Human Passions: From Classical Greece to the Contemporary Psychology of Passions and the Contribution of Christian Spirituality to the Tradition of the Capital Sins

The centrality of passions in the human psyche has attracted recent interest in psychology as a part of the conative domain; furthermore, there is a very important tradition of study on the human passions, which is the Christian tradition of the capital sins. This article aims to present the origins and evolution of the latter tradition through its most influential representatives, with the purpose of understanding human passions in depth. The article is intended to find out commonalities and differences among the most relevant authors in Christian spirituality and the contemporary psychology of passions. In doing so, we are attempting to grasp to what extent the contemporary views are influenced by this Christian tradition. It is also a way to renew the interest in Christian spirituality by going directly to its genuine sources.     

Domus Willisi: a neuro-architectural tour

Fifteen sites in England today can be identified with Dr. Thomas Willis, the Oxford physician and anatomist, who was the founder of neurology. Four of these were domiciles; Beam Hall, where Willis and his colleagues met to study the brain and nerves, can be claimed as the first Neurological Institute. The last dwelling place of Willis is Westminster Abbey, where in 1961 his memorial stone was renewed by neurologists and neurosurgeons. Part of this original stone marks the new Brain Imaging Centre at the Montreal Neurological Institute, where the name of Thomas Willis shares a place in the Hall of Neurological Fame.     

Domus Willisi: A Neuro‐Architectural Tour*

Abstract

Fifteen sites in England today can be identified with Dr. Thomas Willis, the Oxford physician and anatomist, who was the founder of neurology. Four of these were domiciles; Beam Hall, where Willis and his colleagues met to study the brain and nerves, can be claimed as the first Neurological Institute. The last dwelling place of Willis is Westminster Abbey, where in 1961 his memorial stone was renewed by neurologists and neurosurgeons. Part of this original stone marks the new Brain Imaging Centre at the Montreal Neurological Institute, where the name of Thomas Willis shares a place in the Hall of Neurological Fame.     

Evolution from molecules to men

Early modern philosophers discussed the question of time in a variety of contexts; an enduring theme is the connection between time and the rational powers of the human soul. However, authors from a variety of confessional and philosophical perspectives also considered how the passions of the soul engage both humans and animals with the temporal world. This article considers a debate about the connections between time and the passions between two French physicians, Marin Cureau de la Chambre (1594–1669) and Pierre Chanet (c.1603–c.1660). The article explores the extent to which their background in late Aristotelian philosophy shaped this project, and its place within the broader transformation of the philosophy of time in the seventeenth century. Cureau and Chanet belong within a well-known early modern tradition of debates about animal reasoning, but their discussion of time and the passions is a significant yet neglected episode in the vernacularisation of scholastic and Aristotelian natural philosophy.     

The life and times of Thomas Willis and his impact on contemporary medicine

Thomas Willis made numerous contributions to the neurosciences that were broad in scope. In an age of scientific breakthroughs and intellectual revolutions, Willis bestowed upon medical research the clinical rigor that set the stage for subsequent medical breakthroughs. In Cerebri Anatome, Willis introduced a measure of empiricism hitherto unknown in medieval times. By coupling the delineation of brain and neural anatomy with functional studies, Willis brought the science of clinical neurology into fruition. Psychiatry, too, benefited from Willis' elucidation of mental illness and intellectual disability, and modern behavioral psychologists claim Willis as one their early, most ardent champions.     

Drawing,Etching, and Experiment in Christopher Wren’s Figure of the Brain

Abstract

Christopher Wren’s figure of the brain ‘viewed from below’ in Thomas Willis’s Cerebri anatome (1664) set a precedent, not only for subsequent images of the brain, but for scientific illustration. The image is the visual proof of a Baconian experiment conducted by the Oxford dissection team, in which dye was pumped into the carotid arteries of animal and human specimens in order to imitate the natural flow of blood, thereby applying William Harvey’s theory of circulation to the brain. Usually described as engravings, Wren’s images are in fact etchings (produced by the acid process), significant because etching for book illustration was then in its infancy in England. In addition to considering Wren as an experimental etcher, this article frames our understanding of Wren’s contributions to Willis’s project in terms of his virtuosic talents as amateur draughtsman, natural historian, anatomist, and his use of optical and draughting instruments.     

Historical aspects of cerebrotendinous xanthomatosis (CTX)

Thomas Willis made numerous contributions to the neurosciences that were broad in scope. In an age of scientific breakthroughs and intellectual revolutions, Willis bestowed upon medical research the clinical rigor that set the stage for subsequent medical breakthroughs. In Cerebri Anatome, Willis introduced a measure of empiricism hitherto unknown in medieval times. By coupling the delineation of brain and neural anatomy with functional studies, Willis brought the science of clinical neurology into fruition. Psychiatry, too, benefited from Willis' elucidation of mental illness and intellectual disability, and modern behavioral psychologists claim Willis as one their early, most ardent champions.     

Georg Büchner: Anatomist of the animal brain and the human mind

ABSTRACT

The writer Georg Büchner (1813–1837) is considered one of the giants of German literature. Comparatively less well known, however, is the fact that Büchner was also a gifted neuroanatomist who completed his medical studies with a dissertation on the nervous system of the barbel (a freshwater fish with a high incidence in the River Rhine) and gave a lecture on cranial nerves shortly afterward, hoping to secure a position at the University of Zurich. In the copious secondary literature on Büchner, it has often been discussed whether and how his poetic and scientific writings were interrelated. In this article, I compare Büchner’s anatomical and literary views of the brain and argue that two distinct perspectives on the organ were developed here. In the literary works, human behavior was linked to the brain in a manner that betrays the influence of Franz Joseph Gall’s organology. In the anatomical writing, the brain appeared as an exemplar of natural harmony and beauty. In the one case, the brain appeared as an aristocrat, in the other as a pariah. I take this stark contrast to mean that Büchner understood the brain as an epistemically slippery, contradictory object that could only be approached from different angles.     

Milton,the passions,and the knowing body

ABSTRACT

This paper challenges the notion that Galenic humouralism stripped the early modern body of agency and argues that some accounts of early modern materialism were connected to epistemology. It evidences how Milton’s passions are inscribed with the shocking language of agency and moral responsibility to overturn the assumption of “passive”, unconscious passions. It explores two pictures of passions in connection with knowledge: passions as obstacles to knowledge, and passions as sources as knowledge. Both images recast the material body as a knowing agent, but do so with complications. Agency-ridden passions complicate a straightforward notion of agency, and seem to leave early moderns with the option of blaming their passions instead of themselves for deception. Frequent references to internal passions in political discourses also suggests an unsettling degree of comfort with subjectivity in making knowledge-statements, but it is a version of subjectivity that seems far more public than private.     

Irrational Exuberance: Hope,Expectation, and Cool Market Logic

This article examines expectation, optimism, and future-oriented affective postures in financial markets in conversation with theological debates about hope, fanaticism, and enthusiasm. I identify a tendency in economic discourse to valorize calculative and calm rationality over against emotive enthusiasm in market behavior. In recalling the theological debates over passions and interests that proved influential at the inception of capitalism, I argue that the denigration of exuberance in economics bears genealogical links to theological condemnation of the fanatic and enthusiast in early modernity. Retrieving this theological precursor provides an analytical lens for considering the ongoing traction of the language of rationality in economics.     

Violent Belongings: Partition,Gender, and National Culture in Postcolonial India

This article examines the interrelationship of friendship and violence in European juristic traditions and in British scientific voyaging in Oceania. Drawing upon Roman texts and natural law treatises, it shows how friendship, meaning hospitality and trade, appeared as a right asserted by imperial nations, often with the backing of force. Moving from jurisprudence to imperial practice, this article examines the coercive elements of cross-cultural friendship in eighteenth-century British expansion into Oceania. It suggests that it was in the breach more than the observance that discourses of friendship came to the fore, specifically in resistance to first contact and in accusations of theft. Seen to be motivated by either violent or avaricious passions, theft and native resistance tore the bonds of human sociability asunder. I argue that the significance of friendship was twofold. First, in a context of inter-imperial rivalry, friendship signified native consent in claims of possession over land and thus ensured conformity to legal norms. Second, it promised a system of order governed by norms of affective restraint that could sublimate the passions of natives, voyagers and nations.     

Jules Verne's Metaphor of the Iron Cage

Max Weber's concept of the iron cage has become a byword in the scholarly world since the publication in 1930 of Talcott Parsons’ translation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. What is less well-known is that Jules Verne had earlier used the iron cage metaphor in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869) to reveal the paradoxes of modernity. Roland Barthes criticized Verne's vision of modernity as bourgeois and positivistic, pointing out his narrow-minded enthusiasm for futuristic technology. In this essay, I argue that Verne's originality lies precisely in his equivocal attitude towards modernity with its high technology. Verne, I suggest, does not reject technological modernity, but by dissecting it he reveals its propelling forces, high demands and price. He shows that the Enlightenment's Rule of Reason is, in the end, governed by the ancient passions of fear, bitterness and the thirst for revenge. It is this combination that makes the human condition tragic. Verne's Homeric imagination creates an epic hero—Captain Nemo—who personifies the remarkable alliance of modern science and ancient heroism.     

REVISIONISM IN SOVIET HISTORY

This essay is an account of the “revisionism” movement of the 1970s and 1980s in Soviet history, analyzing its challenge to the totalitarian model in terms of Kuhnian paradigm shift. The focus is on revisionism of the Stalin period, an area that was particularly highly charged by the passions of the Cold War. These passions tended to obscure the fact that one of the main issues at stake was not ideological but purely disciplinary, namely a challenge by social historians to the dominance of political history. A similar challenge, this time against the dominance of social history on behalf of cultural history, was issued in the 1990s by “post‐revisionists.” Although I was a participant in the battles of the 1970s, the essay is less a personal account than a case‐based analysis of the way disciplinary orthodoxies in the social sciences and humanities are established and challenged, and why this happens when it does. In the case of Soviet history, I argue that new data and external events played a surprisingly small role, and generational change a large one.     

THE INCEST PASSIONS: AN OUTLINE OF THE LOGIC OF IQWAYE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

Incest is best elucidated as a plethora of human desires, which are affirmed by their social regulation rather than negated by it This contrasts with the received wisdom of anthropological theory which is focussed on the prohibition of incest rather man on the incest desires which motivate the logic of their social regulation through interdictions. The theoretical fixation on prohibition expresses modern Western bourgeois incesto-phobic sensibilities and morality. The upshot of this study is that among the Iqwaye, contrary to the classic incesto-phobic formulations whereby the prohibition of incest is the condition of human sociality, without the positive fulfilment of incest there is no human kinship or social existence. In Part 1 the problematics of incest are delineated in the context of Iqwaye mythopoeic cosmogony. In Part 2 (to appear in the next Oceania issue) I present concrete articulation of incest passions in the main structural configurations of Iqwaye social organization (the naming system, patrifiliation, matrifiliation, affinity, cross-sex siblingship, institutionalized male homosexuality). Thus, the theoretical view of incest outlined in the first part is ethnographically demonstrated. A special emphasis is placed on the centrality and irreducibility of radical imagination in the constitution of human social reality.     

Wilful Design: The Sampler in Nineteenth-Century Britain

This article recovers the cultural significance of the sampler in nineteenth-century Britain. I argue that this mainstay of female education models a circular shape of development in which the young girl painfully revises earlier experience; the subject is conceived of as perpetually reworking herself without obvious linear progression. Though this article is situated against canonical works of Victorian fiction, it focuses primarily on actual samplers to argue that these pieces of childhood embroidery should be recognized as a form of life-writing. After establishing the conventions of the sampler, I turn to an apparently anomalous example that exemplifies the temporal and affective patterns ingrained by the pedagogical exercise of sampler sewing. My central artefact is an autobiographical sampler from the needle of a 17-year-old Sussex girl named Elizabeth Parker. Currently housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum, this textile from 1830 recounts Parker’s childhood experiences in service, and the horrors of physical abuse and sexual assault that led her to contemplate suicide, all compressed into 46 lines of cross-stitch. I argue that the sampler as a pedagogical tool resists the Bildungsroman’s model of the self as formed through temporal progression towards self-contained adult agency. Instead, the sampler materially and thematically enforces the recursive temporal dynamics of conversion.     

THE INCEST PASSIONS:AN OUTLINE OF THE LOGIC OF THE IQWAYE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

In the first part of this paper (Oceania 62(1)) I presented the mythopoeic-cosmological foundations of incest among the Iqwaye people, a Yagwoia-Anga group of the West Menyamya Census Division, Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea. The core of incest passions derives from the primordial autosexual-autonutritive, i.e. self-procreative, cosmic man. Here I am demonstrating how incest as autocreation is realized in the main structural configurations of Iqwaye social organization, specifically the naming system, patrifiliation, matrifiliation, affinity, cross-sex siblingship and, finally, institutionalized male homosexuality.     

The Old English annal for 757 and West Saxon dynastic strife

The article seeks to place the unusual entry for 757 in the Parker Chronicle into the context of eight- and ninth-century controversies about hereditary succession in the Kingdom of Wessex: The argument proceeds in three steps. Firstly, I try to differentiate between the level of the recorded events and the level of the record and argue that a complicated process of transmission from the first to the second level may have to be assumed. Secondly, I seek to show that the entry displays a critical attitude against Ine's eighth-century successors in Wessex. Thirdly, I link such criticisms to the dynastic politics of Ine and the descendants of Ine's brother Ingeld, who ruled Wessex throughout the ninth century.     

Rousseau’s Antidote to Egoism

ABSTRACT

Our contemporary culture has been labelled as one of “greed.” Our challenge, it is argued, is even more formidable if we recall Rousseau’s argument that it is the desire for esteem and fame that is the driving force of modern societies. This striving for recognition is the direct offspring of l’amour-propre, here translated as egoism. Contemporary economic systems thrive on this corrupted form of self-love, which is often sugarcoated as ambition, or even courage and vision. The development of l’amour-propre can be partly prevented and checked through the cultivation of l’amour-de-soi, conceived by Rousseau as being the source of the humane passions, a clear-sighted reason, and a mature conscience. At the cultural and institutional level, Rousseau’s thought implies a radical transformation that consists in the detachment of self-fulfillment from economic achievements, and the subordination of economic life and interests to other human ends, such as the good and virtuous human life. The corrupting effects of luxury and the loss of liberty caused by the multiplication of needs are therefore especially highlighted. Conversely, the alternative, non-military and non-materialist ethos in Rousseau’s works is emphasized.