Physiological Investigations

 

1. It would be wrong to think that all the organs of the body are pumps. The heart is a pump and it features prominently in our picture of the body, but not every organ resembles the heart. We might be tempted to think that the lungs, stomach, and kidneys are pump-like, but what about the bones, skin, and blood? The organs are like tools in a toolbox: they may look similar but they do very different things. Do they all modify something? That too can be made to fit many cases, but does the skin modify anything, or the eyes? The organs are united by family resemblance not by any shared feature. There are many organs with many functions and modes of operation; we should not try to force them into a single mold. Any more than words should all be assimilated to names.

 

2. We can call the activities of bodily organs “organ games”. They resemble each other much as games do, and they are active like games. They are part of our “form of life”. Organs can also be compared to chess pieces. In the beginning was the deed. Organs have a use, a function: they are like language in this respect. Both are part of our “natural history”. The variety of organs is like the variety of words. Organs are the words of the body, its active components.

 

3. The relationship between organs and their function is not easy to discern or describe. This is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of perception (the organs all look alike and have similar-sounding names). The function is not reducible to the structure, as the author of Tractatus Logico-Physiologicus wrongly supposed. Is the function “contained” in the structure? We can say this, but it is not contained in a “queer” way. What would we say if a heart suddenly stopped beating in its regular manner and instead started beating in a quite different pattern? Would we say it was malfunctioning, or that it always had this function? The case would be like someone unexpectedly giving 5 as the answer to the question “What is the sum of 13 and 278?” The heart simply finds it natural to go on in a certain way without consulting any “interpretation”. Is the function of the heart the same as its possible movements? This is like asking whether the meaning of a word is the same as its possible uses. There is a way the heart is supposed to behave and the way it does behave (normative versus descriptive), but we find it difficult to locate this difference in any discoverable fact. The heart does not beat as it does by following the example of a second invisible heart inside it (a homunculus heart): that would lead to regress and paradox. The function of the heart is “exhibited” in what it does—in its “practice”. A heart could not have the function of beating thus and so if it beat only once.

 

4. There is nothing hidden or queer about the organs of the body. There are no private organs or beetle-like organs concealed inside boxes. Everything is open to view (though the body may need to be literally opened in order to see the organs). There is no elan vital (a “queer process”). We can provide a “perspicuous representation” of the body’s organs. There are no profound physiological problems about the organs, though there may be puzzles (Harvey’s blood circulation theory of the heart was a paradigm of physiology, comparable to Russell’s theory of descriptions). It is a mistake to intellectualize the body, or to view it solely through the lens of geometry (as D’Arcy Thompson did). The organs are parts of the living human creature; and they have ordinary criteria of ascription. We must not “sublime” them, or take them to be part of another layer of human reality. They are no more remarkable than language, which is public, functional, and heterogeneous. There is no “general form of the bodily organ” any more than there is a “general form of the proposition”. The body is like a city built over millennia: here a very old structure (four limbs), there a newer adaptation (a bipedal gait), and here something quite recent (the human larynx). Organs no more perform a unitary function than speech acts do. Nor is there any deeper level of analysis according to which the body is fundamentally uniform. It would be wrong to try to reduce the organs to simple elements (“cells”).

 

5. Physiology can never interfere with the workings of the body—the body is perfectly in order as it is—it can only describe it. Physiology does not operate with an ideal bodily form to which actual bodily forms only approximate; that is a myth resulting from taking the body on holiday. The myth is no more plausible than the myth of an ideal logical language. The distinction between organs can be vague (where does the digestive system begin and end?), but this vagueness does not impede the body’s functioning. A tribe might carve the body up quite differently (literally in some instances), according to their “customs”, “practices” and “form of life”, and it would be pointless to argue with them about it. All organs are equally important: it isn’t that some are vital and perfectly formed while others are dispensable and poorly formed. No one would think that language divides into the superior and the inferior (mathematics versus animal husbandry, say), and it is equally misguided to think the heart and brain are superior to the kidneys and the gall bladder. Each plays its own “organ game” with its own purposes and rules. Physiology can never result in a perfect type of body shorn of all defects: that is a chimera, as mistaken as the idea that language could be replaced by a symbolic calculus. We must resist the urge to think this way by conducting a patient examination of the way the body actually works. Don’t think, look! In the end all we can do is perspicuously describe the way the organs are used. There can be no physiological theory of them, contrary to the author of the Tractatus (the body as a totality of hidden platonic forms). Above all, we must steer between a desiccated machine-like picture of the body and a queer spirit-like picture of the body, viewing the body rather as a family resemblance, form of life, natural history, deed involving, criteria oriented, public, game playing, toolbox type of thing. Back to the rough ground! We must abolish the myth of the “queer physiological process”. We must attend to the body’s “grammar”. We may need “therapy”. Then physiology will finally be able to find peace and let the fly out of the fly-bottle.

 

 

Two Dogmas of Rationalism

 

We may suppose the rationalist to hold two theses: (a) there is an analytic-synthetic distinction, and (b) the meaning of statements can be reduced to the innate ideas expressed or denoted by the terms in them. Since rationalism accords priority to a priori statements, the odd member of the pair in (a) will be the class of synthetic statements (we will suppose for the sake of argument that the distinction between a priori and a posterioristatements maps onto the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements). What kind of truth do they have? Answer: the kind in which the predicate is not synonymous with, or contained in, the subject—that is, it is different in meaning. But how is this notion to be defined? We know well enough what synonymy is—we recognize it easily when we see it and dictionaries are full of it—but it is more problematic to say what it is for words to differ in their meaning. Is it a matter of the words not being intersubstitutable salva veritate? Or is it a matter of there being different ideas in the minds of speakers who use the words? Neither option is very appealing, but nothing else suggests itself. So the rationalist is unable to define the analytic-synthetic distinction, because of the difficulty of saying what difference of meaning amounts to. Maybe this notion should be abandoned and replaced by the idea that all words really have identical meaning: that is a simpler hypothesis and nothing in science contradicts it. Why suppose distinctions of meaning when no such differences can be defined or discerned? So this dogma is best abandoned: there are only analytically true statements, because the notion of differences of meaning cannot be made satisfactory sense of. The concept of synthetic truth is without scientifically definable content.

            Second, the rationalist is committed to the thesis that statements are isolated constructions built from symbols that express innate concepts. This suggests that they can be verified individually, by reference to the individual concepts they contain. For example, we can verify “Bachelors are unmarried males” by consulting our innate ideas of bachelor, unmarried, and male. We need not stray beyond this statement to take into account other statements. But this account of verification is too atomistic; in fact, we can only verify analytic statements by making reference to other connected statements. Thus their meaning is more holistic than has been supposed, given the connection between meaning and verification. For example, when I verify that bachelors are unmarried males I have to understand such statements as “Marriage is a legal contract between consenting adults containing such and such commitments” and “A male is one sex of a species with two sexes characterized by a certain type of anatomy”. And these statements themselves contain words that I have to understand by reference to other statements such as “A legal contract is a binding agreement between people with such and such penalties attached”. And so it goes on indefinitely in a network of interconnected statements. There is no isolated verification of a single analytic statement but rather a holistic verification of a whole set of connected statements. Really it is whole theories (sets of sentences) that are confirmed not statements taken in isolation. So the rationalist dogma of reduction to a fixed set of innate ideas has to be wrong, with each idea attached to the individual words of the statement. Rationalist reductionism must be rejected.

            What lessons can we draw from this little exercise in parallels? First, the corresponding arguments against empiricist “dogmas” are about as plausible as these arguments, which is to say not very plausible (I will spare you the details). Second, the problems with empiricism alleged in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” have precise counterparts in relation to rationalism, so they in no way favor rationalism over empiricism (not that the author of “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” claimed as much). What we left with, then, if we accept these arguments is an epistemology that is neither empiricism nor rationalism but exists in some undefined epistemological hinterland. In effect, we are left without any viable conception of sentence meaning and without any theory of how knowledge is acquired—except vague talk of networks, holism, and assent behavior. We are left, that is, with the desiccated picture later defended by the author of the original “Two Dogmas”, consisting of physical stimuli eliciting responses holistically without any viable conception of meaning (indeterminacy plus “naturalized epistemology”). Admirers of “Two Dogmas” need to take this consequence into account. I myself think that the considerations sketched above fail to refute any so-called dogmas in either empiricism or rationalism. On the contrary, the analytic-synthetic distinction is not cast into doubt, and no difficulty in sentence-by-sentence meaning has been detected (whatever “holism” exists is consistent with sentences having their meaning determined by the words they actually contain). At any rate, we can construct entirely parallel arguments designed to undermine the “dogmas” of rationalism.  [1]

 

  [1] It is particularly noteworthy that verification holism (whatever that exactly comes to) can be applied to the acceptance of analytic truths. Holism is not a unique feature of empirical verification. In other words, beliefs always come in groups, more or less extensive, whether empirically justified or based on rational insight (including grasp of what words mean).

 

Studying the Brain

 

Brain studies have proceeded apace since that clump of grey tissue in our heads was tapped as the basis of mind. First it was inspected with the naked eye, prodded and poked; then dissected and anatomized; then stained and examined under a microscope; then electrically recorded, grossly and minutely; and latterly viewed by means of MRI machines and the like. With these instruments we have developed quite a full picture of the brain’s architecture, chemistry, and mechanics—its parts, constituents, and processes. The role of human eyes has been conspicuous in this effort: by using our eyes we have learned a lot about the brain (researchers don’t tend to use smell and taste or touch and hearing). Indeed, we can think of the eye as just another instrument, along with the microscope and the electrode: the eye is the main instrument the brain uses to study itself (with its cornea, retina, fovea, etc.). Brain science is methodologically ocular. It is the eye that chiefly reveals the brain as we now know it. Even when a microscope is used the human eye is still at the epistemic center.    [1] It would be generally agreed that the same methods will continue to be used to accumulate knowledge of the brain—and that no other method would be workable, or even desirable. The brain reveals itself exclusively to these methods: third-person observation, assorted scientific instruments, and recordings of neural activity. In particular, visual perception is the best (and only) route to knowledge of the brain. For what other comparable method is available?

            But this ignores another possible avenue of discovery: introspection, i.e. knowing oneself from the inside. You might reply: but introspection reveals the mind not the brain, so it is of no use as a means of learning about the brain. This, however, assumes that the mind is not an attribute of the brain—possibly being located in a separate substance altogether. But that is wrong: the mind—consciousness—is an aspect of the brain. The brain—a physical object in space—is the bearer of mental states, there being nothing else to be their bearer. Consciousness is a brain state. This shouldn’t be controversial when correctly understood: it does not mean that consciousness is a physical state of neurons just like the physical states they are known to have by using the observational method. It may well be a state of an entirely different kind, as private and subjective as any arch-dualist might wish; but it is still a state of neurons. Neurons have these states as they have the states discovered by the observational methods described above. Electrical activity is an aspect of the brain, ultimately its neurons; conscious activity is likewise as aspect of the brain, and hence its neural constituents. This means that in knowing about the mind by means of introspection we thereby come to know about the brain: we are learning about the brain by introspecting the mind. Knowledge of mind is knowledge of brain. Note that this kind of first-person knowledge is relatively primitive methodologically: there are no microscopes, electrodes, and MRI machines here. We are using our “inner eye” nakedly, without augmentation or upgrade; so we don’t have instruments that can enhance its resolution power or reveal the fine structure of what is revealed. Still, it provides genuine knowledge of the brain—knowledge that extends beyond what can be gleaned using the first method. So we really have two methods available for studying the brain: the perception-based method mainly centered on the eye, and the introspection-based method solely based on the “inner eye”. Put differently, the brain allows both methods to be used to investigate its nature, revealing different things to each.

            Let’s pause to interrogate the phrase “the inner eye”. Can it be taken literally? It might be thought unavoidably metaphorical since there is no eyeball in the brain responding to light given off by the mind. But that is a much too narrow interpretation if the concept of the visual. First, we have the concept of the mind’s eye, i.e. visual imagination: we see things with the mind’s eye as well as the body’s eye. This use of “see” is not metaphorical. Second, and connected, we use the concept of seeing far more widely than for the case of seeing by use of the eyes in the head: we are constantly seeing things that are not sensed by the eyes (a glance at the dictionary will assure you of this). We could call this “intellectual seeing” but even that does not do justice the variety of ways of seeing. In fact, in this capacious use of “see”, it appears to mean something like “perceive clearly” or “perceive as a totality”, which goes well beyond the deliverances of the body’s eyes. Indeed, the eyes don’t see at all if they don’t provide seeing in this wider sense: fragmentary and indistinct visual experience doesn’t count as genuine seeing—for nothing is perceived clearly and as a totality (“blooming, buzzing confusion”). Third, the involvement of visual cortex is relevant to the question of seeing: visual imagery involves activity in the visual (occipital) cortex, and it is not to be ruled out that employment of the “inner eye” might also recruit this part of the brain. It is noteworthy that talk of the “inner eye” (like talk of the “mind’s eye”) comes very naturally to us—we don’t likewise reach for the phrases “inner ear” or “inner touch”—and this may indicate an appreciation of the visual character of introspection. Nothing rules out the idea that introspection might have a visual character in the wide sense, and it is certainly not contrary to our habitual modes of speech. In fact, once you become accustomed to the idea, it becomes quite natural to regard introspection as a mode of seeing: it is certainly an example of perceiving things clearly and as a totality. I propose, then, to speak in this way: then we can say (what is agreeably neat) that we know about the brain by two kinds of seeing—seeing with the eyes embedded in the face and seeing with the inner eye. Both types of eye enable us to see aspects of the brain: physical and mental aspects, respectively. Thus we can study the brain by employing our two sorts of eye—outer and inner. Now we see it one way, now another, with different properties revealed, depending on the type of eye being used.

            The point of central interest to me at present is that neither eye tells the full story. Actually that understates it: each eye is systematically blind to what the other eye sees. The outer eye tells us nothing about the mental aspect of the brain, and the inner eye tells us nothing about the physical aspect of the brain. Each eye is perceptually closed to what the other eye is open to—rather as the human eye is closed to certain parts of the spectrum. The outer eye reveals quite a bit about the brain but stops short where the mind begins, while the inner eye is very revealing about mental aspects of the brain but cannot extend to its physical aspects. In fact, the situation is even more extreme than that: the inner eye doesn’t even give so much as a hint that the brain is a physical object located in the head, while the outer eye intimates nothing about the existence of consciousness. So far as each eye is concerned, the brain is nothing other than what it can reveal; but each offers only a very partial picture of the brain’s full reality. These two modes of seeing are thus remarkably tunnel-visioned.    [2] They don’t even acknowledge the existence of the aspect of the brain they are not geared to reveal. They are blind to each other’s domain in a very strong sense: constitutionally ignorant, dedicatedly blinkered. It is almost as if they want to deny that the brain has another aspect altogether—the one they can’t resonate to. And this means that, as means of studying the brain, they each suffer from what I shall call methodological closure. It could also be called methodological blindness or partiality or selectivity or divergence or tunnel vision or bias or ignorance, but I use the word “closure” to recall the phrase “cognitive closure”: the type of closure at work here derives from specifically methodological limitations rather than from limitations of the entire cognitive system. We could also call it “instrumental closure”, bearing in mind the point that methods involve instruments, whether natural or artificial. If the eye counts as an instrument of investigation, then we can say that the outer eye is instrumentally closed to mental aspects of the brain, while the inner eye is instrumentally closed to physical aspects of the brain. Both are useful instruments for gaining knowledge of some aspects of the brain but also useless for gaining knowledge of other aspects. They each suffer from a form of instrumental specialization: one is designed to get at physical aspects of the brain (inter alia) and the other is designed to get at mental aspects of the brain. The brain has each aspect just as objectively as it has the other, but our methods of knowing about it favor one aspect over the other, as a matter of their very structure. Outer eyes can vary in their scope and limits from organism to organism; well, our two sorts of eyes also vary in their scope and limits. Each has a blind spot where the other has clear vision. That’s just the way these eyes are made.

            Now this raises an intriguing question: are there any other aspects of the brain that these eyes don’t see? Is there anything about the brain that they are both blind to? Surely that is very possible, since not everything about the brain will be revealed by these perceptual systems: we may need theory and inference to discover properties hidden to these two modes of perception. Of course, the perceptual foundations are likely to constrain the scope of theory and inference, but we can suppose that new properties may lurk in the brain, which belong to neither sort of perceptual faculty. In fact, I think (and have argued) that this must be so, on pain of having no account of the connection between the two aspects of the brain. But I won’t repeat that now; my point is rather that the limitations of both ways of seeing suggest that we are highly confined in our methods for knowing about the brain. If both faculties are so sharply limited, what are the chances that the conjunction of them provides total coverage? Why should the capacities of these eyes, inner and outer, exhaust the objective reality of the brain? The brain might be brimming with properties to which our two eyes are completely blind. True, the two eyes do well within their respective domains of operation, yielding impressive knowledge of the brain, but the limitations of each, as revealed by the other, suggest a good deal of methodological closure—which is to say, ignorance. The two instruments have the limitations of all instruments, given their inbuilt scope and limits; and the brain might well (almost certainly does) have aspects to which they are both incapable of responding. It is left up to reason alone to try to discover what they decline to disclose, and pure reason can only go so far without a supply of primitive data to go on. What if the brain houses a completely distinct set of properties that are not hinted at by either the inner eye or the outer eye? Then we can expect methodological roadblock, instrument failure, and cognitive collapse. At any rate, the two eyes will not themselves be up to the task of disclosing what the brain contains.

            Putting that aside, what are the broader implications of seeing things this way? Phenomenology turns out to be brain science: Husserl was a brain scientist (as was Sartre and other phenomenologists). Moreover, phenomenology relies on the use of an inner eye to establish its results—it has a vision-based methodology. Psychology is also the study of the brain, even in its least neurological departments, since the mind simply is an aspect of the brain. Philosophy of mind is philosophy of the brain, for the same reason. By the same token, brain science is (partly) phenomenology, because consciousness is a property of the brain as such—not just correlated with it. Locke, Hume, and Kant (among others) were students of the brain, since “impressions” and “ideas” are states of the brain (mental states of the brain). We can even describe psychological studies as studies of the physiology of the brain, since “physiology” just means “the branch of biology concerned with the normal functions of living organisms and their parts” (OED). There is no requirement here that the functions be physical in nature (whatever quite that means): they could be irreducibly mental (and that word too has no clear meaning short of stipulation). The study of mind is a physiological study, conducted by means of the instruments available to us, both natural and artificial. The study of the brain thus includes a great many methods and disciplines, many of which are divorced from the methods adopted by what is conventionally called “brain science”. The so-called humanities are all brain science in the end—and there is nothing in the least reductive in saying that. It is just an acknowledgment that the brain is the de facto locus of the mind—where the mind happens, what bodily organ it derives from. The mind is not an aspect of the kidneys or the heart, and is not an aspect of an immaterial substance; it is an aspect of the organ we call the brain. To say that is not to reduce the mind but to expand the brain. This is why it is important to understand that introspective knowledge is knowledge of an aspect of the brain (in fact, several aspects). And it is also important to understand that the kind of knowledge contained in a neurophysiology textbook is only partialknowledge of the brain, omitting everything that can be learned about the brain by introspection—as well as by psychology and other studies of the human mind (history, literature, and science itself as a human institution). The brain is a multi-faceted thing. It is a mistake to let a single mode of access to the brain bias one’s general conception of the kind of thing the brain is. The brain is a far more remarkable entity than our untutored senses represent it as being.    [3]   

 

    [1] Compare astronomy: here too the investigator must rely on the eyes and optical instruments such as the telescope. Without these devices he or she would be hopelessly stymied. And it just so happens that distant objects interact with our eyes in such a way as to permit astronomical knowledge. Thus reality and method mesh, but only just.

    [2] Isn’t it true that any instrument, including the human sense organs, contains inbuilt biases that obstruct knowledge of anything outside their range? When you look at an object through a microscope, say, you no longer take in its macro features, focused as you are on its microstructure. If you did nothing but this your whole life, you might naturally come to think that things don’t have macro features. Similarly, telescopes elide facts of distance that are apparent to ordinary vision. The eye itself with its limited visual field gives an impression of non-existence to what lies outside of it (thus fueling idealism). All instruments of knowledge tend to suppress other knowledge, if only by occupying one’s attention: so they are not just partial but also oblivious of, and biased against, realities they can’t reveal. Don’t we have a strong impression when looking at a brain that it can’t contain consciousness? Our eyes give us a biased sense of the possibilities of the brain. From a different perspective it might seem perfectly natural for the brain to be the locus of consciousness.   

    [3] It would be different if every physical object could introspect itself, thus revealing an inner mental being as well as an outer physical being, but so far as we know this isn’t so (even for the staunchest panpsychist). The brain stands magnificently alone in its dual nature. My own suspicion is that the brain is wildly different in its objective nature from what we suspect, a complete anomaly of nature, given our standard modes of knowledge acquisition. A weak analogy: the earth is really very different from other planets in the solar system, which is what allows it to have life and mind on it. It is similar to them in many ways, but in crucial respects it is not—particularly as regards water content and temperature. Likewise, beehives and ant colonies are very different from mere aggregations of insects, exhibiting another level of organization altogether. But these are only lame analogies: the brain is special in a special way (and we don’t know what that way is). I tend to picture it in my imagination as having a completely different color from every other object.  

 

 

Labile Fear

 

Fear is a besetting emotion. It is with us always. It is also a universal feature of animal life. Fear motivates like no other emotion. It is unpleasant, intense, and disruptive. We do well to understand it. The aspect of fear I want to focus on is its extremely labile character (OED: “liable to change, easily altered”). It is labile along two dimensions: abruptness of change, and flexibility of object. You can feel an intense and overwhelming fear at a particular time and instantly cease to feel it if circumstances suddenly change: that is, if your beliefs change (beliefs are also highly labile). This is biologically intelligible: circumstances can change rapidly and we need to update our fear emotions accordingly. You thought you were about to be attacked by a bear but you suddenly realize it is only a bush: the emotion evaporates in the instant, with barely an echo remaining. Similarly the onset can be sudden, as when what looks like a fallen branch turns out to be a rattlesnake. Again, this is evolutionarily predictable. Other emotions have more lag time, more inertia, especially attachment and love: they start more gradually, build up, and take time to dissipate. Fear is like pain: it can abruptly end and begin—and pain is one of the things we most fear (death being the other thing). Love isn’t like a sensation at all in that it has no such well-defined temporal boundaries; the closest thing to it are sensations of pleasure, which may take time to take hold and time to dissolve. But fear is highly responsive to changing circumstances—hyper-labile. It is nimble, belief-dependent, and easily triggered and terminated. Phobias are a case in point: the fear can be intense in the presence of the feared object, but it quickly subsides once the object is removed. The phobic subject is not continuously assailed by fear of the phobic object if it is kept at a safe distance, but the onset is sudden when confronted by it. The point of fear is to be switched on quickly when the occasion demands and not to hang around once the danger has passed or receded.

            But it is the second labile aspect of fear that really makes it stand out. Here again there are two expressions of this: variability of object and object redirection. You can be afraid of almost anything and of nearly everything; fear is not choosy. There are people who are deathly afraid of celery or butterflies; many people are terrified of non-existent objects; the unknown inspires general dread. We are all afraid of death, disease, poverty, loneliness, failure, and rejection. I am not at all happy with heights. Again, love is far choosier: you can’t love just anything. This feature of fear seems rather counter-evolutionary: why install such an undiscriminating fight-or-flight response? Where is the biological payoff in celery phobia? Perhaps this is an overshoot of the need for flexibility of object; it is certainly puzzling (hence phobias are regarded as irrational). Freud had elaborate theories about why certain phobias exist (celery as a symbol of something genuinely dangerous). But the second aspect is particularly peculiar (in both senses)—what I called object redirection. This is a curious psychological phenomenon, though evidently common enough. I mean the tendency of fear to shift its object from one thing to another for obscure reasons. Suppose you are afraid of becoming unemployed: you then find yourself afraid of individuals of a certain ethnic group. Your fear has shifted from your own joblessness to certain people. Or you fear the police and find yourself afraid of anyone in uniform. You might recognize this as irrational but your fear mechanism has other ideas.  [1]Trauma works like this: it spreads fear around indiscriminately. Thus you are easily triggered by situations with only a slight resemblance to the original traumatic event: from gunfire to firecrackers, from near drowning to water in general. The fear spreads itself wildly from one object to another, finding similarities everywhere. You might be afraid of anyone with a certain accent because of a bad experience with someone with that accent years earlier. The spread is not entirely unintelligible, but it is certainly extreme and unruly. Whole populations can become fixated on a certain fear object as a result of their other fears. This is fear overflow, fear misdirection, fear shift. Fear will readily swap one fear object for another without much regard for rational justification. It is just too labile—too ready to attach itself to inappropriate objects. Fear fizzes away inside, searching for an outlet, and it can easily be redirected to objects not deserving it.  [2] We need a catchy phrase for this so that its prevalence can be memorably captured (compare the phrases “confirmation bias”, “cognitive dissonance”, “sublimation”, “projection”, and the like): how about “fear shift” or “fear retargeting” or “fear transference”? It is the marked tendency of fear to latch onto anything in the general vicinity—the analogue of loving any blonde person because you love one blonde person (which is not a real thing).

            We have all heard FDR’s famous statement, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”. Is this true—can it be true? Can we fear fear? You can be afraid that you will feel fear in the heat of battle, and you can be afraid that other people will be afraid of you and hence attack you: but can you fear fear itself? The answer would appear to be No: for what is there about fear in itself that should occasion fear? How can that emotion be a proper object of fear, any more than other emotions? Can you be frightened of hate as such (as opposed to its possible consequences)? There is nothing intrinsically dangerous about fear considered in itself: it is just a feeling. You can be afraid of the consequences of fear (you might ignobly run away when battle is joined), but the emotion itself is not fearsome. So despite the ability of fear to take objects seemingly at random, it cannot take itself as object—any more than happiness can be feared. Have you ever heard of a case of fear phobia? The statement in question is at best misleading; it must mean something like, “We should be afraid of the consequences of a certain kind of fear, such as violent action”. With respect to fear itself, it is not so labile as to be able to latch onto that.  [3] Can you fear prime numbers or remote galaxies or moral values or electrons? Doubtful—though celery and butterflies evidently can arouse real fear. So fear is not crazily labile, just pretty damn indiscriminate. In understanding and mastering it we need to be aware of its power to mutate and metamorphose and redirect, but we needn’t be concerned to curb it in relation to everything. We must not be paralyzed by fear or dominated by it or bamboozled by it, but we do need to respect its powerfully protean character. It is exceptionally plastic, malleable, and volatile, but not absolutely bonkers. Fear is not a form of insanity, though it comes close sometimes.

Freud thought that sexual desire lies behind almost every aspect of mental life, so that it needs to be understood and regulated; the more plausible view is that fear gets its talons into almost everything, so it needs to be understood and regulated. This applies as much to private life as to international politics. We don’t need to fear fear; but we do urgently need to understand it. It is reported that a few people feel no fear as a result of physical abnormality (the amygdala is supposed to be involved): it is hard for the rest of us to grasp what this must be like (envy would not be inappropriate), but certainly such individuals have a very different mental life from the rest of us. They are not plagued by this wayward, erratic, alarmingly anarchic force; they are not victims of their own cerebral fear centers. The existentialists focused on anxiety (angst) as the prime emotional mover of human life, but fear is surely the more pervasive and active force in our lives, in all its varieties and manifestations. We rightly fear a great many things, but we also unreasonably fear many things too. It is hard not to see our fear responses as a botched evolutionary job—cobbled together, out of control, riddled with design defects. Apparently, different components of it evolved during different evolutionary periods, as ecological demands changed over time; it was not intelligently designed to know its proper scope and limits. Fear is a biological mess, a simmering hodge-podge, and certainly not designed with our happiness in mind (it clearly contraindicates the idea of a divine creator). Not having it at all might not be such a bad idea. Imagine going to the dentist with no fear in your heart! You could still make rational judgments about possible sources of danger, but no more of that nasty oppressive emotion clogging up your brain. We all have to master our fear by effort of will, recognizing that it is not always beneficial; why not make a drug that simply removes it from the human psyche?  [4] Pain, yes, that seems necessary to a safe and successful life; but fear we could definitely live without. Do we really need our eye-watering fear of death? That fear is a serious blight on our life (animals are happily free of it and do quite well in its absence): we don’t need that biting searing debilitating feeling clouding our days! Fear is not something we should simply accept as a fact of life; maybe it is just a temporary aberration in human history. We could certainly do with less of it, or at any rate a more rationally ordered fear economy. Wouldn’t it be nice to live just one day without fear of any kind?  [5]

 

  [1] When does fear enter human life? It doesn’t seem to exist in the newborn, except perhaps in a very rudimentary form; it awaits the development of reason. It must be a traumatic experience when fear finally makes its appearance: “What is this horribly upsetting feeling I’m having?” The Garden of Eden was clearly a fear-free zone until knowledge and sin introduced fear into human existence. Fear and knowledge are closely intertwined: you can’t fear what you don’t know. When will it be over? Only with death apparently: then fear will be no more.

  [2] Thus fear is easily manipulated: it is just so mobile and malleable. Fear is the secret weapon of the dictator—his or her raw material (fissile material, we might say).

  [3] What if someone said, “I am not afraid of anything except being afraid”? Wouldn’t we reply: “So you aren’t afraid of the consequences of being afraid either but just of the emotion itself—that makes no sense”. The only way we could be afraid of fear is in virtue of its unpleasant phenomenology—its kinship to pain. But could we be terrified of that unpleasantness? It is like the idea of being in love with love: could you be desperately in love with it? It can’t be just like other love objects. Metaphor is at work in such locutions.

  [4] This drug would make Heidegger’s philosophy virtually obsolete. And could Kierkegaard have written Fear and Trembling and Sickness unto Death?

  [5] Then too, there is the question of shame: people tend to be ashamed of their fears and don’t like talking about them. Do we really need the burden of shame in addition to the fear that prompts it? Aren’t we burdened enough already?