Proust Was a Neuroscientist. Jonah Lehrer
in the place where mine was; so, now, here is only one distinct leg to the eye, yet two to the soul. Where thou feelest tingling life; there, exactly there, there to a hair, do I. Is’t a riddle?”
Weir Mitchell, unaware of Melville’s prescience, never cited Ahab’s medical condition. He published his observations of the mystery in two neurology textbooks. He even published a special bulletin on the phenomenon, which the surgeon general’s office distributed to other military hospitals in 1864. But Weir Mitchell felt constrained by the dry, clinical language of his medical reports. He believed that the experience of the soldiers in his hospital had profound philosophical implications. After all, their sensory ghosts were living proof of Whitman’s poetry: our matter was entangled with our spirit. When you cut the flesh, you also cut the soul.
And so Weir Mitchell decided to write an anonymous short story, written in the first person.* In “The Case of George Dedlow,” published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1866, Weir Mitchell imagines himself a soldier wounded at the Battle of Chickamauga, shot in both legs and both arms. Dedlow passes out from the pain.
When he wakes, Dedlow is in a hospital tent. He has no limbs left: they have all been cut off. Dedlow describes himself as a “use-less torso, more like some strange larval creature than anything of human shape.” But even though Dedlow is now limbless, he still feels all of his limbs. His body has become a ghost, and yet it feels as real as ever. Weir Mitchell explains this phenomenon by referencing the brain. Because the brain and body are so interconnected, the mind remains “ever mindful of its missing [bodily] part, and, imperfectly at least, preserves to the man a consciousness of possessing that which he has not.” Weir Mitchell believed that the brain depended upon the body for its feelings and identity. Once Dedlow loses his limbs, he finds “to his horror that at times I was less conscious of myself, of my own existence, than used to be the case … I thus reached the conclusion that a man is not his brain, or any one part of it, but all of his economy, and that to lose any part must lessen this sense of his own existence.”
In his short story, Weir Mitchell is imagining a Whitmanesque physiology. Since soul is body and body is soul, to lose a part of one’s body is to lose a part of one’s soul. As Whitman wrote in “Song of Myself,” “Lack one lacks both.” The mind cannot be extricated from its matter, for mind and matter, these two seemingly opposite substances, are impossibly intertwined. Whitman makes our unity clear on the very first page of Leaves of Grass, as he describes his poetic subject:
Of physiology from top to toe I sing
not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the
Muse, I say the form complete is worthier far.
After the war, Weir Mitchell’s clinical observations fell into obscurity. Because phantom limbs had no material explanation, medical science continued to ignore the phenomenon. Only William James, in his 1887 article “The Consciousness of Lost Limbs,” pursued Weir Mitchell’s supernatural hypothesis.* As Harvard’s first psychology professor, James sent out a short questionnaire to hundreds of amputees asking various questions about their missing parts (for example, “How much of the limb can you feel?” “Can you, by imagining strongly that it has moved, make yourself really feel as if it had moved into a different position?”). The results of James’s survey taught him only one fact about sensory ghosts: there was no general pattern to the experience of lost limbs. Every body was invested with its own individual meaning. “We can never seek amongst these processes for results which shall be invariable,” James wrote. “Exceptions remain to every empirical law of our mental life, and can only be treated as so many individual aberrations.” As Henry James, William’s novelist brother, once wrote, “There is a presence in what is missing.” That presence is our own.
The Anatomy of Emotion
Whitman’s faith in the flesh, although it was the source of his censorship, had a profound impact on the thought of his time. His free-verse odes, which so erotically fused the body and the soul, actually precipitated a parallel discovery within psychology. An avid Whitman enthusiast, William James was the first scientist to realize that Whitman’s poetry was literally true: the body was the source of feelings. The flesh was not a part of what we felt, it was what we felt. As Whitman had prophetically chanted, “Behold, the body includes and is the meaning, the main concern, and includes and is the soul.”
His entire life, James loved reading Whitman’s poetry out loud, feeling the “passionate and mystical ontological emotion that suffuses his words.” In Whitman, James discovered a “contemporary prophet” able to “abolish the usual human distinctions.” According to James, Whitman’s poetic investigations of the body had discovered “the kind of fiber … which is the material woven of all the excitements, joys, and meanings that ever were, or ever shall be, in this world.” Whitman realized how we feel.
The convergent beliefs of James and Whitman should not be surprising. After all, they shared a common source: Emerson. When Emerson came to New York City on his lecture tour in 1842, his speech “The Poet” was lauded in the papers by the journalist Walter Whitman, who would take his line about a “meter making argument” literally. While in the city, Emerson also met with Henry James Sr., a dilettante mystic and critic, and was invited into his New York City home. William James, Henry Sr.’s eldest son, had just been born. Legend has it that Emerson blessed William in his cradle and became the infant’s godfather.
True or false, the story accurately reflects the intellectual history of America. William James inherited the philosophical tradition of Emerson. Pragmatism, the uniquely American philosophy James invented, was in part a systematization of Emerson’s skeptical mysticism. Like Emerson and Whitman, James always enjoyed puncturing the pretensions of nineteenth-century science. He thought that people should stop thinking of scientific theories as mirrors of nature, what he called “the copy version of truth.” Instead, they should see its facts as tools, which “help us get into a satisfactory relation with experience.” The truth of an idea, James wrote, is the use of an idea, its “cash-value.” Thus, according to the pragmatists, a practical poet could be just as truthful as an accurate experiment. All that mattered was the “concrete difference” an idea produced in our actual lives.
But before he became a philosopher, William James was a psychologist. In 1875, he established one of the world’s first psychological laboratories at Harvard. Though he was now part of the medical school, James had no intention of practicing “brass instrument psychology,” his critical name for the new scientific approach that tried to quantify the mind in terms of its elemental sensations. What physicists had done for the universe, these psychologists wanted to do for consciousness. Even their vocabulary was stolen straight from physics: thought had a “velocity,” nerves had “inertia,” and the mind was nothing but its “mechanical reflex-actions.” James was contemptuous of such a crude form of reductionism. He thought its facts were useless.
James also wasn’t very good at this new type of psychology. “It is a sort of work which appeals particularly to patient and exact minds,” he wrote in his masterpiece, The Principles of Psychology, and James realized that his mind was neither patient nor particularly exact. He loved questions more than answers, the uncertainty of faith more than the conviction of reason. He wanted to call the universe the pluriverse. In his own psychological experiments, James was drawn to the phenomena that this mental reductionism ignored. What parts of the mind cannot be measured?
Searching for the immeasurable led James directly to the question of feeling. Our subjective emotions, he said, were the “unscien-tific half of existence.”* Because we only experienced the feeling as a conscious whole — and not as a sum of separate sensations — to break the emotion apart (as science tried to do) was to make it unreal. “The demand for atoms of feeling,” James wrote, “seems a sheer vagary,