Leonard Cohen and Philosophy (31 page)

When considering an emotion like love, bodily reactions can scarcely be the entire story. When, in “Hallelujah,” Cohen denies that love is a victory march, he points to the conceptual complexity of love. Even those who consider themselves nonreligious will be familiar with 1 Corinthians 13 and its characterization of love. Love, we’re told, “is patient and kind; it is not jealous or conceited or proud.” Whether or not one agrees with this biblical characterization of love, there is an important lesson here: the experience of the bodily reactions associated with love cannot be the complete story of love, for there are behavioral, social, and cognitive conditions that must be met in order for it to count as
genuine
love. In a similar vein, love is not just what one feels; it’s also something one can
give
—or fail to give—to another, as Cohen notes in “Suzanne.” And in “Chelsea Hotel #2” we see the importance of distinguishing infatuation from love, which are sometimes hard to distinguish merely in terms of feeling. Infatuation is of course a powerful and beautiful emotion. But it’s also fleeting, limited to a time and a place, to a moment in the narrative of one’s life. While Cohen remembers the sweetness of an infatuation, locating in at a specific time and place (the Chelsea Hotel in New York in the late sixties), it isn’t love; for one thing, he rarely thinks of her anymore.

In songs like “Why Don’t You Try” and “Humbled in Love,” we again see the complexities of love, of even the desire for a love that is lacking, and also the strictures of marriage or long-term commitment. Not all loves are lifelong yet the codification of love in a marriage is meant to be. Vows, as Cohen puts it, are difficult. Against the permanency of marriage stands the possibility of many emotionally satisfying infatuations. With the commitment of lifelong love—or at least, lifetime monogamy—a person forecloses on the future possibilities of infatuation. We see a similar tension between monogamy and freedom in “There Is a War,” “So Long, Marianne,” “Ballad of the Absent Mare,” and “I Tried to Leave You.” Such tensions are sometimes reflected in the possible asymmetries of love, that is, in cases where the strength of
love between two lovers is not equal. In “Iodine,” for instance, compassion and pity can sting as much as iodine when one partner needs the other more than she needs him. Asymmetries in love can sometimes result in the loss of one’s identity to the other, as reflected in “Fingerprints.” Here Cohen seems to intimate that love can lead to emasculation and the loss of one’s fingerprints—one’s identity—to the other.

Likewise, jealousy appears to have a strong cognitive component. Whether or not a person feels jealousy will depend, at least in part, on how he thinks of himself and his relation to his partner. As Cohen suggests in “Sisters of Mercy,” if you don’t think of someone as a lover, thoughts about her intimate relations with another are unlikely to produce jealousy. Relatedly, in “Paper Thin Hotel,” Cohen expresses relief from the jealousy that might have been aroused by hearing his erstwhile lover making love to another. A burden was lifted from his soul. This relief seemingly resulted from Cohen’s—the song’s narrator’s—realization that love wasn’t under his control. In these cases, judgment and conscious reflection play an essential role. Emotions must be analyzed in this sense, and from such analyses, we learn about ourselves and the nature of human existence. In “Villanelle for Our Time” (with lyrics that sound Cohen-like from a poem by Frank Scott), Cohen indicates that we
search
our emotions, emotions that have been informed and influenced by pleasurable and painful experiences from which we may rise again to play some “greater part.” And as they can and must be reflected on, so they can be taught to others (“Teachers”).

Cognitivists, it should now be clear, emphasize the
social
nature of emotions. So for example, in
The Rationality of Emotion
Ronald de Sousa advances his notion of a “paradigm scenario,” a social context in which we each learn culturally appropriate expressions of emotion. But not only are emotions learned and reinforced socially, some only make sense within the context of complex social relationships. Think, for example, of the powerful sense of betrayal you might feel as a relationship unravels due to infidelity, and
the sense of regret your partner might feel for causing such emotional pain in a former lover. These socially rich and complex emotions are represented in Cohen’s works like “Bird on the Wire,” “A Singer Must Die,” and “Leaving Green Sleeves.” Here we again see the complex interplay of a desire for freedom (from romantic attachment), the emotional pain it has wrought in others, and the regret that he is the cause of such pain. We perhaps see something similar in “Tower of Song” where Cohen expresses surprise and regret for the bridges burnt between himself and a lover and the river that has widened between them. The social and cognitive complexities of love, jealousy, regret, and ultimately forgiveness are also evident in love triangles. Consider Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat,” where these complexities intertwine, and through which the members of the triangle grow, learning about one another, and themselves. Rather than being brief perturbations, love and the emotional pain of love lost or betrayed may not even diminish over time, as noted in “Ain’t No Cure for Love.”

Emotion as a Process

Is a tear an intellectual thing? Yes and no. As is so often the case in philosophical disputes, the truth may lie somewhere in between. Rather than treating body-based and cognitive theories as competing and mutually exclusive theories of emotion, it may be better to approach them as complementary aspects of what is a very complex phenomenon. Jenefer Robinson (pp. 28–43), for example, argues that we should understand emotion as a process between bodily arousal on the one hand, and “cognitive appraisals” on the other. Such appraisals allow for complex emotions like lifelong love, jealousy, and regret, and allow us to interpret our bodily reactions in meaningful ways, ways that relate both to our physical and social environments. They also help make sense of the fact that our emotions track our judgments about people and situations. Bodily arousal, on the other hand, helps explain how we
experience
emotions, the feelings that so color
our existence and motivate us to action. Body-based theories also allow us to explain groundless emotions like phobias, which resist rational modification through judgment; someone with a paralyzing fear of flying may accurately judge that flying is one of the safest modes of transportation, though the fear remains. Arguably, there is no simple mapping between emotions and judgments or bodily states; rather, emotions involve a complex exchange between body and mind, and a process account captures this.

Consider again the example of jealousy. Suppose you see your lover in what appears to be an intimate embrace with a stranger. You will likely have a very sudden emotional response. Perhaps you feel as if someone kicked you in the stomach. Your muscles tighten and your heart begins to race. Perhaps you even
flush
with anger or
droop
with sadness. Your attention now focusses on the object of your jealousy—the stranger. Your initial reaction, visceral and largely reflexive, represents the body-based theorist’s conception of emotions as pre-cognitive, hardwired bodily reactions. Yet even these initial responses are not free of cognitive content, for you must recognize your lover
as
your lover and
conceive
of her interaction with this stranger as intimate and as a potential threat to your relationship. But now suppose you notice that this stranger bears a likeness to your lover and then recall that her brother, whom you have never met, was to be in town this week. Quickly, your fear turns first to doubt, then to hope. After being introduced to your lover’s brother, your jealousy immediately dissipates, quickly giving way, perhaps, to a sense of guilt and embarrassment for having
jumped to conclusions
. I think that in this and similar cases we must recognize the rich and complex interaction between bodily reactions, the reflexes to which none of us are immune, and the more intellectual aspects of our emotional lives: belief, inference, and evaluation.

According to de Sousa (“Emotion,” pp. 61–75), such a compromise allows us to explain how language and narrative structure enrich the distinctive emotional lives of human beings. Our sophisticated cognitive architecture enables us to
transform the more primitive emotional structures we share with other animals, bringing new depths and new dimensions. Perhaps some of our more complex emotions are quintessentially human. While dogs and horses surely have complex emotional lives, without the cognitive sophistication that perhaps comes only with human-like language, some emotions would seem to be beyond their ken. Take, for example, moral indignation at political injustices and the resulting cynical apathy towards politics and political leaders in the face of such injustice. Songs like Cohen’s “Anthem,” “On That Day,” and “Everybody Knows” capture the existential angst and powerlessness we feel when confronted with the realities of modern human society. Like it or not, the rich (usually) get richer, the poor poorer, our political leaders, our “captains,” often lie to us, and there are, indeed, “killers in high places.” Such realizations of the inequities and hypocrisies of life leave one feeling
broken
, which I interpret in both bodily and cognitive terms: the recognition of life’s unpleasant realities involves complex realizations that may leave us feeling empty
inside
. Cohen’s “The Land of Plenty” presents what is arguably a more hopeful or philosophical take on the sorts of problems endemic to modern society.

This sort of compromise between bodily and cognitive approaches to emotion is often well represented in poetry. To take just one example, consider this passage from the Greek poet Aeschylus’s
Agamemnon
(specifically, Robert F. Kennedy’s famous rendering of the passage, which appears as the epitaph on his tombstone):

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget

falls drop by drop upon the heart,

until, in our own despair,

against our will,

comes wisdom. . . . .

Note the interplay between physical and cognitive elements. Even when we sleep—even when we’re
unconscious—
emotional pain persists, falling like drops of rain upon the
heart
.
Yet from this despair, over
time
and through
reflection
, even against our conscious will, comes
insight
and
wisdom
. Cohen often notes the wisdom that can come from emotional trauma. In “Paper Thin Hotel,” for example, he suggests metaphorically that one can only reach heaven after going through hell. Indeed, some of the most profound lessons any of us learn in this life come from situations that evoke powerful emotions, emotions from which we learn and grow.

De Sousa (in his article “Emotions”) suggests thinking of emotions in terms of “parallel systems of control” where the older, faster, not fully conscious mechanisms emphasized by body theorists are guided, interpreted, assessed, and
reassessed
by the newer but slower and more discerning systems of conscious judgment and reflection. Emotions, then, provide information about things we care about, things we value, and this is reflected at the deepest, primordial levels in the states of our bodies. I believe that Leonard Cohen’s musical compositions nicely reflect the rich complexity of this interchange between mind and body, for while emotions are indeed evaluated by the mind, they are also
written in the flesh
.

18

The Prophetic Mr. Cohen

T
IMOTHY
P. J
ACKSON

L
eonard Cohen is not the New Moses or the Second Coming of Christ or a Reincarnation of the Buddha. Moreover, Marc Chagall can rest easy; Mr. Cohen is an average visual artist. (I, at least, can take or leave his drawings and paintings.) Cohen is, nevertheless, the closest thing we have today to a Biblical prophet. He was born and remains a Jew. He was involved for a time with Scientology. He sustains a long-term love affair with Christian imagery and ethics. He is an ordained Buddhist monk. He has studied with a Hindu mystic in Mumbai. And he is a sincere admirer of Taoism and Sufism.