Revolting Passions

Abstract

Whatever happened to the passions? The pathe, passiones, or passions of the soul were a major mental category for thinkers from the ancient Greeks to the early moderns, until the "emotions" came into existence in the nineteenth century. The new science of psychology took over many ancient categories wholesale. The senses and the intellect, the memory and the will were all preserved. But the passions and affections-although they persisted, and persist to this day, in some contexts-were never studied by the exponents of evolution and neuroscience. Instead they were displaced by the "emotions", whose place as a psychological category was cemented through its adoption by eminent scientific figures including Charles Darwin and William James. 1 The predominant scholarly attitude towards the emotions in recent decades has been one of loving restoration. Long maligned by moralists and theologians as irrational and harmful, so the story goes, it has fallen to modern philosophers, neuroscientists and psychologists in recent years to retrieve the emotions from centuries of neglect and abuse and to restore their intellectual lustre. The standard view now is that emotions are cognitive states which constitute intelligent appraisals of the world. They are neither mere feelings, nor obstacles to reason. The cognitive nature of emotions is used to argue not only against a strong dichotomy between reason and emotion, but also in favour of the relevance of our emotions to ethical decisions. Our pro-emotional revisionism has also extended to rereading canonical works in the history of ideas in search of precursors for the modern orthodoxy about the close interconnection between thinking and feeling.There is a danger that this modern surge of approval for the emotions will obscure our view of the real nature of both secular and religious traditions of thought about these subjects. Looking carefully at the history of our categories can alert us to important differences between a mental typology

“Emotion”: The History of a Keyword in Crisis

“…Nonetheless, it indicates well enough the challenges that still face theorists of “emotion,” especially the need somehow to articulate the assumed relationships between physiological processes and mental experiences, and between states of feeling and states of thought. Among those philosophical and psychological writers of the 19th century (and before) whose works have been excluded from the canon of the history of psychology, but who resisted the conglomeration of “passions” and “affections” into “emotions,” who argued for the centrality of the intellect and cognition to states of feeling, and who connected psychology most closely to philosophy and ethics rather than to physiology, some clues may still be found as to what went wrong in the construction of modern concepts of “emotion” in psychology (Dixon, 2003, 2011; Gendron & Barrett, 2009). …”

“…The semantic connotations that were lost by the transition from “passions” and “affections” to “emotions” in theories of the human mind can all be grouped together under the unifying theme of pathology: cognitive, medical, or moral (Dixon, 2006, 2011). “Passion” and “affection” were both terms whose etymology and core meanings emphasised passivity, suffering, and disease.…”

“…The terms “emotion” and “emotions,” by contrast, were detached from the linguistic worlds of theology and moralism. They never appeared in any English translation of the Bible and, unlike the terms “passion” and “passions,” were very unlikely to be paired with such moralising epithets as “despicable,” “detestable,” “evil,” “perverted,” or “vicious” (Diller, 2010, p. 150; Dixon, 2011). …”

The Tears of Mr Justice Willes

“…18 Tears only became ‘expressions’ of ‘emotions’ during the nineteenth century. 19 Even then, they continued to be expressions additionally of thoughts and of sensations. Not only, then, did crying not necessarily express a particular emotion such as grief or sorrow; it did not necessarily express any emotion at all.…”

Educating the emotions from Gradgrind to Goleman

“…That violent passions should be subdued and benevolent affections cultivated was a commonplace of moral philosophy, both ancient and modern (Dixon 2003(Dixon , 2006(Dixon , 2011a. One eighteenth-century statement of this view, connecting it explicitly with questions about the schooling of children, is to be found in the work by Lord Kames mentioned above, Loose hints upon education (1781).…”