects drop out, yet there will be attaining of some sense of it as though it were present, and the proper reaction will be carried out. The mind gets its early revivals without sense of revival. They have presentative force, and are sensings of objective reality though there is no objective reality there at the time to sense.

These early simple revivals, which are all hallucinatory, perform an important function. They are practically anticipatory, in that the reaction is secured before the actual presence of the reality. Thus they save an actual bodily experience, though the mental is quite real, yet fainter than actual object would give. Thus with an enemy an animal will revive, upon slight indirect sensation, previous experiences, and it will have in ideal form, i.e., without the objective reality, a very real experience with what is to it real enemy, thus escaping before full advent of enemy. When a shadow alarms a low organism—and even very low organisms seem to react to shadows—there is no actual harm done to its members as would happen with a concrete body, and hence there is no direct pain. The shadow is yet taken for real body, and revival pains and revival sensations are attained with this, and there is consequent activity. Shadow does not appear as sign of enemy, but in itself a dangerous reality, so that anticipatory reaction is gained without actual representation. In most cases in low organisms what we take for fear or other emotion is probably no more than revival of the type of which this shadow experience is an example. What is actually unreal, being only revival, is taken for the real, and is acted on accordingly, and in most cases this action is of service as anticipatory. When the organism discovers the shadow to be but shadow, a something, not the object, yet connected with it, when it becomes a sign of further experience, this is representation as the basis of emotions such as fear and anger.

The pain intensity in the simple revivals, re-presentations, is doubtless less than in experience with objective realities, so there is a saving on this score in pseudo-direct experience. While reactions are secured upon this method without injury being actually inflicted, still there is loss of economy in this, that the activity is excessive under the circumstances. Priority of action to real injury is secured, but at an excessive expense of energy, almost equal to that in actual experience with the real thing.

This acting to a false reality, while it has a value for experience, is, as said, uneconomical, and it must sometimes not have the anticipatory force. The cheat and illusion is ultimately at some critical moment cognized by consciousness, revival comes to be estimated at its real worth, and sense of reality and unreality is formed. The revived presentation does not stand in and by itself alone, but it acquires a significance, and it loses the force of complete reality value. That which is brought into consciousness again is not only revival, but is felt to be such.

To constitute representation, then, there must be not merely revival, but sense of revival with some sense of unreality of revival form. But this would avail nothing save it brought in sense of its value for experience. The revival must not only be appreciated as such, but the relation to the experienceable must be cognized. The calling up of the past must be applied to experience. The sight of a fire not only calls up revivals, but there is the sense of the experienceable therewith, and an emotion which incites me to walk to the fire and receive warmth. Mere return and sense of return must be supplemented by sense of value for future experience. Representation is experience doubling on itself. All representation is more than representation of thing, revival; it is representation of experience as such, hence an experience of experience. We must always emphasize as the essence of representation not the revival, but the sense of the experienceable or experienced thereby conveyed.

The process to representation we see exemplified in measure in awaking from a dream. The dream itself, speaking from the objective point of view of observing psychologist who detects no real things in interaction with the body, is representative in nature; but, for the experiencing consciousness, there is no sense of revival, and all is presentative activity. Things are known as such, and not as dreamt or represented. Awaking is a gradual pouring in of sense of revival and of sense of objective unreality of the experience; we become conscious that the activity is no direct consciousness, but a recalling or reproduction. The dream image, which was so real to me while in the dream, I now hold as representative only, as having no immediate answering form and substance. When, as with the superstitious, the dream is felt to have significance, to have a meaning for life in pleasure-pain terms, then emotion becomes possible, and fear, hope and kindred feelings are excited.

We observe that representation is then a new order of consciousness. Representation cannot be attained by any combination of experiences, revival or direct, but it is a unique and reflex act. It is not a development of presentation, as an echo and re-echo of it; and the mere fact of absence of external cause or object does not constitute a cognition as representation. The objectifying is not self-contained, but it conveys a meaning for experience. Representation is an experience which includes some cognizance of or sense of experience, and it is thus the germ of self-consciousness and consciousness of consciousness. Experience comes to be more than a series of detached and isolated activities with no cognitive power beyond a direct and immediate apprehension, but by rising to some appreciation of itself it becomes forewarned and forearmed, able to consciously appreciate and attend to its own welfare.

We have also to emphasize this, that while representation involves a conscious re-objectifying, it must also include some re-feeling consciously accomplished of pain and pleasure. Revivals of pain and pleasure are felt and are appreciated as revivals, as having their basis not in present object, but in previous experience. It is by understanding feeling as experienced and experienceable, it is in view of pleasure-pain experience, that emotion arises. It is not sense of imminence of object, but of imminence of pain and pleasure, that awakens responsive emotion and so self-conservative action. Emotion always implies a pleasure or a pain in ideal sense of the experienceability of either. Representation as cognitive revival and sense thereof is subsidiary to representation as feeling revival with sense thereof. For instance, the representation of a tooth and of pain of toothache are correlative representations. Mere representation of cognition has no value in itself, is a mere idle panorama, save as it brings on representation of pleasure-pain. Unless representation of object implies representation of pain, there is no deterrent effect on the mind, and no proper bodily reaction.

We may believe that the order and basis of the representative side of mind is practically the same as indirect and simple activity, that the actual motive forces and originating impulses are pleasures and pains. We should suspect that the first revival attained was a pure feeling revival, and that the first representation was of pain and pleasure, and not of object, a consciously re-feeling rather than a consciously re-objectifying. The immediate value of the feeling side necessitates that all differentiation be initiated there.

Representation is only of experience of things or of pleasure-pain experience. It is always experience of experience, hence the expression, representation of an object, is, in strictness, inaccurate. Experience of things, as cognitive act, is always presentation. Yet early representation must be considered as very much adulterated by presentative elements. It was only slowly that representation was differentiated as a distinct power such as we find it in human consciousness; at the first it must have resembled the confused state that we sometimes experience between sleeping and waking when a given image often shifts from presentation value to representation value, and then back again.

Representation at the first is also purely concrete and particular. Bare appreciation of the experienceable does not include idea of experience. But representation in itself is merely a calling up and application of definite experiences as such. Experience as general term is not known, but only the particular facts as experiences.

The earliest emotions arise, of course, with reference to the bodily functions which have the most direct vital significance, as nutritive, reproductive, and motor activity. Very simple organisms seem to apprehend that a certain object is food before actually consuming, to have sense of the experience, and some emotive disturbance. The pleasure of feeding and incorporating into the bodily tissue is sensational, but any feeling previous or subsequent to this and with reference to this is emotional. A very young child feeds, and does not know food. Gradually it associates the visual sensation of whiteness of the milk with the immediate taste sensation and pleasure feeling. But the sense of whiteness at first arises only with and after the actual taste and pleasure experiences; it only gradually notices what gives it satisfaction or pain, thus repeating the evolution of mind, which is from feeling to sense, and not vice versâ. Only slowly does it attain power of appreciating whiteness previous to actual experience and as indicative of such, that is, a power of representation. Then emotions, as expectancy, and desire, become possible, and will can be stirred to active appropriation of food, a fact of the greatest importance in the struggle for existence. Once attaining the sense of the representative value of its cognitions, the child is enabled to consciously accomplish anticipatory actions.

An element which complicates emotion at a late stage is representation of representation in indefinite regressus. In advanced human consciousness, where mind is very reflective and introspective, this phase is prominent. The nuances of modern emotion are largely due to this mode of complication. Montaigne remarks that what he most fears is fear. As fear implies representation, fear of fear implies representation of representation, which in its turn may be feared, and so on ad infinitum. Spencer terms love of property a re-representative feeling; but this psychosis does not imply representation of representation, but merely representation of desirable realities. Desire of possession is an emotion, but not emotion at emotion. It is not an experience in view of representative experience, but with reference to a direct experience, that of ownership. Since we make representation the basis of emotion, it would be natural to make classes of emotion representative, re-representative, etc.; but this is quite too subtle a distinction to be fruitful or practical.

As there are stages of representation, so there are varying degrees of strength in the sense of representativeness. A colour may be recalled to consciousness several times as neither more nor less red, and precisely of the same quantity, yet the sense of its representation quality may differ greatly at each time. There are all degrees of intensity in this sense, from dimmest feeling, when the representation hovers on the confines of the presentation field, to the point of perfect conviction of representative nature. When consciousness is not exactly sure whether an object is directly seen or only recalled, is a presentation or only a revival, sense of representation is obviously at its lowest degree of intensity.

We have also to remark that in presentation and representation the object is not to be divorced from activity. It is a natural analogy that cognition as subjective-objective is a picturing, the picture and the object pictured seeming to be diverse but co-existent constituents of consciousness. Cognition seems to consist in both the thing as realized and the realizing act. It is an attitude of mind which is a holding on to a something which it has in its grasp. But there is no distinction in consciousness itself of the presented and the presenting, the represented and the representing, of product and process, of content and activity; there is only the presenting, the activity, which is itself the object. Sense of colour conveys, indeed, by the common vice of language that the colour exists for consciousness, and is perceived by consciousness. But, subjectively and psychologically speaking, the object is always no more than the objectifying, the thing no more than the activity. Thus the analysis into content and activity is fundamentally false; it assumes a world of objects which are merely at bottom object-sensings.

Emotion is an arousing and energizing. It is perturbation, disturbance, agitation, excitement. It is a throwing open the throttle and putting on a full head of steam. The whole organism quivers with the sudden inflow of force and life, is quickened to its highest pressure. In all higher psychic life it is a driving force of the utmost importance. However, the trend of evolution is in the direction of economy, and with the highest forms of consciousness emotion accomplishes its work even before arriving at agitation intensity. Feeling of the emotion type, that is, representative, is always at first a rather intense perturbation. Fear, for example, is with the lower minds always fright; with higher minds it often appears as dread. I stand on the railway track when a train is approaching, and a slight fear enables me to take the self-conservative action of stepping from the track; but with my dog, in similar circumstances, I judge by his hasty jump and general expression that his fear is always more intense and more generally disturbing. Emotion being a force which quickly tends to exhaustion, it is obvious that those animals will, ceteris paribus, have the advantage which react with the least expenditure. Thus the tendency of evolution is away from intense emotionalism.

In this emotion conforms to a general law. The earliest occurrences of any given form of psychosis are with strenuousness and with exaltation and excitement of the organism. We speak of fits of anger and gusts of passion, but for early consciousness we might also justly speak of fits of seeing and hearing. Common vision of external objects is for lower consciousness as rarely attained, and requires as much of force as beatific vision of seer and poet in the human mind. The new psychosis is but momentary, and implies high tension and great friction, but progress is toward continuity and ease of working. Emotion is in human life a tolerably constant element, like perception with whose representative side it is correlated, and within certain ranges it rises because of the force of heredity with apparent spontaneity.

We remark that the social significance of emotion is embodied in the word treat, as treat kindly, badly, etc. Our treatment of each other always means activities inspired by some emotion.

We must acknowledge that representation is very complex and difficult of analysis. For our present purpose, however, representation is a revival with sense of revival and unreality, and yet indicative of reality experienceable in pleasure-pain terms, and thus the occasion of emotion as stimulus of self-conservative action. The young child perceives no danger; its pleasures and pains are not related to things, and have not led to the evolution of a world of objects. Pain and pleasure lead it slowly to correlate its senses, so that the burnt child learns to dread the fire; the emotion of fear is aroused with cognition of the experienceable. Objectively, we must divide psychoses into those which directly result from actual engagement of the organism with objects, or the reverberations therefrom; subjectively, into simple self-contained states, and into reflex states which view experience, and so being representations involving emotion. Just how from re-experience sense of re-experience and of its value for experience—sense of pre-experience—arises, is something we have not particularly inquired into, but it is something that appears a mysterious and difficult problem. That the perception of object should ever carry with it sense of possibility or certainty of further experience, painful or pleasurable, is, when candidly considered, a remarkable and singular operation. The problems of origin of consciousness of self, of consciousness of consciousness, and of sense of reality seem unsolved, but I believe that a thorough study of representation would throw much light on these points; but this is not the place to pursue this investigation. When we take up representation—emotion life in detail, we may be able to make suggestions on some moot points.