What is the History of Emotions?

Barbara H. Rosenwein, Riccardo Cristiani

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781509508532
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

What Is the History of Emotions? offers an accessible path through the thicket of approaches, debates, and past and current trends in the history of emotions. Although historians have always talked about how people felt in the past, it is only in the last two decades that they have found systematic and well-grounded ways to treat the topic. Rosenwein and Cristiani begin with the science of emotion, explaining what contemporary psychologists and neuropsychologists think emotions are. They continue with the major early, foundational approaches to the history of emotions, and they treat in depth new work that emphasizes the role of the body and its gestures. Along the way, they discuss how ideas about emotions and their history have been incorporated into modern literature and technology, from children's books to videogames. Students, teachers, and anyone else interested in emotions and how to think about them historically will find this book to be an indispensable and fascinating guide not only to the past but to what may lie ahead.

1
Science

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that's all.”

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Political history is about power relations: kings, queens, revolutions, constitutions, and the like. Military history is about war: campaigns, arms, battles, and so on. We have fairly clear notions of these topics. But what is the history of emotions about? How can we have a history of something unless we have a definition of it first? What are emotions?

Premodern views

Although the category “emotion” is itself relatively new, nearly equivalent terms – such as motions, affections, and passions – were part of the languages of the West from the time of the ancient Greeks. The semantic fields of these terms were (and are) not precisely coterminous, and, furthermore, even the modern English word “emotions” means different things to different researchers. Nonetheless, the commonalities are enough to allow for discussion, as long as we recognize the fuzziness of the terms.¹

Theorizing the emotions was long the preserve of philosophers. Aristotle (d.322 bce) devoted many pages to the topic in the second book of his Art of Rhetoric. The orator had to sway his audience, and that was a matter not only of setting forth facts, but also of moving hearts. The emotions, said Aristotle (using the ancient Greek term pathe), “are all those affections which cause men to change their opinion in regard to their judgments, and are accompanied by pleasure and pain; such are anger, pity, fear, and all similar emotions and their contraries.” For Aristotle, emotions were forms of cognition: they depended on the individual's assessment of any given situation. Consider the case of anger, which interested Aristotle (and other ancient philosophers) very much. It was evoked by “a real or apparent slight, affecting a man himself or one of his friends, when such a slight is undeserved.” This definition relied on cognition: it meant that a person judged not only that someone had slighted him (or her) but also that the slight was undeserved.²

Later, in the Hellenistic period (323 to 31 bce), Stoic and Epicurean philosophers made the study of emotions a specialty, but only to master and overcome them. For the Stoics, emotions consisted in two sequential judgments: first the appraisal that something – whether internal or external – was good or bad; second the decision about how to react. On the whole, they considered all emotional reactions to be wrong-headed. There was no way to avoid the first inklings of emotion – a sinking feeling, a blush, chattering teeth – but the wise person refused to assent to them, refused to allow those so-called “first movements” to become true emotions. “That anger is stimulated by the impression of injury received is not in doubt; what we are asking is whether it follows immediately upon the impression itself … or whether it is generated when the mind assents.” So wrote the Roman philosopher Seneca (d.65 ce), for whom assent was the crucial factor.³

With the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity at the end of the fourth century, theologians rather than philosophers became the chief theorists of the emotions. Many early Christian ascetics accepted the Stoics' wary view, but others welcomed emotions – as long as they were directed in the correct way, toward God and not toward things of this world. Augustine of Hippo (d.430) set the terms of the discussion: “The character of a man's will is at issue. For if it is turned the wrong way [away from God], it will turn these emotions awry; but if it is straight, they will be not only blameless, but even praiseworthy.”⁴

As theology merged with philosophy and medicine in the thirteenth century, ever more complex discussions of the emotions ensued. In the seventeenth century, philosopher and mathematician René Descartes's treatise on The Passions of the Soul (1649) seemed to separate mind and body, a dualism that would later have long-term repercussions. Philosopher and physician John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) made the passions, from love to shame, the product of experience. Well into the eighteenth century, theologians, physicians, and philosophers continued to share the task of theorizing the emotions. But over time, secular, mechanistic, and physicalist approaches came to dominate. During the nineteenth century, “emotions” became the term of choice, displacing passions, affections, and many other words. As a convenient and simple category ripe for investigation, that term set the stage for the present near-monopoly by experimental scientists. To be sure, sociologists and anthropologists have much to say on the topic, and we shall bring them into the discussion from time to time. But at the forefront of the public eye today are the scientists. The remainder of this chapter will explore their chief theories, for historians of the modern field of the history of emotions cannot – and usually do not wish to – escape them.⁵

The science of emotions

In 1981, psychologist Paul R. Kleinginna and Anne M. Kleinginna, dismayed by the bewildering proliferation of definitions of emotions that had been proposed by their peers, tried to find common ground. Surveying the field, they found ninety-two different answers and nine “skeptical statements.” Working with them all, they came up with a hybrid definition on which, they hoped, everyone would agree:

Emotion is a complex set of interactions among subjective and objective factors, mediated by neural/hormonal systems, which can (a) give rise to affective experiences such as feelings of arousal, pleasure/displeasure; (b) generate cognitive processes such as emotionally relevant perceptual effects, appraisals, labeling processes; (c) activate widespread physiological adjustments to the arousing conditions; and (d) lead to behavior that is often, but not always, expressive, goal-directed, and adaptive.⁶

Although cited every so often, this definition is hardly ever adopted, no doubt because by trying to please all, it pleases none.

More helpful is a textbook from 1996 by psychologist Randolf Cornelius, The Science of Emotion. Cornelius covered four foundational theories of modern psychology: the Darwinian, Jamesian, cognitivist, and social constructionist. We will review them in this chapter, for they continue to be the paradigms that scientists work with today, and we will show along the way how they manifest themselves in the newest trend in the science of emotions: neuropsychology. In Chapter 4, we will see how they turn up in our children's books and in videogames, for this provides a glimpse of the pervasiveness of these theories not just in textbooks but also in lived experience – including the lived experience of historians.

There is also Freudian, or psychoanalytic, theory. It is of particular importance for therapy and for inquiries into the unconscious, but does not lend itself well to the experimental method favored by most scientists. Psychoanalysis was influential in “psychohistory,” which flourished in the 1970s. Although certainly touching on emotions, neither psychoanalysis nor psychohistory focused on that topic, being concerned, rather, with drives (the so-called sex and death instincts) and their role in the formation and functions of the id, ego, and super-ego in individual development and human relationships.⁷

Are they emotions or are they not? Moods, feelings, sentiments, affects

When Cornelius began his book on the science of emotions, he presented some examples rather than give an abstract definition: “This is a book about emotions. It is about joy, love, anger, fear, happiness, guilt, sadness, embarrassment, hope, and many other emotions as well.”⁸ Most of us – and certainly most scientists – agree that sadness is an emotion. But is “depression” an emotion? Are feelings the same as emotions? When we say: I am “feeling sad,” no doubt we mean to express an emotion. But when we say, “You hurt my feelings,” no emotion per se has been hurt. To some degree historians of emotions do not need to worry too much about these fine distinctions, first because they were not necessarily made in the past (they are anachronistic) and second because historians must deal with complex phenomena that few in the past neatly labelled “an emotion.”

However, the word “affect” poses a somewhat different problem. Used as the equivalent of emotion by many scholars, both in history and science, it also has been made the crux of a theory that deliberately separates affect from theories of emotions. This is a modern development. Derived from the Latin affectus, affect was traditionally used either as a word for the emotions or as one of the emotions. In the fifth century, Augustine used it interchangeably with other words for emotions – the Latin equivalents of words like perturbations, affections (a word with the same root as affect), motions of the soul, and passions. All of these, said Augustine, were in the will – a faculty of the soul (or mind). All emotions were good when turned towards God and bad if directed at worldly things. In the twelfth century, however, affect (and related words, like affections) tended to be linked specifically to love. Officials at the court of the coun...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1: Science
• 2: Approaches
• 3: Bodies
• 4: Futures
• Conclusion
• Selected Reading
• Illustration Credits
• Index
• Plates
• End User License Agreement