History of The Human Sciences

Jan De Vos and Ed Pluth (Eds.), Neuroscience and Critique: Exploring the Limits of the Neurological Turn

New York and London, Routledge, 2016, 236 pages, hardback £95.00, paperback £31.99, ISBN: 978-1138887350

What is it about neuroscience? Ever since a group of disparate life sciences – partly propelled by ‘the decade of the brain’ in the 1990s[ref]Rees, D and Rose, S. (2004) The New Brain Sciences: Perils and Prospects, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press[/ref] – congealed into what we today call ‘neuroscience,’ scholars from the humanities and social sciences have been committed, sometimes intensely committed, to a more-or-less sharp critique of this science, and the unspooling of its socio-political effects[ref]Edwards, R., Gillies, V., and Horsley, N. (2015) ‘Early Intervention and Evidence based Policy and Practice: Framing and Taming. Social Policy and Society 15(1): 1-10[/ref][ref]Martin, E. (2000) ‘Mind-Body Problems’, American Ethnologist 27(3): 569-590[/ref][ref]Bennett, MR and Hacker, PMS (2003) Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, London: Wiley[/ref]. Indeed, in recent years, neuroscience has not only been the object of critical scrutiny, but has become something of a whet-stone on which critique sharpens itself – a sort of funhouse mirror for critical social scientists to figure out what it is, exactly, they stand for. What explains this cultural role of neuroscience in the academy? Is it a fear that, in its powerfully reductive hold over human subjectivity (so it seems, anyway), neuroscience will ultimately stake a claim to all social, cultural, and human insight – an ‘expectation,’ as Jan De Vos and Ed Puth put it in their introduction to Neuroscience and Critique, ‘that the neurosciences will explain it all?’ (p.2).

Neuroscience and Critique appears in an established genre – but it has significant virtues of its own. Central among these is the sheer breadth of its scholarship: this is a properly interdisciplinary collection, featuring not only philosophers with interests in critical theory and/or psychoanalysis, but also a geographer, an anthropologist and STS scholar, a neuroscientist, and a psychologist, among others. What holds this disparate collection of interests together is a commitment to not only some kind of critical engagement with neuroscience – but also a shared attention to what, precisely, critique can do, even to what critique might be, as it gets more widely entangled in neuro-sciences and neuro-cultures. At the heart of the book, then, is a deeply committed reflexive attention to what it is we do when we think critically about neuroscience. The conjunction ‘and’ in the book’s title is crucial: at stake here are not only the ‘conditions of possibility’ for neuroscience, but also for critique itself (p.4). As I will discuss below, I think there is an uneven distribution of sophistication in the consideration of these two poles; nonetheless, readers looking for careful work on the stakes of critique today, especially as it approaches the natural sciences, will find much to think with in this volume.

The book is in three sections. The first, ‘Which Critique?’, perhaps the most overtly philosophical of the three, is also where we get the most explicit examination of the conditions of critique itself. It asks, as Jan De Vos puts it in his own contribution: ‘what are the limits of a deconstruction of neuroscience?’ (p.24). In De Vos’s account, one cannot simply do ideology-critique of neuroscience today, given the claim that neuroscience itself now makes on critical thought (‘targeting our false consciousness, laying bare the illusions involved in love, altruism, rationality…’ [p.23]). As De Vos shows, however, neuroscientific empirics remain haunted by psychological and humanistic concepts – they are inhabited, he argues, by a folk-psychological human subject, coterminous with the birth of the modern sciences, and which might itself yet be the object of critical scholarship (p.25, 39). A more overt defence of critique is offered by Nima Bassiri – who, against the fashion of the times is unconvinced that critique has to be associated with ‘negativity, undue skepticism [and] excessive suspicion’ (p.41). Bassiri proposes instead a different kind of critical question, one not mounted on this suspicious imperative, viz. (I paraphrase): what is it about contemporary selfhood that legitimizes brain science as its singular technology? This is a good question, and Bassiri approaches it through an historical epistemology of forensics – uncovering a need, especially in the nineteenth century, and amid concerns over disorders of simulation and malingering, to decide whether we are or are not our selves, in the grip of such experiences (p.55).

The second section (I am only here selectively surveying some essays from each), ‘Some Critiques’ is the most empirical part of the volume, and this, not coincidentally, is where it is strongest. Geographer Jessica Pykett, for example, analyses ‘the political significance of the influence of psychological and neuroscientific approaches in economic theory’ (p.82) – situating her account in the work of ‘discerning the precise models of the human subject selected by policy makers’ (p.88). That labour of discernment leaves Pykett well placed to propose, against the turn to ‘non-representational’ theories in geography, that ‘the widely presaged undoing of the human subject within human geography may… be premature’ (p.96). In the volume’s most compelling chapter, Cynthia Kraus, of the interdisciplinary ‘Neurogenderings’ research network, argues against self-consciously ‘critical’ programmes that are too often wrapped up in attempts to assuage conflict. Kraus argues, instead, for ‘dissensus,’ or the ‘study of social conflicts inherent to processes of knowledge and world making’ (p.104). As she points out: ‘people come to speak the language of the brain, not only because it has a prominent truth-discourse… they do it to come to terms with conflicting life situations’ (p.105). And it is not only by focusing on, but indeed exacerbating such conflict, says Kraus, that scholars interpellated by neuroculture might pose ‘the conditions under which interdisciplinarity… could be valued as a theoretical and practical solution’ (p.112).

The final section, ‘Critical Praxes,’ consists of papers by three scholars working within the neurosciences in relatively heterodox ways. I found these interesting in themselves, but (at least in the case of the latter two) struggled to relate them to the broader themes of the book. In this section is an argument for ‘embodied simulation’ from the neuroscientist, Vittorio Gallese (famous for his role in the discovery of mirror neurons) –  a proposal, in brief, that what is at stake in intersubjectivity is not only a kind of mind-reading, but actually the incorporation of others’ mental states (p.193). And there is a related discussion of empathy from the neuropsychoanalyst, Mark Solms – for whom empathy is not only a perception of others’ states, but a mode in which a subject ‘projects itself…into the object’ (p.205). For Solms, this projecting-into is always an affective move: whatever the desires of scientific psychology, ‘feelings come first’ in the work of encountering and (ultimately) tolerating the world (p.218).

There is some variability across the chapters, but I found much to stimulate and provoke in this volume. And if there is, for my taste, sometimes too much of the rhetoric of continental philosophy and critical theory here, still Neuroscience and Critique made me think hard (harder than I am used to) about the potent range of practices that we might arrange under the sign of ‘critique,’ as well as the very different inheritances and stakes of those practices. Those – like me – accustomed to being casually dismissive of the critical impulse, especially as it relates to neuroscience, have much to gain from these essays, even where there is disagreement.  Nonetheless, in the spirit of the book itself, and as a contribution to the important conversation that I think it wishes to provoke (and it should), let me here make two critical interventions of my own. They centre on the two poles of the book’s title: ‘neuroscience’ and ‘critique.’

One thing that was often unclear to me, as I read the book, was what different authors actually intended by ‘neuroscience’– who it was they were actually addressing in the guise of this figure. For example, authors in the volume (albeit not all of them) sometimes invoke ‘neuroscience’ or ‘the neurosciences,’ as if such terms represent a stable or coherent category – leaving aside the contingency, partiality, and specificity of the myriad different practices that are actually affiliated to this image. But if we are going to talk about ‘neuroscience,’ then we need to be clear whether we are talking about, for example, cognitive neuroscience, or molecular neuroscience, or systems neuroscience, or neuroanatomy, or whatever it is. This might seem like a nitpick – but actually such practices, only lately gathered under the umbrella, ‘neuroscience,’ have significantly different inheritances and trajectories. What gets lost, when we fail to recognise these differences, is any sense of the lively debates, contests, and disagreements that actually go on within ‘neuroscience’ itself. In fairness internal critique is discussed in the introduction (p.3). Still, overall, I felt that I got little sense from the book of the sheer range of (often quarrelling) methods, perspectives, epistemologies, and so on, that go on under this polyvalent noun, ‘neuroscience.’ For example, when De Kesel says in his interesting and suggestive contribution that he will ‘show the limits of neurology’s attempt to comprehend freedom’ (p.13), it is not clear to me what is indicated by that noun, ‘neurology.’ Indeed no neurological work is explicitly cited; we have only secondary philosophical texts. Similarly, Reynaert, in his philosophically rich chapter, argues ‘that neuroscience runs the risk of becoming dystopic in a logical sense by committing a category mistake’ (p.62). But relatively little ‘neuroscience’ is discussed in the chapter, beyond the now somewhat hoary example of Benjamin Libet’s experiments on free will, and conversations around it (p.75). Indeed, something that strikes me about the volume, taken in the round (by no means applicable to all chapters), is that, for a book about ‘neuroscience and critique’, there is sometimes quite a bit less actual neuroscience discussed than one might anticipate – even in chapters that claim to speak of either neuroscience or the brain.

Rather than simply picking holes, however, I want to use this feature of the volume to pose a broader question in the sociology of knowledge: what are we are we actually talking about when we talk about neuroscience? What are we (here I mean ‘we’ scholars in the social sciences and humanities, and not only the present authors) concerned about, or critical of, when we are concerned about, or critical of, ‘neuroscience’? Because clearly it is not always the laboratory practice, or the output, of an actually-existing neuroscience. And here is maybe the crux of the issue: the editors and authors would perhaps respond – with justification – by saying that they do not promise in-depth reading of neuroscience literatures; that their interest is in (as per the subtitle) ‘a neurological turn’ – which is to say, a cultural and historical object, and not a laboratory one. What concerns them is the way in which the neurosciences ‘are both situated within culture and in turn influence culture’ – as well as the practices of bordering that then ensue (p.4). Which is all fair enough. But I cannot get over the feeling that, in the absence of a committed and detailed attention to specific and carefully-parsed neuroscientific literatures, we are potentially faced with a paper tiger. Which prompts another question: how are we to think sociologically about critical attentions to ‘neuroscience,’ and to a ‘neurological turn,’ when those intentions are not necessarily or always made manifest via a sustained attention to contemporary neuroscientific experiments, practices, or concepts? Is there not some risk that we are in the presence of a phantom – that the ‘neuroscience’ in question may only be a product of the very critique that presumes to unravel it?

This brings me to my second critical point. It seems to me that the central question of the book is, as De Vos and Pluth put in a perceptive and subtle introduction: ‘what are the conditions for a critique of the neurosciences from the humanities?’ (p.3). As they point out, there can be no reactionary turning-back to the ‘before’ of neuroculture – not least because, as Nikolas Rose (2003) and others have pointed out, we cannot now separate our subjectivity from our consciousness (or indeed our inhabitation) of our cerebrality[ref]Rose, N. (2003) ‘Neurochemical Selves’, Society 41(1): 46-59[/ref]. What is needed, according to De Vos and Pluth, is ‘something other than a simple, humanistic critique of the neurosciences’ – a way of thinking that

engages in questions about the conditions of possibility, impossibility, and the domain, or range, of different sciences and disciplines… how far does the legitimacy of the neurosciences extend? How is the relation of the neurosciences to the humanities to be thought? (p. 4).

I am sympathetic to such an ambition. We see one aspect of it in the chapter by Philipp Haueis and Jan Slaby, which critically analyses the stakes of the Human Brain Project, arguing that that project is entangled in specific computational and economic infrastructures – thereby producing a kind of ‘de-organ-ization’ of the brain, even leading to a kind of ‘world-making,’ that reconfigures the outside vis-à-vis the experimental microworld of brain and computer’ (p.124, 131). We see it similarly in the contribution of Ariane Bazan, which maps a history of interaction between biology and psychology, and diagnoses a new ‘moment’ for psychology, via a neuropsychoanalysis that works to ‘characterize the… knotting-points between the biological and the mental,’ placing physiological and clinical concepts in new orders of relation, and thus subverting old hierarchies (p.181). There is much to admire in such critical analyses. And yet. In The Limits of Critique (2015), the literary theorist, Rita Felski distinguishes between two ways of being suspicious.[ref]Felski, R. (2015) The Limits of Critique, Chicago: University of Chicago Press[/ref] The first, ‘digging down,’ is the now deeply unfashionable practice of digging into the concealed ‘truth’ of the text, to discover what’s really being said (Marx and Freud are obvious icons of this mode [p.61]). The other mode of suspicion, more recent, and perhaps more subtle, works through a strategy of ‘standing back.’ The goal – clearly, Michel Foucault is the guiding light – is now ‘to “denaturalize” the text, to expose its social construction by expounding on the conditions in which it is embedded’ (p.54). I read the critical ambiton of Neuroscience and Critique very much through this latter mode. And yet, as Felski points out, the distinction between the two may be less profound than it seems: for all its analytical coolness, she argues, for all its disdain for simplistic hermeneutics, that second mode, that critical-theory procedure of ‘standing back,’ is ‘just as suspicious and distrustful’ as its truth-digging forebears – surrounding this practice is still a profound commitment to ‘drawing out undetected yet defining forces, to explain what remains invisible or unnoticed by others’ (p.83). For all its subtlety, I wonder if we are not, throughout this volume, still in that old suspicious mode. What Felski demands of us, in any event, is that we take seriously the question of whether we are not, in 2016, still mired in critical accounts of neuroscience, and neuroculture, which, even at their most sophisticated, are still working to dredge up, to make visible, to spatialize, that always-undetected, mysterious, and all-powerful force.

Neuroscience, says Joseph Dumit, in an important afterword to the book, is surprisingly weak today (p.223). Indeed it is precisely its weakness, its epistemological fragility and plasticity, argues Dumit, that makes neuroscience dangerous in the hands of industrial, political, and economic actors, working to instrumentalize research for their pre-determined ends. Dumit asks us to thus read the essays in Neuroscience and Critique as a map of fragility – a helpful guide to tensions and aporias within neuroscience, which the reader may wish not only to note, but to exacerbate (here I am reminded of Kraus’s desire for dissensus). And that reader might so exacerbate not with destructive or paranoid intent, but precisely to ‘help defend [neuroscience’s] right to explore brains against its instrumentalization by industries’ (p.226-228). This is the vital question: what kind of neuroscience do we want to see in the world? At the risk of introducing simplicities of my own: what kind of neuroscience are our scientific collaborators and colleagues working towards, and what tools do we have for working with them, for collaborating with them, even for making shared things with them? How far are ‘we’ willing to travel down that road? The map in this book is certainly a good point for starting those conversations. But it is precisely conversations, interactions, and shared readings, that need to be had. And for this, I think we need to let go of that still-suspicious work of standing back. Even if our primary interest is in cultural objects, we need to engage more closely with actual neuroscientific experiments, in their many actual manifestations in the world. This, it seems to me, is the still unrealised promise of neuroscience and critique.

 

Des Fitzgerald is a lecturer in sociology at Cardiff University. His first book, co-authored with Felicity Callard, Rethinking interdisicplinarity across the social sciences and neurosciences, is available open access from Palgrave Macmillan now.

 

Patrizia Guarnieri, Italian Psychology and Jewish Emigration under Fascism. From Florence to Jerusalem and New York

New York, Palgrave Macmillan US, 2016, 275 pages, Hardcover $100.00; E-Book: $79.99,  ISBN: 978-1-137-30655-5/978-1-137-30656-2

by John Foot

This is a difficult and at the same time a fascinating book. It has many sites of focus and can also be read as a set of collective biographies or individual pathlines through the worlds of psychology, fascism and Jewish identity in Italy and elsewhere. The overall analysis of the book is linked to the study of psychology and psychologists in Italy – and the way this nascent and marginalised discipline developed in that country before, during and after fascism – and in particular in the city of Florence. Thus, Guarnieri tells us a number of important stories of individuals who carried forward this discipline and taught and research within various areas of psychology. Within this world, in Italy, we quickly come across the all powerful role played by Agostino Gemelli in the private Catholic University in Milan. As Guarnieri points out, Gemelli had institutional resources behind him. Gemelli, a friar, turns up time and time again in this book as a king-maker, able to create or destroy careers – and someone who, within Italian psychology, it was very difficult to avoid.

For me, the most fascinating parts of this volume are those linked to the pernicious effects of Italy’s anti-semitic laws of 1938.  These laws led in most cases to the expulsion of all Jews from academic posts in Italian universities.  These people were forced to find another job – not easy in a country which officially discriminated against Jews and where psychology itself was hardly a major discipline. Guarnieri then takes up individual pathways of certain key psychologists. There is the detailed and extraordinary story of Enzo Bonaventura, who emigrated to Palestine in March 1939 and became Professor of Psychology in the Hebrew University.

But perhaps the most shocking part of this book are the stories of what happened to these Jewish psychologists after fascism had fallen during and after World War Two. Unfortunately, as with many other Jews who had been discriminated against or sacked in a variety of sectors, their reintegration and rehabilitation was neither easy nor straightforward. Would these people simply be offered their former jobs back? Some were happy to stay where they were, but others tried to return to Italy. Others appeared lost – nobody seemed to know where they were or what they were doing. Should those who ‘replaced’ these people be themselves sacked or moved on?

In 1947 a national competition was opened up for a Professor of Psychology (in reality this was for three prestigious Chairs).  Bonaventura was an obvious candidate for one of these posts. But Gemelli was to play a key role in deciding who got these jobs, despite his (to put it mildly) co-habitation with fascism. In the end Bonaventura did not even put himself forward. Guarnieri argues that this was thanks to political and personal manoeuvres designed to keep him out and assign these jobs to others. This is also – for Italy – a sad and depressing tale of half-truths and conspiracies, of the re-writing of the past and of continuity with fascism (something which was particularly true within academic institutions).  Bonaventura died in April 1948 during clashes with what Guarnieri calls ‘Arab forces’ in Jerusalem. A street there is still named after him.

More controversially, Guarnieri also points the finger at the role played by Cesare Musatti in this story. Musatti was a legendary public figure in Italy – the first intellectual to bring psychoanalysis to the masses and a frequent presence in the press and on television during his lifetime. He was also, very clearly, a man of the left and someone with – it seems – impeccable anti-fascist credentials. Guarnieri does not pull her punches concerning Musatti – and it is surprising that this ‘case’ has not been taken up in the Italian press in any way. In short, Guarnieri accuses Musatti of having re-invented his own past – both before and after obtaining the coveted chair of psychology in Milan’s Statale University. Worse, Guarnieri argues that Musatti had ‘not made any bones about collaborating with the promoters of racist theories’ under fascism. This is explosive stuff to say the least. It is to be hoped that a debate and further historical research will follow these revelations about Musatti’s role before and after fascism.

This is a book packed to the brim with interesting material for further study and pathways to be followed. It is intensely multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary – touching not just on psychology, but also on social history, trans-national history, cultural studies, Jewish studies, politics and memory. However, the text itself is a major hindrance to an understanding of the arguments made within the book. Much more copy-editing was needed and I can find no reference as to whether this is a translation or was directly written in English. Either way, it needed an extensive re-write to clarify much of what is included here. And this is a great pity, because this book sheds light not just on the history of academic psychology in Italy, but also on a complicated and painful past which has remained hidden for some time. In that sense, it is a brave and important book.

John Foot is professor of modern Italian history at Bristol University. His most recent book, The man who closed the asylums: Franco Basaglia and the revolution in mental health care, is available now from Verso.

Louise Sundararajan, Understanding Emotion in Chinese Culture: Thinking Through Psychology. 

Springer International Publishing, 2015, 201 pages, Hardcover £90.00/-Book £72.99, ISBN: 978-3-319-18220-9/978-3-319-18221-6

by Gerald C. Cupchik

Louise Sundararajan’s book offers a comparison between Western and Chinese culture based in part on differing modes of cognition that underlie lived experiences. Her approach is more nuanced than the usual East and West comparison. First, she is careful to focus on Chinese culture instead of making sweeping generalizations about the East. Second, while using the term “West,” she focuses on contemporary Western psychology. Since scientific psychology does not necessarily represent the full scope of knowledge about Western emotions, this book pertains primarily to western psychological conceptualizations of emotions, not Western emotional experiences per se. Sundararajan presents as a scholar with a foot in each of two worlds. On the one hand, she introduces many valuable concepts from Chinese culture and, in particular, the contrast by Confucian and Daoist approaches to life and meaning. On the other hand, she is well versed and established in the mainstream literature from Western psychology with a bit of philosophy thrown in.

Sundararajan summarizes the challenge of understanding Chinese emotions as follows: ‘This suggests that a central problem for understanding Chinese emotions is the gap between mainstream western scientific terminology and indigenous Chinese psychology.’  At the heart of her book is the bridging of dynamics of emotional processes in Chinese culture with concepts and findings in the Western empirical tradition. Implicitly juxtaposed against mechanistic thinking in Western psychology is the Chinese approach that focuses on dynamic processes.  Sundararajan explains this difference in terms of that between non-relational and relational cognition. Relational cognition, which applies to Chinese culture, focuses on holistic mind-to-mind transactions based on shared meanings. Western culture embodies more linear non-relational cognition emphasizing mind-to-world transactions and mastery over the environment. Whereas the former is marked by Communal Sharing, the latter is reflected in Market Pricing. Understood in terms of a “dual processing model,” the Chinese mode of thought is automatic, intuitive, and holistic (System 1), whereas the Western approach is effortful and reflective (System 2). Summing up these differences in mindsets, she claims that the Western and Chinese cultures are ‘upside-down universes of each other.’

Obviously, establishing broad categories and binary oppositions such as the ‘West’ and the ‘East’, involves many levels of abstraction. To some, this distinction is suspect and ultimately misleading. One of the most stringent critics of this approach is Edward Said[ref]Said, E.W. (1978). Orientalism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.[/ref]  who considers it a legacy of Orientalism, the persistent East and West comparison.

“Throughout the exchange between Europeans and their ‘others’ that began systematically half a millennium ago, the one idea that has scarcely varied is that there is an ‘us’ and a ‘them,’ each quite settled, clear, unassailably self-evident.”  (Said, 1993, p. xxv)[ref]Said, E. W.  (1993). Culture and Imperialism.  New York:  Alfred A. Knopf.[/ref]

Continuing this line of criticism, Sundararajan uses the East and West comparison in a subversive manner. First, instead of using the West-East comparison in an ‘us versus them’ fashion, she suggests that the two conceptualizations of emotion are complementary– somewhat like yin and yang with each taking turns being the under-current of the other. Second, she turns cultural reductionism on its head.  Instead of reducing all cultural phenomena to collectivism versus individualism, she uses the cross cultural findings on cognitive styles as an explanatory framework to foreground the rich cultural phenomena of Chinese emotions, with special focus on the nuanced differences in conceptualization of emotion between China and modern Western psychology.

To elaborate on this central theme, Sundararajan devotes one chapter each to the three foundational ways of thinking in Chinese history — harmony, Confucianism and Daoism.  Chinese discourse on emotion is founded on the notion of harmony which is ‘understood as moderation’ based on self-regulation. There is a dynamic quality associated with the search for complementary relations between seeming opposites (the yin and yang dialectic). This effort after optimal harmony leads to emotional refinement as exemplified in this description of Confucius as ‘mild, and yet dignified; majestic, and yet not fierce; respectful, and yet easy.’ Framed in terms of Western psychology, this effort after harmony is characterized in terms of ‘concurrent goal pursuit’ so as to be inclusive and make the best possible choices.

The Confucian approach to social development emphasized strong social ties and inner/private consciousness in a ‘rites-based’ society. This contrasts with a Western emphasis on ‘big gods,’ laws, and public spaces. The Chinese communal approach emphasizes the quality of relationships and concern for the other. The goal was to humanize power so that respect was ‘earned through sharing and helping.’ Accordingly, ‘the ideal model of the social order is the family’ and the cultivation of an inner sense of self that is sincere and cultivated through the arts, in particular music and poetry. Thus, emotional engagement is fundamental to ritual performances as in mourning where deep sorrow is considered more important than attention to minute details of observances. The outcome of this approach is filial piety combining intimate benevolence with respect for authority.

The ideals of Daoism are exemplified in the attributes of hermits who abandon the existing social order in favour of the solitude preferred by wanderers. Giving up the comforts of society and social status enabled inward hermits to achieve a state of transcendence and a deeper appreciation of harmony with nature. This was embodied in a spiritualized approach to social relations which emphasized equality in contrast to the hierarchy embodied in a Confucian emphasis on elder and younger, father and son, and so forth. The Daoist approach to independence and transcendence focussed on uniqueness rather than on egocentrism and competition with the attendant deleterious effects on health. The acceptance of an eremetic life style flourished when Chinese civilization was at its zenith during the Tang and Song dynasties rather than during its decline under the Mongol rulers.

The second part of the book is dedicated to exploring complementary ‘contours of the emotional landscape’ in Chinese culture. An example of dynamic harmony is embodied in deep feelings (qing) surrounding ‘heart-aching love’ (xin-teng) which can be both bitter and sweet at the same time. In Western language, this emotion combines the perception of vulnerability with empathy and anxiety over the well-being of another. These feelings are situated in a ‘gut-feeling approach to morality’ that is central to Chinese culture. This analysis of intimacy is predicated on ‘we–ness,’ bonding that is based on shared mind-to-mind intention and modelled after the parent-child relationship rather than the mating pair. Metaphysically, the Chinese notion of affect implies a sympathetic universe which is sustained by an affective bond among all things from humans to stones and rocks in nature. Emotion in this context works by means of a ‘resonating feedback loop’ not unlike that of a tuning fork. The importance of emotional resonance/attunement is brought home through examples of paradoxical communications of affect such as an expressed emotion of seeming anger that masks the underling feeling of relief and gratitude.

Of particular importance in a Chinese context is the presence of spontaneity, authenticity, and creativity in an emotion. Wisdom of the ancients helps to explicate these different facets of emotion. As in the case of traditional poetry, the ideal state of emotion freely embodies a simple message that is deeply felt. Thus, an authentic expression of emotion is sensitive to the meaning of a situation and is free from the interference of intentions to control it by a deliberate mind. This account of spontaneity in the Chinese expression of emotion is at odds with a Western academic emphasis on appraisal and purposive action. But it does fit with a mystical approach such ‘that the unleavened bread of mystical experience has no use for the yeast of discursive thought.’

The author reminds us of the duality in Chinese culture, between the hierarchical nature of social relations from a Confucian perspective (e.g., between parent and child) and the horizontal emphasis on egalitarian relations in Daoist thought (e.g., between person and nature). In a hierarchical context, we find the complex intimacy between parent and child who may be “spoiled rotten,” given vulnerability and immaturity. This transforms into caring gestures toward parents as youth gives way to indebted gratitude in adulthood. Thus, the good feelings attendant to gratification of impulses leave a glow of self-worth that changes to filial piety and caring gestures. As my young guide on a tour of Nanjing expressed it to me: ‘I am nothing without my family.’

Refinement in Chinese culture is embodied in the concept of savoring which applies both in everyday life and in an aesthetic context. This concept is unique in that it encompasses both positive and negative episodes. Temporality plays an important role encompassing both immediate and retrospective experiences in subtle nuances. Thus, from a Chinese perspective, savoring includes mindful awareness of sensory experiences that are integrated in an ideal mental world best expressed in poetry. The greatest challenge to a Western mind is appreciating the insight into emotions that comes from experiencing emptiness which may also apply to negative experiences in one’s life. Savoring without blinding expectations (thus emptiness) enables the person to appreciate the gist of things and also fosters novel connections. This new understanding is enhanced by reflective self-consciousness that formalizes relationships and sets the stage for “enlightenment.”

When placed in a broad multicultural and historical context, the Chinese approach to emotion differs substantially and substantively from that favoured in the West. While the West has long been concerned with the ways that emotion can distort ‘reality,’ the Chinese notion of qing holds that emotion ‘discloses something that is true about the person and the world’ by grounding the person in reality. This sensitizes the person to the undisclosed or implicit impact that the world has upon us. While Western theory focuses on differences (‘symmetry breakdown’) that foster action and control, the Chinese privilege symmetry as evidenced by a heightened appreciation of harmony and resonance with others and nature as a whole.

My reading experience heightened an understanding of the ways that the principle of complementarity is actively embodied in Chinese philosophy and social relations. The Confucian emphasis on hierarchy, and its effects on maintaining social harmony through parent-child relations, is complemented by a Daoist appreciation of how silence and intimacy helps us savour subtle qualities of nature and our social world.

Sundararajan makes a valiant attempt to build a bridge between traditional Chinese concepts and thinking through ideas in contemporary psychology. In part, this effort is successful because it shows how Western ideas and findings can resonate with Chinese culture. But it also indirectly reveals the burdens of Western mechanistic ideas that are worlds apart from the holistic attitude underlying Chinese thought. This awakens a savouring mind to the need for Western culture to be more reflective about its own purposive and ‘Enlightened’ biases or,  as the subtitle of the book suggests, ‘thinking through psychology.’

I hope that Europeans/North Americans appreciate Sundararajan’s in-depth representation of their work. But I personally feel that her account of Chinese emotion does not need Western psychology at all since, from my perspective, Western research seems to have lost ecological validity. Thus, the value of this book is not just that it introduces us to principles underlying the empathic, moral, and aesthetic values of Chinese culture. It shows us the limitations of our own Western concepts and empirical methods that may lead us away from a resonant understanding of the social world. In Chinese landscape paintings, we project ourselves into the empty spaces and resonate (from Hsieh Ho’s Six Principles) with the implied meanings; in other words, projection and empathy. Thus, by adopting a Daoist worldview, we enter into phenomena and overcome the alienating effects of experimental conditions and method as a whole. We essentially adopt the Verstehen orientation at the heart of a German Romantic perspective that is both empathic and intuitive rather than the British Enlightenment emphasis on distant and logical sympathy. Incorporating a sense for “emptiness” and “resonance” can help us think through the biases of Western psychology and enhance the insightful outcomes of our empirical projects.

 

Gerald C. Cupchik  is Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. His book The aesthetics of emotion: up the down staircase of the mind-body is out now from Cambridge University Press. 

Stephen T. Casper, The Neurologists: A History of a Medical Specialty in Modern Britain c. 1789-2000

Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2014, 288 pages, hardcover £70.00, ISBN: 978-0-7190-9192-6

Stephen T. Casper’s first book is an interesting reflection on the early origins of neurological sciences and the reasons why they came to dominate descriptions of mental processes and human reasoning.  Casper uses traditional techniques in the history of medicine to reveal the long history of the birth and development of the specialism of neurology in Britain.

One of the most important contributions of this book is its consideration of how late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century descriptions and understandings of the brain and the nervous system fell within a wider humanistic project. Casper’s exploration of the archives of the Neurological Society of London offers a unique window onto the nature of debates on topical issues at the time, in particular the conflict between specialisation and general medicine or generalist approaches to the body and mind.  As Casper argues, ‘specialisation’ was an idea that was ‘peculiar to modernity’ which otherwise employed the language of evolution to develop organic models of society ultimately within functionalist sociology. His reflection on neurology as a discipline thus offers insights into how and why neurological hypotheses and ideas prospered in the British context as well how neurologists themselves negotiated their ability to offer wider insights on human nature whilst simultaneously protecting their own science.

Although the term ‘neurology’ can be traced to 1664 in the work of Thomas Willis, and was used by phrenologists in the late 18^th-century, it appeared rarely in both medical and lay literature until the latter part of the 19^th century.  The specialty of neurology also emerged at this time. Its origins are associated with the foundation of the journal Brain: A Journal of Neurology in 1876. However, Casper argues, neurology did not achieve a coherent form until the interwar period.  And even when it did, there were always attempts to protect it from the constraints of disciplinary limitations and to promote its insights more widely.

The Neurological Society of London had some pretty important members.  In 1886, John Hughlings Jackson became first president of the Society, its members also consisting of David Ferrier, who had famously experimented on cerebral localization of function in animals; Francis Galton, statistician and general polymath; and Herbert Spencer who had been critical in establishing the discipline of psychology using the logic of evolutionary sciences. The society brought thus together a highly significant group of intellectuals, providing a venue for the integration of multiple fields of knowledge.  Most physicians who were members of the Society regarded themselves as generalists with broad interests in physiology, medicine and the general issue of nervous conditions. As Robert Young has argued, these thinkers were critical to harnessing epistemological questions in psychology and relating them to theories of brain and nerve function. [ref]Robert M. Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century : Cerebral Localization and Its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier, History of Neuroscience ; No. 3 (New York ; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).[/ref] Casper’s first chapter reflects on how these ideas influenced the formation of a distinct medical discipline of neurology in the twentieth century.

As many historians have noted, the First World War was critical in the rationalisation of medical practice and the drive for efficiency and economy that compelled the specialisation of both hospital care and scientific disciplines.[ref]Roger Cooter, Mark Harrison, and Steve Sturdy, War, Medicine and Modernity (Stroud: Sutton, 1998).[/ref] Casper’s second chapter explores the significance of this to the science of neurology where, he argues, it was particularly transformational.  This chapter looks in depth at the work of Henry Head and Russell Brain, neurologists at the London Hospital, and their discussions of war injuries.  It also examines how they considered the significance of their own practice, which is very revealing in its grandiosity, for example Head’s claim that he worked ‘in the passage-way between the physical universe and the dwelling place of the mind.’  There is something exceptional about these general claims to cultural and scientific knowledge and Casper elucidates this well.

Chapter three explores a controversial episode in the history of scientific research concerning Kathleen Chevassut’s research under James Morgan Purves Stewart into the spinal fluid of patients with multiple sclerosis. Chevassut claimed to have found an organism responsible for causing the disease and argued that a vaccine could be produced, publishing in the Lancet, but wider medical opinion turned against her, guided by the research of emerging expert Edward Carmichael.  Casper argues that this episode drew attention to the need for further regulation in neurological research and the formation of a new professional association, The Association of British Neurologists, from which Purves Stewart was forever excluded. The scandal brought to light the significance of professional guidelines and the threat of the Victorian ideal of united social and medical investigations.  Casper claims that it demonstrated why the science of neurology was restricted in its scope.

Chapter four explores the relationship between neurology and state medicine from the 1940s to the 1960s, pointing out that the success of the Association of British Neurologists and the growing monopoly of neurologists in carving out a well-supported and stable field of clinical practice.  The Association of British Neurologists lobbied the Ministry of Health to appoint an advisor in neurology, which they finally did in 1958.  As Casper notes, it was the success in the formation of neurology as a clinical science that ironically led to its demise as a comprehensive field of scientific enquiry.  At that point, laboratory research was increasingly conducted by basic scientists who did not have a wider interest in clinical problems. Neither did they necessarily have interests in the wider human sciences on the relation between psychology, physiology and evolution. What came to be known as the ‘neurosciences’ were demarcated as a separate field.

As Casper argues in the final chapter, the rise of specialized clinical neurology never fully replaced the earlier model of neurological sciences as part of a wider reflection on human nature and motivation. The formation of the ‘neurosciences’ that drew together biological sciences and social sciences have provided a new kind of outlet for these questions, although within a very different framework of professional expertise.

There are some limitations to Casper’s approach and his focus purely on neurology as a disciplinary practice.  Although this enables precision and focus, sometimes it detracts from the wider debates and discussions about nerves within other fields such as psychoanalysis, psychology and endocrinology.  Furthermore, greater contextualization of debates within the social sciences and the wider political landscape of Britain, particularly in the post-war period, would have enriched the discussion. The history of neurology and the neurosciences is becoming increasingly topical as today’s scholars wrestle again with the hierarchy of the disciplines and the potential of current neuroscience and epigenetics to renew or revitalize the disciplines of sociology and history.[ref]e.g. D. Fitzgerald, N. Rose, and I. Singh, “Revitalizing Sociology: Urban Life and Mental Illness between History and the Present,” Br J Sociol 67, no. 1 (2016).[/ref][ref]e.g. Renwick, C 2016, ‘Biology, Social Science, and History: Interdisciplinarity in Three Directions’ Palgrave Communications, vol 2, 16001 (2016).[/ref] Although Casper makes links between the historical discipline of neurology and today’s neurosciences, it would have been useful for him to have used more innovative questions to engage more strongly with work by Nikolas Rose and Fernando Vidal on the dominance of the neurosciences and the significance of this in relation to other social sciences, particularly in the post-war period.[ref]e.g. Nikolas S. Rose and Joelle M. Abi-Rached, Neuro : The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013)[/ref][ref] F. Vidal, “Brainhood, Anthropological Figure of Modernity,” Hist Human Sci 22, no. 1 (2009).[/ref] There is much more to be said on how disciplinary lines in the ‘neuro’ disciplines have been drawn and how they may be drawn in the future.

Nevertheless, Casper’s book is a very good reflection on the history of disciplinarity and how knowledge has been created and passed down in the field of neurology. It is an excellent complement to histories of psychological and psychiatric knowledge. It is also a very good reference book as it presents a close reading of archival sources and is meticulously referenced. Casper’s first work also demonstrates his ability to think widely on the connections between disciplines in the creation of medical knowledge. It is thus a welcome addition to the literature on the history of neurology and other disciplines and their relation to the wider history of the human sciences.

Bonnie Evans is a Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London.  She is conducting a project on Neuroscience, Psychology and Education: Autism in the UK 1959-2014. Her peer-reviewed publications include a recent article in History of the Human Sciences: ‘How Autism Became Autism: The Radical Transformation of a Central Concept of Child Development’. Her forthcoming book The Metamorphosis of Autism: A History of Child Development in England (Manchester University Press) is due out in December.

 

Angus Nicholls, Hans Blumenberg on Myth and the Human Sciences 

New York and London, Routledge, 2015, 277 pages, hardcover £90, e-version £34,99, ISBN: 978-0-415-88549-2

I am fully convinced that this book will become an important tool in research and teaching, not only on the twentieth-century German philosopher Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996) but in the wider areas of myth and anthropology. It may even be of interest to an even more diverse audience, bringing a new level of complexity to current debates between religion and evolutionary theory. The title of the book itself holds the possibility of bridging the gap between cultural studies and natural sciences and reclaims the term “science” from the latter. It demonstrates, through Blumenberg’s work, how interwoven mythologies and the natural sciences actually are. The border between logos and myth is, according to Blumenberg, a fictive one.

Nicholls’ monograph is the very first comprehensive English-language introduction to Blumenberg’s theory of myth, but even compared with introductions that are available in German, it is unique in its commitment to making Blumenberg’s arguments accessible combined with an extraordinary depth of scholarship on his intellectual background.

Blumenberg’s highly original theory of myth, outlined in the volume Work on Myth (1979; English translation 1985), distinguishes him as the most important German theorist of myth of the second half of the twentieth-century. His work has resonated internationally across academic disciplines ranging from literary theory, philosophy, religious studies and anthropology, to the history and philosophy of science.

Blumenberg’s theory of myth is deeply related to debates within the broad field known as the ‘human sciences,’ particularly to philosophical anthropology and evolutionary biology. Emerging from his view of humans as ‘creatures of deficiency’ – organisms which, by virtue of their capacity for reflective thought, find themselves at odds with the order of nature – his theory breaks with enlightenment ideas by ascribing to myth a rational function. Indeed, the distinctive feature of Blumenberg’s approach is his view of myth as the solution to a problem relating to human evolution rather than a pre-rational mode of thought. Blumenberg, so Nicholls tells us, found that while other organisms adapt to their situations through instincts associated with natural selection, a large part of human adaption is cultural, and is constituted by the construction of stories. Myths constitute human attempts to rationalise and control anxieties concerning the indeterminate and uncontrollable forces of nature by anthropomorphising these forces into distinct and individual mythic objects. The division of the powers of nature into the polytheistic pantheon of myth, says Nicholls, summarising Blumenberg, enables these powers to be tamed and makes them accessible through mythic images and stories. In functioning as the fundamental cultural coping strategy adopted by humans, myth is, in Blumenberg’s view, always an attempt to conceptualise and understand reality by dealing with it in images. This, however, should not be understood as a rational or theoretical approach to a question or dilemma: rather than being such a response to it, myth covers a question in order for it not to become acute, and is therefore not able to produce a fully controlled state between question and answer. Blumenberg asserts that as long as there are elements of external reality that resist the wishes of humankind, there will always be a place for myth within human thought.

The fundamental adaptive and cognitive functions of myths enable us to survive the most hostile surroundings and, therefore, they are the most powerful evolutionary tool that we have. The ‘absolutism of reality’ designates a state in which man is helplessly exposed to natural forces of which he can have no sure understanding, to which he can impute no benign intentions, and from which he needs to distance himself in order to secure his survival as a species. For Blumenberg, all the achievements of human culture presuppose that this state of sheer biological nonviability, this nightmare scenario of ultimate selective disadvantage, has been put behind us through nothing but our ability of telling tales. In this sense, myth is already an attempt to render the world comprehensible, to identify divine or demonic powers, and to manage them, for example, by means of sacrifice or supplication.

It is especially appealing that Nicholls, in the conclusion of his introduction, reflects on Blumenberg’s peculiar neglect of political mythology in his published work, while extended reflections with Ernst Cassirer’s Myth of the State, as well as a departure from the analysis found in his Nachlass, entitled Remythisations. Nicholls also found a text on Hitler’s self mythologisation through a key concept Blumenberg calls ‘Präfiguration,’ a retrospective creation of predecessorship, or quasi magical lineage, which might be what he referred to as the ‘missing chapter’ of Work on Myth in a letter. Nicholls skillfully contextualizes these reflections with Blumenberg’s background in philosophical-theological studies, where he must have been familiar with Auerbach’s discussion of the notion of Noah’s Ark as a praefiguratio ecclesia or Moses as a figura Christi. In analogy to this concept Blumenberg outlines Hitler’s self-mythologisation as the culmination point of a Prometheus project in which Alexander the Great, Frederick the Great and Napoleon were his predecessors. This discovery and an exploration of this avoidance or self-perceived failure to publish those reflections (suggestive perhaps of biographical motives) gives this book a special significance in Blumenberg studies.

Nicholls gives his readers some insight into possible biographical reasons for this (whilst steering clear of any simplistic biographical speculation) that also explain Blumenberg’s delayed presence in the Anglophone intellectual world. Being classed as ‘half-Jewish’ meant that he had to endure gradually worsening hardships from 1933 onwards. He was excluded from the formal part of graduation celebrations at secondary school: he wrote a speech as he had come top of the class, but it was read out by a classmate. Catholic theology was the only subject choice subsequently open to him, as it was offered by the church and not by the state. He then spent time as a compulsory worker at an aeroplane manufacturer before finally being imprisoned in a work camp (where he only survived as a personal protégée of the large-scale industrialist (and NSDAP-member) Heinrich Dräger, a producer of gas masks. After the war, Dräger financed Blumenberg’s university education. However, until the very end of his life, Blumenberg remained unwilling to explore any personal motives for his interest in mythology. He is being largely unknown outside Germany, since he was neither a part of the émigré Jewish elite, nor a part of those implicated for their collaboration with the Nazi regime, but he had an extraordinary career in Germany as a modern academic who recognized the necessity of networking, building influential research clusters and inviting debate, while simultaneously being enviably productive publishing single-authored monographs.

The chapters of Nicholls’ monograph that address different contextualisations of his work within philological, phenomenological, and anthropological discourses (as well as the political reception of his main volume, Work on Myth) stand independent of one another, each comprising a thorough body of references, which will enable scholars from different fields to access Blumenberg’s work more easily. By displaying and introducing his many sources, disciplinary affiliations and comprehensive studies, Nicholls also contextualises Blumenberg’s arguments in relation to philosophers and anthropologists such as Arnold Gehlen, Jacob Taubes, or Erich Rothacker, whose texts are not currently accessible to non-German speaking readers. Context is also provided in relation to the better-known phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, the Heidegger-Cassirer debate, and the philosophers and sociologists of the Frankfurt School. Among those chapters another highlight of this introduction is what Nicholls describes as Blumenberg’s ‘Goethe Complex”'(p.155). in which he analyses Goethe’s Prometheus Fragment and portrays Goethe’s self creation as a culturally constructed massif, that rises up before the reader (p. 158), and then unfolds into an impressively lucid effective history of this poem based on Blumenberg’s analysis.

Nicholls’ remarkable familiarity not only with Blumenberg’s extensive and published and unpublished oeuvre (archived at the Literaturarchiv Marbach where Nicholls was a visiting fellow), but also with the many discourses and disciplines with which it is interwoven, makes this book a treasure trove for anybody with an interest in philology, myth, phenomenology, anthropology, or the intellectual life in 20^th century Germany.

Tina-Karen Pusse, is a Lecturer in German Literature at the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at NUI Galway in Ireland, where she is PI of the Research Cluster Transnational Ecologies and Co-Chair of the cluster Gender, Discourses, Identities. Publications include studies on Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Fictionality and Factuality in Autobiography, Theory of Laughter, Elfriede Jelinek and Heinrich von Kleist. Forthcoming in 2016 are the edited volumes “Madness in the Woods. Ecopsychopathologies in Film, Gaming and Literature” as well as an Introduction in Ecocriticism.