Musik Willkommen bei Denken hilft bei DorfTV. This is a double first. Willkommen bei Denken hilft bei DorfTV. myself if it gets more complicated to ask questions in German as well. Our guest has worked in Germany and also understands the German language. The second renewal concerns the topic we are discussing today. So far in this program, we have dealt with economic and political topics. But I am also a cultural historian and I am interested in the cultural history of perception. I have invited one of the few experts on this subject. Today we are talking about the history of feelings. This also has a political dimension. Feelings play a big role in politics today, for instance used by right-wing populists who have established politics of hate. Think on, maybe if you can think on Donald Trump. I hope that we have time to address the political dimension at the end of our program. Now for my guest. Rob Bottice is a senior researcher at the Academy of Finland Center of Excellence in the History of Experience. This is in Tampere in Finland. He has previously held positions at Harvard University, McGill University, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, and Freie Universität Berlin. Bordes had published extensively about 17 books in the history of medicine, of science, and of emotions. At the homepage, he terms himself as a writer, historian, traveler, runner, and musician. Thank you very much for taking the time for us. Thanks very much for inviting me. It's a pleasure. My first question. You assume that emotions that people feel are nothing constant. Normally, one would think that joy, sorrow, pleasure, sadness, and so on are always the same. People of all times feel the same. We know, for instance, that the expressions of feelings is variable. There are certain cultures, for example, where men are not allowed to cry in public. But you go much further. You mean literally that people feel differently. How do you arrive at such statements? Yeah, this is immediately right to the heart of the most important problem and most important claim that historians of emotions make and and that is a profound and fundamental challenge to universalism the universalism that comes from a certain strand of American psychology since the 1960s 70s which would have it that yeah there are maybe six maybe seven basic emotions and that they're the same for everybody everywhere all the time and only the surface changes and I think that the history of emotions, it comes from a place and from a time when there are actually lots of different disciplines doing emotion research, which challenge this rather popular idea that things are universal. rather popular idea that things are universal and the the agreement point across all these disciplines from social neuroscience to social psychology to some philosophies of emotions anthropology of emotions and history is that there is a fundamental relationship between the expression of feelings and emotions and if you like what's on the inside and that there's a fundamental relationship of feelings to the world in which they are expressed, performed, practiced. And that the constraints of a context not only influence what a person can express or emote outwardly, but that feeds back onto how things feel in a place and in a time so that's a if you like a shared consensus an understanding of emotions as being somehow social and cultural and political i would say as well as being embodied and the historical contribution to this has been to take seriously the fact that emotions in different places and in different times had completely different conceptual and theoretical frameworks than we have, say, in the contemporary West, and that what people think their feelings were and how they operated had an effect on the experience of them. So that's it. That's it in a nutshell. Obviously, there's way more one could say, but in a. So that's it. That's it in a nutshell. Obviously, there's way more one could say, but in a nutshell, that's it. All these topics you are discussing and you are dealing with have, for me, a very interesting self-reflexive aspect. Maybe this is a first question. Maybe it's too hard to understand, but I will do it. A little bit, one question about the epistemology of your analysis. More principal questions. One can say also that scientific thinking wants to eliminate subjective experience as a source of knowledge. But your intention is to take experience seriously and you put it in the framework of a world view. The question is for me how this can be done in a scientific way. How can the boundary of the application of scientific thinkings be crossed while maintaining scientific methods? So what is the scientific in your thinking, in your ideas? Yeah, it's a good question and there's a couple of reasons at least why it's very difficult to answer. I think the easiest way to approach this is obliquely to think about what it is that's so compelling about the alternative view, namely that emotions are universal and there are only so many. That is very easy to try to represent and to control for in a laboratory setting. Its parameters are very limited. And to some extent, you can fabricate, and I mean that in both senses of the word, a kind of control. So you can make an appearance of a controlled setting to test for this apparent universality the problem is what happens when you take the controls away and i think this is where this more dynamic approach to emotion research steps in and it comes with this precise problem of how you maintain a scientific grasp so some of my my colleagues in the united states made this criticism from within the field of rhetoric and from within the field of neuroscience where they understand that emotions are this dynamic and situated experience and what they asked their colleagues especially in psychology to do and especially in laboratory settings to do was to keep their eyes open to a kind of generalism. In other words, it questioned the value of their scientific work if their scientific work had no meaningful implication or application to the real world. And so they asked for scientists, hard scientists, if you like, of emotion to rediscover more generalist principles in order to get at something which was human as opposed to something which was, if you like, trying to eradicate the situatedness and the subjectivity of a human through a laboratory setting. I think it makes it more fuzzy, obviously. And in some ways it takes away some foundations. It challenges core epistemological foundations about what it is a human is um and that makes uh testing it and probing it much more uh wild if you like um but i think that the real key for me is to emphasize and really underscore the fact that this scientific work on emotion was never and is not now neutral or apolitical or somehow free from a context. There's no such place and there's no such time. And the attempt to construct, if you like, an objective view about what an emotion is or what a human experience is, it always had its politics baked in, even to the point of that objectivity being a kind of practiced affective disposition in the laboratory. If I may, there's a wrinkle I would add to this, and that is to offer a perspective from the neurosciences which have in recent years been increasingly aware of the fact that the brain and the body are they are situated systems in in worlds of other brains and bodies in the worlds of institutions and of cultural repertoire and memory and so on um to the point where it seems like reading social neuroscience these days they have discovered a need to invent the humanities in order to complete a picture of what they do. And from a history of emotions perspective, I always like to put my hand up and say, that's okay, we already exist. We can work together. And it will challenge all of our core assumptions to do that. This is a nice argument for humanities. all of our core assumptions to do that. This is a nice argument for humanities. So to have one of the modern science on your side. Well, you know, I get... I'm sorry. May I come to your book? Of course. I want to speak about the history of feelings. And there is also a German translation, Die Geschichte der Gefühle. And this is in some kind an overview or maybe an introduction into your topic. And it's a long, a very long, you are dealing with a very long period, about 3,000 years. and you have examples from Europe, not from other cultures. And you begin your analysis with Homer's Iliad, the first comprehensive text we have in our history in our intellectual history. The Iliad describes the battle of the Greeks for Troy. The army commander Agamemnon and the young hero Achilles get into a heated argument. Agamemnon humiliates Achilles and the latter is enraged. Here the speak is about menis, usually translated as wrath or rage. But you understand it like this. It's a reaction to a profound threat to the social order. And it contains the impulse to restore the order. Is this allowable or worthy, Enger? Can we see it from the perspective of this culture? I tend to resist entirely the temptation to try to translate this category, mainness, into a modern Western anger category. Because I think from the attempt to translate, you introduce or at least risk introducing confusion. And I can trace, this is one of the things that the historian of emotions does, I can trace where the orthodoxy comes from to make this translation of menis into rage or wrath or anger. And there's a 400-year tradition of making that translation, and it serves a certain purpose. And it changes the plot to make that translation. And the reason I resist calling maneness really any kind of anger is that what Achilles does when he has this maneness doesn't look recognizable as anything that I understand by the word anger. He's upset at at the beginning for sure um but he spends two-thirds of the iliad doing absolutely nothing um and i think that uh the popular reception of achilles is that he is this sort of enraged um violent murder murderous military hero or anti-hero even. But all of that violence and murderousness and all of that military activity only takes place in the Iliad when he has explicitly given up this thing called maneness, which is translated as rage. So all of the battlefield activity in the Iliad that Achilles does is after this thing that's usually rage is given up. And so my question, my starting point is, okay, then what was it then? And my starting point is, okay, then what was it then? It doesn't make sense for him to have been enraged and then give up that rage and only then become violent. To me, that makes the plot extremely difficult to understand. A fundamental question with respect to your reading or your interpretation of Menes and with respect to other examples we find in your book could be that the boundary between the inner subjective world and the auto-objective world. Feelings, for us, feelings are understood, it comes from the inner world. There are inner psychological reactions. They came from an inner processing. But meanings come, as you write, rather from the outside. May I quote you in the English version, you write, man is not a mere passion and cannot be equated readily what we can call an emotion. It does not arise from within, but has both social and cosmic stimuli. So you interpret it in some way. I'm very aware that this is a very complicated question, and we have to speak maybe some hours, but we can do it. Well, I think that basically this is the right line. So what I want to emphasize is that this boundary making between inner and outer of a kind of internal production of human experience and the world out here. I want to argue that that is a rather modern construction and that the idea of an emotion as an internal product of sort of human psychology and physiology is really only datable back to the 19th century and before that you're dealing with other understandings of of how people feel in the world so with particular reference to what's happening in the Iliad, there are two things to say. One is that, of course, if we're taking these characters on face value, Achilles is a demigod. He's not even fully human. And he's communing directly with divinities. And he's a king right so all of these extremely important political and cosmic forces are in play for him um what happens with him and agamemnon at the beginning is really a sort of turning of the world upside down um uh upsetting the cosmic order and you can see the Iliad is playing out as it's about restoring that order but I think that the more important thing the reason why to study it at all is that this text or this this epic poem is alive and right at the heart of Greek culture for hundreds of years. So it's an example to the people who learned it, to the people who were inspired by what counts as virtue here, what counts as appropriate behavior. These were real humans um and they were uh in a way uh figuring their own experiences through a shared understanding of this text and um it's what i mean by uh it mattering how uh knowledge and belief frameworks about human experience and human feeling are constructed if you're existing in a in a society uh say classical athens um where you have multiple divinities and where you have a very particular political arrangement um and a very particular understanding of the humoral body um then you're going to experience your life through these frameworks um and it it should uh feel alien to to us um and my argument here is if if we're reading it simply and and somehow uh easily translating that that kind of Greek experience into something that's readily available to us, then we're probably doing something wrong. These are very deep questions and I hope we have some people who look at this interview have some people who look at this interview who can follow us. In chapter three, you write about Hildegard von Bingen. She lived in the 12th century. She has formulated many visions in which they see God. She sees special forms of love you are writing about, and she sees viriditas, something like greenness or a greening power, a force that brings about life and makes everything grow. The argument of Hildegard in these times is plants are green, they can grow because they have veriditas, the green power. And Hildegard described these experiences in some way as a seeing. She sees all of this. And for us, these are experiences that we find difficult to relate to. But she means it literally. What she sees is not imaginations. She really sees. You're right. It's only for me as a historian to say that Hildegard knew that she really did, namely to see all that. And after she's a respected person, this is believed by her environment in the context of the Christian medieval worldview. of the Christian medieval worldview, she has for her contemporaries the ability to something that really exists. And this is connected with strong feelings. It is about perception or about feelings and where is the border for you? Yeah, that's a good question. I use the word feelings. I think perhaps, so I was unsure when the German translation of my book was being prepared about how this semantic choice of mine would be carried forward. I mean as I'm sure you know gefühle is often a straight translation for emotions and I was explicitly trying to avoid using the word emotions because in English the word feelings it carries so many additional potential meanings feelings are emotions yes but they're also senses they're also perceptions they're also thoughts and judgments and i wanted to retain this ambiguity in the case of hildegard what i think is happening is she is perceiving and sensing certain things and interpreting them through a framework of meaning so that they make sense in a certain way. is a clear process of making sense of what she perceives. And she perceives through a kind of visionary set of senses. I think she tastes and she hears, but not with her earthly senses, but with something else entirely. Really, what I was doing was trying to resist what 20th century scholars did with Hildegard, which was to try to diagnose her by modern standards. So Hildegard is a kind of well-known figure in migraine research because people assumed that all of this could be reduced to a lifelong experience of having migraine, ocular migraines. And all the things that she saw were pathologized in this way. she saw were were you know uh pathologized in this way but that's not how she made sense of it and it's not how the people around her made sense of it um and somehow what she felt what she experienced in working out what these uh things she perceived were uh were, was not pathological at all, but almost like she was a prophet, a visionary, something really divine, and experienced these phenomena as divine. You spoke about the inner senses. This is a difficult concept we don't have in modern times. Maybe. Maybe if you caught the neurological findings is how to interpret this. It is difficult. But I would ask you about with respect to a historian thesis. There is a thesis that reasoning in some way has become more abstract in comparison from the high Middle Ages, for instance Hildegard von Bingen, to our modern times. Known examples are the concept of numbers, the difference between Arabic numbers compared to the Roman Greek numbers, the perspective painting, it is a more abstract painting, the idea of an abstract space, the idea of an abstract time, or the idea of an abstract money that makes time is money understandable. In my reading, people can understand this in the 16th century, not before. From our point of view, it's a question. One could say that feelings have acquired a more abstract component or more generally. Are there for you systematic differences between feelings in the Middle Ages and feelings in modern times? Maybe it's two big questions, but I want to ask you. to ask you? Well, what I would say is there are clear differences in the way that feelings are understood, both at a kind of high epistemological level and at a, let's say, a vernacular everyday level. What I want to resist is the idea that modern feelings are in some way more sophisticated or more complicated or more abstract in the sense of having progressed in some way. In the earlier days of the history of emotions, there were some strong reactions from medievalist scholars against certain modernist principles that somehow the middle ages were childlike, both in terms of their control or understanding of their feelings and their capacity for reasoning. And there's been a lot of good work on both medieval emotions and ancient emotions that shows that these are extremely complex, affective worlds, and that the relationship between feelings and reason has always uh also been complex and that um reason uh always has some share in something affective it's not ever devoid of affect and that if there's anything really distinctive about modern reason it's that it has gone out of its way to stake this claim that uh reason uh has no part of emotion that's a very modern claim and, and it's quite fun to challenge it actually and show where especially high claims for the preeminence of reason are actually a kind of mobilization, a political mobilization of a certain form of affective behavior. of a certain form of affective behavior so i i don't see a kind of line of progression what i see are distinct different complex understandings of what's of what's going on in the human but for example you know a humoral understanding of the human body and all of the implications of that in terms of like diet health climate and so on are just as complicated as a sort of modern physiological understanding of human viscera and hormonal secretions and and neural networks and so on. Just different place, different time. May I switch the discussion to more modern and more practical questions? One question is from my original field, namely economics. Economists are sometimes accused from a critical point of view of being uncompassionate. They do not take suffering into account in their calculations. They draw up cost-benefit calculations. In that, it doesn't matter how the people concerned really feel about it. In your book, you mention a historical source. It's utilitarianism, a philosophy from the 18th and 19th century that puts a utility in the foreground. One important author is Jeremy Bentheim. You write a little bit about him. He writes that inflicting pain is justified if that serves a useful function. A useful function. One may think for example of the suffering of animals that are now industrially produced and killed so there is cheap food. Another dramatic example is the calculations for global warming. There are calculations by economists who say how the high price of carbon dioxide should be so that the benefit should be higher than the damage measured in a gross domestic product. How people suffer in this process is not taken into account. My question is what's your interpretation of this, what economists, I know this from my field, do in a practical way? It has dramatical consequences. And the more fundamental question may be, does a rational view of the world, as economists usually do necessarily include callous or unpitying thinking well it doesn't necessarily include it I think that whenever you start to think politically economically whenever you try to make strategic of strategic policy, it becomes very difficult to picture well-being or to picture kind of human consequences on an individual subjective or small scale, social scale. So I think that it's this kind of social calculus and utilitarianism was nominally about the greatest happiness for the greatest number. So it performed a kind of emotional calculus. If we do this, will the positive effect in terms of people's pleasure outweigh the negative effect in terms of someone or something's pain? So those kinds of questions you could handle when it came to animals, non-human animals, if you took the view that human life was without question more important. He wasn't thinking in terms of any kind of ecosystem, but simply on a kind of sliding scale of whose suffering was more important and what was the desirable outcome. I don't know. I mean, I think about this now in terms of, and I talk about this a bit in the book and i i've looked at it again since writing the book and i i look at the place of um positive psychology and happiness politics within economic uh policy making and strategizing both at a kind kind of national governmental level and at a broader level as part of the UN, say. happiness is built into economic strategy is to completely redefine what is understood as happiness and then build it into policy making that still manages to avoid any serious questioning of how actually feels so you you can transform happiness into um a kind of index of workplace satisfaction or an index of um freedom to choose uh say you know in elections or freedom to assemble or whatever it is, you can introduce happiness and well-being as an index of the extent to which people are okay with conforming with whatever capitalist agenda is being mobilized in a given place. But very few of these projects ever actually ask anybody how they're feeling. So I've always been sitting here in Finland. The reality is that none of these surveys, reports or indices tells us very much at all about what it is like experientially to live in these places. They do not say how it is to be marginalized in these places by race, gender, age, ability, sexual orientation, and what the causes of a statistically manifest unhappiness may be. One might even argue that such things are part of the problem. For encouraging happiness in political and economic terms and in promoting political and economic solutions to unhappiness, they implicitly operate within the neoliberal capitalist agenda. operate within the neoliberalist capitalist agenda. And it's unfolding work, high debt, stress, lack of community, loneliness, and so on. All symptoms of the neoliberal capitalistic agenda that makes people unhappy. So we have in some way an experience of being unhappiness and a handling and a culture of happiness. Look at all the selfies. In 2000 years one would say we are the most happiest culture in our times. And the other aspect is that maybe 20% or a quarter of the population have depressions sometimes, or have very hard experiences, a crisis, a psychological crisis, and so on. What's your answer to all this? I have cited you. aside you yeah yeah well i think so i mean you know if you were to take selfie culture as evidence of happiness that would be inter it would be interesting to test that i would take it as evidence of vanity perhaps an evidence of an attempt to be happy it's about presentation to the world and presentation to oneself. I'm not convinced that it's a sign of happiness so much as it's a sign of a futile effort towards a prescribed idea of happiness that somehow is never really fulfilled. i think that um there's a risk in all of this sort of happiness politics um that it's very easy in a way to represent um a majority in any given place of people who can go along with the system and will answer the surveys in a way that makes them seem satisfied and sort of well placed in whatever that workplace or economic culture might be. But I struggle a bit when, especially sitting somewhere like Finland where, you know, it's every year pretty much it's announced it's the happiest place on the planet. And the tourist board here and all of the media capitalize on that, and they sell it to the world. It's come to Finland. We've got the secret of happiness. What it raises is that Finland has the highest depression rates in Europe, and it has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. And you cannot explain those phenomena through the positive psychology framework. It doesn't make sense. There is an enormous amount of suffering in this society and across Western societies, which it's very easy to sort of erase or diminish through this happiness frame. And so my question always with happiness politics is who does this happiness agenda serve? And I don't think it's serving people on the ground. It's serving the interests of people who make the money and make the policy. So what I do ultimately here is I want people to pause and reflect when anybody asks how they feel is to really put the emphasis on the word how like well where are my feelings coming from how are they being directed what is being prescribed for me as a sort of a way of being or a way of interacting with the world, a way of expressing, a way of performing my daily tasks. Because a lot of people's real subjective experiences are simply overlooked by the way that the question is framed. That's interesting for me. Your argument is that the happiness politics serves not the real experience, maybe, of the majority of people. But there is a more common aspect as well. In chapter 6, you write about feelings in our times. And you write, it is as if people can no longer identify on any level exactly what kind of affective experience they have had, but only they have moved, being moved. On the one hand, you write, there is an abundance of statements about emotions. It suggests a profound openness to emotional experience, and on the other hand, a bewildering emotional aporia, a sort of affective illiteracy. Are we emotionally illiterate? Well, maybe. I wanted to make that a provocative statement. So, I take seriously my argument that emotion knowledge, that is the way emotional epistemology is built, has an effect on how people experience emotions. So if you spend decades building an emotional knowledge system that says there are only six emotions and it's all just a question of intensity um and this is it for all of humanity these six things um if you teach that in schools which is what happens you know my my my son is at school today doing this in Finland, courtesy of an American company that sells basic emotions to schools all around the world. If you do this enough, then you will end up with people who do experience through this very limited framework. And it means that they'll have experiences that somehow they have to funnel into a limited range of expressions. And it won't necessarily capture the complexity or the profundity of what they feel. You know, for me, it's like the post sports match interview in any sport where an interviewer asks a player, how did you feel? And the answer is some version of, well, it was very emotional. And that is both culturally and temporally appropriate and also rather meaningless. And I think that in previous times and in other places, people had a much more diverse and intricate vocabulary, repertoire for describing what they were going through. And they could connect it to perhaps otherworldly uh ideas as well uh which which aren't so available in a kind of purely material uh modernity so emotionally illiterate i don't know it may be too strong um but it does seem as if people are not they don't they don't have a kind of intricate conceptual repertoire with which to express themselves about how they feel and I could speculate about the kinds of problems that follow on from that limitation. But to me, it seems like our own emotional moment, if you like, our own specific history of emotions moment in Europe and North America is defined by that kind of limitation. It's actually a poverty of understanding how we feel. Another important aspect is the role in politics today. For instance, right-wing populists and radicals are known to be specialists in appealing to, heightening, and politically exploiting negative feelings. Many also invoke their feelings in rejecting scientific findings. Appealing to feelings seems to become more important than sub-rationalist analysis. Is there a return of feelings in politics, but with negative effects, not with respect to what you said in your last statement? Should we develop or must we develop a political rhetoric of positive feelings, of centered feelings, of real feelings, not about the exploitation of feelings. And this is an aspect which is very important for Austria. The Austrian Freedom Party is actually the biggest one in Austria, if you follow the polls. It's the biggest one in Austria, yeah. Yeah, well, we have a similar thing in Finland, where perhaps the second largest party is of the extreme right, and they have their inflamed rhetoric. I mean, I know that it's an active major concern for, say, the European Commission. There was a funding call this year across Europe to try to understand affective democracy, is what they call it of extreme emotions tied to political ideologies, although the ideologies are often pretty thin. thin. My kind of perspective on all of this is that democracies or political cultures have always had affective drivers, whether they were extreme or moderate, they were always there. And that to some extent, there is always a political intention to exploit a certain kind of feeling. And it could be temperance, it could be something really benign, but it could still be activated through a kind of anger. I put it in perspective of things like rhetorical anger in ancient Greece and the way that Greek politicians would deliberately mobilize anger because it was appropriate to the situation. I feel like with far less sophistication that that's what's being carried out by certain politicians today is that they are exploiting anger as a sort of righteous practice, if you like. I'm not sure what the answer is um the the answer is certainly not um an appeal to reason because i think that all of this mobilized anger uh within that people would claim that their their ideas and their thoughts are reasonable and just um and their anger comes from the fact that they aren't allowed to carry through these these ideas um so i'm not sure what the what the solution is or uh how to go about um is or how to go about, if you like, steering these emotions back into something a bit less intense. But it might be helpful, at least as a first step, to acknowledge that the center, the middle ground, appeals no less to people's emotions and its political ideas. People know less to people's emotions and its political ideas. So it may be reasonable to start with a better education of people's emotions. They would really strongly benefit from reading some Aristotle, I suspect. All this has direct political consequences. And we come to the end of our interview. Maybe a last question or a last statement from me to your book. In the introduction, you write about the aspect of emotional freedom. you write about the aspect of emotional freedom. You say that have this knowledge about this different way people can have feelings, can express feelings, can live feelings and so on in different times and in different cultures. Maybe a first step to come to emotional freedom. And in your last statement with respect of the handling of feelings of the right radicals, it goes in this direction. So maybe one could say that the understanding of strange feelings of people of earlier times, if we understand this a little bit more, we make a step to understand our own feelings a little bit more. For me, this is a very... This is the main question. What does it mean to be a human? Yeah, exactly. And I think that just giving people a tool, that's all I feel like I'm really doing or can do, is giving people today a tool to understand that the way they feel is not just some kind of natural biological up swelling or emergence, but that it comes from somewhere. And that if they're having a certain kind of feeling or sets of feelings, that it's been, that is the product of where they are and when they are and of political framing and of knowledge framing and that they can, that can be changed. Like it's not fixed, it's not set, it's not essentialized. And I think that's got to be a useful tool to have the question is what kind of politics we want to have how can this be done, what are the signs that steps in this direction are undertaken and thank you very much for this for me a very exciting interview for your exciting analysis and your books and what's the next books you are writing in oh my well I just this year a book came out on the history of pain which is following the same thing. And now I'm working on a book on the power of belief. Thank you very much for the interviews and for giving us your time. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. Thanks. Danke für das Zusehen. Ich hoffe, Sie haben uns folgen können. Ich hoffe, es war auch möglich zu sagen, dass das alles zutiefst politische Fragen sind, die wir heute diskutiert haben. Und ich freue mich sehr, zur nächsten Sendung von Denken hilft bei DorfTV begrüßen zu können. Auf Wiedersehen.