Contrary to appearances, Holler’s Erotic
Morality is not a book about the ethics of carnal love. The use of the term
"erotic" in the title refers not merely to sexual intimacy, but to
embodied, sensual engagement in the world. To be "erotic" in this
sense is to be fully present to one’s sensual engagement with whatever happens
to be "there" for us in our lives at the moment. It is to derive a
moral stance in the world based not upon a disengaged intellect, but upon the
felt meanings of the world as they are disclosed to a living body.

Holler is a theologian, an
associate professor and chair of the department of religious studies at San
Diego State University. Yet her "erotic morality" thesis is based
much more upon psychology than theology. Holler’s handling of the psychological
literature does however resemble an "outsider" more than an
"insider." She doesn’t bother to address the thornier issues about
embodiment, cognition and emotion that psychologists are currently debating,
and psychologists who are interested in reading an addition to this debate
should look elsewhere. What Holler does contribute, however, is precisely her
"outsider" status — her ability to take psychological research and
synthesize it as perhaps only a theologian could do, in order to specifically
address the issue of an embodied moral philosophy. Holler’s weakness, perhaps
to due her "outsider" status, is her tendency to over-generalize from
the literature in ways that tend to support her argument. I say this despite
the fact that Holler’s argument is very close to my heart and I wholeheartedly
endorse her ethical philosophy. Holler’s strength does not come from the
discerning eye of a social scientist but in the synthesizing vision of a
theologian.

Holler is a great synthesizer. She
pulls from a wide variety of sources — feminist spirituality, deep ecology,
empirical psychology of emotion and psychopathology, phenomenological
psychology, post-structuralist philosophy, French psychoanalysis, neo-Marxist
social theory, hagiography, and Christian and Buddhist theology in order to
frame her thesis. Again, this is both her strength and weakness. By drawing
from such a large well of influences, she accomplishes a number of aims. First,
she is able to support her thesis from a number of different epistemological
and ontological perspectives. Second, she is liable to gain adherents to her
thesis from a number of different, and often competing, camps in the social
sciences. Cognitive-behavioral psychologists will enjoy and appreciate her book
as much or even more than postmodern psychologists. On the other hand, a deeper
inspection of her sources reveals contradictory and, at times, antagonistic
epistemological paradigms. There is, after all, a deep philosophical divide
between, say, Lacanian psychoanalysis and Damasio’s neuroscientific approach to
emotion, or Goleman’s notion of "emotional intelligence" and Bob
Kugelmann’s phenomenological reading of "stress." Not that these
rifts can’t be overcome through careful analysis and synthesis, a project that
Holler has begun here. But more work needs to be done to analyze these
epistemological differences in the literature inspiring this piece of work.

Holler’s book, in any case, is not
primarily a philosophical analysis. It is a piece of good rhetoric meant to
inspire the reader to take up a moral life founded upon sensual, emotional and
compassionate engagement in the world with others, creatures and things. For
this reason, her book will appeal especially to smart readers looking for
inspiration to live a more deeply fulfilling life. In this sense, Holler is
engaged in what Robert Romanyshyn has called a "cultural
therapeutics." It aims to transform a dangerous and destructive way of
living (a culture) by inspiring individuals within that culture to change that
manner of living one person at a time (whether or not this is possible is
another argument altogether). On this level, Holler’s work is an undeniable
success.

Holler’s cultural therapeutics
begins with the basic premise that, historically, morality has been
body-denying rather than body-affirming. Such an ethic is based on logos
rather than eros; that is, it is based "on rules, authorities, and
duties" rather than "a somatic, intuitive form of agency in which
empathy, compassion, and care are the central moral qualities" (p. 1). An
erotic morality would, on the contrary, be based on embodied awareness, and its
central metaphor would be the sensation of touch, in contrast to the cultural
hegemony of vision. Whereas vision is paradigmatic of distance and detached
analysis — the favored sensation of denial, solopsism and idealism — touch is
the sensation of intimacy and contact.

By reclaiming touch and embodied
sensuality for morality, Holler is attempting to turn back the clock of Western
ethics since the Greeks. The shame and guilt associated with the body in
Judaic-Christian morality are exchanged for a joyful celebration of our
contingent and finite carnal being-in-the-world. Such a celebration, argues
Holler, opens the way for gratitude and, in turn, care and compassion. Moreover,
Holler’s ethic is not merely in the service of psychological transformation —
her philosophy is not individualist — but deeply political. "Societies
that fear eros," she writes, "cannot create morally adaptive somatic
conditions because they care more about constructing impermeable boundaries
than they do about the suffering created by those boundaries" (p. 9). An
erotic morality founded on embodiment would, instead, be based upon our
physiological and also intuitive awareness of the permeability of our boundaries
as a source of health: a softening of rigid bodily structures as a gateway to
loosening rigid ideologies, an openness to otherness and difference that mimics
the give and take of our bodies when we eat and excrete, breath in and breathe
out, speak and listen.

Holler argues her thesis by
examining five different kinds of touch: autistic, disembodied, sadistic and
pornographic, masochistic and ascetic, and mindful types of touch. To spell out
her lessons on autistic touch, Holler draws predominantly from the
autobiographies of two well-known figures struggling with autistic disorder,
Temple Grandin and Donna Williams. This is understandable. Since the disease is
defined in part by a severe deprivation in verbal skills, the accounts of
Grandin and Williams are some of the very few first-person accounts of autistic
disorder in the literature. This is interesting in light of the fact that 95%
of persons with autistic disorder are male, which simply highlights how
atypical these two cases are. Nevertheless, even if these cases are not very
representative of disorders in the autistic spectrum, they do serve the purpose
of helping Holler to articulate her point — namely, that any kind of autistic
disorder is characterized by major dysfunction in tactile sensitivity and
emotion. By using autistic disorder as an extreme case, and by exploring how
two women with autism have successfully coped with the disorder, Holler is able
to highlight some therapeutic means for dealing with similar deprivations that
run rampant in our ‘out of touch’ culture.

In order to explain her thesis that
logos has historically trumped eros — that "the obedience
to law and duty" has predominated at the expense of moral agency and
compassion — Holler makes the case that, traditionally, ethics has been
"deontologized," that is, it operates as a "flight from the
body" which is formalized as "moral discourse around absolute rules,
rights and duties" (p. 62). Holler blames the usual parties, Descartes and
Kant (among others), for the mind-body dualism that founds this
deontologization of ethics. Drawing largely from Antonio Damasio’s somatic
marker hypothesis in Descartes’ Error, and with a little help from
Foucault, she elaborates how practical reason is impossible in the absence of
feelings and emotions — and thus, clarifies how deontologized ethics are
founded upon a fundamental falsehood, a denial of our embodied
being-in-the-world and a turn away from the lived body that is the condition of
possibility for thought. A mind disengaged from the body is an ill body, a
broken body, a diseased body, as in the hyper-reflective world of the
schizophrenic, as described by Louis A. Sass.

But what, after all, is at stake?
What is at stake for Holler (in the vein of neo-Freudian French feminism, not
to mention Herbert Marcuse) is that the repression of eros, which leads
inevitably toward a projection of eros upon a disowned other: the
feminine, nature, the body, etc., all of which become objectified and ensconced
within a rigid system of moral rules at the expense of our more organic ethical
response to the other in the concrete circumstances of our everyday lives.

Holler’s next task is to develop an
argument for how morality came to be disembodied and out of touch to begin
with. She argues that deontologized ethics has the same roots as the
dissociation that results from trauma and victimization. Faced with a world too
painful to bear, the mind retreats and dissociates; the body becomes alien and
"Other." In the wake of trauma, and the consequential association of
feelings with pain, eros becomes a dangerous force to be mastered rather
than a basis for moral agency. The orientation of mastery, in turn, tends to
ride roughshod over our otherwise natural predilection to empathize with others
and therefore cuts us off from our felt basis for ethical action. For Holler,
the sadist — represented by the figure of Hitler — is emblematic of the
disengaged touch that results from violence and trauma. Pornography represents
the detached, objectifying style of the sadist’s comportment towards others and
the world.

Another response to stress, trauma,
and social isolation is masochism, which Holler associates with
"self-destructive behaviors, addictions, and obsessions, such as eating
disorders, drug use, compulsive exercise, and self-mutilation" (p. 129).
It is the obsessiveness of masochism and ecscetic self-denial that constitutes
their failure to respond to violence and trauma. However, masochism and
escetism can at times be transformed into a revolutionary, transformative and
hence ethical action, and Holler finds examples in cases of hysteria and the
escetic lives of some Christian saints, particularly female mystics. In such
cases, pleasure and pain provide an opening to intimacy and moral agency.
Masochism as such becomes "transubstantiation," a "redemption of
the flesh" that can participate in "the transformation of
culture" (p. 163).

But, for Holler, erotic morality is
best rooted in what she calls "mindful touch," a concept developed
mainly from Buddhist thought and practice, especially Vipassana meditation,
commonly referred to as "mindfulness" meditation. In this style of
meditation, the practitioner typically sits with eyes closed, keeping his or
her spine straight. The person then focuses attention on the breath.
Inevitably, the person in meditation finds his or her mind wandering. The task
is to notice and acknowledge that one’s mind has wandered, take note of the
content of one’s thoughts at that moment, and then return to concentrating on
one’s breath. This type of meditation is thought to have many benefits, not the
least of which is a reduction of the stress response. But for Holler, Vipissana
meditation is most notable as a practice for getting in touch with one’s
sensual, embodied existence, as well as the interdependence (or
"emptiness") of all things.

For Holler, mindfulness meditation
is emblematic of the kind of embodied practice necessary to cultivate erotic
morality. Such practices are a matter of "reclaiming the sentient
awareness to promote the circlings of the flesh necessary to our physical,
psychological, and moral well-being" (p. 182). The purpose of this
reclaiming is to mend our broken touch, where we have become numb or
hypersensitive as the result of violence, neglect and trauma. In turn, we
become once again ‘in touch’ with our inclination to respond as moral agents to
the ethical call of the felt meanings of the world.

Holler’s thesis is one, perhaps, we
should reflect upon carefully as a potential route to a "cultural
therapeutics." But there is much more work to be done. Holler’s work here
still lacks the scientific and theoretical rigor that could persuade those who
may be less sympathetic to her message. I would like to see her engage in a
future work that more systematically and rigorously addresses the
epistemological quandaries her thesis raises, particularly among the many
different social scientific and philosophical theories she cites. On the other
hand, I would also like to see Holler take a different tactic and more clearly
spell out how her "erotic morality" would function concretely in our
everyday lives. Given a morality founded on eros, how would this
function to change the way we interpret law in the courts, for example? How
would it alter the way we practice business or educate our children? What,
indeed, are the concrete implications of this kind of morality for the
functioning of communities?

Finally, I find myself concerned
that Holler spends much of her time exploring psychopathology and then
generalizing her conclusions to the general population. The great majority of
her analysis in the book explores psychological disorders, including autism,
post-traumatic stress disorder, hysteria, obsessive-compulsive disorder,
anorexia, schizophrenia, and so on. But I question the fruitfulness of this
method, even if it is a method quite popular, particularly in the postmodern
literature. I do agree that we can learn much from psychopathology, but perhaps
not in the way Holler learns from it. Holler takes psychological disorders and
tries to understand something about the human condition. Yet as a clinical
psychologist, I understand psychopathology to be a largely moral and political
act. By defining what is "abnormal," we must of course implicate in
that choice what is "normal," and so by definition psychopathology is
an implicit act of creating a normalizing ethic. Yet this is a point that
Holler seems to ignore, to the detriment of her argument. Holler seems to
succumb too easily to the normalizing ethic implied in the labels of
psychopathology. In turn, this approach runs the risk of unwittingly affirming
the status quo she is attempting to critique. Even if one were to disagree with
this argument (e.g. if one were to hold a medical model perspective on
psychological disorder), Holler could still be faulted for drawing conclusions
about the general population based on research largely carried out on people
who, by definition, are quite unlike the typical person. Despite these gripes,
I must say that there are places where Holler wonderfully proves me wrong here,
such as in her discussion of anorexia. But, unfortunately, these digressions do
not centrally frame her argument in a way that saves her thesis from these
criticisms.

I have other minor points of
contention with Holler’s thesis, but rather than elaborate upon them, I’d much
prefer to end on a positive note, because I think, when all is said and done, Erotic
Morality is an important book that should be widely read. And readers will
find, thankfully, that Holler’s lucid and clear writing is a breath of fresh
air. I highly recommend the read.

 

©
2003 Brent Dean Robbins

 

Brent Dean Robbins, Ph.D.,
Department of Philosophy, Allegheny College, PA

Categories: Ethics, Philosophical, Psychology