Marilynne Robinson - The Givenness of Things

I have been reading Jonathan Edwards lately, notably the Treatise Concerning Religious Affections , “affections” being the eighteenth-century term for emotions, more or less. He lists these “affections”—joy, love, hope, desire, delight, sorrow, gratitude, compassion, and zeal, as well as fear and dread — and demonstrates from Scripture their intrinsic part in the experiences of faith. I have been impressed for some time by American philosophical pragmatism, at least as I understand it, or as I find it useful in my own thinking. The great pragmatist William James, in his Varieties of Religious Experience , seems to be making much the same argument Edwards had made more than a century earlier, in his case centering the question on the meaning of the profoundly emotional and sometimes transformative character of many religious conversions. His posture of objectivity, scrupulous because it is tentative, different as it is from Edwards’s intensely scriptural and theological approach, makes the same assertion Edwards makes, which is that a kind of experience felt as religious and mediated through the emotions does sometimes have formidable and highly characteristic effects on personality and behavior that are available to observation. Many of my nineteenth-century American heroes passed through the alembic of what they, like Edwards, called conversion, this qualitative leap in religious intensity and commitment that typically changed solidly pious Presbyterians or Methodists or Congregationalists into Congregationalists or Methodists or Presbyterians capable of prodigies of selflessness and discipline and generosity. I am and am not of their tradition, a mainline Protestant who has a vested interest in believing they overstated the importance of these singular, threshold experiences, and who takes it to be true that the grace of God works as it will, even gradually, patiently, quietly. This is not by any means to question the authenticity of the visions and passions they passed through, or to suggest that these were anything but enviable. These enthusiasms struck whole classes of Andover and Yale divinity graduates, sending them out to the frontier to establish churches and colleges that would help to create a culture of enlightened self-sufficiency, that is, a culture resistant to the spread of slavery or committed to its abolition. Their works speak for them still. Their devotion to their purpose is an impressive, if forgotten, proof that, in a great many ways, faith forms life and drives behavior. In their case, it engaged them in truly urgent work, and gave them an extraordinary steadiness of purpose. It made them realists, pragmatists.

Thus are we plunged into the mysteries of consciousness. There is nothing unusual about this — we are so deeply immersed in these mysteries that we have no way of establishing an objective view of them. The behavioral sciences have toiled for generations to explain how we think, why we act as we do. The models they proceed from are generally either reactions to environment that are measurable by them, or presumptively delusional states like the intuitions and experiences that sustain religious belief, or that sustain the sense of the self. My Yale divines believed heroically in a kind of personal agency that allowed them to see and engage reality and to change it, and they did this in the thrall of a kind of visionary experience it would be very difficult to describe in the reductionist terms our science of the mind allows us. They are forgotten historically, perhaps because they and their labors resist description in reductionist terms.

Granted, throughout history brutal and disastrous crusades have been carried out by leaders acting at the urging of visions and ecstasies. And brutal and disastrous customs have thriven in the humdrum of ordinary life, in the absence of anything to be called vision, slavery, for example. We are a strange species.

In all circumstances complex, higher-order thinking is called for, among contemporaries and certainly among historians. Scientific reductionism, good in its place, is very often used to evade the great fact of complexity. It has no vocabulary for higher-order thinking, which it often dismisses on the grounds that it chooses not to address it. This science begins with the assumption and ends with the conclusion that subjective experiences are not as they present themselves to individual or to common experience, though, as in the case of moral judgment, they are only and always subjective.

(I find myself using the terms “objective” and “subjective” though they imply a clean and simple distinction where no such thing is possible. A neuroscientist might see herself as the arbiter in such matters, an apostle of the objectively true with machinery to prove it. And to me she might seem like someone intoxicated by her role and loyal to its orthodoxies. In this she is like a great many of us who are specialists in one way or another, though readier to exempt herself from suspicion of bias and fallibility than most of us are. Alexis de Tocqueville described the emergence in the Europe of his day of “men who, in the name of progress, seek to reduce man to a material being.” He says, “They look for what is useful without concern for what is just; they seek science removed from faith and prosperity apart from virtue.” They style themselves “champions of modern civilization,” and so on. My point is simply that the posture often assumed by the behavioral scientists, the ones who claim to be the agents of social transformation as they dispel illusion and reveal the hard fact of our materiality, has been around for a long time. It is an established role in Western society, refreshed from generation to generation by claims to newness and rigor, always bringing this same bold, irrefutable truth. It has proved impervious to the demonstrations by physical science that materiality, however defined, is profoundly amazing, uncanny, in no way suited to the antique rhetorical uses made of it in Tocquevilles’s time and ours. All this tells strongly against positivist claims to objectivity, which are after all an essential part of this role.)

Recently I heard a neuroscientist in Europe explain that what we call fear is in fact a pattern of heightened activity, synapses firing in a certain region of the brain. This seems to some to dispel the mystery, to refute the illusion of selfhood — aha! there it is! a bright spot on a screen. No doubt if I and a higher ape encountered a lion, there would be an interesting similarity in the pattern of excitation in our nervous systems. And much would be made of this. But if I and the ape were confronted with a subpoena or a pink slip, all similarity would vanish. This is to say that human emotion is conditioned profoundly by culture and society and one’s individual history of interaction with them both, in other words, by being human. Reaction to a subpoena would vary radically from one human being to another, depending again on personal history. In other words, neuroscience might tell us something about the processes by which fear becomes a physical sensation. But the sensation in most cases means only that a predisposition compounded of memory, association, information or the lack of it, temperament, and circumstance has been triggered and physiologically expressed. Fear as sensation is too late in the causal sequence to define fear itself. And its true origins would be dispersed throughout the brain, raising questions about the meaningfulness of the apparent relative quiet of the parts of consciousness where it has its origins, therefore about the meaningfulness of the local excitation of particular neurons. Its quiet could imply that the workings of the mind, or brain, are not of a kind existing instruments are designed to capture.