Marilynne Robinson - The Givenness of Things

Jonathan Edwards knew that the emotions have a physical component, and he knew it could be argued that this is all they amount to. He said, “The motion of the blood and animal spirits is not the essence of these affections … but the effect of them … There is a sensation in the mind which loves and rejoices, antecedent to any effects on the fluids in the body.” He is arguing here for the capacity for emotion in spirits, disembodied souls. He is speaking within a set of religious and cultural assumptions, just as our neuroscientists do when they tell us that fear is the firing of certain synapses in the brain. Their culture and moment allow them to say, in effect, it is not you who are afraid — a little patch of gray matter is responding to stimuli in the environment. Then is there a self, at all? The point is now actively disputed.

Medical science does not know what life is, but it is very careful to distinguish it from death just the same, and very little inclined to question the reality of the phenomenon on the grounds that it lacks a satisfactory account of it. Neuroscience does not know what the mind or the self is, and has made a project of talking them out of existence for the sake of its theories which exclude them. They have banished the dichotomy called Cartesian by excluding one major term, the mind, that is.

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Jonathan Edwards is a pragmatist by my definition because he has a very active sense of the givenness of things. We know what love is — he uses the word without definition or modifier. Like every Christian moralist since Jesus, he knows love can attach itself to the wrong things, things of the world, things like power and wealth that are usually implicated in exploitation and impoverishment, if the prophets are to be believed. Still it is love he is speaking of, and we understand what he means by it. Modern English speakers may be a little less discriminating in their use of the word than the ancients were, but perhaps not. When poor old Isaac expresses his love for a stew of game, he uses the same verb Moses uses in the commandment that we love God with all our heart, soul, and strength. Of course Isaac associates the stew with rugged Esau and his life in the fields and the sunlight, so, like most things we love, it exists in a web of meaning and memory. Early translations into Latin and English made distinctions the Hebrew Bible did not make, sometimes introducing caritas , or charity, where the context implied holy love. Sometimes, as in the Vulgate’s version of the words of Isaac, it employs paraphrase.

Scriptural and modern usage does reflect experience. Love, however elusive, however protean, however fragmentary, seems to have something like an objective existence. It can be observed as well as tested. Perhaps it is better to say, language reflects a consensus of subjectivities. We seldom agree in our loves, we vary wildly in our ability to acknowledge and express them, we may find that they focus more readily on cats and dogs than on justice and mercy, neighbors and strangers. And yet, for all that, we do know what love is, and joy, gratitude, compassion, sorrow, and fear as well.

Fear is an easier subject than love because it relates more directly to environment, complex as that is. The human impulse to fear is antecedent to any construction, even though, as I have said, it is shaped and triggered by culture and personal history. We all know that there are people in this country right now who acquire arsenals and gold coins and shipments of freeze-dried hamburgers and then sit in their basements waiting for the first clap of Apocalypse. However peculiar to culture and temperament this may be, the fear behind it all is just plain fear. In principle, in order to empathize, anyone who has ever had a bad dream or sat in a dentist’s chair need only scale the experience up. It would help if the empathy could factor in a near-certainty that subversives are beaming dreams into her brain or that world history is an international conspiracy of dentists. Failing this, we still know what fear is, how it feels, and how it both sharpens and distorts our perceptions.

On the other side of the question there are those who feel the objectivity of their view is established in the fact that they have produced accounts of subjective experience that are impossible to affirm on the basis of subjective experience. People may accept the meaningfulness, the truth value, of the claim that an emotion is identical with a patch of cerebral activity registered by a machine. This might well influence their own experience and worldview, that is, their subjectivity. Still, it is hard to see the point of defining emotion, or subjectivity, by depriving it of the character that defines it. If you happened to have a thousand-dollar bill, and I told you it was in fact a slip of paper with the image of Grover Cleveland printed on it, you would not accept this as true in any important sense, no matter how true it might be in the impossible absence of history, culture, society, and the rest, no matter that a higher primate would drop it in favor of a candy wrapper. It is indeed arbitrary, purely an effect of cultural consensus, that a slip of paper has value in the total absence of intrinsic value, simply because a certain number of zeros follow a one. My basement dweller has given much thought to this conundrum. The slip of paper will likely prove for human purposes to be highly negotiable all the same, on the strength of subjective consensus.

For Edwards the existence of the emotions and their character are arbitrary phenomena, in the sense that they reflect the intent of God in creating humankind. If his intent had been different we, like every created thing, would be utterly different as well. But God made us in his image, that is, with attributes that we share with him. Since religious thought assumes that he has made us one by one, so to speak, our participating in these attributes is arbitrary, too. Their existence need not be arrived at as the consequence of evolution or as an effect of self-interest or by making any other account of them that would rationalize and compromise them. This is the anthropology of the soul, and, besides its cultural and political importance — we are created equal, we are endowed by our Creator — it is entirely compatible with the pragmatism that accepts things in their complex and veiled givenness, extrapolated neither to nor from. God so loved the world. God is love. Love one another as I have loved you. These sentences are intelligible to us because we do, in however misdirected or dilute a form, participate in this attribute.

For Edwards our nature is a reflex of the expectations God has of us. We are told to hope. To fear. To feel compassion and gratitude. All these things we can do, can scarcely refrain from doing. The Bible is a compendium of passions, emotions, and meditations. The whole traffic of interaction among human beings, and between the human and the divine, is essentially a matter of inward experience — often it is dread, loneliness, homesickness, and regret, interpreted as alienation from God, or as the fear of alienation. Skeptics have always taken this kind of thinking for anthropomorphism, a primitive or wistful projection onto the unreadable universe that makes human traits into divine attributes. Skeptics can’t prove that this is true, and believers can’t prove that it is not true. Faith takes its authority from subjective experience, from an inward sense of the substance and meaning of experience. The same is true of disbelief, no doubt. Objective proof cannot be claimed on either side.

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From the point of view of Jonathan Edwards, these “affections” he names exist apart from any particular human being who might be their locus, no matter how much they are colored by temperament and by occasion. They are full of meaning intrinsically, as they are felt and expressed and as they are suppressed and denied. The aesthetic and moral order of the universe to which they are essential, and in which we are assumed by him to participate, are freestanding as well. They are intrinsic to the meaning of the whole of Creation, as our minds and perceptions are also.