Terwijl ik bezig was aan een blog over
Brian Massumi (dat misschien nog komt), kwam ik het volgende hoofdstuk tegen:
Een latere reprint van het 1899 boek |
Kate Stanley, "Affect and Emotion:
James, Dewey, Tomkins, Damasio, Massumi, Spinoza," Chapter 2 in: Donald R.
Wehrs & Thomas Blake (Eds.), The
Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism. Palgrave
Macmillan imprint of Springer Nature, 2017, p. 96 – 112 Chapter 2 books.google; [Pdf van het hele boek te vinden op BookSC]
Kate Stanley wil in haar hoofdstuk laten
zien dat verschillende stromingen (of ook “generaties”) in het affect-onderzoek
eigenlijk alle teruggaan op William James, die op zijn beurt veel ontleende aan
Spinoza. Het volgende deel uit dat hoofdstuk neem ik hier graag over; daarmee
heb ik dan (eindelijk) ook een blog over William James en Spinoza. Zijn naam
viel wel eens (het uitgebreidst in dit blog), maar het was nog nooit tot een blog gekomen over
deze (mede-)grondlegger van de psychologie.
In het volgende gaat het vooral over het werk, dat ik hier naar voren haal en van een link en afbeelding van de titelpagina voorzie:
William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology and
to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals. New York: Henry Holt and Company,
1899 –cf. archive.org
[Hierna volgt een deel van het hoofdstuk van Kate Stanley]
[…]
fewer affect scholars have noted Spinoza’s formative force in James’ thinking
and writing.
At Harvard in 1890, James taught a philosophy class on Spinoza
alongside a psychology course that used his recently published The
Principles of Psychology as its textbook. A year later, he began to bring
these two streams of investigation and pedagogy—the philosophical and the
psychological—into direct contact with each other, through two lecture series
that form the basis of his practical theory of education. James frames his Talks
to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals as an
attempt to put his psychological model of emotion to work in the classroom and
in daily life. Spinoza guides this endeavor, supplying the basic insight at the
heart of all these talks: “action and feeling go together.”[44] Addressing an audience of
Cambridge teachers, James looks to Spinoza to suggest that the primary aim of
education should be to cultivate feelings that give rise to positive and
productive actions. In “The Will,” the concluding lecture of the series
delivered to teachers, James cites Spinoza to argue that positive thoughts and
feelings are more hospitable to the exercise of a freer, less constrained will:
Spinoza long ago wrote in his Ethics that anything that a
man can avoid under the notion that it is bad he may also avoid under the
notion that something else is good. He who habitually acts sub specie mali,
under the negative notion, the notion of the bad, is called a slave by Spinoza.
To him who acts habitually under the notion of good he gives the name of
freeman. See to it now, I beg you, that you make freemen of your pupils by
habituating them to act, whenever possible, under the notion of a good.[45]
Following Spinoza, James argues that the best way to transform
students from “slaves” into “freemen” is to teach them habits of introspection;
only those who are introspectively attuned to the positive or negative valence
of their feelings are equipped to distinguish good from bad guiding “notions” of
how to act.
The pedagogical principles that James derives from Ethics are
founded on Spinoza’s fundamental claim that there is “no absolute, or free, will”
for those who “do not know any cause of their actions.”[46] Such ignorance is, for Spinoza,
the definition of “human bondage,” which can only be countered by an intimate
awareness of the workings of affective life. He writes, “a man does not know
himself except through the affections of his body and their ideas. So when it
happens that the mind can consider itself, it is thereby … affected with joy,
and with greater joy the more distinctly it can imagine its power of acting.”[47] In short, the “power of acting”
stems from the “power to understand” both one’s own affective capacity and
one’s own affective action.[48] An increased understanding of how
affects arise and operate in turn increases our capacity to act upon them so
that, in turn, we are “less acted on by them.”[49]
Spinoza’s influence on James can be heard throughout Talks to
Students in his affirmative calls for a freer and fuller life. In the first
lecture of that series, “The Gospel of Relaxation,” James invokes Spinoza as an
antidote to the problematic underside of the American “national ideal” of
rapidity, vivacity, and incessant activity toward progress. This
“bottled-lightening quality” of the “American Character” has fostered “bad
habits” manifested in “those absurd feelings of hurry and having no time, in
that breathlessness and tension, that anxiety …. Present and future, all mixed
up in our mind at once, are the surest drags upon steady progress and
hindrances to our success.”[50] James recommends a Spinozian “plan
of living” to correct this “defective training” and to usher in “‘acquiescentia
in seipso,’ as Spinoza used to call it.”[51] As Spinoza insists, this “blessed
internal peace and confidence” can only be achieved through an integrated
“union of mind and body,” where there is “no essence of the mind” independent
of “an actually existing body.”[52] James echoes this teaching,
attributing Spinoza’s “healthy-mindedness” to his fundamental understanding of
an integrative mind-body loop, which two hundred years later will become the
basis of Jamesian emotion.[53]
In Spinoza’s understanding of the body’s capacity for action and
the mind’s capacity for reflection,
James finds an action-oriented “plan of life.”[54]
[45] Ibid.,
821.
[46] Spinoza,
Baruch Spinoza, A Spinoza Reader: The
Ethics and Other Works, trans. Edwin M. Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1994), 53.
[47] Ibid.,
53, 98.
[48] Ibid.,
164.
[49] Ibid.,
164–65.
[50] James, Writings 1878–1899, 831, 833.
[51] Ibid.,
829.
[52] Spinoza,
Reader, 40, 160.
[53] William
James‚ Writings 1902–1910 (New York:
Library of America, 1987), 121.
[54] Spinoza,
Reader, 3–4.
Stan,
BeantwoordenVerwijderenDank voor dit stuk. Deze James (ook een van de grondleggers van het pragmatisme), was ook een gelovig persoon. Ik vraag me af hoe hij tegen deel 1 van de Ethica aangekeken heeft. En hoe hij de pragmatische waarheidsopvatting zou kunnen combineren met Spinoza.
Groet,
Howard
Ik ga er niet vanuit dat je van mij antwoord op deze vragen verwacht, Howard.
BeantwoordenVerwijderenMisschien is er iets vergelijkbaars te vinden bij die andere pragmaticus, Charles S. Peirce (1839 - 1914) over wie ik een uitgebreid blog scheef (maar die vermoedelijk minder gelovig was?):
http://blog.despinoza.nl/log/charles-s-peirce-1839-1914-achtte-de-geometrische-orde-van-de-ethica-merely-a-veil-over-the-living-thought.html