Text/Ma Xiangyang
The scalpel marks the curtain of a new era
One day in January 1632, the 26-year-old young Dutch painter Rembrandt was preparing a public performance in Amsterdam. The young painter took Amsterdam by storm with his creative portrait style. This time, he was invited by the Amsterdam Surgeons' Guild to paint on the spot for a unique anatomy class being conducted by Dr. Dupp, a renowned scientist in the industry, to commemorate and recognize Dr. Dupp's outstanding professional reputation.
Dr. Dupp's anatomy class
Rembrandt's masterpiece, "Dr. Dupp's Anatomy Lessons", is still in the Maurites Royal Gallery in The Hague, Netherlands. In the painting, the artist depicts eight doctors appointed by the Amsterdam Surgeons' Guild, of which the protagonist, Dr. Dupu, is placed in a strong contrast between light and dark light, and the other seven doctors watching the anatomy class are either staring, surprised, or suspicious, only Dr. Dupp's expression is particularly intriguing: he neither faces the audience, nor does he pay attention to the dissecting object on the hospital bed, and even ignores his colleagues - at this moment, he is staring into the distance outside the room.
Antonio Damasio, a well-known contemporary neuroscientist and author of In Search of Spinoza, believes that the expression of the protagonist, Dr. Dupp, conveys an unsettling atmosphere in European society at that time: "Look what we have done! "The scientist tool represented by the scalpel gave birth to the important research path of today's neurobiology concern with the material connection between brain cells and thoughts, and in those years triggered Spinoza's subversive and dangerous discovery: Dr. Dopp's scalpel, together with the philosopher Spinoza's biological discovery, is respectlessly breaking directly into the sacred world of the Creator—the most secret emotional and spiritual world of human beings—including the mechanisms by which desires, emotions, hearts, and wisdom occur and operate. It was these genius prophecies and discoveries that led to Spinoza's lifelong expulsion from the Church and confined to seclusion in the bright dust of that era until his death from pneumoconiosis at the age of 44.
This day is a dramatic moment that attracts much attention in human society. Among the public who watched Rembrandt's live painting performance that day, English physiologist William Harvey (who later discovered blood circulation) and Spinoza's mentor Descartes were also among them. Europe in the mid-seventeenth century, centered on the Netherlands, was the century of genius of the explosion of human intelligence.
A new era began in which people began to believe only in facts, observations, and experiments. Instead of the Cartesian way of exploring human origins, the elaborate scalpel, lens, microscope and laboratory were convinced that new scientific tools could dissect the structure of the human body and go deep into the body beneath the skin, understanding all the essence of human beings, such as desires and emotions, body and mind, self and world.
It was in this year that Spinoza was born.
Four hundred years later, Spinoza's research on the mechanisms of emotion shocked contemporary neuroscientist Damasio. Just as people felt on that day in January 1632 when watching the painter Rembrandt describe Dr. Dupp's anatomy class, when today's audiovisual cultural media are replacing the literacy cultural medium, you will also feel the wonderful fit between Damasio's contemporary neuroscience discoveries and Spinoza's ethical theory.
When Dong Yuhui, the first Internet celebrity of Oriental Selection, seamlessly switched between ecstasy and tears in the live broadcast room; When Wei Ya and Li Jiaqi shouted "My family" in the live broadcast room, and turned the relationship between people and products into an emotional connection through various fan festivals and gratitude activities; When former US President Donald Trump accused all newspaper news of being "fake news" and used social networks like Twitter to govern the country; When communication scholars marvel that "cyberpeople" are more willing to replace facts with emotions in a "post-truth" media society has arrived, you will be surprised to find that the mechanism of emotion that Spinoza saw is exerting a more important influence on social life.
Starting from the hottest neurobiology of our time, Spinoza's journey from cell physiology, to body anatomy, and finally brain science research, to explain the biological foundations that are essential to the ethics of virtue, Spinoza's inspiration to contemporary biologists.
Mechanisms of homeostasis: from emotion to feelings
Spinoza's theory of the emotional engine is inseparable from the innate, automated, life management device called "homeostasis" within the human body - like a leafy tree, this device has evolved through different body tissues and structures for a long time, forming a very complex, sensitive, and highly coordinated internal regulatory system and regulated life state.
In simple terms, the homeostasis mechanism includes four levels of body tissues from bottom to top: the bottom layer is composed of metabolism, basic reflexes (such as startles, natural response mechanisms to noise, touch, and hot and cold light), and the immune system; The middle level is the behavior of pleasure (reward) and pain (punishment), the collection of these reactions and their associated chemical signals that form the physiological basis of pleasure or pain in the experience of life; The third layer is the upper brain drive and motivation, which Spinoza sometimes calls "impulse" and "desire", which refers to the behavioral impulse of the organism by a specific drive and the conscious feeling (such as resolution or inhibition) of this impulse; Finally, the fourth layer is the branch that approaches the top but does not reach the ultimate, the emotion itself, which is the "crown jewel" that life uses to regulate its state. Narrow emotions include happiness, sadness, fear, pride, shame, compassion, etc., all of which constitute the most important life experience of each person.
"In Search of Spinoza"
[US] Antonio S. By R. Damasio
Zhou Renlai Zhou Shichen / trans
Zhanlu Culture | China Textile Press
March 2022
The most important social function played by the homeostasis mechanism is what Spinoza calls the state of "effort" at any point in an individual's life—"everything does its best to try to keep it alive." In order to achieve the goal of a so-called "happy" life, all body cells, including the brain, are working hard all the time to carry the load.
In other words, the efforts of all cells in the homeostasis mechanism are intended to provide a better state of life than the intermediate state (e.g., muddled, drunken dreams and death), the social ideal expressed by Jefferson and other sages in the Declaration of Independence—"I believe that the fact that all people are born this way, that they tend to protect life and seek happiness, that their happiness comes from successful endeavors, is the basis of virtue." ”
The chemical molecules transmitted in the blood, and the electrochemical signals conducted along the neural pathways, all these "effort" instructions constitute a wonderful basic device of life to automatically solve the basic and important problems of our lives: such as finding the source of energy (from material to spiritual); absorption and conversion of energy; Maintain internal chemical balance in harmony with life processes; Maintain the structure of the body by repairing losses; As well as protection against diseases and external factors that harm the body, etc.
For tens of millions of years, individual brains and society as a whole have been co-evolving to produce a series of far-reaching cultural behaviors in today's human society: such as group security, the power of cooperation, necessary constraints, altruism, and the original union. The brain tissue of a small bee contains only 95,000 neurons (humans have billions of neurons and trillions of internal neuron connections, and some lower organisms such as Caenorhabditis elegans have only 302 neurons and about 5,000 internal neuron connections), and have also evolved quite deep sociality.
Darwin and Freud tried to study the effects of the mechanism of emotion on humans from different perspectives, such as innate and acquired. In Damasio's view, studying the mechanisms by which emotions occur must separate emotions from feelings, otherwise "it will be difficult to see how beautiful emotions are, how amazing their wisdom is, and how powerful they can solve problems for us." "From the occurrence of emotions to the feeling of emotions, four conditions must be met at the same time: the organism, the nervous system that can map the structure of the human body and the state of the body (so that the neural patterns in these maps are transformed into mental patterns or appearances), consciousness, and brain mapping. Among them, brain mapping is particularly important. Emotion at the beginning is a problem, and the regulation and feeling carried out by brain mechanisms is another active process. In the case of love, for example, love is nothing but as a pleasurable state.
Once we can feel and witness the state of life in our hearts, this is obviously an even more wonderful moment! When one tries to reverse the source of feelings and their processes, one finds that feelings can bear witness to the depths of our minds, which may be the real reason why life is a complex organism. Psychologists have shown that some individuals who suffer frontal lobe damage early in life tend to lose the ability to empathize, attach, embarrass, and other social emotions toward others, and thus fail to exhibit innate responses that herald the simplest social moral systems: such as the germination of altruism, and the lack of due kindness, proper blame, and proper sense of self-failure.
In this regard, the homeostasis mechanism of human beings constitutes the cornerstone of the governance of social life. On the one hand, humans have spent millions of years evolving their own homeostasis automation devices to make them more and more perfect; On the other hand, we have also invented various non-automated social devices such as contracts and organizations to regulate group behavior to promote and maintain the homeostasis mechanism from each individual to the homeostasis mechanism of society as a whole. In the case of Nazi totalitarianism, many of the non-automated tactics (such as the murder of Jews) that the Nazis claimed to adopt to build a "better and just world" were deeply flawed and vulnerable in their motives, goals, and means. Many organizations, social customs, and moral codes in contemporary society essentially mimic homeostatic regulation mechanisms, mimicking a life-like homeostatic regulation mechanism through a long "umbilical cord" and linking it to other levels: desires and desires, emotions and feelings, and conscious management of both. Even though the inventions of institutions such as the United Nations, which are an important part of society's large-scale promotion of its homeostasis system, these imperfect and non-automated social adjustment mechanisms are still signs and beacons of human progress, however dim and weak the light of this lighthouse may seem today.
The biological basis of virtue
The importance of biology in Spinoza's bioethical system in the seventeenth century cannot be overemphasized. According to the point of view of modern biology, the human brain and society have been co-evolving in the past, and the life system proposed by Spinoza is obviously constrained by a physiological mechanism that has a natural tendency to protect life - the preservation of life depends on the preservation of life functions and, therefore, on the regulation of life.
In fact, the regulated state of life is expressed in the form of emotions (such as pleasure and sadness), regulated by desire; Through self, consciousness, and knowledge-based rational construction, the human individual can recognize and understand desires, emotions, and the instability of life conditions. Conscious people understand appetite and emotions as feelings, which in turn deepen people's understanding of life's fragility and turn them into a concern that eventually flows from the self to others.
Spinoza's question is that once all of people's deliberate behavior, including virtue, is actually determined by a priori conditions such as certain uncontrollable physiological structures, can humans still have "free will"? He never denied that everyone is consciously making some kind of choice, and that the best state of all life, politics and society is freedom. A life is free only when he lives by his own nature alone, acting only by his own decisions. In fact, this is his original intention to become a warrior, hermit and loner from the age of 21. In order to take control of life itself, Spinoza admits that since all human emotions are "reasonable" and a "rational" act that is beneficial to the performance of the organism, then we can still say an absolute "no" at any time, as firm and urgent as Kant, even if the freedom to say "no" sometimes seems so illusory.
In Spinoza's Ethics, biologically-based virtue has a twofold meaning: first, the simplest happiness, which derives from the tendency of human beings to act according to their tendency to protect themselves, but this is not enough, and the more important feelings of human happiness, in addition to the need to establish non-automated homeostatic devices with the words social contract, come from a force to escape the ravages of negativity and counteract the uncertainty and threat of vulnerability of life. For Spinoza, happiness is not a reward for virtue, it is virtue itself.
On July 27, 1656, the 24-year-old "eccentric", rebel and hermit Spinoza was expelled from the Jewish community, and in 1670, at the age of 38, he settled alone in The Hague, bringing a bookshelf and his collection, a table, a bed, and lens-making equipment that he used to make a living.
Born into a wealthy family and struggling in his later years, Spinoza did not hesitate to refuse the generous donations of his friends, receiving only a small pension of 300 florins a year, enough to pay for his room and board, buy paper, ink, glass, and tobacco, and pay the doctor's bills. At the age of 44, Spinoza died of silicon lung tablets, an occupational disease, and throughout his adult life, the reclusive philosopher made a living by grinding lenses and selling them, and his lungs were completely covered in shiny glass powder until he could no longer breathe.
Spinoza has loved lenses all his life. Lenses provide insight into the deepest emotions and feelings of the body, as well as insight into the nature and divinity of life and mind. Feelings arise from the process of life, are the source of life, and are the whole purpose of life. Spinoza is not only to vindicate emotions, but also to teach people how to face life itself. Between bravery and hope, he chose courage, the rarest virtue in the world, and as for the "hope" he hoped for, he defined it as follows:
"Hope is nothing else, but an unstable joy that comes from the future or appearance of the past of something, and in a way we doubt its outcome."
Freedom and sincerity are ethereal, and virtue is happiness.