Wojciech Kaftanski: Kierkegaard, Mimesis, and Modernity

Kierkegaard, Mimesis, and Modernity: A Study of Imitation, Existence, and Affect Book Cover Kierkegaard, Mimesis, and Modernity: A Study of Imitation, Existence, and Affect
Routledge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Philosophy
Wojciech Kaftanski
Routledge
2021
Hardback £120.00
264

Reviewed by:  Steven DeLay (Research Fellow, Global Centre for Advanced Studies)

The concept of mimesis has a rich, complicated career in the history of aesthetics, philosophy, and theology. Plato and Aristotle both make much of it. Later, Lessing, Kant, and the Romantics draw heavily upon it as well. More recently, so too have René Girard and Heidegger. The term’s power to compel widespread attention is due in part to its fascinating ambivalence. As the existentialists noted famously, imitation (a core notion at the heart of mimesis) can be pernicious, “a mysterious force animating masses of people to uncoordinated collective common action,” a source of “dissolution of differences leading to normative uniformity,” a “spontaneous reflexive process” responsible for “marginalizing the value of human individuality, the meaning of subjective experience, and the role of passion and faith” (1). At the same time, imitation is fundamental to the artistic representation of beauty, the creative and ethical tasks of grappling with ideality, and, of course, the theological notion of imitatio Christi. In the human search for meaning, mimesis is thus both fundamental and inescapable. And to be sure, modernity’s “way of thinking about […] the role of authority and institutions in humanity’s orientation in the world” (2), entails a reconceptualization of mimesis itself, and how in turn it shapes the distinctly modern pursuit of an authentic human existence. According to Wojciech Kaftanski’s study Kierkegaard, Mimesis, and Modernity, it is Søren Kierkegaard who “offer[s] us one of the most comprehensive and profound accounts of modernity” (1). “What, then,” Kaftanski naturally asks, “are we to make of Kierkegaard’s understanding and use of mimesis?” (7).

Mimesis can be variously defined, as Kaftanski observes. It can designate “emulation, mimicry, dissimulation, doubling, theatricality, realism, identification, correspondence, depiction, verisimilitude, resemblance” (7). In the classical world, it typically denoted “faithful imitation of a model” (7). In the modern context, it is has come to be associated with creativity, “as originality, genius, individuality, imagination” (7). It is thus “ambivalent, inconspicuous, and in many ways blurry” (7). For as Kaftanski notes, mimesis also admits of a “pharmacological” meaning—it is “both a problem and a cure for the maladies of the modern individual” (7). Realizing it is futile to give the term any single concrete and exhaustive definition, it is better to approach the term by treating its cluster of concepts along the lines of Wittgenstein’s theory of family resemblance.

This polyvalence of mimesis is apparent in Kierkegaard’s own handling of the term. Contrary, then, to what one might initially expect from a study of Kierkegaard, Kaftanski’s interest in the term extends beyond “simply imitation, or the imitation of Christ” (7). As he notes, Danish does not provide “a direct translation of the Greek mimesis into a noun” (9). The key term is Efterfølgelse (which can be literally translated into English as “following after”), a translation of the Latin term imitatio, itself the translation of mimesis (9). But Kierkegaard’s linguistic repertoire for mimesis is expansive and multi-layered, an “impressive and far wider” vocabulary than has been acknowledged (9). As Kaftanski says,

Kierkegaard uses a variety of terms to refer to the broad mimetic sphere in his corpus, such as Gjentagelsen (repetition), Ligne (likeness, and to liken, to resemble), Lighed (similarity and equality), Sammengligning (comparison), Eftergjøre (going and doing after), Efterabelse (aping or parroting), mimisk (mimic or mimical), but also Fordoblelse (redoubling), Reduplikation (reduplication), Dobbelt-Reflexion (double-reflection), Dobbelthed (doubleness or duplexity), Dobbelt-Bevoegelse (double-movement), Billede (image or picture), and Forbillede (prototype, model, tyfpe, pattern) (9).

In addition to the linguistic complexity of the phenomenon, there is the further fact that mimesis also reflects the multifaceted aesthetic, scholastic, economic, political, social, and religious context in which Kierkegaard was living and writing. Human beings orient themselves in place. And in the modern period, the city is central to that place. As Kaftanski says, the reinvention of Kierkegaard’s own Copenhagen was itself undertaken in mimetic fashion, by architecturally and culturally emulating Belin, Paris, and London (3). According to Kaftanski, the becoming of the modern city is a “macro-representation of the becoming of the individual […] the city and its inhabitants mirror one another” (4). How so? Part of it is that “mimesis entails both retaining the old and assimilating the new” (4). Copenhagen accordingly transformed itself into something new by reworking its past. But such reworking was not so banal, but in many ways radical. At the time, nineteenth-century Copenhagen was a city indelibly shaped by the formation of mass society, as well as class struggle. Consequently, a tendency emerged among its lower-classes to attempt to “imitate and appropriate” the standards, values, and tastes of the bourgeoisie (6). However, dissatisfied with their economic and political conditions, “an age of revolution” (2) quickly swept across Europe beginning in France and Germany, eventually finding its way to Copenhagen too. This “revolutionary mass action” exhibited a “mimetic-affective crowd behavior” (6)—a force of “mimetic magnetism, fascination, somnambulism, scapegoating, and violence” (12), which Kierkegaard himself was keen to resist, and led him to coin the pejorative terms “the public” and “the crowd.” Thus, as a modern critic of modernity, Kierkegaard’s account of becoming a single individual was deeply responsive to the interlocking mimetic structures of his economic, social, political, and religious milieu. Assuming a countercultural role resembling his philosophical hero Socrates, in this way the “gadfly of Copenhagen” was born.

As Kaftanski explains, Kierkegaard’s literary output reconceptualizes mimesis by creatively appropriating a variety of both classical and modern sources. At stake in doing so, is a conception of mimesis that shifts from “the ideal of representation characterizing pre-modern and the early modern” to an understanding that sees “humans as radically imitative creatures” (5). Mimesis, in short, is not simply an aesthetic phenomenon pertaining to the realm of artistic representation, but a fundamental feature of human existence as such. As Kaftanski says, “Representation is among the three fundamental meanings of mimesis conceptualized in classical Greece. The other two are ‘imitation’ and ‘expression’” (15). On such a view, mimesis is a process of “making present,” one guided by the goal of achieving “similarity and truth”—an artwork sets its vision on replicating “morally desirable objects,” aiming to reproduce something guided by “normativity and correspondence, form and mode” (15).

But whereas for classical art mimesis is “about representing some original, hence producing copies” (19), modern artists sought instead to create “new originals” (19). For the moderns, art should not merely seek to copy reality, but instead express something original or novel. Art, so the thought goes, “should not serve any other purpose but itself” (20). Here Lessing’s influential theory of aesthetics proves illustrative. “Lessing,” says Kaftanski, “asserts that the goal of art is to display beauty; hence, art is irreconcilable with suffering. Second, aesthetics is its own goal; it does not serve other ends” (21). Indeed, according to Lessing, art and religion have their distinct and largely “irreconcilable territories” (20). As is well-known, the Romantics consequently “tended to consecrate art as a religion” (19). Kierkegaard seizes on Lessing’s view, turning it to his own purposes. For according to Kierkegaard, if art and religion are in some way incompatible, this underscores the essential fact that art is said to be unable to express the religious dimension of suffering (15) which so interests Kierkegaard. Religious suffering, as Kaftanski says, is something Kierkegaard sometimes appears to maintain cannot be represented in the arts (20). If the goal of art is depicting beauty, then the ugliness and horror of the crucified Christ eludes its power of portrayal. For Kierkegaard, that art is unable to capture the inner truth of religious suffering in turn suggests that the religious life is itself irreducible to, and indeed higher than, the aesthetic life. For whereas a strictly aesthetic existence remains characterized by “human indecisiveness and a sensuous and disinterested attitude toward the world” (16), religious striving concerns “the pursuit of […] absolute fulfillment that the world cannot provide” (17), a “becoming an individual before God” (17). If art is undertaken simply for its own sake, it would appear to be irrelevant to the kind of authentic human existence Kierkegaard is so interested in expressing.

And yet, as Kaftanski notes, some of Kierkegaard’s own writings indicate a more ambivalent relationship to the value and function of both art and aesthetics. This becomes apparent when one considers the concept of ekphrasis important to Lessing himself—as Kaftanski says, “Ekphrasis is at work when a physical object of art, such as a painting or a sculpture, gets its written account” (21). Because ekphrasis uniquely “engages the subjectivity of the recipient” (21), it has the power to transform the viewer in ways that have implications for religious transformation. Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author Anti-Climacus says as much. “The synergy of word and image,” Kaftanski writes, “can be seen in cases where Anti-Climacus refers to the activity of telling a picture, or describing what is represented in the picture, hence following the classical definition of ekphrasis, of re-presenting in words what already has a visual representation” (24). “Anti-Climacus,” says Kaftanski, “believes that if one can ‘be’ moved by the image of the suffering Christ to the imitation of His sufferings into one’s life, then one is becoming a genuine Christian” (25). In short, the experience of viewing the picture has an existential and mimetic dimension (27). Although, then, for Lessing, “the guiding task of aesthetics is to represent what is beautiful and harmonious, ‘the image of the crucified Christ’ is ugly and represents violence and chaos” (27), in Kierkegaard, because an artwork is not reserved to one particular medium, but instead consists of various media, it is possible to create a “spoken picture or, one could argue, a visualized narrative” (27). Such a work could in principle serve a mimetic function, by in effect calling the viewer to change.

Kierkegaard, thus, is neither a classical nor a full-fledged modern thinker (40), as his idiosyncratic view of the relationship between art and religion attests. For one thing, Kierkegaard is deeply suspicious of the modern ideal of human autonomy. Whereas the Enlightenment was wholly critical of classical mimesis, which it viewed as incompatible with the values of originality and creativity, Kierkegaard finds certain aspects of the modern conception of mimesis objectionable. For Kierkegaard, the modern ideal of an anti-mimetic, self-sufficient existence is a myth to be rejected (28). And yet, although the Enlightenment ideal of self-sufficiency is primarily hostile to mimesis, Kaftanski notes that it is actually Kant who in a way formulates a number of mimetic concepts that are relevant to Kierkegaard’s own attempt to work out a mimetic account of human existence. For Kant, the open-endedness of artistic production entails that aesthetics becomes a “judgment of taste” (30). Central to aesthetic production and valuation are four concepts of imitation: “copying [Nachmachung], aping [Nachäffung], imitation [Nachahmung], and emulation or following [Nachfolge]” (30). For Kant (and the Romantics too) who “cherished the ideal of mimesis understood as originality and criticized forms of art that aim to represent reality and hence were related to a pre-given existing model” (37), this modern criticism of classical mimesis led to the rejection of the mimesis-imitation of an artist to the elevation of the creativity of a genius (32). If for Kant, “genius cannot be taught and learned” (129), previous works of great art serve as exemplars “not for imitation” but “for emulation”—in encountering such a work, “another genius is thereby awakened to the feeling of his own originality, to exercise freedom from coercion in his art in such a way that the latter thereby itself acquires a new rule, by which the talent shows itself as exemplary” (127). Kierkegaard follows the Romantics in valuing originality over realistic representation of a model, but he “maintains that the Christian existential creation is in fact in relation to a model […] the model is transcendent” (37)—namely, Christ the prototype. Romantic anthropology, which takes autonomous agency to mark the human essentially, fails to provide the conceptual resources necessary to depict “the representational dimension of Kierkegaard’s own presentation of the ideal self” (33). As Kaftanski explains, “the aesthetic-religious puzzle of the representation of the suffering of the crucified Christ” (39) in turn leads Kierkegaard to formulate philosophical and literary works whose mimetic idioms seek to present an adequate picture of ideal Christian existence.

To do so, Kierkegaard begins by taking up existence in its “time-oriented and concrete, but also mundane, ordinary, and recurrent” everydayness (44). It is here that a pair of key Kierkegaardian notions, repetition and recollection, enter the picture. “Repetition—this is actuality and earnestness of existence,” says Kierkegaard (50). Repetition’s experiential task is to “recognize continuity in time” (45). In thinking about the drudgery of modern factory work and life, for instance, it is easy to understand how the banality of such an existence could lead to despair. One way it might do so is by leading those crushed beneath the weight of existence’s apparent absurdity and emptiness into substituting reality for a realm of ideality, of imagination. This is what happens in the aesthetic life, as Kierkegaard understands it. In this “hyper-reflective existence fueled by and lived in imagination” (51), there is a “lack of commitment to one’s life possibilities” (51). For the aesthete, “life splits up into a boundless multiplicity [held] within the sphere of reflection” (61). “Devoid of the ethical component,” the aesthete’s reflective “system” is not a life-view (61). The danger of imaginary dispersion in hyper-reflection is manifestly apparent in the theatrical. When producing or viewing a performance in the theater, one “entertain[s] a number of self-representations, which [Kierkegaard] calls ‘possible variations’” (52). The trouble is that, by doing so, one fails to actually be oneself, and instead loses oneself in imaginary characters and situations that have no real bearing on one’s real life. “This mimetic mirroring of the theater,” says Kaftanski, “constitutes a type of a private laboratory where one can fragment oneself” (52). Suffice it to say, if the dangers of idle escapism attending aesthetic enjoyment and diversion were already pressing with nineteenth-century forms of entertainment such as the theater and the newspaper, today that is only more so the case, given the advent of television, film, and the Internet.

According to Kierkegaard, however, the aesthete’s fragmentary response to existence is not the only possible form a response to the spectacles of the modern milieu may take. The key to appreciating the alternative Kierkegaard envisions lies in the concept of mimesis itself, which, according to Kaftanski, Kierkegaard himself sees “as embodied and performative” (44). Repetition as a mimetic concept entails “movement, imagination, and time” (45). And if this mimetic process is put in the service of a model truly worthy of imitation (60), then instead of remaining trapped in an imaginary world of ideality, ethical transformation and religious awakening is achievable.

If “life emulates art,” such emulation should “contribute to the becoming of a self in actual existence” (72). Here Kierkegaard exploits the mimetic power of texts themselves. For according to Kaftanski, Kierkegaard’s notion of repetition is a forerunner of Ricoeur’s refiguration. “The textual extension of real life,” says Kaftanski, “becomes mimetically re-appropriated back into real life and, essentially, becomes a part of it” (73). In a word, “the self emerges from the text. In effect, the text contributes to the creation of the self” (74). It is possible to actualize the ideality contained in a text. In this way, a text can function as a mirror of one’s existence, as a basis through which to pattern one’s own life. This becomes particularly salient in cases in which a text serves as a form of self-examination, not for any reader only, but especially for the author himself. Like Rousseau, whose Confessions were meant to be an exercise in self-judgment, so too Kierkegaard’s own partly autobiographical texts become an occasion for narrative self-examination (78). As Kaftanski says, “Kierkegaard’s autobiographical narratives participate in a formative process of the self—hence, the formation of the self—through a continuous and repetitive procedure of self-recognition, self-interpretation, self-understanding, and self-creation” (78). Writing becomes an extension of life, by enacting a process of “life-development,” through which Kierkegaard reworks himself “in and through his own literary production” (81). Rather than remaining a merely aesthetic pursuit, literary and philosophical production perform an ethical, even religious, function. “Autobiography,” so Kaftanski concludes, “is a peculiar mirror that allows the author to see oneself as another, to correct oneself, and, paradoxically, to correct the mirror” (82).

Central to this mimetic interplay between text and life is what Kierkegaard calls a “psychologiske Experiment” (82). The author invents various characters (which may or may not be versions of one’s actual self) that in turn serve as a source of ethical and religious self-assessment. Far from aesthetic production serving as an escape from reality, it can thus serve as a means of perfecting it, by cultivating an “authentic existence” (82). It does so by individuating the author (and its other readers) from the pernicious influence of social contagion and conformism. Due to the sociality of mimetic desire, “herd behaviors in humans include panic and rioting” (83), as such mimesis involves “affective and visceral mood-sharing” (84). While Plato’s conception of mimesis was focused on representing objects, and Aristotle’s at representing action (88), Kierkegaard’s coordination of action and fiction is not then simply about realistic representation, but demands an authentic existence—providing “templates of existence” (90), the resulting literary figurations are designed to be taken as existential prescriptions (90). Kierkegaard recognizes that stories needn’t be mere fictions, for poetic depictions of life can serve to perfect human life and transform it (89). By means of the text, mimesis effects a transition from literary representation to representation in action in real life. Informing us “about the world as it is and as it could be, or even sometimes as it should be” (90), they are not “simply fantasy or, for that matter, corrective mirrors” (91). They issue “blueprints” for existence, prescriptions for selfhood (91). These literary “experiments” (91) are exercises in life itself, for “writing and reading is a process of self-understanding, encapsulating oneself, and self-formation that is stretched between two worlds: the actual and the fictive” (91).

In Kierkegaard’s own case, the highest “poetic possibility of himself” (92) is to be a genuine Christian. At stake in his literary production is expressing a self-ideal of himself (“Kierkegaard the martyr”) and hence a “picture of the ideal Christian” (91). Thus, as Kaftanski notes, “Following Ricoeur’s mimetic arc, we can understand Kierkegaard’s ‘real’ life as dependent upon, or mediated through, a textual representation of himself” (91), and it is this tension between poetic and actual existence and the issue of translating a prescribed ideal of life into reality, that constitutes “the conundrum running through his authorship” (92).

How, then, can an “imaginary construction”[1] (94) assist the process of becoming a single individual, an authentic human before God? It is necessary to reduplicate, through action, the ideality embodied by Christ. Whereas the aesthete is one for whom his “life has no history, no unity, and no continuity to it,” the life of genuine faith “has a beginning, is organized around a unifying idea or a goal, and has a telos” (93). In reading Kierkegaard’s portrayal of such a life, one is called to undertake the task of becoming an individual, a form of existence itself “represented in descriptions of the imaginary characters’ wrestling with suffering, love, death, finitude, freedom, and time—but also with God, despair, and sin” (95). If the ideal expressed in the text is ever to be truly understood, it must be appropriated by a reduplication in the actual existence of the reader. When it comes to faith, this reduplication requires a far more earnest and serious effort than what in Kierkegaard’s Copenhagen was taken to suffice. As Kierkegaard says,

No, Christ has not appointed assistant-professors—but imitators or followers. When Christianity (precisely because it is not a doctrine) does not reduplicate itself in the one who presents it, he does not present Christianity; for Christianity is an existential-communication and can only be presented—by existing. Basically, to exist therein, to express it in one’s existence etc.—this is what it means to reduplicate (99).

Imitation, we see, is an experiential imperative for Kierkegaard’s account of the development of a life-view. As Kaftanski notes, a cluster of concepts—Eftergjøre, Efterligne, Lighed, and Ligne—are operative in the Dane’s account of existential redoubling and reduplication (113). “Eftergjøre,” Kaftanski explains, “refers primarily to a sophisticated human capacity for imitation that is has mostly secular application” (114). When, then, writing of the ideal of “Being like Christ, or resembling Him” (115), Kierkegaard sometimes uses the term Ligne, which, like Efterfølgelse (“following after”), is to be contrasted with Eftergiore and Efterligne, meaning “to counterfeit, to mimic” (118). He chooses Efterfølgelse to account for this task. While Kierkegaard frequently contrasts Efterfølgelse with Efterabelse (“mimicking” “aping”), towards the end of his literary production he attributes pejorative connotations to Eftergjøre and Efterligne. In any case, the point for Kierkegaard is that the individual ought to find a way to incorporate the ideality of authenticity into actuality. For in doing so, the authentic human being, which Kierkegaard names “the single individual” (122), transcends mundane “social expectations” (120), and, overcoming the tug of conformism and mediocrity characterized by a kind of “levelling” rooted in a pernicious perfectibility entailing a “certain plasticity, malleability, or moldability of human nature” (121), instead emulates the image of Christ genuinely, in what Kaftanski terms Kierkegaard’s “existential mimesis” (123). Here again, Kaftanski finds it fruitful to turn to Kant. Kant notes four types of imitation in the Critique of the Power of Judgment—“Nachäffung, Nachmachung, Nachahmung, and Nachfolge” (125).

The first word has been translated into English as ‘aping’ or ‘parroting’; Nachmachung has been translated as ‘copying;’ ‘imitation’ is the usual translation of Nachahmung; Nachfolge has been translated as ‘emulating,’ ‘following,’ but also as ‘succeeding’ (125-26).

Reworking Kant’s own conception of “exemplary originality” (127), Kierkegaard articulates a form of existential emulation whose ideal entails an “interpretive duty [with] an individual and subjective character, in contrast to imitation that follows a preset standardizing pattern that can be adhered to on a mass scale” (130). Whereas patterning oneself on societal everydayness “produces in individuals the feelings of estrangement and alienation, who then seek the remedy to these negative feelings in mimetic collective behavior” (130), Kierkegaard’s imitatio Christi is meant to produce an integrated, authentic individuality. In doing so, such existential mimesis “does not place the imitator in an elevated position based on their functions and education, as it is in Plato and Aristotle, nor based on their extraordinary skills or moral merits, as in Kant” (130). Rather, Kierkegaard’s existential mimesis is an egalitarian project (130), for everyone is able, if he is so willing, to follow after the pattern of Christ.

Of course, this is not to say that doing so is easy. As Kierkegaard himself notes repeatedly, many people fail to do so successfully. What particularly interests Kaftanski is the complex mimetic imagery Kierkegaard develops in the course of developing an account of how this process of becoming a single individual is supposed to work itself out in actual existence. As Kaftanski says, “Kierkegaard’s Forbillede denotes that which represents an idealized and hence ‘prototypical’ quality of someone or something. The Danish Forbillede, also translated into English as ‘pattern,’ comes from Billede, which stands for ‘image’” (133). These terms are roughly Danish equivalents to the classical notions of “figura and exemplum” (133). “Forbillede,” says Kaftanski, “the prototype—plays an important role in Kierkegaard’s Efterfølgelse—imitation” (133). At stake is a “movement from the ideal to the actual” (134), a “creation in reference to a model” (133) that captures for Kierkegaard what it “means to be and become a genuine Christian” (134). Because “figura denotes something material and visual, but also formal and structural” (135), not only does such a figure “already embody and determine modes of interpretation, appropriation, and representation” (135), it sets “an ideal that an individual should internalize” (137). It is an ideal that many fail to ever internalize—negative models, for Kierkegaard, include “pastors, assistant professors, journalists” (137). But there are examples of those who do accomplish it (or come close)—Abraham, Job, the sinful woman, even the lilies and the birds! Job, for instance, represents the “ideality” (151) of the biblical criterion for being human as a single individual—for in the “existential redoubling” (152) by which Job enacts the ideal of faithfulness to God, by “actually relating himself to the ideal” (153), he finds himself persecuted by all of those he knows, including his friends. Job becomes an offense. Unlike the hero who achieves the admiration of others, Job is scorned and hated. As Kaftanski recounts, “What follows is the public condemnation of Job, disapproval of his person, mockery, insults, and ostracism. This social phenomenon of universal punishment represents ‘the scapegoat mechanism,’ and Job is the scapegoat” (144); “The friends contribute to the suffering he experiences. Instead of soothing his pain, they condemn him and amplify his misery” (147). Depicting the suffering of Job, Kierkegaard expresses his own ideal of Christian martyrdom, of the idea that to be a true Christian is to suffer. Recollecting the life of Job in literary form in turn serves as an injunction to reduplicate that same suffering in one’s own life. As Kierkegaard says, “My entire work as an author has also been my own development” (141).

But as Kaftanski notes, if “Forbillede designates a perfected or ideal representation of someone or something” (150), for Kierkegaard, existential reduplication in the case of ideal Christianity is impossible. The Christian is always “a being in becoming” (155). This means that the typical view of Kierkegaard, which interprets him as straightforwardly recommending the imitation of Christ as prototype for human existence, must be modified. Kaftanski, rather audaciously, claims that, for Kierkegaard, “Christ as the prototype is not sufficient with respect to guiding would-be Christians to successfully imitating Him” (154). This is so, says Kaftanski, because according to Kierkegaard, “[Christ] is not a human being as we are” (157), but is rather “a God-man” (158). Paradoxically, then, Kierkegaard’s “ideal picture of being a Christian” (158) requires acknowledging that Christ himself is not a Christian. “Jesus Christ,” says Kierkegaard, “it is true, is himself the prototype, and will continue to be that, unchanged, until the end. But Christ is also much more than the prototype; he is the object of faith” (156).[2] In depicting the ideal picture of being a Christian, Kierkegaard intends to show others, particularly his complacent fellow Danes, that exposing “themselves to the mirror of the Word” (162) involves “perpetual self-accusation” (161).

Consequently, “an authentic Christian existence, which demands from Christians not admiration but imitation” of Christ (179), must navigate the reality of human frailty. This means, first, recognizing the pitfalls of admiration itself. As Kaftanski observes, “admiration is collective and contagious” (179), “is not powerful enough to motivate us to do the good” (182), and “is suspiciously like an evasion” (182). As an affective phenomenon, admiration is subject to “magnetism” and “prestige” (185), the “power of opinion” (186), a morass of “shared feelings, emotions, passions, and affects” (186), which, typified by the “readership of a newspaper” (188) only forms a contemptible “collective identity” (189) that stunts the individual’s becoming. That alone would be bad enough! Yet admiration, which lies at the root of social conformism, is also prone to violence and irrational upheaval. Here Kaftanski exploits the insights of Girard. For if, as Kierkegaard would say, “the public is a phantom” (192), this is because the “deindividualization created by mass media and public opinion” (193) is susceptible to dynamics of “social pressure, human collectivity, and affective contagion” (204) which for Girard culminates in violence and scapegoating. This is powerfully apparent in the horrific death of Christ himself, who the crowd turns upon. The Messiah, who was initially hailed as a King upon entering Jerusalem, is shortly thereafter handed over to the Romans in lieu of Barabbas—“crucify him!” As Kaftanski says, “The quickness and the spontaneity of this altering reaction of the crowd suggests a kind of affective independence of that swing of valences on the pendulum of affectivity” (196).

Given the fraught nature of such mimetic behavior, there is an admitted oddity in “Presenting mimesis as a remedy to the problems caused by mimesis” (215). But this is precisely what Kierkegaard’s account of existential mimesis aims to do. The important difference between good and bad mimesis, Kaftanski notes, lies in the “non-comparing” and “nonimitative” nature of the former. Here, “indirect prototypes” can be useful—as Kaftanski observes, “one can become a Christian by living as the lily and the bird live” (222). Such “icons” or “middle terms” are necessary in the process of becoming an authentic self, argues Kaftanski. For again, if “Christ is a God-man,” and thus “not a Christian” (227),[3] this means that the ideal of being like Christ is one for which we will always fall short. In some sense, emulating Christ entails being left to one’s own self—“In walking alone, one is deprived of the direct resource of the visible model” (229). I should note that, although Kierkegaard was highly critical of what he perceived to be the superficiality, insincerity, and hypocrisy of the Danish Lutheran Church, his attack on Christendom often remained largely beholden to the theological dogma inherited from Augustine and Luther. Kierkegaard for much of his career, like Luther, labors under the idea that human depravity essentially prevents one from ever measuring up adequately to the ideal of authentic Christian existence. In effect, one is never truly a Christian, because being a Christian involves a kind of perpetual incompletion, or, better, imperfection. However, it should be noted that, in his very last journal entries, Kierkegaard at times expresses discontent with this Augustinian and Lutheran conception of human depravity and weakness. Such an anthropology, Kierkegaard notes, unintentionally leads to the same mere admiration of Christ he criticized so adamantly, for it eliminates the sort of “primitivity” Kierkegaard comes to view as essential to New Testament Christianity. This is all to say that some of Kierkegaard’s more pessimistic remarks concerning the supposed impossibility of ever emulating Christ genuinely should perhaps be tempered by his own later comments on the subject—remarks which, abandoning Lutheran orthodoxy, underscore the legitimate possibility of emulation. Such a view, as it happens, would be more in line with a strand of optimism apparent in the New Testament itself, which frequently mentions the possibility of obeying God, insofar as God’s commandments are not burdensome and provide joy, peace, and rest.

Having traced the various shades of mimesis, their pertinence to modernity, and their relevance for the project of human authenticity, Kaftanski at the work’s conclusion can rightly conclude that, “Just as Kierkegaard is not perceived as an important theoretician or critic of mimesis, so Kierkegaardians do not seem to find mimesis to be of much importance to Kierkegaard’s thought and authorship” (238). Kaftanski’s book corrects both these errors by convincingly (and engrossingly!) reconstructing Kierkegaard as a thinker “contributing to the modern shift in appraising mimesis from artistic representation based on the ideals of similarity to mimesis as a human condition underpinning the individual and social aspects of human existence” (239).

Needless to say, philosophers of religion, readers of Kierkegaard, and scholars of post-Kantian European philosophy more generally, will benefit from Kaftanski’s text immensely. Everyone knows that reading somehow changes us. Kaftanski in effect provides us with a powerful account of how exactly the art of reading does so, by shaping and transforming the individual who authentically encounters a text. Of course, no work is flawless. Others will object to some of the things Kaftanski says. At this stage of the review, it would be customary to list the potential objections. Instead, however, I should like to emphasize that Kaftanski’s work is an important contribution to an influential body of works that has taken up the issues of authenticity and identity in modernity—to wit, Charles Larmore’s The Practices of the Self, Stephen Mulhall’s Inheritance and Originality, Claude Romano’s Être soi-même, and Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self. While reading this text, one’s mind frequently will inevitably turn to Heidegger, a figure who looms large in such a context. Fitting, then, that Kierkegaard, Mimesis, and Modernity’s very last line should mention Heidegger by name. The concluding reference to Heidegger proves timely. It is no small thing that, by the work’s end, Kaftanski has shown how it is Kierkegaard, not Heidegger, from whom we have the most to gain when reflecting upon what it means to live an authentic human existence. As for the significance of Kaftanski’s own text’s contribution to that task, it bears returning to an earlier moment in the text, in which Kaftanski examines Kierkegaard’s remarks from a book review of the nineteenth-century Danish novelist Thomasine Gyllembourg-Ehrensvard. In his review, Kierkegaard is very complimentary of her work for many reasons. As Kaftanski says, chief among them is the fact that Kierkegaard found writing the review of Gyllembourg-Ehrensvard’s book to not only serve as an exercise in recollecting what the book contained. More importantly, Kierkegaard found himself “changed in the repetition” (57) of writing it. I have had a similar experience in writing this review. Having thought about what Kierkegaard, Mimesis, and Modernity gives to think in the course of writing this review of it, I have been reminded of what an extraordinary gift existence is, and how invigorating it is to feel the possibility of being able to continue the task of actualizing the ideal of becoming a single individual through Christ. No doubt other readers will have the same experience. For, more than just a theoretical meditation on existential mimesis, Kaftanski’s account is a call to it.


[1] The clear resonance between Kierkegaard’s notions of “imaginary construction” and “psychological experiments” and Husserl’s phenomenological technique of eidetic variation is not coincidental. As Shestov reported, Husserl once confided to him that a secret inspiration for his phenomenological method was Kierkegaard.

[2] According to Kierkegaard, in the New Testament, Christ is represented strictly in the mode of being, rather than becoming. For this reason, any strict emulation of Christ is rendered impossible for us, since as mere human beings we find ourselves in a contrasting process of incessant becoming. Without at all meaning to suggest that Kierkegaard is wrong for emphasizing the uniqueness of Christ as the God-man, I do think it is worth noting that there are apparent traces of Christ’s own process of becoming in the Gospels, a becoming that accentuates the humanity of Christ. For example: “And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man” (Luke 2:52).

[3] Interestingly, Nietzsche says exactly the opposite: “There has only been one Christian, and he died on the Cross,” The Anti-Christ, §39.

Jussi Saarinen: Affect in Artistic Creativity: Painting to Feel, Routledge, 2020

Affect in Artistic Creativity: Painting to Feel Book Cover Affect in Artistic Creativity: Painting to Feel
Jussi Saarinen
Routledge
2020
Paperback £23.99
176

Natalie Depraz, Anthony J. Steinbock (Eds.): Surprise: An Emotion?

Surprise: An Emotion? Book Cover Surprise: An Emotion?
Contributions To Phenomenology, Vol. 97
Natalie Depraz, Anthony J. Steinbock (Eds.)
Springer
2018
Hardback 88,39 €
X, 189

Reviewed by: Andrew Bevan (Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University, London)

What is it to define an emotion? Or to categorise an experience as an emotion? This is the aim of this collection of essays, the result of a conference of 2013 with the same name that discussed ‘surprise’ and attempted to categorise it as emotion, feeling, affect or otherwise. The editors identify two main theoretical frameworks with which to approach the question: psychology and philosophy. They argue that, whereas psychology treats surprise as a primary emotion, philosophy relates surprise to passions which are then opposed to reason. With this split in place, they seek to question these frameworks: is surprise not also cognitive? Is it not embedded in language? And how is it to be related to personhood and the interpersonal and moral emotions? Already we see that the exercise of defining an experience as an emotion takes place within the traditional binaries of philosophical psychology: passion/reason, emotion/cognition, etc. Yet throughout this volume, perhaps the most surprising aspect of surprise is just how inadequate these traditional categories are and how the phenomenon under discussion will exceed and trouble these traditional binaries.

One immediate difficulty the volume is faced with is what to call that which is to be defined or categorized: what is this realm of undefined or uncategorised? What most general word can refer to it: ‘surprise’? At some level, all authors can speak to this uncategorised experience called ‘surprise’; there is some binding of word and experience such that all authors can write on its vagaries and varieties. Yet how is this to be disambiguated from similar terms like wonder, startle, glance, etc. as well as the translation of these terms from other languages, most notably that of wonder (thaumaston) which, as Plato argued in Theaetetus, ‘is the only beginning of philosophy’ (155d). This is the very problem the volume engages with and thus, in so doing can be read as continuing this long tradition of surprise as the beginning of philosophy.

Three main themes occur in all the authors’ discussions. The most commonly invoked criteria for surprise that all authors mention in some form or another is the frustration of expectations. For example, Steinbock delineates surprise not only as ‘an experience of unexpected givenness’ but as ‘the accommodation of us to the situation by being the acceptance of what I cannot accept’ (10). These expectations can be implicit or explicit and not merely cognitive: they are discussed through concepts like habit or bodily adaptation to an environment. It is then in the frustration of expectations, or the difference between expectation and actuality, that surprise arises. Authors use many concepts to characterise these expectations (dispositions, integrations, entanglements and habit) and their frustration (startle, rupture, punctuation, anxiety, novelty and reconfigurations).  But there is also room for concepts that convey a lack of surprise when expectations meet actuality (affinity, affordance).

The second commonality is the question of temporality: while most agree surprise involves a spontaneous, sudden, ‘rupture’ this is merely the first part of a temporal dynamic. Desmidt, for example argues ‘surprise is the structure of the temporal dynamic of emotional emergence’ (62).

The third point of agreement between most authors is that surprise is ambiguously valenced: surprise can be positive or negative and so appears to transcend any simple division into positive/negative valence.

But, whereas the authors tend to agree on these three main points, there is then much divergence in their characterisation of surprise. The main problem in comparing positions to agree any consensus and the possibility of answering the question of the volume is that the difference between the authors’ positions in part stems from different understandings of the terms being used to categorize ‘surprise’. For instance, if surprise is to be an emotion, there is little discussion or agreement of what an emotion is, nor its difference or identity to affect, passion, feeling etc. is. Some treat affect and emotion as synonymous, others as strictly different but few reflect on what they might mean nor what categorising surprise as one or the other would entail.

The authors who give most attention to this question are the two editors of the volume, Steinbock and Depraz and both invoke Kant to define emotions. Steinbock foregrounds Kant’s use of temporality to differentiate affect and passion: affect is sudden and rash in contrast to the duration of passions (12-13).  Steinbock then, despite the suddenness of surprise, argues surprise is part of a process of much longer duration. But he concludes not that surprise is a passion but that surprise ‘belongs to the sphere of emotions (and is not a mere affect)’ (13). Steinbock thus seems to equate passion with emotion. Furthermore, whereas affects are ‘feeling-states and pertain to who we are as psychophysical beings, where we would find experiences like pleasure or pain, being ill at ease, tickling and arousal,’ emotions – such as ‘regret, remorse, fear, longing and surprise’ (14-15) – are emotions because ‘they can occur without any essential relation to personal ‘otherness’ in that experience’. But ‘genuine’ emotions are those which ‘presuppose an “order” or even “disorder” of the heart – to use a phrase from Pascal – and are lived in some way toward some other as bearer of value in a ‘creative’ or personal manner’ (15). Here we see that the divisions of psycho-physical to ‘personhood’ are played out to differentiate affect from emotion.

Meanwhile, Depraz argues that in psychology, surprise is treated as an emotion. She again cites Kant but, unlike Steinbock, identifies emotion with affect (‘emotion, here as Affekt’, 26). This identification of emotion with the German Affekt has a psychological precedence perhaps beginning with William James in his Principles of Psychology. For Depraz, surprise ‘is not an emotion in the sense of a basic feeling like fear, anger, disgust, jor or sadness.’ Her main argument is that ‘surprise involves an emotional and cognitive component but results in a more encompassing and integrative circular (time, bodily, expressive-descriptive) phenomena’ (39). Depraz then invokes the concept of valence to undermine the idea that surprise is an emotion: valence characterizes more precisely the ‘affective dynamic of the surprise rather than emotion as such, which always remains a partial and static state’ (40). Although surprise is linked to emotional valence when associated with these emotions, it may also appear as ‘a neutral, mixed or epistemic emotion, i.e. as a violated expectation that affects both action and cognitive processing.’ (39).

Other authors tend to reflect less on the problem, focusing their attention purely on emotion (Desmidt, Brizard) or tending to identify emotion with affect (Livet mentions ‘affective attitudes’ (109), ‘affects or affective bursts (111), ‘emotional or affective attitude’ (112)). Although Brizard does state that startle, that can be used to assess emotional reactivity which can be ‘modulated by affective states’ (78). Sheets-Johnstone in insisting the body is not ahistorical or living, speaks of ‘affective dynamics that move through bodies and move them to move’ (83). Yet, quoting Jung, she seems to elide any difference between affect and emotion (85).  Emotions/affects are then qualitatively different: they have their own ‘distinctive qualitative kinetic dynamics’ (85).

At least three different approaches can be identified then: affect equals emotions; emotion is a type of affect; or affects and emotions are different. A fourth approach, however, is to avoid the whole problem by mentioning neither affect nor emotion – such is Casey’s singular approach: he instead likens surprise to glance, something that is perhaps less contentious and more familiar.

This difference in understanding and use of terms then makes the guiding question ‘Surprise: An Emotion?’ difficult to answer: it of course depends on what an emotion is. So when Steinbock argues surprise is an emotion, and Depraz that it is not, they are working with slightly different understandings of what emotion is. For Depraz, emotion is an affect, for Steinbock it is not. Yet both agree that the aspect that differentiates surprise as one or the other is temporality: surprise is not sudden but part of a more involved process.

Perhaps some attention to the terms being used (affect, passion, feeling, emotion) might yield a more productive discussion. The terms affect and passion in particular have a long and rich philosophical heritage and perhaps most significantly enter the philosophical discourse through its use by Cicero, Augustine and others to translate the Greek pathos. Now, whilst passiones is a transliteration of the Greek pathos with similar meanings, affectio already existed in Latin and is comprised of the prefix ad- + facio. Ad- usually adds a movement to or against something whilst facio has a very broad signification including to make, build, construct or produce. Passiones is also the root of our passive and thus this choice of translation would foreground an essential passivity to this realm of experience. Whereas, with the choice of affect, which can be active or passive voiced (‘to affect or be affected’ will become central to interpretations of Spinoza), it is the binary of active/passive that is paramount in discussions of Greek pathos.

However, Cicero, in Tusculan Disputations, chooses neither affect nor passion but uses perturbatio to translate πάθος. He prefers this to morbus, meaning ‘diseases’ because the Greeks also used πάθος for exaltation and joy which we cannot consider disease. Thus, already we see the problem of valence when it comes to choosing a term to characterize these experiences – the term itself cannot be valenced. Furthermore, by choosing pertubatio, Cicero makes a philosophical intervention in the reception of Greek philosophy by replacing medical metaphors with metaphors of movement and reintroducing into Latin a model of mind in Plato and Pythagoras who divided the soul into two: one of peacefulness that shares in reason and another that doesn’t, the seat of stormy emotions, motus turbidosPerturbatio captures this metaphorical domain as it is comprised of the prefix per- meaning ‘thoroughly, to completion’ and turbāre from turbo ‘to disturb’ and implicitly contains a sense of a passive initiation of something that must run its course which means that, for Cicero, it becomes imperative to avoid perturbations in the first place as once initiated they cannot be stopped but must flow to completion.

On a purely etymological level, this understanding of perturbation resembles that of emotion which derives from the Latin ēmovēre to move out, drive away or banish, for example, pain. In this choice of concepts it is an implicit negatively valenced motion (as turbo or moveo) that is foregrounded . However, from a wider perspective than mere etymology, Thomas Dixon’s From Passions to Emotions claims that by 1850, the category of emotion had subsumed ‘passions,’ ‘affections’ and ‘sentiments’ in most English-language psychological theorists such as Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40). The increase in popularity of emotion arose from the 17th century consolidation of philosophies of individualism as well as a secularisation that sought to avoid the associations of passion and affection with the biblical and theological preferring emotion for its alternative network of relations to psychology, law, observation, evolution, etc. This resulted in differing causal explanations for the phenomena: whilst Christian philosophers assumed passions were the soul acting on the body, emotions then became the brain acting on the body. The scientific brain replaces the theological soul as agent.

This analysis of concepts reveals at root two alternative approaches adequately described by affect/passion and emotion. Whether separated or identified, however, they nevertheless share an implicit foundation in activity and passivity and in the metaphorical domains of theology, medicine and physics. The question as to whether surprise is an emotion, affect or other is therefore not philosophically, historically or politically neutral. And this question continues to haunt the pages of this volume: for the question of valence appears regularly as well as the question of active/passive. And the metaphorical domain continues to oscillate between a philosophical approach (mainly that of phenomenology) and a more scientific one of psychology and linguistics. Indeed, the sheer diversity of disciplines included in this volume (without any one dominating) – medical (depression), philosophy (phenomenology), science (psychology), theological (in the discussion of Paul) or language and literature – continues the question over which metaphorical domain to place the concepts in. Such a complex and multi-faceted problem does indeed touch on everything from language, linguistics, phenomenology, science and theology and it is therefore refreshing that this volume features accounts from all these differing approaches.

Moreover, the volume is enhanced through combinations of these disciplines: the introduction states the multidisciplinary approaches as ‘philosophy, psychophysiology, psychiatry and linguistics’ (vi) and mention early attempts at the interface of philosophy and linguistics, phenomenology and psycho-neuro-physiology or philosophy-phenomenology. Phenomenology, neuroscience, physiology, is an interesting and productive binding.

If this short history of the concepts used to describe this realm of experience reveals anything, it is perhaps how implicated in past metaphysics this whole discourse is. Thus, it might be productive to uncover how implicitly the authors depend on such a past metaphysics (notably that of a past metaphysics of coupled opposites derived from Greek philosophy) in approaching the central question posed by the book. Furthermore, perhaps the value of this book lies in its manifestation of a tension relating to how surprise appears to depend on and yet transcend these categories and conceptual histories of philosophy.

Sheets-Johnstone speaks directly to this question of past metaphysics when she complains of a ‘metaphysics of absence’ that leads to an ‘absence of the body below the neck’ (84). The traditional body/mind division is that which leads to this critique. But the influence of a past metaphysics of coupled opposites is felt most concretely with the numerous oppositions that continue to structure the problem field: positive/negative, approach/avoidance, and sympathetic/parasympathetic nervous systems not to mention emotion/cognition and emotion/volition. Such a metaphysics enables the very analysis Livet proposes in his concluding paragraph where he walks through eight possible combinations based on oppositional pairings of explicit/implicit, emotion/volition and the transition between the two. This then requires also that emotion be opposed to cognition and the whole realm of complexity is perhaps reduced to slotting aspects into a neat, three dimensional grid of implicit/explicit, emotion/volition, affect/cognition.

But perhaps the main oppositional pair that governs all these other pairs is the active/passive which features prominently in many authors’ discussions and may stem from the translation of the Greek pathos into a discourse of passivity. For example, Steinbock asks whether surprise is active or passive given that startle must be passive (10). For Livet, the active/passive is applied to the difference between emotions (passive) and volitions (active) and Livet argues both can actually be active either in an explicit, conscious or implicit way. But ultimately, Livet and Steinbock both demonstrate just how futile and inadequate conceiving something like emotions as passive or active is. Steinbock notes that the active/passive cannot adequately be applied to surprise for it cannot be purely passive but indicates transition from a more passive to a more active awakening (12). Often what is passive is said to be also active leading to them being active and passive at the same time and the whole point of the distinction to disappear.

The centrality of the active/passive together with the alternate history of mostly disturbing movements gives rise to a conception of affects as quantitative flows and is evidenced in the repeated mentions of intensity and valence. For example, in Depraz’s brief history of the concept of valence that began with Kurt Lewin in 1935. He proposed valence as a double-opposed movement of attraction and repulsion in reference to his force-field analysis of social situations. It defines the intrinsic attractiveness of an event, object or situation and, by extension, also the attractiveness of the emotion itself. This concept then became ‘an operative concept to define the very structural dynamics of emotions in psychology’ (41). Perhaps we could say more generally it is a metaphysics of coupled opposites that defines the structural dynamics of emotion implicit to psychology?

Given the privileging of their disturbing character, passions, affects or emotions are then treated as (or have to be differentiated from) external impositions disrupting purely self-present subjects that produces philosophies of defence that privilege sameness over difference. This approach would then consider surprise as negative or, at least, somewhat out of our control.

Furthermore, if surprise is based very much on this difference between world and self, the question of what is surprising – prominent mostly in the linguistics section – is problematised as it will vary from individual to individual. Philosophies might then seek to ‘master’ affects: because one could not know in advance whether a surprise would be negative or positive, it is better to resist them all together. This question of individuality presents a challenge to those papers that try to elicit surprise in experimental settings. Can surprise be identified in the absence of the experiencer and their expectations that are often implicit? This is perhaps why Steinbock differentiates surprise from startle – one could agree we could all be startled by a loud interruption but whether one is surprised by some of the examples might depend on one’s experience in the world, particularly in the case of police interactions (9). Perhaps this question underlies the difficulty inherent to the project of deciding whether surprise is an emotion.

Bloechl is perhaps most explicit in addressing this question. He writes that, if surprise depends on some difference between a subject’s expectation and actuality, ‘the intelligibility of the experience depends in some important measure on the condition of the subject and its relation to the world in which it lives’. He thus argues we can differentiate among surprises by attending to the context in which they occur (historical, cultural, personal-psychological, etc.). But, he adds, ‘without surrendering the possibility of grasping their inner unity in some irreducible essence (eidos)’ (119). What is it that remains the same across all differences in surprise, different expectations, different subjectivities? The experience of difference?

An important point to mention on this question of individuality and whether emotions like surprise can be said to be universal is the focus Ekman’s paradigm of ‘basic emotions’ based on facial expressions receives in Depraz, Brizard, Goutéraux, Celle et al. Although Ekman receives criticism in Sheets-Johnstone for ‘“the absence of the body below the neck”’ (84), his paradigm as a whole continues to pervade the psychological discourse of emotions despite major methodological criticisms coming from within and without psychology. Ekman’s paradigm has been coherently critiqued, particularly over its claims to cross-cultural comparison, most notably by Ruth Leys in her The Ascent of Affect.

So is there an alternative to this approach to affects and to surprise? Could we uncover such an alternative, manifest them in the same way surprise acts to manifest a difference between implicit expectations and actuality? Can a focus on surprise yield the very surprises needed to reveal implicit foundations? Perhaps surprise best offers such a path with its ambiguous valence problematizes any neat ascription to either positive or negative. Furthermore, whilst we may know surprise in itself, the details of its surprise is unique to each occurrence. And, in the surprise, we can learn the difference between our habitual, implicit being as it becomes manifested in the difference to the actual. Thus, affects here become a potential for individual growth and becoming rather than something to be defended against whilst retaining some universality for comparison and intersubjective understanding.

One such alternative is being drawn out by the work of Depraz for instance in her rejection of opposites for circularity (39). She argues, refreshingly, that ‘integrated emotions [like love, submission, etc.] show that we have to deal here with a three-dimensional dynamic model and not with a linear list of emotions opposed one to the other’ (29). She notes how phenomenology is uniquely positioned to enable such a synthetic integration of of cognitive, physiological, evolutionary and other aspects and her proposal is for a cardiophenomenology that places the emphasis not on the brain but on the heart partly because the heart-system is an integrative system and better recognizes the ‘unique dynamic circular living rythmic of such a system’ (48). The heart self-organizes ‘as soon as the embryo develops spontaneous contractions independently of the brain’ and integrates the nervous and brain system as well as performing a control function (48-49). The heart is both physio-organic and uniquely lived. You can’t feel your neurons but you can feel your heart and thus is ‘self-feelable’, an auto-affection. Thus the heart becomes, ‘the matrix of the person as both lived (affection) and organic (muscle), or again, the core of the weaving between the first- and the third-person experience of the subject’ (48).

Such an approach allows for physiological measures to get third-person perspectives on surprise as startle yet also allows for comparison with first-person perspectives on the feeling of those physiological measures. It also allows the experiential aspect not just a theoretical-textual approach so that individual differences in singular surprising events can be acknowledged. Surprise is thus the core-experience of a heart-centred, cardiophenomenology for Depraz.

This focus on the heart and its rhythmicity gives a more interactive circular dynamic than the perhaps active/passive transmissions of the brain from input to muscular output.  Instead of causal, sequential flows of neuronal pathways, of flowing out of movements that must be expended, which always eventually leads to the active and passive (the brain as active sending out of passive sensations or movements), Depraz enables a focus on integration and circularity.

Desmidt also mentions cardiac psychology as ‘an integrative dynamic that includes the systems of the context, the body (and the heart and brain within the body), and the lived experience that dynamically interact according to the three phases to produce an emotional experience’ (64). He quotes Craig’s model of emotion in which an emotional experience ‘is produced by the sequential integration in the insular cortex of five types of information according to a spatial gradient’ (66).

Yet is this a move that repeats the debate between Galen and Aristotle – Aristotle seeing the heart as the centre, Galen the brain? For the nervous system is also seen as integrative. Perhaps the ultimate issue here is not whether it is the brain or the heart that is central but the challenge to the dominance of the active/passive ‘sending out’ for one that is more about circular dynamics.

Livet also acknowledges there should be a focus on ‘the entanglements between the different aspects of motivation experience […] without taking for granted restrictive definitions that overestimate their oppositions and underestimate their intimate relations. He urges a study of the ‘entanglements between different aspects of motivational experience without taking for granted restrictive definitions that overestimate their oppositions and underestimate their intimate relations’ (114). As to the active/passive, Livet recognizes that emotions are usually considered passive whilst volitions active but proposes they be considered as two kinds ‘that belong to a more inclusive category, namely the category of motivational dynamics’ (105).

It is then a question, not of oppositions but of entanglements, bindings, integrations that cannot be reduced to couplings of opposites or mechanical linear flows of active and passive but instead opens to the question of what bindings might enable and sustain our flourishing. Bloechl can perhaps be read as providing how an affect such as surprise could lead to our becoming and not be something to be defended against, mastered or known in advance through the example of Paul. Notably, Bloechl attends both to Paul’s state such that he experienced the surprise of a conversion (which depended on Paul’s ‘disposition’) as well as how he then integrated the experience. He looks for evidence for the former by attending to Paul’s Judaism prior to the experience and the latter through the Christianity in Paul’s letters.

What Bloechl concludes is that in Paul’s experience, and perhaps the experience of surprise more generally, there is a passage from inward and personal experience to an outward and universal discourse. He adds, ‘unless there is an affinity […] between that which surprises and that which is interpreted as the surprise, the event itself is literally unintelligible’ (127-128). This ‘affinity’ could also be called a context and it is surprise which can alter the entirety of a context, it comes, he adds, with ‘its own horizon of meaning’. Yet ‘unless at least some of this new meaning can be fused with the meaning of what it may challenge and transform, it remains strictly alien. The nature and limits of that fusion are open to interpretation and call for concepts that do not obscure the experience in question’ (128). Surprise and affects not so individual as to be incomparable across individuals or cultures but not so universal as to preclude the first-person perspective. Somewhere between reductive binaries and trivializing infinities.

Such an individual/universal approach is demonstrated in the volume applied to depression which is conceptualized in terms of an inability to anticipate pleasure in a situation even when they do then feel pleasure in its actualisation. Yet, it is a pity this account did not take into account the individual histories of expectation/actuality that is so paramount to surprise – if someone is depressed and cannot anticipate pleasure in a situation perhaps it is because of so many failed expectations? Although the authors suggest ‘hyporeactivity in depression may be characterized by an imparied cardiac physiology, especially during the anticipation phase’ (67). Here the question of individual history and ahistorical biology rears its head and the benefit should surely be in their mutual cooperation.

Perhaps if there is one key theme emerging from all these discussions it is the question of difference; difference between emotion and cognition, a difference encountered in an organism’s interaction with itself and its world that leads to differentiations, splits, retreats or avoidance and it extending or protending itself into its past/future. This focus on difference also helps against one discipline dominating: where is the organism’s self-difference? In the neurons? The gap between neurons? Any criticism of a cognitive privilege could then be countered by the fact that these expectations are often implicit and, moreover, manifested in the difference experienced and thus prior to any split between mind and body, this split coming after the fact as an attempt to integrate the experience. Indeed, it could be through a historical series of surprises that we find ourselves in this problem of mind/body dualism split. Is the feeling of oneself then arising from a unity with oneself or difference to oneself?

There are several mentions of the entangled nature of emotions and surprise. Can these be best understood within a metaphysics of opposites such as of active/passive, of cause/effect any longer? Or is the domain emotions try to capture one more of contingency, of expectations meeting actuality where these are not opposites but in their unfolding produce each other. Just like Picasso’s quote ‘je ne cherche pas, je trouve’ cited in this volume: it is only in finding, in the difference between expectation and actuality, that one knows one was searching.

It is in the unfolding of the entanglement this collection of essays resides in rather than the entanglement itself where surprise and emotion surely lie. Otherwise, we cannot truly find the alternative to the dominance of cognitive and computational so many authors descry. It seems if universality is not acceptable, and definitions vary, the experience of defining affects is the very experience of individuating, growing and self-differentiation, this self-differentiation that is the universal. Is this not a more adequate account of the affect surprise? Such would be the performative and not merely textual effect of reading this volume. Today, perhaps it is not wonder but surprise that is the beginning of philosophy.

Christos Hadjioannou (Ed.): Heidegger on Affect, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

Heidegger on Affect Book Cover Heidegger on Affect
Philosophers in Depth
Christos Hadjioannou (Ed.)
Palgrave Macmillan
2019
Hardback $119.99
XXV, 289