There is a summary at the end before the footnotes.
Plato and Silvan Tomkins Midwifery and Shame
Plato and Silvan Tomkins Midwifery and Shame
The Torpedo Fish and Why Virtue Can be Taught
Brian Lynch 2007(Edited 2025)
Introduction: Bridging Plato and Tomkins
Men separated by 2500 years yet connected by a study of primary aspects of what it is to be human and to communicate.
Plato, the Greek philosopher of Athens, wrote his ideas almost exclusively through what we know as the dialogue form and through a protagonist, Socrates, a real-life figure.
Silvan Tomkins, a Doctorate of Psychology, developed a major school of psychology called Affect Theory throughout the better part of the twentieth century.
Plato, of course, is hampered by many things, most notably the lack of the scientific method and a refined terminology. This makes Plato’s achievement even more amazing.
This work arises out of a central passage of one of the most famous works of Plato, “The Meno.” This passage and the dialogue in general address several central questions basic to our humanness and psychology. We want to see how Plato articulates them and then how Tomkins recapitulates them so many years later.
More specifically, I will claim that Plato understood, at some important level, the importance and primacy of emotion over reason but, without our scientific method and vocabulary he could not go further with this understanding. He was left with creating a myth. He was also left with, other than myth, reason as his only fallback, again having no way of understanding emotion.
Let us first see what one of the core issues of Tomkins’ work is, as there are many. One of these issues is an example of how language rising to the level of terminology becomes so powerful and gives Tomkins the ability to advance where Plato could not.
We have to first lay some groundwork and speak of something quite modern, and that is biology. And by quite modern, I mean that quite seriously, for modern biology is no more than some 200 years old, which is only a mere second of historical time.
It is important to ask the reader in a forthright manner to assess what they think their concept of “biology” is. Why do I say this? I do so because we are at a certain time in history where we continue to classify areas of thought and disciplines, and while some try to unify areas of thought, this is by far not our general direction. How many people actually look through a microscope and see organisms or cells in a high school lab, let alone have a concept of the flow of blood through the heart or take any science-level college course today?
This is one point. Another is to ask the reader to take a moment and to think if there is a justification for thinking of the “mind” as being separate from the flesh-and-blood body and where you put the “mind.” More than one ancient culture places the mind in the heart.
That said, Tomkins, a psychologist, thought in terms of a biologist and thought in terms of emotional biology. There is much written about why we have such a hard time thinking of “the mind” as “embodied.” Darwin and many others believe that are brains developed “too” much capacity. There is a phrase “the runaway brain”; it is, in fact, the title of a book. In short, we have become, in many ways, our own worst enemies, unable to keep track of our integrity. We really do have a “big head,” a “swollen head,” in the sense of not being able to recognize that our psychology is embodied.
So it is posited that, as humans, from sometime early in our development in the uterus, the nervous system develops some subsystem that will be our emotional radar system, just as we have a system for physical pain, just as we see or hear.
Through my experience, I am quite sure that the vast majority of my readers have never thought of “interest” as an emotion. I confess that I had never thought of it as such. I would have placed it in the category of “thinking” or “reason” had I been asked.
The general thought is that we now know that intrauterine life is quite active and it is only correct that I update this section on child development after almost 20 years. This is a rework of the the orignial passage by DeepSeek AI. I use it verbatum as I could not do better and it reflects rather precisely what Silvan Tomkins described some ficty years ago and is the deep forundation for the conclusion of the paper:
Recent advances in developmental science affirm that cognition emerges not as a sudden leap into verbal abstraction but as a layered continuum rooted in embodied, sensory, and affective processes. Intrauterine research reveals that fetuses engage with their environment through sound, touch, and rhythm, forming rudimentary neural pathways shaped by sensory input and biochemical signals from the gestating parent. By the third trimester, the fetus demonstrates auditory discrimination (e.g., recognizing maternal voice) and motor responses to stimuli—early traces of sensorimotor anticipation, a precursor to associative learning.
Postnatally, infants navigate the world through multisensory images—sights, sounds, textures—interwoven with visceral emotion. These sensorimotor experiences, encoded as affective memories, generate proto-conceptual associations (e.g., a face with comfort, a sound with nourishment). Crucially, "image" here transcends the visual; it is a cross-modal amalgam of all senses, fused with emotional valence (e.g., warmth, distress). This affective-sensory matrix underpins preverbal reasoning: infants infer causal relationships (shaking a rattle produces sound), anticipate outcomes (crying elicits care), and engage in social referencing (reading emotional cues in caregivers)—all before linguistic framing.
Neurodevelopmental studies highlight the amygdala and insula’s early maturation, privileging emotional processing and interoceptive awareness, while the prefrontal cortex—responsible for abstract reasoning—develops gradually. Thus, the infant’s "logic" is affective, embodied, and enacted through sensorimotor loops. Even memory, as dynamic reconsolidation of sensory-emotional traces, operates imagistically long before semantic encoding.
Contemporary models of embodied cognition further suggest that language later scaffolds—rather than replaces—these preverbal foundations. Early associations (image + emotion) evolve into symbolic thought via neural plasticity, with language refining, not originating, reasoning. We now recognize that "preverbal reasoning" begins in utero, expands through infancy, and persists as a substrate of adult cognition—where intuition, metaphor, and nonverbal inference remain deeply tied to sensory and affective states.
In sum, the mind’s trajectory from fetal reactivity to verbal abstraction is not a timeline of discrete phases but a fluid integration of emotion, sensory image, and association. Reasoning is not delayed; it is reconfigured, with affective-embodied experience remaining its enduring infrastructure.
3. Defining Shame and Interest
With this, I hope the stage is set to introduce a unique definition of shame. Tomkins’s definition of shame is “the impediment to ongoing positive affect (feeling).”
Interest is a positive feeling or affect. What do you feel when you are interested in something and you are interrupted? I hope that you will quickly find that this is a ubiquitous feeling that is experienced many times daily—from the can of pop that you think has another swig in it and you pick it up and there is nothing there, to the mate who comes in the room and changes the channel, to walking into work and saying “hi” and not getting a response, or to the news that someone has died.
Note it is an “ongoing” positive affect, feeling. That is, the interest has to still be there. I still have to want what I wanted. The interest has not been extinguished. This is different from “surprise,” which is when all previous feeling is wiped out. The purpose of this is so that we may pay attention to what is going on right now and give our full attention to it.
Now we expand a bit on Tomkins’s findings and add a feeling or affect, and that will be “joy.” “Joy” is the second of the two positive affects he says we have innately. So “shame” is the impediment of either ongoing interest or joy.
The articulation of “interest” as a primary emotion is crucial to my whole theme, and it is in part argued that it is one important ingredient that Plato lacked.
Turning our attention to “The Meno” in the light of the advantages Tomkins had, Plato’s achievements are nothing but astounding, as I will argue that, without the help of the concepts and techniques of modern biology and the idea of “interest,” I believe Plato “discovered” shame and understood its dynamics.
It is also the case that my main goal is indeed to speak about interest and not shame. As I have said, I believe interest is Tomkins’ real discovery. However shame is a close second, and as I hope will become clear they are opposite sides of the same coin. We reconize shame more readily becasue it is painful.
Summary of “The Meno”:
Upon many readings of “The Meno,” I felt that Plato was saying 1) that virtue could not be taught and 2) that, on the other hand, we could teach disciplines such as mathematics.
The dialogue starts with Meno asking, “If virtue comes from teaching?” For Socrates, the question is, “What indeed is virtue?”
1. In the first section, Meno offers various definitions.
They decide that no one’s claim to teach virtue survives examination. But if there are no teachers, there are no learners, and therefore virtue does not come from teaching.
Meno is left wondering where virtue comes from. Socrates replies that their error was in assuming earlier that only knowledge provided the right guidance. The fact is, true opinion does too. True opinions lack the stability of knowledge until transformed into knowledge by “reasoning out of explanation.” But they provide no less practical benefit than knowledge. Thus, either knowledge or right opinion could make men good and beneficial to their cities. But in either case, virtue does not come by nature. But neither does it come from teaching, so it cannot be knowledge. Therefore, virtue must be right opinion, coming not through rational means but by divine dispensation, like the utterance of soothsayers and seers—that is, unless a genuine teacher of virtue can be found. Meno agrees. Socrates repeats that to achieve clear knowledge, it is essential to investigate first what virtue is in itself, and so they part.
Where does this leave us, and why is it important?
I think we read Plato with the erroneous idea that he is saying something quite different, and that is that we can reason our way to vital questions. Although he comes out and says that there is no teaching. Of course, that is a bit different from saying there is no reasoning, but they can be confused. That is, we suffer great cognitive dissonance when we read him and suffer through most philosophical discussions. The reason for this is quite understandable, and that is we were doomed to fail. We were doomed to fail until we hae caught up with ourselves. We were doomed until we had all the pieces together. Until we see that reason is at the service of emotions. So there is no teaching, but there is reasoning.
Men. O Socrates, I used to be told, before I knew you, that you were always doubting yourself and making others doubt; and now you are casting your spells over me, and I am simply getting bewitched and enchanted, and am at my wits’ end. And if I may venture to make a jest upon you, you seem to me both in your appearance and in your power over others to be very like the flat torpedo fish, who torpifies those who come near him and touch him, as you have now torpified me, I think. For my soul and my tongue are really torpid, and I do not know how to answer you. And though I have delivered an infinite variety of speeches about virtue before now, and to many persons—and good ones they were, as I thought—at this moment, I cannot even say what virtue is. And I think that you are wise in not voyaging and going away from home, for if you did in other places as you do in Athens, you would be cast into prison as a magician.
Soc. In order that I might make another simile about you. For I know that all pretty young gentlemen like to have pretty similes made about them—as well they may—but I shall not return the compliment. As to my being a torpedo, if the torpedo is torpid as well as the cause of torpidity in others, then indeed I am a torpedo, but not otherwise; for I perplex others, not because I am clear, but because I am utterly perplexed myself. And now I know not what virtue is, and you seem to be in the same case, although you did once perhaps know before you touched me. However, I have no objection to join with you in the enquiry
This passage is one of the most important that I will emphasize and a centerpiece for me of the paper. My idea is that Plato doesn’t have a clue as to what to call the phenomena that he has discovered. The phenomena he is describing, the effect of the “torpedo fish,” so he uses this strange metaphor that has become important. That is precisely the metaphor of the torpedo fish. I ask the reader why the metaphor became so famous. Why is it referred to so much? Because it describes something important. Why is it we have not been able to give it another, more modern name?
I think we can now. The amazing thing is his description takes place in the most appropriate circumstance, and that is in the learning situation. That is, he does not bring it up talking about interpersonal situations or talking about guilt or embarrassment.
Remember the definition of shame per Tomkins: “the impediment of ongoing positive (interest or joy) affect (feeling).”
Here are two people involved in an intense discussion about the subject of virtue. Might we say that they are intensely “interested” in the subject? They also have a hard time agreeing on anything. Might we say that their mutual interest is being impeded?
I often hope to enlighten those I talk to about shame, hoping that with work they will see it, in the end, as only a friendly feeling, a necessary evil. Simply put, shame in its most basic form is akin, or simply is, “confusion” or a form of “hurt” or discomfort. When I am trying to solve a problem, do I not feel a kind of “physical” phenomenon akin to at least the tiniest headache?
[SHAME]
Now from Roget’s New Millennium Thesaurus, we have “confusion, discomposure, irritation, pang, bewilderment, pain, discomfort.”
Of course, there are many other synonyms, but we are interested in the above ones. Why is it that these synonyms are not commonly brought to mind? All of them could be substituted, I argue, for the sting of the torpedo fish.
Remember, we argue that Tomkins grounds us biologically. Affect is biological. So interest and shame are biological.
As humans, we, in a sense, transmit “interest.” We are like fish in water. We evolved in the earth’s environment and atmosphere. We did not evolve in outer space. It is impossible to think of looking out and experiencing “nothing.” There is simply always something. That experience, to me, is at some level of consciousness/interest. Many, at this point, will call me to task for many of what they see as technicalities and nuances concerning consciousness. I am here, however, to talk about “interest,” and I, in turn, think that everyone else is ignoring it in great part. That said, we cannot look into the world to “nothing.” So there is an interface between the world and us, and that interface is going to have a threshold. If things go well, it is described as being aware, conscious, or interested. We can move to joy. If the world intrudes just slightly too much, we suffer confusion, discomposure, pangs, irritation, bewilderment, discomfort, and shame.
Learning and Teaching
Men. And how will you enquire, Socrates, into that which you do not know? What will you put forth as the subject of enquiry? And if you find what you want, how will you ever know that it is something you did not know?
Soc. I know, Meno, what you mean; but just see what a tiresome dispute you are introducing. You argue that man cannot enquire either about that which he knows or about that which he does not know; for if he knows, he has no need to enquire; and if not, he cannot, for he does not know the very subject about which he is to enquire.
Men. Well, Socrates, is that argument sound?
Soc. I will tell you why: I have heard from certain wise men and women who spoke of things divine that—
Men. What did they say?
Soc. Some of them were priests and priestesses who had studied how they might be able to give a reason for their profession; there have been poets also who spoke of these things by inspiration, like Pindar, and many others who were inspired. And they say—mark, now, and see whether their words are true—they say that the soul of man is immortal, and at one time has an end, which is termed dying, and at another time is born again, but is never destroyed. And the moral is that a man ought to live always in perfect holiness. “For in the ninth year Persephone sends the souls of those from whom she has received the penalty of ancient crime back again from beneath into the light of the sun above, and these are they who become noble kings and mighty men and great in wisdom and are called saintly heroes in after ages.” The soul, then, as being immortal, and having been born again many times, and having seen all things that exist, whether in this world or in the world below, has knowledge of them all; and it is no wonder that she should be able to call to remembrance all that she ever knew about virtue, and about everything; for as all nature is akin, and the soul has learned all things, there is no difficulty in her eliciting or, as men say, learning, out of a single recollection—all the rest, if a man is strenuous and does not faint; for all enquiry and all learning is but recollection. And therefore we ought not to listen to this sophistical argument about the impossibility of enquiry: for it will make us idle and is sweet only to the sluggard; but the other saying will make us active and inquisitive. In that confiding, I will gladly enquire with you into the nature of virtue.
Men. Yes, Socrates; but what do you mean by saying that we do not learn, and that what we call learning is only a process of recollection? Can you teach me how this is?
Soc. I told you, Meno, just now that you were a rogue, and now you ask whether I can teach you when I am saying that there is no teaching, but only recollection; and thus you imagine that you will involve me in a contradiction.
Men. Indeed, Socrates, I protest that I had no such intention. I only asked the question from habit; but if you can prove to me that what you say is true, I wish that you would.
In the above section, much is happening. Plato plants the question, “How do we know or enquire into what we do not know?” This is one of the high points of the dialogue, and it is a perplexing question. It is one that I have consistently ended up thinking that Socrates believes and plants rather than Meno. After all, elsewhere Socrates says that he is certain of one thing, and that is he does not know.
What is going on?
At this point, I now begin to theorize much more about what is going on in the dialogue. I point this out so as not to lose sight of my main premise, and that is to assure you that I believe it is crucial to understand the analogy of the torpedo fish as an articulation of shame.
Next, we appreciate that there is not an appreciation of interest and there is not a biological appreciation of either shame or interest by Plato.
I suggest that what happens at the moment of being torpified is almost as terrifying a moment as it is a realization or clarity about “confusion” itself. It is a moment of realization that there is a possibility of ignorance. This is immediately followed by placing the statements about not being able to know into the mouth of Meno, thus setting up the opening for Plato to save us from this abyss of ignorance by giving us the theory of recollection.
This is done by the famous encounter with Meno’s attendant. Socrates asks Meno to bring him an attendant whom Meno assures him has been with him all his life and is uneducated. Socrates then rapidly puts the boy through a geometry class. He does this through a series of rapid-fire questions and drawing lines in the sand. The boy answers all the questions correctly. Socrates neatly draws the conclusion that the boy “knew” the answers all along, recollected them, and that he only was a midwife. Of course, from a distance, there are many problems with this part of the dialogue. Socrates is asking leading questions. He is “teaching” the boy. Then this is to say nothing of the necessity of the boy having some aptitude for math.
My guess is, again, that we are terrified of not knowing. That the most likely thing to be discovered first and to be clarified would be our ignorance, and this would indeed be confusing and shaming. Shame is powerful. He needs to solve the problem.
The theory of recollection gives us hope that there is some touchstone of knowledge, some source.
Simply put, Socrates’/Plato’s technique seems to be to show us that we don’t know a lot when we think we do. What does this sound like? It sounds like they are interrupting everyone’s “interest.” This causes great hurt and confusion. This can be and ends up being a dangerous thing. In fact, it ends in the death of Socrates. Causing the shock of the torpedo fish is a dangerous thing. I propose that the theory of recollection is a type of temporary escape valve from the horror of possibly not knowing. When we are stuck, we can have faith that we do know the answer. We just need to try harder, to look for the right companion or midwife to help us. It is not important whether it is true or not or whether Plato believed it or not.
The theory of recollection is tantamount to a negative impression of the “real” dialectical process. The here-and-now give-and-take of the process causes friction and danger because it causes shame and anger. The theory of recollection gives us hope of finding a “soulmate” or midwife to commune with without these dangers. In terms of Tomkins, this need for escape can be explained clearly through the work of a colleague of his, Donald Nathanson. Nathanson did us a huge favor by summarizing a huge swathe of Tomkins’s work in what he calls a “Compass of Shame.”
The idea is that when we hit a rough spot or indeed when our interest is interrupted, we, as humans, only have five options. Those options are expressed as:
- The desire to withdraw or escape
- The option to blame ourselves for the situation
- Avoidance is a complex array of activities among which we include all of our addictions.
- Then there is the option to blame or attack someone else.(compass of shame)
Finally, we can renew our efforts and solve the problem and get around the rough spot.
In this most general case of “The Meno,” where we are dealing with general philosophical matters and issues such as virtue and whether we can ultimately know anything at all, again, is it not maybe terrifyingly shaming to come up against the idea that we may not be able to know?
Socrates makes everyone uncomfortable. He is speaking, continually interrupting everyone’s interest. Everyone thinks they know the answer, and he continually shows them they do not.
Plato understands the delicate matter of teaching anybody. He understands that we come to any learning situation with preconceived notions, and we need to be helped in learning. That is about the best we can do; anything more than that will impede our learning and push us into shame. Push us over that threshold that I have tried to describe between interest and shame. Barring the ability to describe that threshold, he invents the theory of recollection. He puts his students and everyone at ease from then on by giving them the confidence that they know the answer if they work hard enough.
I would say that the theory of recollection is a type of “avoidance” and a way to solve a big problem that Plato finds himself in at this point in the dialogue, and that is again being in the position of getting himself out of the hole of answering the shaming question of Meno. And this is, “How is it that I know what I do not know?”
I hope that this is worth writing if for nothing more than to bring one’s attention to what I see as possibly the origins of our concepts of what it is to feel shame and how reason is quite secondary to interest, shame, and primary images. That, and we seemed to have ignored that Plato seemed to have much gotten it right, but Western Culture persisted in emphasizing the preeminence of reason.
7. Virtue Can Be Taught: A New Perspective
So I need Plato for another important reason, and that is to raise the question in the first place and for him to go through all the intricate arguments as to why it can’t be taught. Of course, he does a great job. I doubt if a better job can be done of it even now. The arguments sound “modern.” I say one cannot do better unless and until one understands the concept of “interest.” Barring that, yes, virtue cannot be taught. Without an understanding of biology and how that informs us of how we can see the mind and body as an integral organic whole, one is probably doomed.
Tomkins gives us the pieces to complete the task. Tomkins, unfortunately, got mired in the negative of shame and humiliation, but this is and probably was a necessary step along the way.
As I said at the beginning, our reasoning capacity makes us human, and so at first, before we developed science and technology to discover our biological selves, we had to invent explanations of why things work. The sun went around the earth; the earth was flat, and animals were machine-like creatures. All these explanations were what? They were all “reasonable” in their day. So too it was reasonable to think “reason” itself was king, as we still persist in thinking.
So what I see has happened is a peeling away of the onion. The first layer is reason. We see that it is not necessarily the be-all and end-all.
My purpose is to do just that, to maybe wonder if Plato had this piece of data that Tomkins provides, namely the concept of biological interest, he might have thought that virtue could have been taught. I think virtue can be taught, and I think Tomkins, via the concept of interest, finally gives us the reasoning to achieve this age-old dream, and it lies in our biology.
So again, it was natural to get ahead of ourselves. Reason is powerful. We had to have this powerful tool in the first place to create the sciences that would in turn lead us to learn about our deepest and inner workings—a bit of a paradox. Yet in the scheme of things, what is a mere 2000 years? So we thought it went something like reason—emotion—activity, whereas I claim we are on shaky ground unless we at least see that our activity, our reasoning, and our emotions should be seen as a mix, all equal and cohabiting with one another.
Reason gave way to looking at “shame” and confusion and the negative consequences of confusion and shame, namely problems. So we applied reason to those problems and came up with solutions and went around and around and around for many years.
This activity kept us busy and obscured and hindered the real prize, and that was the discovery of biological interest.
Once having contemplated this idea of a deep neurological emotional network and this ability for the organism that, of necessity, broadcasts and recognizes the display of interest in others automatically (please take seriously here the idea of transmitter and receiver)—a radio has no choice but to pick up a radio signal when tuned into a particular station. The thing here is we are always tuned in when in the presence of another human. We may not be fully conscious of the signals, but we are receiving them! And we are transmitting them! Once we accept this, we have to accept our interconnectedness and need for one another.
I hope one sees where this is going. How can we realize this interconnectedness and not nurture it and care for it? Once that is learned and once we learn that each time that interconnectedness is broken, we will feel confused, hurt (shame). Will we not want, again, to nurture and maintain that bond?
It is obvious that virtue can indeed be taught in this sense, and that is that the earlier and the better we educate people in these matters, the more we make people aware of how they are biological transmitters of this precious thing called “interest.” The more they will care. That virtue is nothing but caring for that medium. Virtue at its “worst” is in our own long-term best interest. But I believe that it would not be seen as that if large numbers of children appreciated this from early on; what they would develop would be “mutual” and not so many individual interests, albeit I would hope there would be a healthy balance and respect for both, both individual and mutual interests.
Plato, we see, pointed out that we suffer great confusion and, from the beginning, had too much faith in reason and overestimated its usefulness. Thus, he shot down sophists and the reliance on rhetoric. He seems to me to have realized that we all bring to the world primary images and prejudices or, if you are interested, interest. I think this is mostly seen in his theory of recollection.
Now, most of history has been an interplay between what I see as humanity’s unfortunate lack of understanding of interest, and thus a constant suffering of confusion and shame, and so a constant kind of damnation to a purgatory of problem-solving that has been a waste of energy.
It is hoped that we now move the last step and back to understanding the whole picture of our emotional-rational apparatus that takes into consideration “interest.” That step evolves by simply switching the order from reason-emotion to emotion-reason in their order of importance as far as their emotive importance. Once we understand interest, we are able to understand that they need not be so “rational”; we can understand other people’s interest. We can understand that they might be different from our own. We can understand that interests can conflict, and that in conflict, that need not be so bad. In fact, it may be an opportunity.
We can understand that conflicting interest can cause hurt, confusion, frustration, and a slew of secondary emotions such as anger and fear. We can then understand how it can all end in much wasted time, energy, and money and use of “reason.” But understanding from whence the pain comes, and that is interest and not, say, “hate,” opens the door for much quicker resolution.
Let’s take a second and remind ourselves of why we are bothering with Plato. Fewer and fewer people read him as time goes by. This does not negate that most consider all Western Philosophy that follows him to be in some sense a response to him. The reference to his “Torpedo” fish still pops up as a classical reference in a myriad of circumstances.
In this work, I do two things: I examine what the torpedo fish means and claim that the obverse is really biological interest.
What does torpedo fish mean? It simply means the biological impediment of my positive affective stance. Plato, I suppose, could have used some emotive word, but then my Greek is long atrophied. He is descriptive by using the torpedo fish, and the interesting thing is that we continue using this analogy. This phrase, when we use it, is even an odd phrase when we truly have no idea what a torpedo fish is.
Now, not being aware of interest, humans were and mostly still are left helplessly with an amazing conundrum, and that is that unless we have this insight about what lies behind reason, namely interest, then we run into a great deal of negativity. In fact, the “negative” will always trump the positive. Or you can’t get a positive from a negative. At least you can’t initially or without a lot of work.
We all start from a positive stance—an “a priori,” “interested” stance. Call it “awareness” or a “conscious” stance if you want. Once again, what we search for is an affective resonance, and any cognitive content is secondary. Of course, very quickly after only a few years, cognitive content is inextricably wed with emotive content.
This conflict will tend to fly out of control. Fear will beget fear. Anger will beget anger. But this brings us back to why things have not decayed many times. We say because, in the end, behind it all lies a need to connect through biological interest. Interest is the brake on human contact. This is the glue of humanity and indeed of the animal world.
I just said that you cannot get a positive from a negative or at best it is unlikely. I would like to be precise about this.
I am interested, and I am interrupted. I think this is what is likely.
Well, that has been the scenario up until now, and it has left a lot of people out of the game; those who could not stand up to the collusion of those arrows were out of the game, were they not, and are they not?
Plato’s genius is in using dialogue and in staying with it, the dialogue. The dialogue is a conversation and especially a face-to-face human encounter. It is an affective encounter. It is the best we can do as humans in a physical situation. We can always improve our understanding of the situation. Plato had what humans have always had, a basic understanding of the situation.
It is simply unfortunate that the dialogue or discussion form of learning did not continue to be the mainstay of instruction throughout history. It has had its ups and downs, and it is still popular in various forms. But then we might ask why it did not survive more robustly. Might it be that even though it is a powerful learning model, it still cannot fully compete with the sting of the torpedo fish that raises its head all too often? That is, the conditions have to be “just right” for a dialogue or seminar to work. The lecture, in the end, is much less shaming somehow. Or at least the shame is hidden?
But all that said, I am nevertheless saying and am claiming that what holds the conversation together is our humanness. And that humanness will prove to be more than anything biological interest. That is, we simply need to be together. “What does reason have to do with it?” Absolutely nothing—at least at first and at the end of the day—because the reason we stay together is essentially emotional. To repeat, animals come together and commune, do they not? So would we if we were a species without reason? We are an ape-like species, like it or not, and we now know that, by the way, apes reason a lot, but that is not why they are together. They are together because they like being together and need to be together, and it would never occur to them not to be together (of course, every species is together in their way). Pretty simple thought. Ours is the only species that varies the pattern so much and indeed chooses so often to isolate themselves.
But overall, we must be together. All life forms need to propagate. The German neurologist Baron Richard von Krafft-Ebing put it this way: “The propagation of the human race is not left to mere accident or the caprices of the individual, but is guaranteed by the hidden laws of nature which are enforced by a mighty, irresistible impulse.” But this is not just through sexual “drive” but also through drive plus “interest.”
I should also say, maybe more simply if "simply" our interest in each other was "simply" articulated and brought to consciousness more then it would also work the other way. That is we would appreciate each other and dignity would rise.
What is interesting is that opposition still goes on. That is preserving dignity and appreciation does not exclude dialectic and synthesis still goes on. What is missing, as much as it can, are the internal feelings of shame and inadequacy because there is a universal attention of inclusion and attention to the interest of the other? Shame and humiliation are not seen as tools to "win", or for that matter to "teach". It is understood that to really "teach" one needs to understand the "readiness" of the other or the "interested" stance of the other.
This process clarifies an age-old truism that when the student is ready the teacher will appear. Meaning of course "teacher" was always there but the "student" was not in the right place. But we can now see that even that statement has always been interpreted, as a benign "wise" statement is a shaming and at base humiliating one. Why? Because it essentially "blames" the student for "not being ready".
Actually, it has nothing to do with being ready. The student is where he or she is. They could be in no other place than where they are or where. If they are in a community that truly is inclusive and understands interest they understand that the "student" has something that is probably valuable, and that is a particular point of view, a particular interest. It is the teacher's/community's job to truly be a midwife and bring that interest out. Not humiliate the student, shame the student into hoping to divine the "master's" knowledge or "interest".
We can see our diagram this way now:
Lindner points out that it was not until 1757 that humiliation and humility were parsed.
I quote this rather long passage in its entirety:
"In my work, I follow modern linguistic definitions and
differentiate between humbling and humiliating and between humility and humiliation. I understand humility to be positive, a valuable virtue, and humiliation to be negative, a hurtful violation.
It is interesting to note that this differentiation is historically new. Until 1757, in English, both words meant the same. William Ian Miller informs us that "the earliest recorded use of to humiliate, meaning to mortify or to lower or to depress the dignity or self-respect of someone, does not occur until 1757" (Miller, 1993, p. 175, italics in original).
In other words, humiliation was not seen as hurtful until about 250 years ago. And this was not restricted to English-speaking people. For millennia, people around the world believed that it was normal and morally correct to have masters and underlings and that masters were entitled to be treated as higher beings and underlings deserved to be shown down, "where they belonged." Even when underlings rebelled, it was to replace the master rather than to dismantle the hierarchy.
The emergence of the modern meaning of the word humiliation (1757), namely that it is a violation of dignity, co-occurs with several other transitions. The author of The Invention of the Self, John O. Lyons, 1978, for example, analyzed travelers' descriptions of their experiences and found that around 1750 the authors began to insert themselves as subjects with a personal perspective on what they observed. This change closely preceded the American Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776) and the French Revolution (August 4, 1789), rallying points for the development of the human rights movement. Undoubtedly, the ideas that culminated in today's concepts of human rights predate 1757. However, these ideals did not move to the forefront of Western consciousness until about 250 years ago. At present, human rights ideals are in the process of permeating the normative frames of the entire global village.
In short, in the old hierarchical societies, prior to the start of the human rights revolution, showing underlings their due lowly place was seen as legitimate. The illegitimacy and the violation that is entailed in the modern understanding of the word humiliation was not yet there. Today, in contrast, most people would no longer accept that humiliation has any positive outcome. In today's globalizing world, we need strong and creative individuals. Humiliation, however, does not create strong individuals, but weak individuals. This has been well explained by Lakoff and Johnson (1999) in their discussion of parenting styles, a relevant discussion also for pedagogy and organizational psychology."14
10. Historical Context and Modern Implications
Dr. Lindner’s explanation of the evolution of the separation of the concepts of humility and humiliation as documented in 1757 is most intriguing and powerful.
So my understanding of the position is that until approximately the mid-18th century, the idea of a “higher” and a “lower” was simply taken for granted, within everyone’s consciousness. One was born, say, into a caste, and that was that. Pretty much everyone “served” somebody and, in turn, stepped on somebody or was “served” unless you were at the top or the very bottom. Therefore, the idea that someone below you could humiliate you simply could not enter anyone’s consciousness, or likewise that you could humiliate someone above you, but you could be humiliated by someone above and likewise humbled. Therefore, the two words had much the same meaning.
So Lindner does us a great service by concentrating on the social dynamic of the humiliation process—how humiliation takes place. Some argue that without this advance, we could not have had the advance of the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution with their emphasis on rights nor the French Revolution.
These grand ideas created, at least theoretically, an all-encompassing framework that now, for the first time in history, cradled all mankind and supported mankind not only intellectually but also emotionally. This was the first time in history this had ever happened. This was, we must note, only 250 years ago that Miller made the distinction. It is certainly true that just because an idea is articulated does not mean it is disseminated and adapted. We have had the means to eradicate much of the world’s diseases for some 40 years, but we have not done so.
We have, nevertheless, made the intellectual leap of “equality,” and there is no going back. Everyone has the right now to participate in the dialogue and to pursue happiness.
I say the next watershed is to fully realize the import of the parsing of this humiliation/humility dichotomy along with interest. That is, this parsing of humiliation and humility was needed to bring about rights, yet rights were recognized while the import of what brought them about was not—namely, then, the sea change in this distinction between humiliation and humility. That is, not until now. And this has much to do with what I am saying about interest. Of course, they go hand in hand. They all have to do with the emotional space we live in. But this development could not have been otherwise. We first had to create a safe space or a sufficient space whereby we developed enough freedom and leisure to explore these ideas. Now that we have reached a critical mass, there are enough people to be able to contemplate more than their survival and see what lies behind the creation of the system.
I argue that unfortunately humiliation is still alive, and yet, as I have just argued, it has at least been democratized.
This is why I say we have to wade through the “negative” to get to the positive. Without appreciating interest, you are “just” left with the negative.
Are we today much better off? We now have many articulated frameworks: social and political, and leisure to consider more than survival and competition. We have the ability to start and consider each other’s interest—to see that it really is almost always about wanting the same thing.
As the director of the film House of Fog and Sand said, “The film exposes the unsettling truth that sometimes it is our hopes (interests), rather than our hatreds, that divide us.” In fact, it is the major contention of this paper that it probably always starts as a conflict of hopes (interests) that then turns into hatreds.
So we can see that instead of focusing on:
It might be safe to say that one of the remarkable aspects of the human rights movements and “democracy” is maybe its perceived failure. Why has it not been more successful than it has been in the last two hundred years? Just in the 20th century, there was a time when at least half the world was under totalitarian rule. In light of that, it is remarkable the progress we have now made. Still, there is a long way to go. Why is this?
I go back to the need for humans to “catch up with themselves.” Political and social life marches on because it has to. It waits for nothing. Science and philosophy develop at their own pace. Understanding the “why” and the “how” of things comes at its own pace.
It continues to be true, much of the time, that as Cicero said so long ago,
“Men decide many more problems by hate, love, lust, rage, sorrow, joy, hope, fear, illusion, or some similar emotion, than by reason or authority or any legal standards or legal precedents or law.”
And we note that a popular New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, asserts that “humiliation is the most underestimated force in international and human relations and that humiliated people or nations tend to lash out and engage in extreme violence.” Again, what has changed?
What has changed is that science has begun to give us the answers to why what Cicero said is true and why Friedman’s dynamic happens. Humans have managed to survive to this point—to the point of having developed the democratic framework where now the underpinnings of why that framework works can be manifested and now be taught. Reason now comes back into play and should now be able to truly encompass all of humanity in a true community of mutual interest. We should now be able to show ourselves, all of us, each and every human, how reason and emotion/affect/feeling work together.
It might seem that I am arguing against myself by bringing up an anti-dialectical discussion. I have argued strongly for the dialectic so far, but remember this is Nietzsche’s argument, and it takes us back to Socrates and my point as to why I believe Plato became cautious with the dialectic. Nietzsche shows how quite possibly Socrates became much too aggressive with the dialectical process and took reason to an aggressive level, which indeed got him tried and convicted.
Nathanson summarizes much of Silvan Tomkins and tells us that when we can do little or nothing “by our own hand or mind” to raise our self-esteem, we will “attack.” One way of attack is to shoot down others’ arguments no matter what they might be. What indeed can Socrates do about his stature, place in society, or ugliness?
Anyone who has had the pleasure of reading any of the Platonic dialogues in a leisurely fashion would, I hope, not see them so severely as an “attack” mode form of discourse. Socrates is nevertheless a brutal taskmaster, yet he is not really mean-spirited or humiliating. We must remember that we are always seeing him through the eyes of Plato and therefore do not know whether or not he may have been much more unpleasant in real life. Of course, Nietzsche had no way of knowing either. We do know at the end of the day he was tried for a capital offense.
I have earlier mentioned that it is unfortunate that the dialectical method of teaching did not have overall staying power and that it did not, most probably, because we simply do not understand the dynamic of shame and interest. We only understand it as a way of pursuing “reason” to its limit.
Having participated in many seminars, both enjoyable and tedious, these insights gained through this exercise have been a revelation. Once again, they clarify why the lecture is so much in vogue; there’s no need to be shamed if we just listen.
May we all think of our experience, unfortunately, with the legal profession? Now this is a general statement. To be sure, there are many eloquent and kind-hearted litigators, yet apparently, for the most part, reason seems to have led the profession to, for the most part, “take no prisoners.” And I may point the finger at my profession of medicine, where we so often hide our humanity behind the “necessity” of finding the “cure.”
To be clear, it would seem the largest “elephant ever in the room” in our lives is that education has made little difference in our emotional stability. To be sure, there is a direct relationship between income and education and between education and physical and mental health, but not proportionally in terms of mental health in terms of how we treat each other, in terms of shame and humiliation. Probably the greatest paradox is that “nice guys finish last”! A phrase I have heard much too often in my career! That is, do we or do we not believe that statement? Of course, many a college president, as well as too many honored academics, not so secretly believe that statement.
It would be well beyond the reach of this introduction to delve too deeply into what Silvan Tomkins calls “script.” Script is how we act in the world based on our emotions, and a big part of that is our emotional memory. A big part of who we are is the images we carry around with us. We believe that to have memory is to have feelings about memory, i.e., images. But to have a memory of images is to have pictures of “doing” things.
Were we, for example, “physical” in our problem-solving, or were we taught to “think” through problems? What were we taught about other groups of people? Were we taught subtly, or not so subtly, that we were better than them because we were smarter or more capable? That “reason” prevailed? Or maybe we were not taught to think we were above others but simply needed ourselves to think so. We needed to have something of our own. Were we not so good-looking, were we bullied, did we come in second? Something happened, and now I have my little secret that I am better than most of “those” people. “Oh please don’t, please don’t count me as one of them; why aren’t they even human?” I have heard such from those who profess to be healers. We are shocked! Of course, physicians are most notorious for letting whatever “ethics” they might have slip at a moment’s notice to visit the most unspeakable horrors on others. These, however, are the kinds of things that “pop” into consciousness only to just as quickly “pop” out of censoriousness.
Again, the point is there is a dream world we live in that seems to suggest that reason and the scholarly life that has built up around it have somehow included, de facto, the “betterment of all mankind” in the equation. I think although to claim that that could be “nothing further from the truth” is a bit too strong, as many of our institutions do strive for that goal, on the other hand, so much of “reason” is used exactly for the betterment of the few, often with the subterfuge that it is for the betterment of all. And we know this and support it because, in our inner life, we do believe we deserve, in some sense, more than others. Why is this? It is because of the shame and humiliation we have suffered, and the smarter we are, the more tricks we learn and the more we turn ourselves into pretzels to justify putting others down. This is true, I say, of every one of us, and it has been a slow process of bringing such a “horrible” truth to light. Such things we usually just do not talk about in polite society.
This material has had a hard time coming to light, and I see it not breaking the sound barrier anytime soon exactly for the above-stated reason. Tomkins is famous for, for some reason, eschewing the clinical application of his work until late in his life when he finally saw that he could help people with it. I have always wondered if, in his brilliance, he simply saw into the future and saw what anyone who understood shame was asking of the average person. And what is that? It is, in short, to give up all of one’s defenses, to lay bare the world, to take off the rose-colored glasses. He was saying, using that popular phrase of today that nevertheless fits, “We can’t handle the truth.” So the question is, can we or can’t we handle the truth? The evidence of how we are right now points to saying we definitely cannot handle reality. We withdraw from it about every chance we get and obliterate our minds from the pain of it with drugs or excitement that includes “entertainment” of any kind, from video to real war.
But yet, we do come back to earth for a few moments every day. And we do connect. We do learn. But I felt I had to say what I just did not to be Pollyannaish. We always have to be clear that there are wolves in sheep’s clothing—those who talk about equal dignity but secretly harbor superior attitudes.
Radical change will only come through a massive change in education where emotive forces and dignity are truly on par with reason. I am emphasizing that for the “dialectical” method to work, there has to be an appreciation of the “dignity” of the whole and not just “reason.” In such an environment, there is a push toward the “betterment of all mankind” and safeguarding from the subterfuge of using reason to advance one group’s ends over another.
I do believe virtue can be taught. Virtue can be taught through an appreciation of interest. The reason I should be in a seminar, in college or university, or the Senate, is not to show the dominance of my reason or the dominance of “reason,” but what mutual interest can create. That is not reason but mutual interest. That is, interest is before reason. Reason is the midwife to our interest and to our deep-seated images that we want to give birth to. This is and has always been the description of the creative process. Having once brought Nietzsche into the conversation, it would be wrong not to give him his due. We have already seen that he argues that we came to put too much faith in reason.
Where then did he look for solid ground? If Plato looked to myth for help, he saw modern man losing himself in religion and being unable to face reality. He saw this as ending in great and mass mediocrity.
Nietzsche is important to our dialogue as he provides an important thread or link to Tomkins, not only because of his critique of Socrates for my purposes—since Tomkins himself does not critique either Socrates or Plato—but for his link to Darwin and Freud, with whom Tomkins has everything to do.
Tomkins owes many of his ideas about innate affect to Darwin, and particularly to his work The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Nietzsche’s link to Darwin is a bit more abstract compared to how Darwin came to be interpreted, particularly by people like Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase with which we are all familiar: “survival of the fittest.”
The Origin of Species was published in 1859, and Nietzsche died in 1900, although he did not write for the last ten years or so of his life. Nietzsche was in the position to be appropriately swept up and influenced by “biology.” And so I return to my reference to biology on page two of this paper. I say at the start that Plato did not have the modern scientific tools or language, and he did not. But he is human, and he runs head-on into the phenomenon of “shame,” which I argue, with Tomkins, is at its core biological. It is a “torpedo” fish (a biological animal striking us, or an Asian carp flying up out of the Illinois River, knocking us out of our boat and causing us what? Much shame!). Nietzsche saw in this his biology, his answer: that man needed to look to himself for his salvation. He predates Freud in thinking of “drives,” and from this, he developed the idea of a “Will to Power.” It is not difficult to see reflected in this an echoing of what those who were called “Social Darwinists,” exemplified by Spencer’s saying, were postulating. What was that? Only the strong survive, and indeed, only the strong should survive. There seems to be little doubt that, unfortunately, this is what Nietzsche is saying. He says that in the end, only a select few will have the ability, the courage, to leave mediocrity behind and be self-reliant and sustain the belief that this self-reliance will lead to the true creative forces that are man’s birthright. But as we know, he did not have the benefit of knowing affect and of understanding mutual interest.
No doubt this thinking has been somewhat unsatisfactory to most, yet it points the way to focusing on our biological self and to “drive,” which, shortly thereafter, Freud will articulate fully, and only a few years later, Tomkins will turn on its head.
Nietzsche, in sum, makes a huge contribution by showing us how Socrates set the Greeks on the Apollonian tack of emphasizing the rational and the abstract, overshadowing the Dionysian or emotive forces of life, which eventually, through Darwin and Nietzsche, became Freudian Drive.
Tomkins then sets us straight and tells us that yes, there is drive, but it is not to be let run wild; it is tempered by an “affect” system. We only know to drive through “feeling” it. Drive only comes to consciousness through the affect or the feeling system. I am hungry, but I must then feel something about my hunger.
I am either interested in my hunger, angry about my hunger, disgusted by my hunger, or indeed, I can feel shame about my hunger. In a brilliant summary phrase, he says of reason and feeling, “Reason without affect is sterile, and affect without reason is wild.” Life is neither supposed to be weighted to the Apollonian nor the Dionysian but split down the middle.
[The arguemnt extracted by "NotebookLM":
1 Plato (428/427 BC[a] – 348/347 BC), Founded the Academy in Athens which was the first institution of higher learning in the West. His mentor was Socrates. Plato and the academy laid the foundation for philosophy and science.
His thought comes down to us mainly through 35 dialogues in which his mentor Socrates is the major figure. These works have stood the test of time and many are still used today as teaching tools mainly in the discipline of philosophy.
2 Socrates (469-399 B.C.E.) Greek philosopher comes to us mostly through his appearance in the Dialogues of Plato as we have no personal writings of his. The Greek historian Xenophon also spoke of him and is considered possibly a more objective source than Plato as Plato uses Socrates as his mouthpiece.
3 Silvan S. Tomks Was one of the most influential theorists on emotion and emotional expression. Over a period of 40- some years – until his death in 1991 – he developed a set of original, important ideas about the nature of affect and its relationship to cognition and personality. Tomkins dealt with fundamental questions in a fresh and provocative way, establishing affect as a separate, biological system and providing compelling data on discrete affect expressions. (From Exploring Affect: The Selected Writings of Silvan S. Tomkins, E. Virginia Demos Editor, Cambridge University Press 1995)
His major work is Tomkins, Silvan S.: Affect Imagery Consciousness NY: Springer Publishing Company4 Plato, The Meno 5 The term biology comes from combining the Greek "bios" βίος and λόγος the first meaning "life and the second the "study of". Our modern use was independently introduced by three different men: Karl Friedrich Burdach in 1800, Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus , 1802, and by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in 1802.
I point out several milestones to emphasize how recent major advances have been. 1). Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) use of the microscope. 2) Major use of classifying and systematizing Carl von Linné (1707-1778). 3) The development of genetics by Gregor Mendel ( 1866 ). 4) Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species (1859). 5) 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick clarified the basic structure of DNA. 6
The Egyptians felt the seat of mind resided in the heart.7 Christopher Wills, The Runaway Brain, ( Harper Collins 1991).
Donald L. Nathanson, Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex, and the Birth of the Self W.W. Norton & Company, (March 1994), p. 73.9 Ibid p. 161.
10 Exploring Affect: The Selected Writings of Silvan S. Tomkins. E. Virginia Demos Editor
( Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 399.
11 The Internet Classic Archive, Plato, The Meno, Benjamin Jowett translation, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/meno.html.
12 Ibid 80-80d. 17 18 19
Ibid p 41. Ibid p. 41. Ibid p.42.
13 Ibid 81-82b.
14 Evelin Lindner, (2006). The Role of Dignity and Humiliation in a Globalizing World: New Forms of Cooperative Approaches to Solve New Social Dilemma Situations and Succeed in Intercultural Encounters.
15 Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message, (Penguin Books, 1967). Quoted from Wikipedia cite. note:"[...]the title was a mistake. When the book came back from the typesetter, it had on the cover "Massage" as it still does. The title should have read The Medium is the Message but the typesetter had made an error. When Marshall McLuhan saw the typo he exclaimed, "Leave it alone! It's great, and right on target!" Now there are four possible readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: "Message" and "Message", "Massage" and "Mass Age"."Eric McLuhan in: Phil Baines. Penguin by Design, A Cover Story 1935-2005.Penguin Books.Pg 144.
16 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ: or How to Philosophize with a Hammer ,(Penguin Classics, 1990), p. 40.
20 Donald L. Nathanson, Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex, and the Birth of the Self W.W. Norton & Company, (March 1994), p. 317.
21 We know that physical health is directly related to income. There appears to be a straight line correlation from 80 thousand dollars in family income downwards. This appears to have to do with matters of "control". The higher the income the more control we at least feel we have over our lives. This is reflected in primate populations where "alpha" males are much healthier than subservient males. This is reflected in the thickening of the intimal wall of the arteries. This is a sign of cardiovascular diseases and thus risk of stroke and heart attacks is higher.
On the other hand, we know that egalitarian communities have more overall good health [see Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers' ' ( Little Brown And Company, 2008), Chapter One "Rosetta''.] That is humans need not follow the primate model. We can change the model and build healthy communities. Not only communities whereby the "strong survive". So it is argued here that even the best seminars and learning situations fail when only "reason" is honored and respected. There must needs be a tacit "learned" respect for the dignity and value of all involved realizing that "Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît pas." Pascal. Only through community and that community's true support will their reason really shine.
22 Charles Darwin, Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals.
