Читать книгу Proust Was a Neuroscientist - Jonah Lehrer - Страница 12

Whitman’s faith in the flesh, although it was the source of his censorship, had a profound impact on the thought of his time. His free-verse odes, which so erotically fused the body and the soul, actually precipitated a parallel discovery within psychology. An avid Whitman enthusiast, William James was the first scientist to realize that Whitman’s poetry was literally true: the body was the source of feelings. The flesh was not a part of what we felt, it was what we felt. As Whitman had prophetically chanted, “Behold, the body includes and is the meaning, the main concern, and includes and is the soul.”

His entire life, James loved reading Whitman’s poetry out loud, feeling the “passionate and mystical ontological emotion that suffuses his words.” In Whitman, James discovered a “contemporary prophet” able to “abolish the usual human distinctions.” According to James, Whitman’s poetic investigations of the body had discovered “the kind of fiber … which is the material woven of all the excitements, joys, and meanings that ever were, or ever shall be, in this world.” Whitman realized how we feel.

The convergent beliefs of James and Whitman should not be surprising. After all, they shared a common source: Emerson. When Emerson came to New York City on his lecture tour in 1842, his speech “The Poet” was lauded in the papers by the journalist Walter Whitman, who would take his line about a “meter making argument” literally. While in the city, Emerson also met with Henry James Sr., a dilettante mystic and critic, and was invited into his New York City home. William James, Henry Sr.’s eldest son, had just been born. Legend has it that Emerson blessed William in his cradle and became the infant’s godfather.

True or false, the story accurately reflects the intellectual history of America. William James inherited the philosophical tradition of Emerson. Pragmatism, the uniquely American philosophy James invented, was in part a systematization of Emerson’s skeptical mysticism. Like Emerson and Whitman, James always enjoyed puncturing the pretensions of nineteenth-century science. He thought that people should stop thinking of scientific theories as mirrors of nature, what he called “the copy version of truth.” Instead, they should see its facts as tools, which “help us get into a satisfactory relation with experience.” The truth of an idea, James wrote, is the use of an idea, its “cash-value.” Thus, according to the pragmatists, a practical poet could be just as truthful as an accurate experiment. All that mattered was the “concrete difference” an idea produced in our actual lives.

But before he became a philosopher, William James was a psychologist. In 1875, he established one of the world’s first psychological laboratories at Harvard. Though he was now part of the medical school, James had no intention of practicing “brass instrument psychology,” his critical name for the new scientific approach that tried to quantify the mind in terms of its elemental sensations. What physicists had done for the universe, these psychologists wanted to do for consciousness. Even their vocabulary was stolen straight from physics: thought had a “velocity,” nerves had “inertia,” and the mind was nothing but its “mechanical reflex-actions.” James was contemptuous of such a crude form of reductionism. He thought its facts were useless.

James also wasn’t very good at this new type of psychology. “It is a sort of work which appeals particularly to patient and exact minds,” he wrote in his masterpiece, The Principles of Psychology, and James realized that his mind was neither patient nor particularly exact. He loved questions more than answers, the uncertainty of faith more than the conviction of reason. He wanted to call the universe the pluriverse. In his own psychological experiments, James was drawn to the phenomena that this mental reductionism ignored. What parts of the mind cannot be measured?

Searching for the immeasurable led James directly to the question of feeling. Our subjective emotions, he said, were the “unscien-tific half of existence.”* Because we only experienced the feeling as a conscious whole — and not as a sum of separate sensations — to break the emotion apart (as science tried to do) was to make it unreal. “The demand for atoms of feeling,” James wrote, “seems a sheer vagary, an illegitimate metaphor. Rationally, we see what perplexities it brings in train; and empirically, no fact suggests it, for the actual content of our minds are always representations of some kind of ensemble.”

Ensemble is the key word here. As Whitman had written thirty years before, “I will not make poems with reference to parts / But I will make poems with reference to ensemble.” When James introspected, he realized that Whitman’s poetry revealed an essential truth: our feelings emerge from the interactions of the brain and the body, not from any single place in either one. This psychological theory, first described in the 1884 article “What Is an emotion?”* is Whitman, pure and simple. Like Whitman, James concluded that if consciousness was severed from the body, “there would be nothing left behind, no ‘mind-stuff ’ out of which the emotion can be constituted.” As usual, James’s experimental evidence consisted of ordinary experience. He structured his argument around vivid examples stolen straight from real life, such as encountering a bear in the woods. “What kind of an emotion of fear,” he wondered, “would be left [after seeing the bear] if the feeling of quickened heart beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose bumps nor of visceral stirrings, were present?” James’s answer was simple: without the body there would be no fear, for an emotion begins as the perception of a bodily change. When it comes to the drama of feelings, our flesh is the stage.

At first glance, this theory of emotion seems like the height of materialism, a reduction of feeling to a physical state. But James was actually making the opposite point. Inspired by Whitman’s poetic sense of unity, James believed that our emotions emerged from the constant interaction of the body and the brain. Just as fear cannot be abstracted from its carnal manifestations, it also cannot be separated from the mind, which endows the body’s flesh with meaning. As a result, science cannot define feeling without also taking consciousness — what the feeling is about — into account. “Let not this view be called materialistic,” James warns his reader. “Our emotions must always be inwardly what they are, whatever be the physiologi-cal ground of their apparition. If they are deep, pure, spiritual facts they remain no less deep, pure, spiritual, and worthy of regard on this present sensation theory. They carry their own inner measure of worth with them.”