How do you see the world? What does it feel like to you?
In a previous issue of this newsletter I asked if there were such a thing as universal emotions. I talked about books like the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman’s How Emotions are Made, where she argues that while there are sensations which might be deemed universal, i.e. arousal or valence, the way that our mind makes sense of these sensations is cultural.
The idea that I was trying to explore in that newsletter was where we draw the boundaries between the objective and the subjective. This is something I have been thinking about a lot recently. In the case of emotions this is to ask whether your experience of, for example, shame, is the same as mine, and therefore whether we can claim a stable understanding of ‘shame’ that can exist amongst and between people. There is then of course the whole added layer of how we understand the radically different responses people have to the same event–what causes me to feel the emotion we are labelling as shame might be something that another person just shrugs at.
In philosophy, these ideas (though not specifically about emotions) have been debated as phenomenology. Coined by Edmund Husserl in c20th, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the “discipline of phenomenology may be defined initially as the study of structures of experience, or consciousness. Literally, phenomenology is the study of “phenomena”: appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings things have in our experience.” One of his pupils, Maurice Merleu-Ponty, is a key thinker in anthropology for his way of connecting the perception of the world to the physical experience of being a body moving through it.
We have a tendency to believe that the objective exists in the external world, whereas our murky inner processes are necessarily subjective. Husserl and his followers, for the most part, believe that there is a finite truth that exists in the world that we are able to access, albeit hampered by the limitations of our perception. Expanding our capacities to perceive and better understand our limits should therefore provide a greater access to the truth.
As the anthropologists Arthur Kleinman and João Biehl argue, our current understanding of subjectivity sees it as a synonym “for inner life processes and affective states.” However, the distinction between the objective and subjective is never that clear because we live in the social world. As Sherry Ortner argues, her reading of subjectivity is not merely the affective states themselves, but also “the cultural and social formations that shape, organize and provoke those modes of affect, thought and so on.”
What this means is that subjectivities can be cultivated. The “cultural and social formations that shape, organize and provoke” cause us to live through frames. We are also, as Foucault reminded us, subjects of power. To exist in the social world, with its cultures and formations, also means to be bound by structures of power and inequality. These frame the way that we experience the world. To grow up in a neo-liberal capitalist world is to, for many people, live with a subjectivity that has been pushed to frame the world in terms of competition and scarcity. White supremacy cultivates a belief that hierarchy is inevitable; that some people are worth less than others (or that some people are not people). These subjectivities, cultivated on a societal scale, become political realities. It is why the work to change these systems is so difficult. It is why the work has to be done at the very deepest level in each individual.
But perhaps we can even go further. To recalibrate our subjectivity is to reorient the window through which we view the world. This assumes, however, that there is an objective world that we can spy through our little window. As the poet Ocean Vuong recently pointed out, the Tibetan Buddhist concept of Lojong offers a different reading of phenomenology. In Lojong, argues Vuong, “the world and its objects are pure perception. That is, a fly looks at a tree and sees, because of its compound eyes, hundreds of trees. Whereas we see only one. For Buddhists, neither fly nor human is ‘correct’ because a fixed truth is not present. Reality is only real because of one’s bodily medium.”
As he argues, this view is inherently anti-colonial because “if objects in the real are not tenable, then there is no reason they should be captured, conquered or pillaged.” Perhaps instead of windows onto the world we need to cultivate a radical tolerance of multiplicity. Perhaps it should be our personal window onto multiple worlds. I’m not quite there yet in forming this thought fully, so I will leave this here, ajar.
Next newsletter I’ll build on some of these ideas while thinking about consciousness.
Some things I read since the last newsletter that I thought important:
He Wants to Save Classics from Whiteness. Can the Field Survive? [on decolonising classics]
The Coup We Are Not Talking About [on tech’s role in the ongoing crisis of democracy]
Penthouses and Poor doors [really staggering long read on London’s Nine Elms development, inequality and the housing crisis]