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.

Introducing the Early Modern World: Major Progress in Science, Epic Failure on Emotions

Setting the table

So far we’ve discussed three theories of emotion: visceral – the theory implicit in Homer, pluralist – the theory traceable through Plato, Aristotle and Lucretius, and cognitivist – the Stoic and to an extent Epicurean views.

Now that we’ve laid all this ground work, its time to chart the fate of these competing camps in the Modern World. The 17^th century was a fascinating age in philosophy and science with luminaries such as Bacon,Galileo, Hobbes, Kepler, Leibniz, Locke, Newton, Pascal and Spinoza (just to name a few) all flourishing during the period. And none of them was more influential regarding theorizing on the emotions than René Descartes.

Like most of his contemporaries, Descartes was amazed by the advances in empirical research and he, like they, firmly believed that most if not all of the world could be explained in terms of mechanics and mechanisms, a view sometimes called the Mechanist or Mechanistic philosophy. But Descartes and his cohorts were more radical than they might sound today.

For example, Descartes claimed to commit himself to breaking from all previous theories of emotion and start thinking on the subject anew. But what he actually did was combine his ardent belief in a strict mind-body dualism, which we just saw in Stoicism with the mechanistic philosophy that dominated his times. There’s certainly novelty there, but it’s not nearly a complete break from the past.

The result of Descartes’ combination of mechanism and dualism was a severely flawed but highly influentialtheory of emotions. It – unintentionally – turns the mind into the equivalent of the scent that accompanies a cup of coffee, what we in philosophy call an epiphenomenon and makes the emotions and volition almost completelyvisceral ­– functions of the internal organs and muscles, and not of the brain.

The Cartesian theory of emotions was and remains immensely influential and reaction to it was and  is basically two-fold. People either agree with him that mind is some sort of non-physical, but real, thing and then try to fit it into what they know about physiology, or they say, sure that’s the best way to talk about ‘mind’, but it’s a hopelessly bad idea based on total B.S. so we shouldn’t talk about ‘mind’ (and often not emotions, either) as real things at all.

I believe, as I’ll explain in a few posts, that this pair of reactions to the Cartesian view were a major influence on the rise of sentimentalism in ethics: basically the idea that we ‘get’ right and wrong in the same way we ‘get’ smells and colors; through a special sense and not through reasoning. And thus they ignore the development of and benefits to the P-A-L view of things.

I’ll explain how it came to be that by the end of the 18^th Century David Hume, taking the second reaction to the Cartesian view puts forth a full-grown sentimentalist ethical theory in combination with a worked out theory of emotion and cognition that is related pretty closely to the visceral theory of Homer.

I’ll come right out and say what you probably already get – I find the Cartesian theory, and the responses to it, deeply troubling. The fundamental reason I have such a dislike for both Descartes’ and Hume’s theories is that they share a fundamental problem: the want to but cannot drop the cognitive element in emotions and remain coherent.

In the end, they slip the cognitive component of emotion back into the visceral account by means of ad hocconcepts and/or mechanisms, moves they are not entitled to, and which makes them at best internally inconsistent and at worst useless. That is, at best these theories have several claims that don’t agree with each other and it may even be that these and other problems make these theories incapable of offering us any positive guidance regarding the nature of thought, emotion, or right and wrong.

The Passions of the soul

Descartes wrote an entire book dedicated to the nature of the emotions, The Passions of the Soul. In the next few blog posts I’ll explain the theory he puts forth in the book and identify three serious problems for it. I call these “Cartesian Errors” (the phrase is my own, and chosen for obvious reasons, but what I call the ‘first’ error is also the error referred to by the title of the book Descartes’ Error by Antonio Damasio, though I explain and develop it much more than he did). The Cartesian errors not only make the theory untenable, but worse, Descartes should have known better, and worse still, they became embedded in thinking on the emotions and remain so to the present day. Let’s wrap up this post with a brief introduction to the three Cartesian errors.

The three errors

The first Cartesian error has as much to do with his way of solving problems as it does with his commitment to dualism and the mechanistic philosophy: the belief that ‘mind’ or ‘mental activity’ is pure cognition and that ‘body’ is an unthinking machine, responsive only to pleasure and pain, and having nothing to do with cognition.

The second Cartesian error is that his theory irreparably separates emotion from cognition and therefore is forced into an untenable ad hoc distinction between calm and violent passions in order to sneak intelligence into some emotions. As a result of this split, he can’t find much good to say about the emotions as far as ethics is concerned and so basically takes the position that emotions should be eliminated.

The third Cartesian error is that the theory cannot explain how the mind and body could have duplex communication, which the P-A-L theory gave an excellent argument for, and which I conclude is a fundamental aspect of the emotions backed up by contemporary research.

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!

Plato on how the brain and body influence each other

As I said last time, Plato takes up the Homeric concepts of ‘psyche’, ‘thymos’ and ‘phrenes’ and develops a detailed theory with various similarities and differences to the originals. I also explained that Plato realized that if we could figure out how the living body of a being registers stimuli, it would go a long way toward us understanding how the more intelligent system, the perceptive consciousness of a human, works. He originally set out his theory in his classic Republic (audio), but he offers an extended, more ‘scientific’ discussion of the interplay between mind and emotion in the Timaeus.

His major theoretical development is to talk about the mind as having a tripartite nature, and argues that it is this that allows us to move beyond the child-like behavior of the Iladic people. Upon thinking about human capabilities and behavior, Plato argues that it seems certain that unlike merely conscious animals, humans depend upon two “mental’ systems to live and interact with the world. One is found throughout the body, focused in the chest, and the second is localized at the brain and interconnected with the first one.

Let’s call the first, more basic system ‘body-psyche’. It is basically what today we’d call the central nervous system and its job is to take in the literally “necessary disturbances” of life, such as pleasures and pain, while also being the source of others such as boldness, fear, anger and expectation. Note that all of these are tools necessary for dogs as well as humans to survive, and they are at the core of the ability to socialize. The mental activities of the body-psyche are still aligned closely with simple ‘unreasoning’ awareness (e.g. lusting).

Plato notes, however that humans can sometimes overcome lust and other such unreasoning awareness, but other animals, such as dogs in heat, cannot. This leads Plato to say that the body-psyche appears to be ‘separated’ from the other psyche, the one capable of reasoning, as if by some barrier.

But what is this barrier, what distinguishes the brain-psyche from the body psyche? Plato answers that it stands to reason that something in or about the (human) brain allows for our ability to sometimes overcome unreasoning awareness. (And he thinks, somewhat naively, that it’s quite important that the brain is geographically separated from the rest of the ‘mind-system’ by the neck.)

At this point you may be thinking this two-part distinction is pretty clear cut and are wondering how he’s going to find a third “part” to distinguish. Plato thinks it overly simplifies what is going on, but to move forward he has to write you a check and promise to cash it a little later. He asks a series of probing questions: Do we as a matter of fact note any mental activity at all that is neither pure reasoning nor unreasoning awareness? Is it is possible to explain how such activity is created physiologically? Is there any benefit to pursuing this speculation? He answers “yes!” to all of these.

Getting a better view

Let’s take a step back to look at what is going on here, what Plato is doing. He is in the business of trying to understand how simple awareness and perceptive consciousness work and linking them to higher cognitive functions such as abstract thought. He’s committed to a physiological relationship between them that runs: registering (seeing, hearing, feeling a thing)à consciousness (being aware of and paying attention to the thing) à higher cognition (reasoning about the thing).

So we think that there’s more to the story about perception and mentality than the Iladic story can explain and we’ve got the brain-psyche on one hand and the body-psyche on the other. Plato then stipulates that the bodily psyche itself has two parts. The superior part of the bodily psyche has the following properties: it exhibits “spirit” and ambition; it is physically closer to the brain; it can and does listen to and work with reason; it forces compliance from the (lower) part of the body-psyche that consists of appetites, as for food and sex.

Plato gives a lot of reasons why human physiology supports this view. To show the reality and power of the ‘lower” body psyche, he notes that no humans, in fact no animals at all, could exist if the appetite for things the body needs such as food and rest were not 1) sustained and continual and 2) strongly felt. In fact, this set of necessities we call appetites constantly need satisfaction; I’m sure you know how hard it is to think straight when you’re starving or really have to relieve yourself. Further, when we look at how the heart works and how we can raise and lower our heart rate, we get an idea of how ‘reason’ can use the body to exert its will on the body.

To better explain what the “superior” bodily psyche is, Plato says that by and large the appetites don’t “understand” the deliverances of reason and to the extent they do, they have no innate regard for reason. Instead, it appears to common sense that appetites are enticed – and so controlled – by “images”, they react immediately to what they see. However, the superior body psyche, which I can now tell you is the emotion center, clearly does respond to reason. After all, many people, probably even you, have appetites or desires for things that you wish you didn’t. In fact, many people have desires for things that they really are embarrassed by, and they get really mad at themselves for indulging them. So mad, even, that they often can force themselves to stop. Plato thinks that the fact you can be aware of, judge negatively, and cease to act on an appetite is evidence enough that the reasoning capacity can work in concert with something – the emotions – to control the appetites.

Now the details of the physiology Plato gives us as to how this works are not very useful so I’ll bypass them, and happily, his psychological theories are not dependent on the details. He’s not working from the way the organs actually work and building out a psychology that fits on top. Instead he starts from experience and behavior and is looking to see if there’s a plausible way to account for his theories based on human physiology.

It is useful is to note that he was trying to meet the scientific data he had and at the same time answer a difficult problem as honestly and intuitively as possible, with as much explanatory power as possible. His conclusion was a psychology that says mind consists of three “parts” the psyche which is capable of abstract thought and can control the body, the thymos or “spirited” part, which is our emotion center, and the phrenes, which Plato casts as the appetitive part.

Cashing the check

Remember the end point we’re working towards: Plato thinks we can better understand the mind and human behavior if we move beyond the simple views that our minds are our thymos and that all mental activity is like that of the Iladic people or children, a sort of “hot thinking”. He believes that we can gain great explanatory power from looking at human mental capacity as consisting in three physically interconnected “parts” that will account both for hot thinking and cooler thinking, and that based on how human physiology is set up, the how behind the things this theory suggests happen is plausible. Here’s a high-level synopsis:

1. In humans as with other animals, appetites or desires typically run on their own. All things being equal, when an appetite strikes, humans, like other animals, ‘mindlessly’ pursue it. This much covers how any animal conscious being comes to feel pleasure and pain, and how they affect action. But Plato also wants to explain how humans are not only animal conscious but self conscious and how the two are related.

2. Sometimes, instead, in humans the emotion center (thymos, or superior body-psyche) communicates to the appetites what our reasoning part wants done about a situation, such as whether or not to pursue satisfaction as well as how better to do so.

3. Whatever the communication between these parts is done with, it must be a way that is ‘understandable’ for the appetites. It appears to be a physical messaging system that uses various bodily fluids to affect the vital organs such that the body can be put into various states such as pain and nausea, which have a very strong influence on the will or the desire to pursue a course of action. In fact, these states are strong enough to undermine the otherwise very strong urge to satisfy a currently active desire and replace it with another one supplied by reason.

4. The reasoning part of the mind, in conjunction with the emotions, is able to manipulate the proper physical changes in the body, thus sending the proper message of pleasure or pain to silence (or strengthen) the basic pangs that are messages of appetite. Of course these appetite messages can also be very strong and overpower the inclination to do things that require intelligent thought. These messages go back and forth between the body and the brain, with varying degrees of success. (Going forward we’ll refer to this process as duplex communication).

5. For example, let’s say you have the desire to do something you think is awful, like kicking a puppy that’s been yapping for too long. You kick it and realize the poor thing was just looking for attention and now you’ve seriously hurt it and as you get a sick ‘guilty’ feeling in your stomach, the anger you felt about the yapping disappears, along with the desire to punish the animal, you feel sorry and promise to yourself never to needlessly attack a defenseless animal again.

To strengthen this idea of duplex communication, Plato argues that its clear that bodily conditions can cause illnesses in the brain-psyche, thus stopping it from working as it often can to control our behavior:

1. "Mindlessness": Either ignorance or madness. In the first case, your physical need to eat or to go to the bathroom can become so strong that you are no longer aware of your surroundings. In the second, you literally lose touch with reality due to things such as lack of sleep or syphilis.

2. "Excessive pleasure or pain": too much of either leads to an inappropriate level of exertion, which undermines the ability to hear anything correctly. Think of an addict, of drugs, sex, video games, attention or whatever. They like the thing too much, such that they focus way too much energy on obtaining it and they can’t ‘hear’ things such as the demands of their body, their boss, spouse, friends, etc.

In the next post I’ll give a more detailed discussion of these three parts of the mind, and further explain the benefits of the view for understanding the connection between the emotions and morality.