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McGroarty

Humility, Contemplation, and Affect Theory

Humility, Contemplation and Affect Theory

Study Guide

I.Introduction

Vocabulary

Affect: biomechanical pre-conscious reactions by humans to the environment. These are the immediate reactions to our surroundings before we are aware of them.

Emotions: our reactions to the environment that involve awareness and cognition. These are the affects once we are aware of them. Our emotions are then affected by the content of our memory and imagination.

Psyche: the human mind and its processes, including its state of health or efficiency or inefficiency.

Affective experience: strong reaction to the environment, not necessarily involving consciousness.

Religious experience: a feeling of spiritual meaning that bolsters or alters one’s religious ideas.

Christian contemplative experience: the experience that results from having Christian ideas and following religious ritual and prayer in which one feels the immediate presence of the divine, not mediated by any type of idea or image. It is an experience of nothingness which is at the same time the presence of God.

Peak experience: initially described by Abraham Maslow as a “self-actualizing” experience, this is an experience in which an individual performs near his or her maximum capacity, resulting in a euphoric state that is at the same time efficient and productive in terms of whatever task the person has consciously assumed.

Interpersonal communion: the experience of union shared by two people in which the other is known by means of knowing oneself, and the self is known through the other.

Interocular exchange: eye contact surpassing the 1.5 second threshold beyond which the other must either be regarded as a threat or accepted in communion. Described by Carl Jung as a fundamental human taboo.

Mystic: an individual who describes a personal encounter with Godwithout necessarily using dogmatic language. Mysticism describes a state of consciousness in which one feels united with God and perhaps God’s creation.

  1. How are Affect Theory and The Scale of Perfection similar?
  2. Why are the affect system and religious experience related?
  3. How can peak experience be described in terms of the affect system?
  4. How are contemplation and interocular exchange similar?
  5. What is the difference in shame as understood by Tomkins and how it is understood by Walter Hilton?

II.Duplication, Freedom, and the Affect System

Vocabulary

Living System: a biologically based self-duplicating system composed of a single organism or a collection of organisms, which duplicate themselves by assimilating elements of the environment.

Motivational flexibility: the complexity of an organism can be understood by examining the range of goods that organism attempts to assimilate from the environment. For instance, humans seek more than just food from the environment, and so we form complex behavior in order to continually seek these goods, rather than just conserving energy when our basic needs are met.

Information: data conveyed by a pattern, sequence or arrangement of material that influences or constructs a similar pattern. Information conveys data from an object to another object, and ultimately to a conscious observer.

Afferent information: information that is conveyed to the brain from the senses via afferent neurons.

Efferent information: information carried from repositories in the brain such as the hippocampus toward the motor-reflex system. It may also be looped back into the brain, as in the processes of memory, opening the possibility of consciousness.

Modulates: to modify in order to find a balance between two different sources of information.

The discretion of the analytical faculty: the ability to make judgements on the relative good of the range of desires and the formulation of the most effective and prudent strategy for attaining those goods.

Proprioceptors: sense receptors of information, the vast majority of which does not present itself to consciousness.

Innate determinates of [different] affects: the physical manifestations of an affect. For instance, the raising of the eyebrows in surprise, or the subtle upturn of the corners of the eyes in happiness.

Neural firing: the biological description of brain activity

Low-grade stimuli: stimulation that does not overpower other stimulation through volume or frequency.

Decompose experience: the ability to break down an experience into its constituent parts, allowing those parts of the memory to apply to a greater range of ongoing experience.

Freud’s Drive-based theory of motivation: Sigmund Freud’s theory that humans are ultimately always motivated by the desire for sex, and to some extent hunger and blood. All human activity is designed toward these ends. This theory is largely discredited by modern philosophers and scientists.

Sublimation: the process by which socially unacceptable behavior is masked by other behavior, often below the level of conscious intention. For instance, an individual who has the impulse to kill another person will instead become interested in hunting or violent sports.

The drives cannot counter the affect system without co-opting its energy: humans are motivated by the desire to maintain positive affect and emotion primarily; this emotion may or may not come from the drives.

Image: (capital “I”) the goal and purpose of consciousness, to which it is constantly comparing ongoing self-images.

Material Duplication: the practice of an organism to assimilate elements from the environment into itself.

Informational Duplication: copying the organization of data. Material duplication is a type of informational duplication as the sequence of data that constitutes a system (organism) is replicated in itself. However, consciousness gives rise to the possibility of copying information from the environment to oneself.

image (small “i”): the organization of data retained in memory to assist an organism in interpreting on-going perception. May include some images of the self as part of the feedback.

Image (capital “I”): an image of the self to which the human continually compares the images of the self formed on the basis of the feedback system. The Image is the goal of human behavior.

  1. What is duplication? What are the two types of duplication?
  2. Why do organisms become more complex?
  3. For Tomkins, how does the affect system increase human freedom?
  4. What effect does mobility have on the affect system?
  5. For Tomkins, why have humans developed consciousness?
  6. When do organisms become self-aware?
  7. How does memory affect on-going experience?
  8. What is a “scene?”
  9. To what does the affect system direct human consciousness?
  10. What is paradoxical about memory? Are we liable to remember what we experience most often or what is distinctive?
  11. What is “magnification?”
  12. What is human freedom, for Tomkins?
  13. What is the “image” of consciousness?
  14. What is one of the most important source of the Image of the self?

III.Communion, Shame, and Fear

Vocabulary

Mutuality of affect: two people sharing an affect or emotion

Affective balance: the balance between two affects, which serve to prolong each affect by limiting the energy of the other affect; for instance, joy is balanced by interest, so that the subject does not relax due to an abundance of

  1. How is the infant introduced to its own affects generated by its own feedback system?
  2. What is the first model for social interaction experienced by the infant?
  3. How do infants first experience shame?
  4. What is shame?
  5. How is the self constructed?
  6. How is the presence of shame retained? Is shame good or bad for the person?
  7. How is the “fight or flight” reaction avoided in intense interpersonal experience, for instance in interocular exchange?
  8. What can be evidence that balance in the affect system has been achieved?
  9. When and in what way can shame be beneficial?

III.Hilton and Health

  1. For what purposes did Walter Hilton write The Scale of Perfection?
  2. What is the root of the cause of the defacement of the image of God which we bear within ourselves?
  3. What is the antidote to the root cause of the defacement of the image of God in us?
  4. What is health for Hilton?
  5. What is the result of pride?

IV.The Image of Jesus and the desire for Health

Vocabulary

Vernacular: the common language of any particular area. In 12th-14th c. England, the ruling elite did not speak English; they typically only spoke Anglo-French. Virtually nothing was written in English until the mid-14th c.

Vernacular theology: Anglo-French theology tended to emphasize a very selective salvation; most people, in particular the poor English speakers, they would assume would not be saved. English came to express distinctive theological ideas which were not developed in Anglo-French or Latin writers.

Katapahatic imagination: characterized using detailed mental imagery or words.

Apophatic imagination: characterized by the lack of imagery or words.

  1. Why is humility important for Hilton?
  2. What happens to the focus of a person as he or she becomes humbler?
  3. What led to the recognition by the English people in the 14th c. that they might be capable of salvation?
  4. Why was the name of Jesus particularly important for Hilton and his readers?
  5. For Hilton, what fills the healthy heart?
  6. What is a result of the consciousness of the power of grace for all made in the image of Christ?
  7. In interpreting the parable of the lost coin, how does Hilton interpret the broom the woman uses?
  8. What is the difference in Hilton’s conception of the healthy psyche and that of Tomkins?
  9. Using Tomkins’s terminology to describe Hilton’s thought, in what way is the contemplative attempting to duplicate an Image in herself?

V.Humility and charity

  1. How do we begin to become molded into the image of Christ and become reformed in all the virtues?
  2. What is the first type of reform of the contemplative that occurs?
  3. Why are humility and charity the same virtue for Hilton?
  4. What happens if the contemplative attains charity without humility?
  5. What happens if one attains humility without charity?
  6. What is imperfect humility? Is it good to have imperfect humility?
  7. What is perfect humility? How is it different than imperfect humility?
  8. What are the two interrelated purposes of humility?
  9. Even though she knows herself to be a sinner, why does the sinner not completely debase or denigrate herself?

VI.Communion, contemplation, and health

  1. For Hilton, what is the psychological root of the desire for religion?
  2. What is humility mean for Tomkins?
  3. How does Tomkins describe shame?
  4. How doesTomkins’s use of humility differ from Hilton’s use of the term?
  5. What is the problem of the prolonged experience of shame according to Tomkins?
  6. For both Hilton and Tomkins, why does pride not present an effective strategy against shame?

VII.Luminous darkness and restful labor

  1. In terms of the affect system, how do humans overcome shame?
  2. As Tomkins describes the contemplative process, what are the feelings/affects that are balanced in her mind?
  3. What is restful labor?
  4. What does the contemplative perceive that explains the restfulness of the experience?
  5. For a contemplative, in what way is positive feedback channeled? Why does this happen?
  6. Why does Tomkins urge against harsh ascetic practices such as fasting?
  7. What is psychological health for Freud?
  8. What is health for Tomkins?
  9. What is health for Hilton? What is the difference between his notion of health and that of later psychologists?