“Explaining” Mojo
Somewhere I read that Bertrand Russell never went to a film until he read Bergson, who invoked a “cinematographic” conception of movement, and Russell wanted to see what exactly Bergson had in mind. I don’t know whether or not this story is true, but it presents Russell as a coldly rational philosopher who only stooped to engage with popular culture when it figured in the argument for a theory.
I will risk painting myself into a similar corner by sharing an anecdote that will perhaps make me appear even more coldly rational than the reader will have already ascertained, but hopefully it also demonstrates my ability (and willingness) to learn.
Some years ago I was talking with a friend and, although I have no recollection how the topic came up, we somehow began discussing the song “L.A. Woman” by The Doors. I have never enjoyed the music of The Doors, and I said so plainly, and perhaps I also added something to the effect that that particular song never made any sense to me.
My friend then set about to “explain” the song L.A. Woman to me. He was (when I knew him; I haven’t seen him in years) an enthusiastic explainer of all matters, sometimes to the point of undertaking socially-inappropriate explanation (sort of like Gertrude Stein’s characterization of Ezra Pound as a “village explainer”).
“Explaining” a song or a work of art is sort of like explaining a joke: 1) any explanation is likely to be inadequate and misleading, and 2) if you have to have it explained to you, you’ll probably never understand — i.e., if you gotta ask, you’ll never know. Nevertheless, my friend rose admirably to the challenge and actually did a good job of explaining the song to me in terms I could understand and appreciate.
Up until this conversation I don’t know that I had ever been aware of the word “Mojo”; I may well have heard it, but apparently it didn’t make any impression on me.
What is “Mojo”? We can, as usual, rely upon the Urban Dictionary to give us a good idea of Mojo. The Urban Dictionary gives this as its first definition:
1. Mojo 1600 up, 587 downThe word originally means a charm or a spell. But now its more commonly said meaning sex appeal or talent.“I can get any girl if I just use a bit of the old mojo”
“Man, that girl has MOJO!”
“God help me, I think I’ve lost my mojo!”
And this second definition of “Mojo” in the Urban Dictionary gives more detail:
2. mojo 990 up, 241 downN.
1. Self-confidence, Self-assuredness. As in basis for belief in ones self in a situation. Esp. I context of contest or display of skill such as sexual advances or going into battle.
2. Good luck fetish / charm to bolster confidence.
3. ability to bounce back from a debilitating trauma and negative attitudeHe lost his mojo when she dumped him…
He got his mojo back now.
While “self-confidence” and “self-assuredness” are sufficiently general that they do not limit us to the kind of sex appeal central to the first definition, now that I have had some years to think about the phenomenon of “mojo” I think that it is even more general than self-confidence, and that it is a fact something that philosophers and economists have written about.
At the young age of 22 Immanuel Kant wrote a short treatise entitled, “Thoughts on the estimation of the animal powers.” Schopenhauer amusingly said of this early Kantian effort, “Kant wrote a treatise on The Vital Powers. I should prefer to write a dirge for them.” (On Noise) Kant returned to the vital powers in his Opus Postumum, where he distinguished four aspects of the vital powers or animal powers (animalische Potenzen):
The skillful initiator of motions for the preservation of vital force… rests on the employment of four animal powers: (1) on nervous power as a principle of excitability (incitabilitas Brownii); (2) on muscular power (irritabilitas Halleri); (3) on a force which preserves all the organic forces of nature as a constant alteration of the former two, of which one phenomenon is heat; (4) on the organization of a whole of organic beings of different species, for each other, serving for the species’ preservation.
Keynes seems to be talking about something similar, although instead of “Mojo” or “animal powers” he refers to “animal spirits”:
Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits — a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities. (The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1935, Book 4, Chapter 12, Section 7, p. 161)
This is a very famous passage of Keynes’ General Theory that is frequently cited, and I think it is entirely appropriate to consider mojo in this economic context. If Keynes is right, most of civilization is attributable to “a spontaneous urge to action,” i.e., to mojo.
Perhaps the most detailed account of vital energies or animal spirits is to be found in William James’ 1907 essay on The Energies of Men:
I wish to spend this hour on one conception of functional psychology, a conception never once mentioned or heard of in laboratory circles, but used perhaps more than any other by common, practical men — I mean the conception of the amount of energy available for running one’s mental and moral operations by. Practically every one knows in his own person the difference between the days when the tide of this energy is high in him and those when it is low, though no one knows exactly what reality the term energy covers when used here, or what its tides, tensions, and levels are in themselves. This vagueness is probably the reason why our scientific psychologists ignore the conception altogether. It undoubtedly connects itself with the energies of the nervous system, but it presents fluctuations that can not easily be translated into neural terms. It offers itself as the notion of a quantity, but its ebbs and floods produce extraordinary qualitative results. To have its level raised is the most important thing that can happen to a man, yet in all my reading I know of no single page or paragraph of a scientific psychology book in which it receives mention — the psychologists have left it to be treated by the moralists and mind-curers and doctors exclusively.
James went on to discuss in more detail the absence of vital energies:
Every one is familiar with the phenomenon of feeling more or less alive on different days. Every one knows on any given day that there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth, but which he might display if these were greater. Most of us feel as if we lived habitually with a sort of cloud weighing on us, below our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.
I have thought a lot about vital energies during my adult years, though I thought about them pretty much in the terms of James’ essay, and only recently connected this philosophical idea with the popular culture idea of mojo.
These apparently erudite considerations, also apparently distant from Jim Morrison’s evocation of Mojo in the song L.A. Woman, are all ultimately about the expression of vital energy in the various spheres of human activity (unless one wants to reduce the evocation of “Mr. Mojo Rising” to an anagram of “Jim Morrison” — as if that were the only thing it meant). Call it mojo or vital powers or animal spirits — it all pretty much expresses the same thing.
I suspect that most people experience mojo, in so far as they do experience it at all, in connection with sex appeal or in relation to a, “contest or display of skill such as sexual advances or going into battle,” as in the Urban Dictionary definition, but mojo is not limited to these contexts. Mojo extends as far as one’s life experiences extend, and especially anyone involved in any creative endeavor knows instinctively and intuitively the central role that one’s vital powers play in creative activity.
Recently in An Interview in Starbucks I wrote that I had hesitated to write about a particular passage in Husserl because I didn’t feel that my powers were yet equal to the task. Sometimes vital powers are very specific, in this sense, and one can feel within oneself when one has attained the level one must attain in order to take on a particular project.
When one feels in the full possession of one’s vital energies, when one’s vital energy is at the flood tide, as William James has it, one feels as though one can take on the world. One does not usually think of intellectuals as energetic individuals, but intellectual activity, too, is entirely dependent upon mastering one’s vital energies. Bertrand Russell said somewhere (I can’t remember where, and I can’t find the quote now that I’ve looked for it) that, at one stage of his life, he had, “the energy of twenty locomotives.”
The cultivation of one’s personal vital powers is (or ought to be) a kind of division of practical philosophy. In his lectures on Practical Philosophy: The Greco-Roman Moralists, Luke Timothy Johnson comes at the philosophy of classical antiquity not from the perspective of philosophical theories but from the perspective of practical wisdom in dealing with life. We need just such a discipline in the modern world in order to cultivate our vital energies and thereby accomplish those things we hope to accomplish.
Most people learn these skills by trial and error, such as avoiding people who drag you down and sap your strength while systematically seeking out activities that make one feel energized and fully alive. Such skills can be the difference between being overwhelmed by the world and feeling the master of one’s destiny and in control of one’s fate.
In contemporary psychotherapy, individuals who are vulnerable to being overwhelmed by the world are taught “coping skills,” which are things, once again, that most people learn themselves by trial and error, but some people need to be taught.
One might think of the cultivation of vital energies for creative projects as coping skills for the fully functional. That is to say, if one is getting on fine in regard to the daily grind of the ordinary business of life, one is fully functional, but in order to take the next step and to create something new in the face of an indifferent and possibly hostile world, additional cognitive and emotional resources are needed.
In so far as coping skills can be explicitly formulated, I have to wonder if coping skills for the fully functional, in order to master their vital energies and undertake creative projects, might also be amenable to an explicit formulation.
