Leonard Cohen and Philosophy (30 page)

In a teleological world, however, things are simultaneously much more like what we ordinarily take them to be
and
marvelously transformed. In this world, it is clear that consciousness exists as something other than a kind of unintended consequence of unconscious and purposeless physical processes; rather, it is something that is a unique attribute, in its fully developed form, of human beings. As Nagel argues, a materialist conception of reality, despite its widespread acceptance, is ultimately unsustainable, because it is unable to adequately account for the objective fact that consciousness exists (when I order my salad from you, you understand what I’m asking for when I say that I want you to add extra tomatoes and cucumbers; we know that Suzanne’s shopping choices demonstrate that she’s thrifty), and for the reality of our different subjective experiences (my hunger, your boredom; how tea and oranges taste to Cohen). While we take these things for granted (as the example of what goes on in a mall food court shows), our ability to do the things we do every day is no less strange and miraculous than the images presented in the song: Jesus on his tower, the heroes floating in the seaweed, our desire for love and connection, our fear of loneliness, the trust we place in others. In short, what “Suzanne” helps us see more clearly, what the song brings to our attention, is the way the things we do every day, far from being things we should take for granted, are actually capacities that we should marvel at, as Cohen does and invites us to do too.

Finally, in a teleological world, since thoughts are real, minds can indeed touch bodies. In fact, if we conceive of our world as teleological, we touch bodies with our minds all the time—when we hand over money in exchange for goods, and the person at the checkout hands us what we’ve bought; when we arrange to meet a friend at a particular time and place; when we listen to a song like “Suzanne” with friends and talk about what it means to us; when my fingers type
my thoughts into my computer and you read them in a book. While we can never know what it would be like to be someone else, to experience the world as they do, we all know that others subjectively experience the world, and that their subjective experiences mirror ours in important ways. The shifting perspectives articulated by the narrator (as who is being touched and by whom changes) take us at least partly into one another’s experiences and show how we construct shared meanings together, as our minds interact with one another the same way our bodies do. The fact that Suzanne can get us on her wavelength suggests that Cohen’s metaphysics are teleological rather than materialist, for it’s only when we understand reality in such terms that thoughts are really real and it’s possible to touch someone’s body with your mind.

17

Is a Tear an Intellectual Thing?

L
IAM
P. D
EMPSEY

I hate and love. You ask perhaps how can that be.

I know not; but I feel that it is so, and I am tortured.

—C
ATULLUS
, poem 85

A
nyone who watches Leonard Cohen’s
I Am a Hotel
cannot help but be struck by the range of emotional expression it presents, from the physical exuberance of the dancers in “Memories” to the melancholy questioning and self-doubt in “The Gypsy’s Wife” to the tranquility of emotional reflection in “Suzanne.” Indeed, like a hotel’s ever-changing denizens, emotions come in many forms and are expressed in many ways.

We can roughly divide theories of emotion into two competing camps: body-based accounts that emphasize bodily reactions, and mind-based accounts that emphasize judgments. The fancy terms for these are “somatic” theories and “cognitive” theories, respectively. Body-based theories capture the
visceral
nature of emotions, connecting them with an organism’s survival and situating them within a larger evolutionary story. Mind-based theories work well at explaining socially complex emotions like jealousy and long-term love, those written about by poets as defining that which is quintessentially human.

While it would be misleading to claim that Cohen adopts any specific theory of emotion, his work, like that of all great poets and writers, provides an important window through which to view the nature of one of the most important aspects of human existence. It should be of little surprise that, as a poet and writer, Cohen tends to emphasize the mental elements of emotions. Nevertheless, his work embodies both perspectives. Ultimately, I suggest that even for the poet, it is useful to conceive of emotions as
processes
involving both bodily and mental responses. Understood as a process between complementary but sometimes conflicting systems, a process account is able to capture the rich complexity of emotional phenomena addressed in Cohen’s music, including not only love and infatuation but also jealousy and betrayal.

Bodily Reactions

Famously, the nineteenth-century psychologist and philosopher, William James, and nineteenth-century physician Carl Lange (independently) advanced what is now known as the James-Lange thesis: emotions are constituted by bodily reactions to certain stimuli. Emotional experiences are the perception of these physical disturbances. To see this, James asks the reader to imagine what, if anything, would be left of an emotion if these bodily reactions were absent. Take the case of fear: “what would be left, if the feelings neither of quickened heartbeats nor shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose-flesh nor of visceral stirrings, were present, it is quite impossible to think” (Prinz, p. 46). James’s point is clear: the phenomenology of fear is precisely the experience of these telltale physiological reactions to the fearful stimulus. Consider that if a man claimed to be afraid and yet showed none of these bodily reactions, we would likely be very skeptical of his claim.

These bodily expressions are largely automatic and can include not only things like visceral reactions and changes in heart rate, but also facial expressions, a phenomenon Darwin was quite interested in and which has been studied extensively
ever since. As we all know from experience, a facial expression is a window into a person’s emotional state. When a person adopts the proverbial “poker face,” he intends to draw the curtains on this window. More generally, we tend to corroborate what a person says by what her face expresses, which is one reason communication via email can leave the writer’s intentions and emotions ambiguous. For law enforcement, face reading has become something of a science and has recently been popularized in pop culture by television shows like
Lie to Me
.

The evidence for the bodily basis of emotions is impressive. Jesse Prinz makes the case in “Embodied Emotions” (pp. 45–47). First, for at least the
basic
emotions, namely anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, and joy, we see tight correlations with specific sorts of bodily changes. Second, likewise, evoking certain bodily changes can induce emotions, from forcing a smile to improve one’s mood, to adopting the “power stance” before a job interview to increase confidence. Third, the brain circuits involved in emotions are also involved in bodily regulation and self-maintenance. Fourth, reduced bodily awareness and feedback also results in diminished emotions.

It’s not surprising, then, that we characterize so many emotions using embodied metaphors. For instance, it’s common to characterize the intense sadness of a lost love in terms of a broken heart, the revelation of betrayal as a kick in the stomach, and the nervousness of a public speaking engagement as butterflies in the stomach. We see many such references to embodied metaphors in Cohen’s songs. Cohen frequently invokes the heart metaphor, perhaps the most common embodied metaphor. Expressing the emotional turmoil of love lost in his “In My Secret Life,” Cohen describes his heart as feeling like ice, both “crowded and cold.” In “The Land of Plenty,” Cohen intimates that the heart is a place with space and depth, such that many things may fit in its “caverns.” One’s heart—or “love”—might be pierced (“Field Commander Cohen”) or broken (“The Guests,” “The Window,” “Teachers,” and “Ballad of the Absent Mare”) or restless
(“The Smokey Life”), or hardened with hatred (“Light as the Breeze”), or layered like an onion (“Wishing Window”). One’s heart may stand for the person (“Heart with No Companion” and “Humbled in Love”) or it might be something one searches through intimate emotional reflection (“Villanelle for Our Time”). It may even be something about which one can have expertise, about which one can teach (“Teachers”). In “I’m Your Man,” Cohen speaks of
clawing
at the heart of the object of his affection, as if he were a dog in heat.

Likewise, Cohen often draws comparisons with the state of the body more generally. In “Wishing Window,” we hear that dreams can be so emotionally powerful that stabs of
appetite
can wake one up. And who among us hasn’t been woken by the fears, pains, and appetites of our dreams to find ourselves in a cold sweat, hearts racing, and viscera in a knot? In “Bird on the Wire,” Cohen expresses regret for the emotional pain he has caused others, likening it to the bodily damage caused by an animal’s horns, vividly capturing the visceral nature of feelings of betrayal and regret. Similarly, in “Iodine” and “The Traitor,” Cohen draws a comparison between physical pain—of the sort caused by a hornet sting or by applying iodine to a wound—and emotional pain.

More generally, Cohen sometimes characterizes emotions in terms of
trembling
(“Last Year’s Man,” “Dress Rehearsal Rag,” and “Story of Isaac”) and describes himself as being
inflamed
(“Last Year’s Man”) or, alternatively, as having ice upon his soul (“The Butcher”). In like manner, Cohen sometimes describes lust in terms of
hunger
(“Memories,” “You Have Loved Enough,” and “Closing Time”) and
aching
(“Ain’t No Cure for Love”). In “Love Calls You by Your Name,” loneliness is said to be
shouldered
, emphasizing how loneliness takes a toll on—and is reflected in—the body. Similarly, in “Paper Thin Hotel,” the burden of jealousy is
lifted
from him when he recognizes that love is beyond his control. In “Avalanche,” Cohen characterizes love in affective terms as being more or less
fierce
. While we rarely if ever describe beliefs and other cognitive states as admitting degrees of intensity
or fierceness, we do describe bodily actions and reactions in these terms. As one more example, consider that in “Tonight Will Be Fine” Cohen uses the metaphor of fasting to depict his falling out of love, where he becomes
thin
in comparison to the
vastness
of the woman’s love for him. As well, he notes the relation between facial expressions and emotions when reassured of his lover’s emotions by her eyes and her smile, in contrast to the sorrow in his lover’s “soft” eyes in “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.”

Emotional experience is a thoroughly embodied phenomenon, and this is reflected in the imagery employed by Cohen when expressing the complexities of love, jealousy, and betrayal. We are after all embodied creatures and it is from the perspective of our bodies that we engage the physical and social environments in which we find ourselves. Emotions are intimately connected with our wellbeing as living organisms. It’s not surprising, then, that we find the basis of the phenomenology of emotion in the states of our bodies. Again and again, the lyrics of Leonard Cohen reflect this basic fact of human existence.

Cognitive Theories

In contrast to body-based theories of emotion, cognitive or mind-based accounts view emotions as special sorts of judgment about things one values. Cognitivists will point to the fact that by themselves bodily disturbances don’t tell us what emotions are occurring. Take, for example, “Beatlemania.” Observed out of context, the tear-filled, twisted faces of these Beatles fans appear to express intense anguish and sadness. Far from this, however, these fans are ecstatic and filled with intense joy—the objects of their greatest affection are before them. These fans are not sad, says the cognitivist, precisely because they
judge
the Beatles to be wonderful and
realize
that finally, they are within their presence. (This example is discussed by John Deigh in “Primitive Emotions,” p. 24.) More generally, while certain sorts of facial expressions often track certain sorts of emotions, this connection is
not guaranteed. As Cohen says in his “In My Secret Life,” he sometimes smiles when he’s angry.

Cognitivists also emphasize the fact that with changes in one’s judgments come changes in one’s emotions (Jenefer Robinson makes this point in “Emotion,” p. 28). If the ecstatic Beatles fans were to discover that the men on stage were, in fact, imposters, their overflowing joy would quickly turn, first to surprise, then to anger. Notice as well that emotions like jealousy, envy, guilt, and moral indignation often involve complex evaluations of situations and actions that only make sense in the context of judgment and conscious deliberation. Indeed, the fact that we so often argue about the appropriateness of an emotional response implies, it would seem, that we are evaluating the appropriateness of judgments, which can be, and often are, incorrect. We might argue whether or not my anger over a perceived slight is justified, but we wouldn’t argue over whether my back pain is justified. Feelings are feelings, the argument goes, while emotions are judgments, judgments which, given the facts, may be more or less appropriate.

Cognitivists are also usually interested in
different sorts
of emotions from those addressed by body-based theories. As Robert Solomon puts it, “I am interested in the meanings of life, not short-term neurological arousal” (“Emotions, Thoughts, and Feelings,” p. 79). What Solomon is interested in are things like “life-long love” and emotions that endure and bring meaning to one’s overall existence. He is interested, “not in those brief ‘irruptive’ reactions or responses but in the long-term narratives of Othello, Iago . . . and those of my less drama-ridden but nevertheless very emotional friends” (pp. 78–79). For Solomon, then, emotions are “intelligent” and involve a person’s evaluation of his place in the world. Likewise, Martha Nussbaum, working from the Stoic tradition, conceives of emotions as judgments about things of value over which we lack full control. “The story of emotions,” she writes, “is the story of judgments about important things, judgments in which we acknowledge our neediness and incompleteness before elements that we do not fully control” (p. 184).