Richard Cumberland and the development of the Cartesian theory of emotions

Introduction

You’ve probably never heard of philosopher and theologian (also trained in medicine) Richard Cumberland, but he was highly respected in his time, particularly for his work in political philosophy. He had a deep interest in the way the natural world worked and in identifying natural ethical laws. He followed many of his contemporaries in a spending tremendous amount of time and ink arguing against the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (even though he shared Hobbes’ mechanistic bent). But the second most influential philosophy on Cumberland was Descartes’ intricate dualist theory of mind and emotions

Cumberland followed but also improved up on the Cartesian theory but his efforts led thinkers such as Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume to repudiate the cognitive line of thinking on emotions and morality, paving the way for William James’ wholly visceral account at the end of the 19^th century.

Descartes’ Influence

Cumberland accepts in principle Descartes’ mechanistic philosophy, is an earnest metaphysical dualist, and is an even more avid student of anatomy and physiology than Descartes. But even as he works to further the general Cartesian project on the nature of the emotions he goes beyond Descartes’ theory in ways that undermine core Cartesian beliefs and set the stage for the twin emergences of fundamentally physiological theories of emotion and the sentimentalist ethics. He did so by intentionally making the physical processes of the body even more central to the creation of emotions than Descartes did, and further clouding the role of a separate mind in generating emotions, even as he worked hard to protect the ‘fact’ that the mind in fact did exist separately.

The first significant improvement over Descartes’ positions and arguments is that he starts from the point of view that we ought to compare the similarities and differences between human and animal anatomy and physiology. This immediately makes him less dependent than Descartes on the concept that the soul makes humans fundamentally different from animals.

This starting point also has the benefit of letting him:

1)    Allow for animal souls, beliefs and emotions

2)    Differ with Descartes on the nature of human will and what it can do

3)    Be seriously concerned with a duplex theory of communication between the brain and the viscera

4)    Start with a basic but well-founded conception of two types of emotions

5)    Argue that, properly harnessed, emotions are a wonderful thing

As I explain these five aspects of Cumberland’s work on the emotions we’ll see the good and the bad in it, understand how it extends and grows out of Descartes’ work, and how it sets the stage for the theories of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, and sentimentalism.

How you to cut up the world

Descartes famously – and wrongly – cuts the world up between bodies-qua-machines and human minds (souls). Cumberland, however, takes a more nuanced approach to his ontology, which gives him what amounts to a quantum leap in theoretical sophistication and explanatory power.

Its so groundbreaking for two reasons: first, he’s willing to take human animal physiology seriously, believing that its not right to just think of our bodies as basically the same sort of machine; second, he groups animals with humans as things with mental lives, which means that the world is cut up between animals and humans on one hand and everything else on the other. This fundamentally alters what he can do when he takes up the nature of emotions.

Human and animal bodies are interesting

Cumberland saw what Descartes either missed or ignored; bodies –animal as well as human – are sources of sensation and perception. It’s hard to overstate the importance of Cumberland seeing that animals sense and perceive much as humans do, but as always we’ll focus on the importance for understanding emotions in ethics.

Recall that Descartes’ first error forced him to pack so many abilities into the soul, and make the soul so different than the body, that he was simply unable to tie the mind and the body together convincingly. With his view of human anatomy, Cumberland avoids a lot of this damage, even if he doesn’t completely escape it.

Cumberland remains a dualist, and his version doesn’t convince anyone that the position is true, but it does also go a long way toward helping him avoid the Second and Third Cartesian errors. That’s because his initial position allows him to account for body-level consciousness, which in turn lets him give up a rudimentary but legitimate account of how there are two types of emotions, and how the brain and viscera, mind and body, communicate via feedback loop.

Cumberland seems fine with thinking of animals as having souls, and so beliefs and emotions of a kind. That’s great, but he’s still a Cartesian in that he sees man as special due to our  “spiritual, incorporeal, godlike” minds. That means he doesn’t completely avoid the First Cartesian error, but he makes a connection between mind and body that Descartes couldn’t nail down and that gives him greater latitude for discussing emotions.

Duplex Communication

Cumberland’s desire to map communication between the brain and heart, along with his advanced-for-the-time knowledge of anatomy and physiology lead him to a dramatic change in the relative importance of the brain compared to the soul; the brain does much more work than in Descartes. If Cumberland can consistently attribute mental work to the brain rather than the soul, he can be said to have a duplex theory of communication between mind and body, something methodologically impossible for Descartes.

But at the very least, he goes beyond Descartes’ view that the soul/mind is a thinking thing that passively receives information, magically manipulates the pineal gland and thereby the body. Cumberland doesn’t see abstract thought as the only function of the soul but still argues that reason, through the emotions it helps beget, has a serious role to play in creating action, and he can offer a physical reason how.

Two types of Emotion

Cumberland identifies two types of emotion, The first, ‘passions’, are the intense feeling about or the intense force with, the vehemence with which we do – or refuse to do – things. The second type, which he calls ‘emotion’, are the visible disturbances of the body that go along with the passions.

To understand how emotion and passion relate, I’ll explain how Cumberland views cognition and volition, but for now let’s just say that the will is a function of the mind, different than abstract thinking, it is the agent for the thing that does the ‘real work’, and the strong feeling one has about the actions.

Emotions can be Wonderful 

Finally, unlike Descartes, Cumberland believes that properly harnessed emotions are necessary for being moral. One reason for this is a basic disagreement with Stoicism. As he explains, mankind would be better off “left to the sentiments of nature” instead of being forced into a “hardened virtue” that doesn’t recognize that the passions are “divine and gracious…divine virtues, if their objects be things divine” and allowing for sympathy with our fellow man.

Next time we'll unpack this a bit more and then move on to the rise of sentimentalism.

Whew! The last word on the Second Error!

Last time I finished up by saying that because of his interests and assumptions, Descartes was unable to reach the conclusion he wanted, that emotions are purely mental, and that he looked to be forced into one of two other conclusions: 1) that emotions can exist without mental content, or that emotions can exist without the soul; or 2) that his theory contradicts his assumptions because it's actually lends itself fairly well to defending the idea that emotions must be a type of thought and must have a physiological basis. 

Let's have one last closer look. At the very beginning of his book (A1) he explains emotions are "passive events" that happen to the person/soul, but are specifically referring to the person who they happen to. This fits well with his theory of how perception of things like pictures works. However, he also determined that what emotions are made from and how they are made is completely explainable by mechanistic physiology! To put it super-briefly, though he fixes the "home" of emotions in the soul, it is the body and memory that do nearly all, possibly even all, the work of supplying the mental/belief content necessary to start the physical processes that are emotional actions and reactions. This is actually pretty brilliant, but it was a disaster for his beliefs. So he had to find a way out, a way to show that emotions are perfomances of the mind and could not possibly be performances of the body. 

To flesh it out a little more, lets look at how fear would work (A38): he explains that the movements of the body that "accompany" the emotions do not depend on the soul, all that is required to put a passion in the soul is the proper course of certain chemicals towards the nerves in the heart. From there they can then strike the nerves that make the legs move - and sustain the action - which automatically causes movements in the pineal gland, which causes the soul to "feel and perceive" that we are fleeing from danger. This process can be started by a learned response (as a child you saw a bear eat your dog, now you see a bear and you run), or by "dispositions of the organs" (think reflexes or innate behaviors (flinching when you believe you see a snake, even if its a stick). That is, in a word, bodily volition. 

Descartes goes on to explain (A40) that the emotions mainly incite and dispose the soul to will things for which the passions already are preparing the body. To me, that sounds like a rubber stamp, not an instigator.

Perhaps worse, this sort of explanation leads to a very hard question - in what sense is fear a mental object? How is it cognition, the thing that only the soul/mind can do? Consider - don't animals "fear"? If they do, and they don't have souls/minds, how is that possible? (Descartes would say they don' t have souls and don't fear). But beyond that, we've seen that in some cases the body can start and sustain an emotion, like fear, without any direct influence of the soul. So whatever mental content they have is included in them by means other than the soul!

Remember, on Descartes' view, the body is supposed to have absolutely no part in cognition, yet the first two Cartesian errors have already exposed that instead, he's nearly made the mind/soul impotent or redundant, a position that we'll see later fits easily with Sentimentalism in ethics.

While Descartes is making these points, he also tries to tie on a couple of saving moves: 1) He argues that the pineal gland is really where emotions are felt, even though they feel like they are happening in our body (A33-34), and 2) he argues that the only use of the emotions is to inspire volition/will in the soul (A52). If these two things were right, he'd be making a decent case that the emotions provide the initial motivation for volitions, create them and sustain them. BUT at the same time he is denying #2, saying that the emotions incite a "will for" doing actions they already prepare the body to do, and #1 is very hard to believe (much less prove). 

To conclude, bodily voliton exists: In at least some cases the body is already performing and doing what needs to be done in emotion-situations, as well as in day-to-day actions, just from an image in the brain ("bear") + either learned responses or human nature, and though he wants it to be that the souls is ultimately the "decider", it really seems to be a lot less involved than that. Descartes' theory has two arguments smashing into eachother - one explaining how the emotions are of the body, and the soul is irrelevant, and another concurrently arguing that the body is merely the substratum on which the emotions of the soul perform.

The Second Cartesian Error: Inability to bridge the gap between physical and mental

Descartes’ basic position in the Passions of the Soul is that the emotions are cognitive because they are activities of the soul or mind. One of his problems is distinguishing between other abilities or activities that could seem cognitive, like sensations and perceptions, which to him are not cognitive because they are activities of the body; they are always either focused on the body or objects outside the body.

After all, he thinks, any time you sense something, it’s either your body you sense, or some other object in the world. But you don’t sense your mind or your thoughts. He thinks the same goes for perceptions. In fact, in his earlier book, Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes said perception was ‘non cognitive’, because it provided little more than basic ‘shapes’ for the soul to interpret. However, he does change this in view in quite important ways in Passions of the Soul, and it will seriously affect his conclusions regarding the emotions.

The physical aspect

On Descartes’ account emotions happen in the soul, and therefore are “psychic events”. However, he also explains that they have a physical basis. Though the details of his physical account are now hopelessly wrong, the general idea was pretty interesting and we need to have an idea of how it works to see how he gets in trouble reconciling the physical and mental aspects of emotion.

Descartes explains that emotions are caused and continued by chemicals, which he calls spirits, coursing through the body. These spirits can literally cause the soul to move by flowing to and moving the pineal gland, where he thinks the soul sits in the body. The soul feels the pineal gland move, and these chemicals and movements are also how the soul is presented with images and ‘shapes’, for example, of a bear. If the souldetermines a particular shape or set of shapes to be frightful, it excites the soul into a state of apprehension. This is not itself an emotion, such as fear, but the soul needs to be in apprehension for it to develop an emotion.

The soul will develop an actual emotion based on three factors, any one of which can be the determining factor in what specific emotion develops:

1. The natural temperament of the specific body (your body, mine, Descartes’, etc)
2. The strength of the soul (how naturally strong your mind is)
3. Previous success in dealing with the thing, or similar things, by defense or flight. (learning from memory)

The cognitive aspect

Descartes explains that similar to perceptions, which are not actions of the soul or willed by the soul, emotions are thoughts that happen to the soul. Only what the soul itself wills, what it does, is full on thinking. Knowledge only comes from the soul acting, not being acted upon. Basically, an act of willing, what he calls a volition, isdirectly caused by the soul itself, whereas the proximate cause of the emotions is a specific agitation of chemicals. At the same time, just because passions are received into the soul just like perceptions and sensations doesn’t make them perceptions and sensations; emotions are way stronger. In fact, he argues that nothing can excite the soul as much as the emotions. Given this dual physical and mental aspect of emotions, Descartes sails into some choppy waters trying to explain what sort of psychic events emotions are, and his theory sinks

The problem

You’ll remember that the fundamental thesis Descartes wants to defend was the emotions are of the soul, but in the way he sets about explaining how they are accounted for physically, he’s inadvertently – inescapably – set it up so that they can be completely physically explained. This is a disaster and will take another post to fully explain, but let’s get started on the basics.

In the ‘physical aspect’ section above, we learned that experience can predispose the brain so that chemicals hitting the pineal gland flow directly into one or more of three parts of the body such that in every emotion, some particular movement of the proper chemicals in the brain is the principal cause of that emotion. These chemicals do not contain any ‘mental content’ such as thoughts or judgements, instead they simply make the soul to feel. And as we’ll see next time, the system as he describes can totally bypass the soul and create emotions of all kinds based simply on memory, perception and natural born tendencies in you.

To escape this conclusion, Descartes has to commit the Second Cartesian Error. He must insist that these coordinated actions are not really emotions, but emotion-like behavior. An immediate problem is that the behaviors we’re talking about, for example feeling a cold sweat, your stomach in knots, turning and running, etc are more complicated than other clearly non-mental activities such as breathing, swallowing, blinking, or even absentmindedly walking about. 


If we can be show that these behaviors do have mental content above the ‘shapes’ of simple perception, Descartes would seem forced to accept that in some sense the soul is involved in them. The thing is, because of how he’s defined things, he only has two choices for what to call the behaviors, volitions or emotion. Since the soul does not choose to do these physiological things, they can’t be volitions. That only leaves emotions. But then the soul isn’t really involved in emotions.


To avoid this result, he has to accept that these behaviors caused ‘merely’ by memory, perception and natural born tendencies are emotions. Even if they have nothing really to do with the soul. But then, on his theory, they can’t have any ‘mental content’ or ‘thoughts’. The only other option is to admit a contradiction, which of course is no good either, so he needs to find some way out of the dilemma.


 In short, his great interest in mind-body dualism says emotions must be mental, must be of the soul. Yet he created a mechanism to explain the physiology of what happens to us in emotional states that makes this unnecessary. We’ll finish this up next time.

The Last Words on Lucretius

Intro

As I said earlier, Lucretius thinks the mind controls cognition and the particles it is made up of are localized in the chest. On the other hand, anima, the vital spirit, is everywhere else in the body but the mid breast. Vital spirit’s particles move to the sway of mind particles and give the body sensation; thanks to vital spirit “even the teeth share in sensation”. Keep that in mind as we talk below about "registering" and "bodily awareness".
The View from 10,000 Feet
Echoing Plato’s analogy of the psyche with a country, where the rational part is the leaders and the spirited part is the military,

Basically like this, but I see courage as an example of the broader concept "spiritedness"

Lucretius says that while mind rules, vital spirit is the “body’s guard and cause of health”. It’s a safety mechanism to protect your flesh. In fact, vital spirit and flesh “twine together with common roots” and he thinks trying to tear them apart would be all but impossible, like taking separating the scent out of curry. He also describes it as being so thin and light, so sensitive, that even thoughts can make it move.
Getting Our Hands Dirty
Now that we have the basics on what mind and vital spirit, animus and anima, are, its time to get down to brass tacks. We’ve noted that Lucretius is a strict physicalist, believing that everything that exists is made out of physical particles. And he thinks that mind and spirit are one and the same thing, yet that mind is cognitive and spirit is not. But why should the same substance be able to act so differently?
Isn’t that paradoxical, or worse, impossible? Well, to avoid that conclusion he’s going to need to give us a satisfactory explanation for this apparent strangeness.
The reason, he says, why they can be the same “stuff” but act so differently is that while the mind is affected the same way as the body, vital spirit is “not one and simple”. What he means is that there are different properties to mind and spirit, they are not pure and simple like, say, hydrogen, carbon or iron. Instead mind and spirit are two subtypes of the same basic type of stuff, an “uber-soul” material, vital spirit. And vital spirit is not a basic element either. It’s a mixture of some sort, like water or soda.
We don’t need to go into the actual physical stuff he thinks make up vital spirit, the mind and spirit because its just not even close to being right as far as what we know to be the components of the nervous system. How could it have been, it would be about 1,500 years before the microscope was invented,

Seawater maginfied 25x

and roughly another 360 before the Electroencephalograph (EEG,  the measurement of the electrical activity of the brain) became widely available.

EEGs measure the activity of neurons

But if you’re interested in knowing more, contact me and I’ll send you my fairly detailed discussion of it from my dissertation.
Whatever physical bits it is actually made of, in practice this vital spirit is basically what we’d call “bodily awareness”, the mechanism that allows us to do things like avoid running into people walking past us the other way even by the slimmest of margins. And as I’ve said before, given the way he describes them it’s fair to think of its components, animus and anima, as what we’d say are aspects of our overall nervous system.
So to put a bow on it, he is saying that the best explanation for our capabilities is that there is a physical system spread throughout the body that is responsive to outside stimuli, and that is directly connected to a centralized core, made of the same material. This core component uses in various ways the input to guide the actions/responses of the whole being. This centralized material, when activated by the spread-out system, is able to think and feel to varying degrees. Or as we’d say today, the nervous system allows for or creates the initial conditions for basic things like reflexes but also for our ability to measure and judge, and our ability for abstract thought.
Let’s be clear: Lucretius does not think that the chest-brain-stuff (animus) simply takes in data from the anima, stops the flow and considers the data, then sends commands to a body that is silently waiting. Instead the components that make up vital spirit allow for duplex communication between the brain and the rest of the nervous system throughout the body. It allows for immediate response to outside stimuli by real-time measurement - he explains that the body feels things that don’t quite rouse the spirit, and that our bodies are actually sentient – aware – in a way akin to the way the mind is. But this duplex process also allows for conscious analysis of the stimuli, the body’s responses, the results of the responses, what goals are being achieved, and what goals might be better, as well as the ability to seek after those goals. The body can run “on its own” but a conscious person can study her reactions and change her behavior to her preference. After all, they are made of the same stuff.
Yet its interesting to note and accept with Lucretius that our bodies register a lot more info than we ever actually register consciously. Think of micro-facial expressions, gut reactions, goose bumps, mosquito bites, or even navigating foot traffic on a busy sidewalk. These are all clearly things the body “notes” – or as I will put it sometimes, registers – even though you as a thinking person aren’t aware. And common sense tells us he’s right: not only are we not conscious of things such as mosquitoes biting us, we have no feeling whatsoever of things such as radiation, yet clearly our body registers it, sadly, to very poor results.
Emotion
Lucretius thinks that emotions are qualities of both animus and anima; they both process and communicate information, and so they can’t be irrational. But its hard for him to call them rational too. He’s convinced that emotions are felt physically in the heart and concludes in part from this that the mid-region of the breast is the seat of intellect and mind. But just because they are felt there doesn’t mean they are only felt there. In fact, he believes that there is more than one kind of emotion; one more or less purely mental (but of course physical) and “spirit-based” or “visceral” emotion that is much deeper and stronger but of course still “cognitive”.
On Lucretius’ account, due to the interactions of the physical particles that make up vital spirit, the mind emotes in an interesting way. Basically, anyone in an emotionally charged situation, anyone emotionally agitated, ends up at whatever emotion they end up at (or calm) by going through a progression from the burn of anger, to the chill of fright, and eventually back to calmness, as the duplex communication between the mind and spirit continues.  Whether true or not, given the importance that anger and fear responses have to survival this makes some sense.  These emotions are utterly important to our survival. The problem of course is that they can sometimes be a little antiquated and therefore lead us to misunderstand what our best reactions to a perceived stress should be.
The idea is that for some emotions, say fear for instance, up to a certain threshold only the mind is “emoting”, but there is a tipping point where the vital spirit is roused. As such, the chest-brain area is usually the part handling (and ‘showing” fears, but after a point the whole spirit system gets involved and you see other behaviors related to fear.
He also explains that while vital spirit moves to the “sway” of the mind, it does not always follow mind’s influence. At least sometimes, perhaps even most of the time, it does, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Whether it does or doesn’t depends on what beliefs are followed. When incoherent or mistaken beliefs are followed, we get bad desires and bad results. When correct beliefs are followed we get good desire and satisfaction. So to the extent an emotion keeps you from making a smart choice, or makes you feel like doing something stupid, or counter-productive, they would seem to be irrational, yet the real thing to blame here is not that system, its job is to protect your body, and its perceiving a threat!

A very basic kind of fear

But the animus! It’s the job of the animus to be rational, to oversee things. If the mind doesn’t do its job the times when it is within its power to do so, then the cause must be a physiological limitation, stupidity, laziness, or bad character. Nothing about emotions, or mind, or spirit makes it have to be that emotions and emotional responses have to be irrational or bad.
Conclusion
So we’ve seen Lucretius follow Plato and Aristotle very closely in some fundamentally important respects: 1) He’s keenly sensitive to the impact the emotions can have on other thoughts and on actions; 2) He believes there are two types of emotions; one more or less purely ‘mental’ and one ‘spirit-based’; more visceral and deeply felt, but still cognitive. (Of course both are still purely physical.) While some, say an existential dread, are cases where the mind is by and large the only part emoting, there may be a threshold past which the vital spirit is roused. Similarly, there can be emotions, say fear of a predator, that are more basic and active at the level of the spirit, but past a certain point the rest of the spirit system, the mind, may get involved; 3) he believes in duplex communication between the ‘mind’ and the body, and that 4) the mind and the body are both physical. In sum, he’s in basic agreement with Plato and Aristotle’s insights on ethics and psychology. At the very least nothing they said is directly contradicted by Lucretius.
The improvement Lucretius makes is that he not only understands that there must be a physiological explanation to all this, he tries to explain it. At length. And with some very imaginative, even penetrating insights. In fact, it was absolutely state-of-the-art science for 55 B.C. In fact, it was pretty state-of-the-art for a lot longer than that!
Combining the thoughts of Plato, Aristotle and Lucretius on the emotions, the mind, and ethics, we can see a pretty well worked out, defensible position. I call it the P-A-L account, and I call the theory of emotions in the P-A-L account the “pluralist account” of emotions. That’s in comparison to the visceral account, first developed by Homer, and the third candidate-account, which we're about to start discussing, cognitivism.
Review and Preview
We have a “scientific” (physiologically centered), state-of-the-art for its time explanation of how the mind and body are  parts of a functioning system, how they interact and impact each other, and what thinking and the emotions are. And it all fits in just fine with the psychological and ethical insights of Plato and Aristotle. In fact, I think this P-A-L account is so defensible that I try to update it to current state of the art science in the final chapter of my dissertation, and that updated version is my own belief about how the emotions work in ethics.
Unfortunately, This P-A-L account didn’t exactly set the world on fire at the time. Not long after it was all put into place the Stoics came along and did every thing they could to bury it alive. The fact that I had to write this dissertation at all gives you a good idea of how successful they were. Unfortunately for us.
But before we get to them we have to look at the Epicureans, who have their own strengths and weaknesses to examine.

We'll have to see what you think after the next handful of posts!

Wrapping up Plato

Think for a moment about what it might be like to be a baby. Sure you’re adorable but most of your few waking hours you lay drooling, with blurry vision, no understanding of object permanence, unable to remember or recognize much of anything or any one besides mom and dad. How do we get from that to where you are today (which hopefully does not involve you needing to wipe your chin and be burped)?

Well, babies don’t seem to have a lot going on with their minds but they do have bodies. And Plato realized that the most basic thing about a body, any kind of body, is that bodies are the type of thing into and out of which things flow. Sure enough, this describes babies pretty accurately.

Well, how can something that is constantly leaking and being invaded possibly keep intact, much less grow and thrive? The short answer is sense perception. A living body is going to have to have the capacity to monitor what’s going in and out of it to some extent, even if it can’t immediately do anything with the info. This insight makes Plato say that in a way, sense perception flowers out of the “forceful disturbances” of the outside world.

While sense perception is essential to a living body such as a baby surviving, social animals such as humans are going to need more built-in capacities to survive and thrive. Plato thinks social animals would have to have built in the ability to feel pleasure and pain and the capacity to love. The first two probably make total sense, but what about the third? Why does Plato think social animals like us need to be born with the capacity to love? Well, it’s pretty tough to think of a society, even if it’s a wolf pack, where the members don’t have a strong bond with each other. And assuming that wolves can’t get to know each other’s interests and become friends and partners that way, then they must be bonded to each other some other way. So the idea is that societies form from a natural, instinctual kinship. If Plato were alive today he’d say it’s in our genes.

On Plato’s theory, we start out as these leaky bodies with the tools to sense perceive, to feel pleasure and pain, and to love. But he didn’t say the tools are automatically used or used well. Still, based on these we also soon come to have fear, “spiritedness” (a ‘fire inside’ sort of like pride) and “whatever goes along with having those emotions” and their opposites. What gets us to make use of all these capacities are forceful disturbances” of our bodies.(An aside I discuss elsewhere: the fact that the basis of mental life, of intelligence, is the physical reality of our bodies, the needs we are born with because we have bodies, is the real problem undermining AI research).

Now remember we talked about their being a brain psyche (mind) and a body psyche (emotions + appetites). As babies, our body psyche is clearly way more advanced than our brain psyche, and more specifically, our appetites are running the show. But we have the emotions right there too. As the outside world makes its presence felt and our appetites assert themselves on us, we begin to use the basic tools we just mentioned. Imagine being a baby again. You’re pretty well clueless as to what’s going on around you but when you want something you are agitated, you want it now. It hurts a lot not to have it and it feels great to get it. As Plato says, the appetites are a beast whose sustainment cannot be avoided “if a mortal race were ever to be”.

But it seems wrong to say you spend all your time awake afraid, it doesn’t seem as if babies flail around all day terrified of things so much as it seems they are just waiting for (and occasionally looking for) stimulus. When the stimulus comes, it is either pleasing or not. If it is pleasing they want more until it loses its luster, and when it is painful they want it to stop immediately. And in each case the body has ready at hand responses, clumsy as they may be. Over time, just like any dog or chimp, it will learn to be afraid, or to be hostile, or to care about different things.

To get along much farther than dogs or chimps though, junior is going to have to develop her brain psyche to master its emotional states. To the extent to which she can do this, Plato says, her life will be just and she’ll gain the reward of a “life of happiness”. If the emotions master the psyche, though, or if the appetites go unchecked, look out.

Speaking of the appetites (whatever a body, given its nature, feels a need for): Plato thinks it’s quite important that for anything with powerful appetites there’s immediately a clash between those appetites and the outside world, which is totally indifferent to them. This is the original version of what for humans will become the main moral issue of the rest of their lives: the tension between what you want and your realizations that other people want the same for themselves, and that the world is indifferent to any desires at all.

Let’s review what Plato has said so far. At the core of what we are as bodies imbued with minds, what starts our mental lives and mental development, is the physical ‘violence’ done in and upon our bodies - and so our minds. Our brain psyche is going to have to work with our body psyche and more specifically, our emotion-psyche in our lifelong struggle with the “mighty river” of desires coursing through our body. At first the brain psyche is pretty much just going to get tossed around by the current and we’re going to suffer everything from blurred vision, to clumsy grips, to bladder control issues, to constant crying. And when our bodies collide with the outside world, well, that’s going to be a whole other set of problems.

However, we have built in the mental capabilities to have reasonably effective “baseline responses” to our internal needs and to external impositions, (even if at first they don’t amount to much more than crying and flinching). Over time these responses are honed and changed as our bodies, piloted by our body psyche, have more experiences and develop more coordination. But you need to realize how important this observation by Plato is: this means that our bodies are conduits of information – for themselves and for the brain psyche. The body psyche is replete with information about our changing internal physical states, whether they are caused by other internal events or by external events flowing through us and out of us. All of it registers with us even if we aren’t conscious of it or cognizant of it and the body is capable of acting on some info while ignoring other info. (Its really a kind of judgement, an idea I'll be talking a lot about towards the end of this project.)

Eventually, the appetites’ initially overwhelming force gets mitigated, and as time progresses, the rational or cognitive mind establishes itself more and more, to a degree such that like a successfully adapted animal, the growing person can more and more control its body and get what it wants out of its surroundings. The brain psyche becomes more and more “intelligent”, more and more capable of applying the concepts of sameness and difference, without mastery of which there no judgement and so no deliberate action. We’ll return to Plato and the tripartite soul at the end, but for now we have enough to move on and watch the basic Platonic psychology develop and evolve in the capable hands of Aristotle.