This series covers events from 04/12/1978 - 04/26/1978

This three-class series approaches emotion through Buddhist and Indian psychology of mind together with Western philosophy and depth psychology. Its centerpiece is Anthony Damiani’s paper “The Four Aspects of Emotion: An Essay Based on James Hillman’s Emotion,” which was read and discussed in all three sessions. The paper formulates a general theory of emotion, refusing to settle into any one of the mutually exclusive physiological, psychological, and sociological frameworks, and instead discusses emotion under Aristotle’s four causes, which are correlated with the four quadrants and last four houses of the metaphysical chart. Only fragmentary student notes survive for the classes, and they don't unfold in a straight line. The paper itself is complete, however, and it is the best guide to what the notes are pointing at.

The April 12 class maps the mental apparatus that projects a world. Houses 10 through 12 are correlated with alaya-vijnana, manas, and mano-vijnana, respectively, and the twelve nidanas are placed in the eleventh-house vesica and correlated with the twelve signs of the zodiac. They are the a priori structure of the mind’s own functioning, prior to the empirical person and the world that appear in the twelfth house. The twelve nidanas and the Samkhya tattvas together are the mental machinery which project the world, and thus the neurotic patterns and emotions one experiences are built into the projected image from the start. What manas grasps and works from are the archetypal degrees, which inform the manas how to fabricate the individual and its world.

The April 18 class begins with the symbol as the efficient cause of emotion. Every individual is equipped with the mental machinery to produce the world-image he lives in, and it is the representation of an object, not the object itself, that produces emotion. When manas attempts to grasp an intelligible object, it does so symbolically, so that emotion is the symbolization of the objective psyche: inside the person, symbols are lived out as emotions; outside, emotions are perceived as symbolic qualities. One aspect of the symbol is learned, always aroused within some concrete social or historical context, and it is this conditioned aspect that enables emotion to be manipulated by the conscious control of images; the other aspect is instinctual and unconditioned, given with the constitution, and it sets the limits of learning.

The class then turns to the material and formal causes of emotion. The material cause of emotion is invisible forces—nucleated centers, complexes, dynamic units. Emotion is the psychic form of universal energy. The field of the body is the stuff of emotion, and the bodily situation is the locus of emotion, so that the more body in an event, the more emotion. The storehouse of universal energy is the tenth-house alaya-vijnana. The formal cause of emotion is the soul, in the sense of the psyche: “Therefore, whether we speak of emotion as a total pattern of the psyche, or as a central quality of the soul, we refer to the same model: emotion as the soul in its wholeness.”

The April 26 class begins with a diagram of houses 9-12, which are correlated with the four Aristotelian causes as follows: house 9 with the final cause, house 10 with the material cause, house 11 with the essential, or formal, cause, and house 12 with the efficient, or instrumental, cause. Beneath our thinking lie the five skandhas, the psychical essences that make up a person. These are not attitudes we have, but attitudes we are. Placed in house 9, they carry the hint that each one can be universalized. The seven lokas (house 11) mark stages any entity evolves through, and these lokas apply to individuals at any scale—for example, to planets and solar systems, as well as to human persons.

The final cause gets only a line in the notes: it is the why of what is happening, immanent in the image rather than a goal set beyond it. The paper, however, develops it at length. Emotion works toward transformation. This is not merely a change in conscious representations but a correction of wrong views, which manas forces on the empirical individual so that he grasps the world more adequately. Habit and instinct conserve and adapt in terms of the past, whereas emotion transforms in terms of the future. It opens instinct to education and raises it to involve the whole person. Emotion is therefore an improvement in itself, whatever its consequences. Where it is suppressed rather than consciously lived, it returns as excess and blind acting out, and the paper concludes that emotion is always to be valued more highly than the conscious system alone.

Classes and documents available in this series