Jerome Neu is Professor of Humanities, University of Califonia, Santa Cruz [Cf. vandaar foto]; auteur van een aantal boeken (zie onder).
“Jerome Neu has been one of the most prominent voices in the philosophy of emotions for more than twenty years, that is, before the field was even a field. His Emotions, Thought, and Therapy (1977) was one of its most original and ground-breaking books. Neu is an uncompromising defender of what has been called the "cognitive" theory of emotions.” (Robert C. Solomon) [1]
Neu’s invloed moet niet te hoog worden geschat, want bijvoorbeeld Martha Nussbaum die soms in één adem genoemd wordt met Neu als het gaat om auteurs die ’t cognitieve en evaluerende aspect van emoties benadrukken, heeft in haar Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (2001), geen enkele verwijzing naar Neu (maar wel flink wat naar Spinoza) [cf. books.google].
Voor een breder overzicht van de thema’s die in dit onderzoek aan de orde zijn, verwijs ik naar het artikel “Emotion” in de Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Dan nu naar de werken van Neu:
• Jerome Neu, Emotion, Thought and Therapy. A Study of Hume and Spinoza and the Relationship of Philosophical Theories of the Emotions of Psychological Theories of Therapy. Berkley, Calif.: University of California Press / London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977. VIII, 194 pp. Opgedragen aan Stuart & Renee Hampshire. Is kennelijk vrijgegeven en in z’n geheel te lezen bij books.google
Jerome Neu ziet Spinoza als "the philosopher of psycho-analysis" (ook al verwijst Freud nooit naar hem) en beschouwt Spinoza’s zienswijze inzake emoties als voorbeeld van het ‘cognitive model of emotions’: emoties zijn bij Spinoza gedachten-afhankelijk: verkeerde gedachten namelijk over hun oorzaken. Zonder gedachten, geen emoties.
Volgens hem zou Spinoza beweerd hebben dat emoties eenvoudigweg en niets anders dan gedachten zijn. Volgens hem heeft een Spinozistische benadering de filosofische zin aan van "thought therapies" van het Freudiaanse of "analytische" soort (pp. 2, 107). Het Spinozistische model dat Neu construeert is speciaal opgezet om te verklaren "how psychoanalytic therapies . . . alter emotional life by changing beliefs" (p. 2).
Spinoza's psychology conjoins an unmatched subtlety and perspicacity and a dominant therapeutic concern (the aim of which is human well-being and beatitude) with the effort to situate itself within a coherent and encompassing theory of reality; and it accomplishes a cognitive analysis of the emotions, allowing for rational therapy, rather than descriptive generalisations. Furthermore, the psycho-physical conception of man on which it is based enables it to avoid the assimilation of affective life to the Procrustean bed of mechanistic physics, as carried out in Descartes' theory of a problematic 'substantial union' between a body-machine and a soul exercising pure volonté. Some commentators have drawn attention to a kinship between Spinoza's psychology and Freudian psychoanalytic theory. Thus Jerome Neu maintains that, by treating emotions as essentially thoughts or beliefs, Spinoza may be credited with laying the philosophical foundations for psychoanalysis; [...] Neu's account of Spinoza raises and leaves largely unsolved problems concerning unconscious desire, reflexive knowledge. and the relation between thought and affect; furthermore, it does not do justice to some important differences between Spinoza's thought and that of Freud. […] Spinoza's conception of psycho-pathology is much more restricted than that of Freud; it confines itself to the compass of the passions and their innumerable combinations and permutations.” Aldus Véronique M. Fóti. [2]
• Jerome Neu (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Freud. [Series: Cambridge Companions to Philosophy] Cambridge University Press, 1991 – books.google
Daarin zijn Introduction – books.google - en hoofdstuk 7: Freud and Perversion – books.google
• Jerome Neu, A Tear Is an Intellectual Thing: The Meanings of Emotion. Oxford University Press, 2000 – books.google
• Jerome Neu, Sticks and Stones. The Philosophy of Insults. Oxford University Press, 2009 - 304 pp. – books.google
• Jerome Neu, On Loving Our Enemies. Essays in Moral Psychology. Oxford University Press, 2012 272 pp. – books.google
• Jerome Neu, "POLITICAL EMOTION: FROM PRIDE TO ENVY AND BEYOND." In: The Montréal Review, March 2013
Dan nu de aangekondigde waarschuwing van de doorgewinterde Spinoza scholar Lilli Alanen, professor emerita in Geschiedenis van de Filosofie aan de Uppsala Universiteit Zweden [cf. academia.edu]. Zij schrijft in haar paragraaf
4.1 Ideas and Modes of Thinking
Spinoza's theory of passions is often presented as a cognitive theory, and as a forerunner of contemporary cognitive therapy.[3] Such labels should not be used without the greatest circumspection, for cognitive terms in the framework of Spinoza's original and controversial metaphysical theory of nature, and of the human mind as part of it, take on a meaning of their own. Spinoza's term for what Descartes referred to as passions and emotions is 'affect', and affects, which can be active or passive, are a subclass of what he calls 'affections'. The latter are, literally, impressions or 'traces'—patterns of motion—in the fluid parts of the finite and determinate system of forces constituting the human body. They are the joint product of the interaction of movements caused in part by the body's own striving to persist in being, and in part by the forces of external objects acting on it according to necessary and unchanging laws of nature. Like anything else in Spinoza's universe, these bodily affections are paralleled by ideas. It follows from Spinoza's explanatory or conceptual dualism that these 'ideas of affections (with more familiar terms that Spinoza also uses, 'sensations', 'perceptions', 'images'), are not qua psychological or mental caused and explained by physical processes, but by other, more or less clearly perceived antecedent ideas and perceptions. The dualism here, however, is merely explanatory or conceptual, for the affections themselves are neither purely mental nor purely physical, but as much mental as physical. The ways ideas of affections are linked to and follow each other not only reflect the ways the body is affected; they are expressions of the very same changes that the body's affections are expressions of under the attribute of extension. It is through the medium of ideas that we perceive or are aware of ourselves and of how we qua embodied, or the bodies we are, are affected by other things. Yet these ideas are not, qua ideas, effects of the body's affections but of other ideas and are, ultimately, determined by God or nature considered as thinking. Thus, in the case of an individual finite human mind, the contents of the thoughts it processes, including the ideas of the affects it experiences, depend not only on the (ideas of the) external objects causing them but on the whole set of any other ideas simultaneously present to it, forming the context in which they are percieved. This explains in part why Spinoza could think that changing the larger idea-context within which affects are oerceived through understanding, can transform those affects. (p. 84-85). Lilli Alanen [4]
[1] Robert C. Solomon, Emotions, Cognition, Affect: On Jerry Neu's "A Tear Is an Intellectual Thing" in: Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, Vol. 108 [2002], No. 1/2: pp. 133-142.
Auteur van Solomon, Robert C. The Passions. The Myth and Nature of Human Emotions. New York: Doubleday, 1976
Auteur van Solomon, Robert C. The Passions. The Myth and Nature of Human Emotions. New York: Doubleday, 1976
[3] Ze verwijst hier naar
Jerome Neu's 1977-boek, Herman De Dijn’s “Spinoza's Theory of the Emotions and
its Relation to Therapy” [In: Daniel Garber & Steven Nadler (eds.), Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy
Volume V. Oxford University Press, 2010,
pages:71-90], Antonio Damasio. Voor een sober scepticisme in dezen
verwijst ze naar Yitzhak Melamed's "Charitable Interpretations and the
Political Domestication of Spinoza etc."
[4]
Lilli Alanen, “Affects and Ideas in Spinoza's Therapy of Passions,” in: Alix Cohen, Robert Stern (Eds.), Thinking about the Emotions. A Philosophical History. Oxford University Press, June 2017 - 320 pagina’s, p. 83-108 – books.google
[cover van bol.com]
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