AFFECT THEORY: STUPIDITY DOESN’T EQUATE TO IRRATIONALITY, AND VICE VERSA
To think is to perceive and feel intellect.
1. “Are you rational or emotional?” is a pointless question
“Emotionality and rationality are binary opposite” — most of you, as frequent visitors of personality test sites, would agree with this statement, as well as with means of assessment like IQ (Intelligent Quotient) and EQ (Emotional quotient). Before we further discuss the legitimacy of the statement, I will first take you on a tour through the history of thoughts, to find the originality of the binary distinction of emotionality and rationality.
The psychologists Joachim I. Krueger, Anthony Evans and Gideon Goldin [1] studied and revealed that this binary distinction had existed all the way from Ancient Greek time till the end of the 19th century within the Western intellectual system. Despite certain varieties in their understanding of emotionality and rationality (aka not everyone was thinking highly of rationality over emotionality or vise versa), the general consensus was that these existences were binary opposite. In their research, these psychologists had studied the views of Plato, Darwin and Damasio on rationality and emotionality and made some concise interpretations of those.
First, the understanding of humans as rational animals endorsed by Plato and Aristotle had continued to become the backbone of lots of subsequent philosophical theories. For Plato, intellect and emotion were the two horses to pull the same chariot; and the chariot represented human’s capacity for decision-making. However, Plato’s analogy did pack great favoritism toward intellect: While intellect finds its basis in experience and knowledge, is uninfluenced by instinct, and is of permanent value (at least until we change our view); then emotions were short, impermanent impulses.
In Charles Darwin’s rationale, human emotions, which were instinctive, were the very thing that kept the kind of homo sapiens alive till today. In our process of being morphed by the environment, the emotions that were born would guide them to subconsciously dodge the threats effectively (aka with a good balance of precision and energy efficiency). The vividness of emotions also helped humans to multiply faster, quickly populate the entire surface of Earth and make their way to the top of the food chain.
The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio tried to explain the extremely powerful intertwinement and interaction between emotion and intellect. He believed that for the human body to be able to control emotion was the precondition for the emergence of curiosity, thirst for discovery and abstract thinking. In other words, without emotion, there would be no rationality. However, Damasio still stuck with the dualism, with his hypothesis that emotion was there from the beginning, completely separated from intellect, which came second.
The works of the social psychologist Kamil K. Imbir [2], on the other hand, suggested that the origins of emotion and intellect were in fact two instead of one and the same — an idea likely inspired by Descartes. He returned to the formula “Cogito, ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”) coined by the enlightenment philosopher René Descartes and criticized that this binary distinction was not a result of positive scientific studies, but that of the pre assumption of Descartes which had been constantly proven wrong: The body and the soul were entirely separated. Descartes believed that the body was our natural self and was subjected to the mundane cycle of life, and therefore could not be as important as the soul — something that belonged in the realm of supernature and holiness. And as emotion was born from the body and intellect was born from the soul, it was expected for us to value intellect over emotion.
Most of the time, the fans of science and rationality would love to buy Descartes’s idea. Unfortunately, this argument on the dualism of the body and soul, nature and super-nature had indeed been debunked even in his time. Descartes’s tautology caused us to equate thinking with existence. Had this mistake been fixed, Descartes’s statement would be “I am, therefore I think, and therefore I am”.
Going back to the idea of the binary of emotion and intellect, we would find the same mistake being made: we were also assuming that emotion and rationality existed in dualism as if they were separated aspects of human nature. In reality, up till now, the investigations on origins have revealed that they were more of stated ideas than observable truths. And with that, the ado about being rational or emotional is more of tea-table talk than an actual academic discussion.
In the next part of the article, I will provide some arguments of my own as well as that of philosophers to prove that emotion and intellect was in fact never separated
2. Affect theory — a history of thoughts from Spinoza to Deleuze
Of course, we cannot just exhaustively deny all of Descartes’s philosophical merits; as he was indeed the first to introduce a methodology to consider existence without reciting the existence of God. Descartes’s time was a time where the Church’s political power still reigned supreme. From time to time, people would also hail him as the founding father of modern Western philosophy for his contribution the founding of the Enlightenment Era that had liberated human rationality from the reign of the Church. Descartes’s methodology was then inherited almost entirely by an even more accomplished philosopher — Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza [3] agreed with Descartes that in order for humans to exist and be conscious of their existence, there has to be a thinking entity that’s supreme and ultimate. And as a correction for Descartes’s tautology, Spinoza named the said ultimate entity the Substance — that is the singularity truth beyond all truths. And with that, he made a transition from the dualism of Descartes to a monism.
The Substance was also called by other names, such as Nature, God, the Universe, etc. It is to be kept in mind that in Spinozism, the said “ultimate entity” isn’t understood as a “subject” or a “character” with individuality and subjectivity, a.k.a. it’s not like the God described in the bible. For Spinoza, the Substance was more like the combined existence of the possible existences, just like the universe, and so we cannot describe it like we describe everything else. Basically, a substance is an existence that can exist without anything else preexisting it or affecting it.
Within the Substance exists countless attributes, among which some, but not all, are graspable by humans, such as affect and intellect. Keep in mind that they are affect and intellect, not emotion and wisdom.
For example, if we study the Substance “Universe”, what will we learn?
The first thing to come to mind would be the laws of nature that are a part of intellect such as the nature and existence of matter and forces, things like that. The second would be the observable motion and rest of any entity within the universe, from a glorious star to a human individual. The entities within the universe also interact with each other, especially, between non-human and human entities. These interactions are perceivable, and we call the perception of the “affect”. Affect belongs to the bodily self and doesn’t bear individuality, because anybody of man (and animal as well) are capable of perceiving the presence of outer forces through our senses and nervous system. Affect exists beyond language because it is available to non-linguistic species as well as illiterate humans. And so, while we could indeed put affect into words, the existence of affect isn’t bounded or dictated by words.
Through the network created by language, culture and society, humans could put affect into words. This recreation turns affect into feeling/emotion. Feelings are the social recreation of affect, aka the version of affect that could be understood by words. Emotion would then bear individuality and sociality; because it is fundamentally the output of social means of interpretation. It was also only through language, that humans could interpret intellect into materials for wisdom. Language splits the chaotic and ever-changing universe into individual things, and with our limited intellect, it was the only option for humans to understand the universe via these “things”.
In other words. pieces of intellect like “the Moon as an existence” could be interpreted differently by people of different times, and the studying and understanding of “intellect” constitute “wisdom”; in the same manner, pieces of “affect” such as “the perceivable interaction between a rock and oneself” could also be interpreted into language as “emotions”.
For example, you put into words a thing that is tall, has a wooden trunk, roots and a canopy as “a tree”, which is distinguished from “a mushroom”, “a bird”, or “the earth”, etc. But in the universe, all the said “things” are connected together into one comprehensive entity. Words simply cannot depict that comprehensive entity (aka the Substance), and therefore humans and our language are enveloped by that monistic Substance of Spinoza. For the phenomenologist Jean Luc Marion [4], the dualism of emotion and wisdom was but an illusion created by language and culture instead of a precise interpretation of reality. Meaning that, during the process of interpreting the world using language, the dualistic order came up so naturally as a byproduct that we were convinced that it was nature itself. Thus we felt like “wisdom” and “emotion” were polarly opposite, despite how that wasn’t quite true for “affect” and “intellect”. The truth is, emotion and wisdom are one and the same, as our monistic response to the ultimate truth.
The above basic explanations were the foundation to the Affect theory. In Vietnamese materials, the term “affect” had various translation equivalence, such as “cảm nhiễm” as understood by structural psychoanalysis; or “cảm xúc” as translated by translator Phạm Viêm Phương — the most active translator of Spinoza’s works in Vietnam; and “cảm giác” as a reference to metaphysical theories on the body of the Canadian philosophers Brian Massumi. As an academic myself, I am experimenting with the third.
Ever since the 60s of the last century, with the works of the philosophers Gilles Deleuze in France, and Donna Haraway in the U.S., Baruch Spinoza has been revived after 500 years of being completely forgotten by the academic world. In fact he was also revered as “the ‘prince’ of philosophers” by the Neo-Spinozism humanities scholars for being the one to effectively tackle the human-centric view of post-15th-century humanism. By promoting “affect” into a metaphysical phenomenon, the Neo-Spinozism scholars depicted the universe as an ever-changing whole, with humans being a very insignificant component of it, alongside other closely-interconnected elements.
And so, as we pointed out earlier, affect or emotion are not meant to be an antithesis of rationality, Irrationality, in the same fashion, has nothing to do with affect/emotion. As viewed by Spinoza, the constitution of rationality requires a lot more than “the lacking of emotion”.
3. To think is to perceive and feel intellect
As viewed by the Affect theory, thinking and feeling do always come hand in hand. Thinking (about philosophy, politics, social topics, or intellect in general), for the philosophers Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Harley [5], can constitute their own category called “feel intellect”: where “intellect” means the intake of knowledge and “feeling” means to process it with all the emotions of our body, and with that become able to view the intellect from various perspectives.
By this definition, it is clear that those who rely purely on experience, who speak baseless opinions and don’t employ reasoning when processing a problem are clearly not thinking. The phrase “sentimentalist” is but a disguise for their inability to think, and so we should stop calling them so. We should stop attributing their incapability of thinking to pretty-worded reasons like “being emotional”, “living from the heart”, etc. And on the opposite end, those who apply logical thinking and rigorous reasoning only to attack others without considering how it feels like in their shoes are not thinkers either. The phrase “rationalist” is also but a disguise for their inability to think, so we should also stop referring to them as such.
For Jean Luc Marion [6], thinking and feeling were so inseparable that you cannot think without emotions and, in turn, you cannot develop emotions without logical thinking. This was the result of the network-like interconnection between the three pivotal aspects of the experience of being humans: Feeling, language and memory. Influenced by Henri Bergson, Marion argued that the brain and the nervous system of humans were incapable of memorizing abstract information in everyday life. For example, when you walk home on a warm, pleasantly sunlit afternoon on a path filled with autumn leaves, and the feeling is so nice you can’t help exclaiming to a passerby: “What a lovely day, isn’t it?” After a while, all that’s left in your memory would be the pleasant feeling instead of the detailed context and the conversation itself.
But once the body manages to recall that pleasant feeling, it would be linked to a handful of keywords (a simplified version of the present like “warm”, “afternoon”, “dry”, “pleasant”, “scenic”, “a man”, etc. And then the brain would proceed to the next task, which is to arrange these keywords into something like an abstract grammatical structure that recreates the event by our objective bias. That grammatical structure is memory. Memories contain information of time and space — which are among the products of thinking. And so, without feelings, the said chain of phenomena will not occur, and your ability for logical reasoning will simply be negated. You won’t be able to make a complete sentence, let alone thoughts; because without memory you won’t even be able to recall the previous word that you said. If humans don’t think, they cannot perceive the feeling that they have. Like, for a person with brain death, as the flow of thoughts stopped, then even if their feet go numb or if the syringe shot stings their skin, they wouldn’t respond even just a little.
Thinking has never been easy, and it does require everything that the body has to offer, including all of its past and present versions. And that’s precisely why Spinoza once stated his view that you won’t be able to think if you have never thought about thinking itself. You won’t be able to think if you don’t understand what thinking is.
So go and ask yourself, with all the passion and seriousness, “Have I ever thought?”
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References:
[1] J. I. Krueger, A. Evans & G. Goldin, (June 18, 2010). Reason and emotion: A Note on Plato, Darwin, and Damasio [online]. Available at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/.../reason-and-emotion...
[2] K.K. Imbir, “From heart to mind and back again. A duality of emotion overview on emotion-cognition interactions.” New Ideas in Psychology, 43, pp. 39–49, 2016. doi:10.1016/j.newideapsych.2016
[3] G. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988.
[4], [6] E.D. Young, (Nov 18, 2018). Jean Luc Marion: On Descartes’ Passive Thought: The Myth of Cartesian Dualism [online]. Available at: https://reviews.ophen.org/.../jean-luc-marion-on.../
[5] P.T. Clough & J. O. M. Halley. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
