DIXON, Thomas.
“Emotion”: The History of a Keyword in Crisis. Emotion
Review, Vol. 4, No. 4 (October 2012) 338–344. Link.
Professor Dixon’s article affirms that “emotion”
“is certainly a keyword in modern psychology, but it is a keyword in crisis.
Indeed […], it has been in crisis, from a definitional and conceptual point of
view, ever since its adoption as a psychological category in the 19th century.”
(338)
He divides his text “into three sections which
correspond to three different dimensions of [the] multiple meanings” often attributed to the term:
“categories, concepts, and connotations”.
Categories
“The first books written on the subject of “the
emotions” appeared between the 1830s and 1850s” (340). Until then, “[t]heorists
distinguished especially between “passions” on the one hand and “affections” on
the other.” (339) This distinction, Dixon shows, arose in the response of
Augustine and Aquinas to the Stoic view of passions as “violent forces that
could conflict with reason and lead an individual into sin”. They agreed with
that, but “on the other hand, they did not agree that a state of complete Stoic
apatheia was one to be wished for”. (340) In different ways, they then
proposed a “distinction between passions of the sense appetite and affections
of the intellectual appetite”, which “undergirded moral-philosophical thought
for many centuries”. (339)
According to Dixon, no substantial change would
appear until the 19th century, when Thomas Brown simplified the
previous typology:
“The 18th century saw a proliferation of new
ideas about sentiments and sensibility, as well as about passions and
affections. But in almost all theoretical works, the various feelings and emotions
of the human heart and intellect were understood to fall into at least two
categories: the more violent and self-regarding “passions” and “appetites” on
the one hand, and the milder and more enlightened “interests,” social
“affections,” and “moral sentiments” on the other”. (339) “This more
differentiated typology was lost with the rise of the capacious new category of
‘emotion’ during the 19th century. The key figure in this transition was the
Edinburgh professor of moral philosophy Thomas Brown, whom I have previously
designated the ‘inventor of the emotions’ (Dixon, 2003, p. 109). Brown subsumed
the ‘appetites,’ ‘passions,’ and ‘affections’ under a single category: the ‘emotions.’”
(340) The popularity of Brown’s terminology made impossible for anyone to “devise
a single theory, or a simple conceptual definition, that could cover such a
wide range of different mental states”. (340)
Concepts
“The word “emotion” first arrived on British
shores from France in the early 17th century. […] In both its French and English
forms, “emotion” was a word denoting physical disturbance and bodily movement.”
“Increasingly, during the 18th century, “emotion” came to refer to the bodily
stirrings accompanying mental feelings.” (340) “Finally, from the mid-18th
century onwards, ‘emotion’ moved from the bodily to the mental domain. As early
as 1649, Descartes had attempted to introduce the term émotion as an alternative
to passion”, but “[h]is
suggestion was not generally followed”. (340)
According to Dixon, Thomas Brown, a Scottish “physician and poet as well as a
philosopher, was the first to treat “emotion” as a major theoretical category
in the academic study of the mind, and his use was the most systematic and most
influential of the period.” Dixon even adds: “Here, then, in the lecture halls
of Edinburgh University in the years between 1810 and 1820, we arrive at the
key moment in the history of our modern concepts of ‘emotion.’” (340)
One problem with Brown’s terminology is that it
lacked precision: “’The exact meaning of the term emotion,’ Brown told
his students, ‘it is difficult to state in any form of words.’” But he did try
to elucidate its meaning, claiming that, in Dixon’s words, “unlike sensations,
which were caused directly by external objects, emotions were caused by the
mental ‘consideration’ of perceived objects; and, unlike intellectual states, they
were defined as noncognitive ‘vivid feelings’ rather than as forms of thought.”
(340)
Brown’s lectures, according to Dixon, “exercised
a very wide influence in the decades between 1820 and 1860”. “Two hundred years
later, we are still living with this legacy of Thomas Brown’s concept of ‘emotion’”
(340), a “strongly noncognitive” one. “His stark separation between
intellectual thoughts and emotional feelings”, says Dixon, “was endorsed by
many of the leading psychologists of the late 19th century.” (341)
Dixon then adds – somewhat suddenly – “a second
key figure” in the historical trajectory of the concept, “another Edinburgh
physician and philosopher, Charles Bell.” “Where Brown was the key theorist of ‘emotions’
as vivid mental feelings with mental causes, in Bell’s work we find a concept
of ‘emotion’ which for the first time gave a constitutive role to bodily
movements.” (341) Dixon points out that Bell’s work on expression and emotion provided
foundations for Darwin’s and James’ later ones.
According to his definition:
“For Bell an “emotion” was a movement of the
mind. His brief definition of the term was that “emotions” were “certain
changes or affections of the mind, as grief, joy, or astonishment,” which could
become visible through “outward signs” on the face or body (Bell, 1824, p. 19).
The additional interest of Bell’s work, however, is the importance he gave to
bodily movements, especially of the heart and lungs, as not only outward signs,
but also as constitutive causes of emotional experience.” (341)
So there were two different models, and the
tensions between them “were never fully resolved” (341): “For centuries,
theorists have debated what should be considered the true seat of the emotions:
the soul or the body; the heart or the brain [Dixon credits here Bound Alberti’s
2010 Matters of the heart].
In view of the importance of Brown and Bell in this conceptual history, I would
suggest that the true seat of the “emotions” was in fact the University of
Edinburgh, circa 1820 (Dixon, 2006).” (341)
Connotations
“Passion” and “affection”, now replaced by “emotions”,
“were both terms whose etymology and core meanings emphasised passivity,
suffering, and disease.” (341) “Since the key early “emotion” theorists,
including Brown and Bell, were almost all trained medics, it is significant that
they chose to use a word for the vivid mental feelings which detached them from
this medical thought-world and its pathological associations [...]” (341)
Alongside with that, what also happened was “the detachment of ‘emotion’ from
the established languages of morality and religion”. So far, “[m]any of the
most influential theorists of “passions” and “affections” had been moral
philosophers, clergymen, or both.” But, unlike these and other terms, “emotion”
and “emotions” “were detached from the linguistic worlds of theology and
moralism.” (342)
“The linguistic shift from ‘passions’ and ‘affections’
to ‘emotions’ thus both reflected and enabled shifts in institutional and
intellectual authority. By the end of the 19th century the view was
on the rise in European and American universities that a properly scientific
account of the human mind would be produced only through a thoroughly physiological
investigation.” (342)
But a conceptual consensus was never achieved:
“So, when W. James famously asked in 1884,
“What is an emotion?” he was not engaging with an age-old conundrum, but was seeking
to define a psychological category that had been in existence only a couple of
generations. James’s answer to his own question, one which revealed his
indebtedness to Brown, Bell, and Darwin, was that emotions were vivid mental
feelings of visceral changes brought about directly by the perception of some
object in the world.” (342) But “James’s theory had a curious early career”: “On
the one hand, it became, along with the similar theory of the Danish
psychologist Carl F. Lange, the flagship emotion theory of the fledgling science
of psychology. On the other hand, the theory entirely failed to create
consensus among the psychological community except, perhaps, a consensus that
it was wrong.” (342) “So, by the 1890s, although the idea that “emotion” was
the name of a psychological category had become entrenched, the nascent
psychological community had neither an agreed definition of the extent of the category,
nor a shared idea of the fundamental characteristics of the states that fell
within it.” (342) “The founders of the discipline of psychology in the late
19th century bequeathed to their successors a usage of “emotion” in which the
relationship between mind and body and between thought and feeling were
confused and unresolved, and which named a [very broad] category of feelings
and behaviours […]”. (342)
So contemporary theorists of emotion, for
Dixon, still face the need “to articulate the assumed relationships between
physiological processes and mental experiences, and between states of feeling
and states of thought.” (344) For him, the history of the concept might shed
some light on the problem:
“[…] [P]erhaps now that the definitional crisis
in “emotion” theories has reached a new peak, the time has come to reinstate in
psychological science some version of that distinction between ‘passions’ and ‘affections’
which structured modern thought about mind and morality for so many centuries.
[…] If the lessons of history and philosophy are taken on board, then, it is
just possible that the ideas of Augustine and Aquinas might yet turn out to be
just what is needed to inspire a new scientific paradigm of emotions research for
the 21st century.” (343)
Further reading
“Today there is a
thriving ‘emotions industry’ to which philosophers, psychologists and
neuroscientists are contributing. Yet until two centuries ago ‘the emotions’
did not exist. In this path-breaking study Thomas Dixon shows how, during the
nineteenth century, the emotions came into being as a distinct psychological
category, replacing existing categories such as appetites, passions, sentiments
and affections. By examining medieval and eighteenth-century theological
psychologies and placing Charles Darwin and William James within a broader and
more complex nineteenth-century setting, Thomas Dixon argues that this
domination by one single descriptive category is not healthy. The
over-inclusivity of ‘the emotions’ has hampered attempts to argue with any
subtlety about the enormous range of mental states and stances of which humans
are capable. […]”
