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From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category
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. Overinclusivity of 'the emotions' hampers attempts to argue with any subtlety about the enormous range of mental states and stances of which humans are capable. This book is an important contribution to the debate about emotion and rationality which has preoccupied western thinkers throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has implications for contemporary debates.
300 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 31, 1999
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December 22, 2023
This book overturns common assumptions about history of the term “emotion.” It also provides tantalizing details of this history, which are promising for being applied to contemporary research on emotion (either for dissolving certain extant debates or for inspiring new positions.) Let me summarize the main points. Then I’ll ramble a bit about what I’m thinking about.
Many thinkers assume that (1) Emotion is a modern term, which came into use only in the mid-18th century, and (2) The tacit opposition between emotion and reason, by which we can’t help but understand emotion, originates from the culprit: Christianity and its ethics. Dixon challenges both assumptions. In the introduction he agrees that “emotion” was only used in its contemporary sense in the mid-18th century. But when it was introduced, it was used roughly synonymously with other emotion-terms that go way back, directly to early and medieval Christianity, and indirectly to Ancient Greece. These are terms like passion and affection. This challenges (1).
Dixon also shows that in classical Christian psychology (in its early and medieval stages, before the budding modernism in particularly Scotland in the mid-18th century and the Enlightenment more generally), there was actually a lesser opposition between emotion and reason. The strong opposition between them only emerged with modernism. Chapters 2-4 establish this point. In classical Christian psychology, the human is understood as consisting of a body and a soul/psyche/mind. The soul is understood as your own person. It has “higher” and “lower” appetites (e.g., desire for God v. for sex and food), but all of these appetites are properly yours. You are the one desiring these things and have responsibility over your appetites/desires. In other words, the soul was defined closely with the will, and the will was understood as thoroughly agential.
Emotion, in classical Christian psychology, was understood in terms of “passions” and “affections.” Passions stem from your lower appetites, and affections from your higher appetites. You can be perturbed and enthralled with sex and food, on the one hand, or with God and your higher purposes, on the other hand. The important work as a Christian was to train your lower passions so that you can make sure your life is more governed by your affections, or your emotions towards God.
In contrast, the development of our modern empirical psychology consisted in different changes to this picture (these changes are based in the innovations of different thinkers, and aren’t always temporally linear; history is messy, but in understanding it we need to tell a narrative.) Some thinkers decided that passion/affection are not movements of your own will. Instead they are psychological primitives. They have their own autonomous being. As such, they gain a contour akin to that of bodily sensations and events, which impact us personally, and over which we lack direct control. Other thinkers, namely the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers like Hume, Reid, and Brown, began applying mechanistic models for understanding nature to the task of understanding the mind. The soul became a mind akin to a machine. Agency drops out of the picture. Emotion becomes not just an autonomous psychological entity, but the question of how it relates to our intellect and our bodies can be raised in a new way. Certain thinkers held that emotion determined our governed our intellectual activity (e.g., Hume and Brown), while others held that the situation is less deterministic than that, but emotion “advocates” for certain intellectual attitudes, and we can still choose between those offered (e.g., Reid.)
Over the remaining chapters, Dixon goes through subsequent pictures of emotion, once the Christian understanding of emotion as entangled with your own intellect/will/agency is discarded. In chapter 5 he focuses on Darwin’s work (which influenced Freud and James.) In chapter 6 he focuses on modernist Christian views of emotion, which largely preserve the modernist assumptions; they do not go back to classical Christian psychology. In chapter 7 he focuses on William James’ account of emotion; here he shows that the emotion-reason dichotomy has reached its full force, and that this conclusion is made possible by modernism’s move away from Christian psychology. On James’ account, emotion is a bodily feeling, which can cause us to think about our situation in certain ways.
I wasn’t aware of this history. I’ve been thinking about emotion for some time now. This book focuses on philosophical progress at the “geological deep-time” level of thinkers spanning the past two millennia. This may help me think about the issues I’m researching from these angles: What basic assumptions, shared by clusters of thinkers spanning many centuries, have I inherited? Which assumptions am I interested in challenging, or even rejecting?
I could describe my work as dealing with the issue that emotion is both active and passive. It is wrong to think that we are passive before emotion, or that we form our emotions, as we can form voluntary thoughts and imaginings. Instead, there is some process that goes on, with passive and active elements, which are causally interdependent. This is very vague to me at this time. I’ve thought about my interest in terms of looking for a more specific model of this process, which names the key elements involved, and the kinds of relations/interactions between them. Maybe this is the wrong way of looking at things, however. Alternatively I could focus on what better understanding emotion does for our understanding of particular psychological phenomena (e.g., phobias, implicit bias, existential crisis) and in turn what this does for our understanding of other mental phenomena (e.g., thought, judgment, perception, intention.)
So I’ve inherited assumptions that span all centuries of thinking about emotion: emotion is closely related to issues of passivity/agency (unlike other mental terms, like “imagination” and “belief.”) I also challenge an assumption that seems to span this time: emotion is a singular event that can be picked out by sentences of a simplicity/concision comparable to those that pick out other mental events like perceiving a specific object or having a certain thought. This allows me to challenge an extent assumption, gained during modernism: emotion is something that can be understood as potentially independent of other mental phenomena like thoughts, judgments, feelings, perceptions (and so it makes sense to ask about whether emotion is actually reducible to any of these.) I can take back an older Christian assumption: emotion is something we do, or is a “movement” of a person. But this can be seen under a new light: there are different senses in which we “do” something (e.g., a moment of voluntary decision vs. our accepting all that goes down during an episode of experience and having the option to take a more active position and respond in a certain way to anything that goes down.)
Another notes: I found it fascinating to think about how different assumptions about “the meaning of life” found at different cultural eras influence how people thought about the nature of the mind, and of emotion. The meaning of life in classical Christian times is to life according to God’s will. We are God’s creatures and so have the stuff built into us to be able to accomplish this. We need to explain suffering and evil in this world, since it’s not God’s doing. So we have free will or agency. This allows for a picture of emotion as something that we agentially do, and something we may train or perfect, so that we can get closer to God’s image.
In other words, it is of the essence of being a human that the human stands in a relationship with God. So in theorizing about the mind, a first- or second-person perspective is required, in order to account for this essential aspect of personhood. Emotion will thereby be thought of something we experience or do.
In modernity, there is an increasingly secular understanding of the world, on which things are governed by causality and “laws of nature.” So there is no prima facie reason to think emotion is of our own doing. Taking a “third-person” perspective upon the mind (the kind scientists take upon nature) is appropriate, and agency drops out of the picture. Emotion is now seen as something that can be adequately understood in terms of objective events within the individual: it is caused by psychological or bodily events within the person and brings about changes in other psychological or bodily parts. Also, the meaning of life is somewhat opened to us, or determined by the individual. So emotion need not be understood as subject to some personal project/efforts, geared towards some mandated purpose.
There’s an increasing trend these days of recognizing the importance of intersubjectivity and community. Reading Dixon’s book made me more self-aware about how I’m implicitly motivated by this ethical purpose of re-establishing the centrality of community in understanding the individual’s mind. Classical Christianity saw emotion as something had in relation to God, or as an event under God’s watchful eye. Freud (among other developmental psychologists like Vygotsky) provide a similar but different understanding: emotion is something had in relation to other people, and when we regulate our emotions, it is “perspectives” of other people crucial in our development that “speak” or “frame” our acts of regulation.
Many thinkers assume that (1) Emotion is a modern term, which came into use only in the mid-18th century, and (2) The tacit opposition between emotion and reason, by which we can’t help but understand emotion, originates from the culprit: Christianity and its ethics. Dixon challenges both assumptions. In the introduction he agrees that “emotion” was only used in its contemporary sense in the mid-18th century. But when it was introduced, it was used roughly synonymously with other emotion-terms that go way back, directly to early and medieval Christianity, and indirectly to Ancient Greece. These are terms like passion and affection. This challenges (1).
Dixon also shows that in classical Christian psychology (in its early and medieval stages, before the budding modernism in particularly Scotland in the mid-18th century and the Enlightenment more generally), there was actually a lesser opposition between emotion and reason. The strong opposition between them only emerged with modernism. Chapters 2-4 establish this point. In classical Christian psychology, the human is understood as consisting of a body and a soul/psyche/mind. The soul is understood as your own person. It has “higher” and “lower” appetites (e.g., desire for God v. for sex and food), but all of these appetites are properly yours. You are the one desiring these things and have responsibility over your appetites/desires. In other words, the soul was defined closely with the will, and the will was understood as thoroughly agential.
Emotion, in classical Christian psychology, was understood in terms of “passions” and “affections.” Passions stem from your lower appetites, and affections from your higher appetites. You can be perturbed and enthralled with sex and food, on the one hand, or with God and your higher purposes, on the other hand. The important work as a Christian was to train your lower passions so that you can make sure your life is more governed by your affections, or your emotions towards God.
In contrast, the development of our modern empirical psychology consisted in different changes to this picture (these changes are based in the innovations of different thinkers, and aren’t always temporally linear; history is messy, but in understanding it we need to tell a narrative.) Some thinkers decided that passion/affection are not movements of your own will. Instead they are psychological primitives. They have their own autonomous being. As such, they gain a contour akin to that of bodily sensations and events, which impact us personally, and over which we lack direct control. Other thinkers, namely the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers like Hume, Reid, and Brown, began applying mechanistic models for understanding nature to the task of understanding the mind. The soul became a mind akin to a machine. Agency drops out of the picture. Emotion becomes not just an autonomous psychological entity, but the question of how it relates to our intellect and our bodies can be raised in a new way. Certain thinkers held that emotion determined our governed our intellectual activity (e.g., Hume and Brown), while others held that the situation is less deterministic than that, but emotion “advocates” for certain intellectual attitudes, and we can still choose between those offered (e.g., Reid.)
Over the remaining chapters, Dixon goes through subsequent pictures of emotion, once the Christian understanding of emotion as entangled with your own intellect/will/agency is discarded. In chapter 5 he focuses on Darwin’s work (which influenced Freud and James.) In chapter 6 he focuses on modernist Christian views of emotion, which largely preserve the modernist assumptions; they do not go back to classical Christian psychology. In chapter 7 he focuses on William James’ account of emotion; here he shows that the emotion-reason dichotomy has reached its full force, and that this conclusion is made possible by modernism’s move away from Christian psychology. On James’ account, emotion is a bodily feeling, which can cause us to think about our situation in certain ways.
I wasn’t aware of this history. I’ve been thinking about emotion for some time now. This book focuses on philosophical progress at the “geological deep-time” level of thinkers spanning the past two millennia. This may help me think about the issues I’m researching from these angles: What basic assumptions, shared by clusters of thinkers spanning many centuries, have I inherited? Which assumptions am I interested in challenging, or even rejecting?
I could describe my work as dealing with the issue that emotion is both active and passive. It is wrong to think that we are passive before emotion, or that we form our emotions, as we can form voluntary thoughts and imaginings. Instead, there is some process that goes on, with passive and active elements, which are causally interdependent. This is very vague to me at this time. I’ve thought about my interest in terms of looking for a more specific model of this process, which names the key elements involved, and the kinds of relations/interactions between them. Maybe this is the wrong way of looking at things, however. Alternatively I could focus on what better understanding emotion does for our understanding of particular psychological phenomena (e.g., phobias, implicit bias, existential crisis) and in turn what this does for our understanding of other mental phenomena (e.g., thought, judgment, perception, intention.)
So I’ve inherited assumptions that span all centuries of thinking about emotion: emotion is closely related to issues of passivity/agency (unlike other mental terms, like “imagination” and “belief.”) I also challenge an assumption that seems to span this time: emotion is a singular event that can be picked out by sentences of a simplicity/concision comparable to those that pick out other mental events like perceiving a specific object or having a certain thought. This allows me to challenge an extent assumption, gained during modernism: emotion is something that can be understood as potentially independent of other mental phenomena like thoughts, judgments, feelings, perceptions (and so it makes sense to ask about whether emotion is actually reducible to any of these.) I can take back an older Christian assumption: emotion is something we do, or is a “movement” of a person. But this can be seen under a new light: there are different senses in which we “do” something (e.g., a moment of voluntary decision vs. our accepting all that goes down during an episode of experience and having the option to take a more active position and respond in a certain way to anything that goes down.)
Another notes: I found it fascinating to think about how different assumptions about “the meaning of life” found at different cultural eras influence how people thought about the nature of the mind, and of emotion. The meaning of life in classical Christian times is to life according to God’s will. We are God’s creatures and so have the stuff built into us to be able to accomplish this. We need to explain suffering and evil in this world, since it’s not God’s doing. So we have free will or agency. This allows for a picture of emotion as something that we agentially do, and something we may train or perfect, so that we can get closer to God’s image.
In other words, it is of the essence of being a human that the human stands in a relationship with God. So in theorizing about the mind, a first- or second-person perspective is required, in order to account for this essential aspect of personhood. Emotion will thereby be thought of something we experience or do.
In modernity, there is an increasingly secular understanding of the world, on which things are governed by causality and “laws of nature.” So there is no prima facie reason to think emotion is of our own doing. Taking a “third-person” perspective upon the mind (the kind scientists take upon nature) is appropriate, and agency drops out of the picture. Emotion is now seen as something that can be adequately understood in terms of objective events within the individual: it is caused by psychological or bodily events within the person and brings about changes in other psychological or bodily parts. Also, the meaning of life is somewhat opened to us, or determined by the individual. So emotion need not be understood as subject to some personal project/efforts, geared towards some mandated purpose.
There’s an increasing trend these days of recognizing the importance of intersubjectivity and community. Reading Dixon’s book made me more self-aware about how I’m implicitly motivated by this ethical purpose of re-establishing the centrality of community in understanding the individual’s mind. Classical Christianity saw emotion as something had in relation to God, or as an event under God’s watchful eye. Freud (among other developmental psychologists like Vygotsky) provide a similar but different understanding: emotion is something had in relation to other people, and when we regulate our emotions, it is “perspectives” of other people crucial in our development that “speak” or “frame” our acts of regulation.
March 24, 2022
"From Passions to Emotions" records the huge change in self-understanding that occurred largely from the 17th and through to the 19th centuries. Dixon begins with a fairly detailed explanation of the "psychologies" of Augustine and Aquinas. The old Christian theology of the person recognised two faculties of the understanding and the will. There was no "third faculty" of the “emotions”. Contrary to a common misunderstanding this was not rationalistic.
The first thing to understand is that the word "emotions" did not exist in the classical, biblical or for the first 1500 years of the Christian era. So the story is more complicated . The early (Augustine) and medieval theologians (Aquinas) distinguished between two kinds of "emotions" - passions (evil) and affections (good).
The second is that Augustine and Aquinas distinguished between the passions - sinful desires and drives - that result from the Fall and the corruption of our nature. Hence they did not trust the passions precisely because they were unruly and liable to control us. On the other hand, the "good emotions", called affections - e.g., love, joy, patience etc - were seen to be movements of the mind through the will and hence were objects of the mind.
The third point is that the primacy of the mind was not intellectualism or incipient rationalism, but a way of seeing the ordering of the faculties. Therefore it is a mistake to read this as a "reason vs. emotions" dichotomy. This is because they did not even conceive of "emotions" as moderns do. The mind moved through the will in love, joy etc. These “emotions” were movements of the mind, the mind directing to virtue through the will.
Fourthly, they were opposed to the Stoics and their "apatheia"– i.e., the denial of "emotions" or desires for a state of "indifference" . Augustine and Aquinas taught that proper affections were to be directed to God and not to creatures or created things. This was not because such creatures were evil, but because our relation to them needed to sit under our love and desire for God. Therefore the wholesome way to love creatures and created things was as love to God. That is so to say, we love my neighbour for God’s sake. Well-ordered love is always love for God.
Fifthly, where did evil passions come from? Well, not from a body polluting a pure soul! Quite the opposite, Augustine positioned the passions squarely in the fallen soul, whilst Aquinas attributed them somewhat to the fallen body as well.
The bulk of this book is to unpack the various streams of development in the Scottish tradition of Hutcheson, Hume, Reid, Brown, Chalmers, Bain and McCosh. Of particular interest to me were the discussion of Jonathan Edwards' Religious Affections, of the Free Churchman and Princetonian, William McCosh, who wrote on the emotions, and of scots evangelical and presbyterian pastor and theologian, Thomas Chalmers.
The account ends with William James and the birth of modern psychology based on a largely naturalistic and reductionist understanding of the person. Dixon shows this to be fruit of 19th century positivism, scientific reductionism and naturalism. Over this period "emotions" gradually replaced "passions" and "affections", the mind and soul as entities, and all feelings and emotions were reduced to physical phenomena.
The first thing to understand is that the word "emotions" did not exist in the classical, biblical or for the first 1500 years of the Christian era. So the story is more complicated . The early (Augustine) and medieval theologians (Aquinas) distinguished between two kinds of "emotions" - passions (evil) and affections (good).
The second is that Augustine and Aquinas distinguished between the passions - sinful desires and drives - that result from the Fall and the corruption of our nature. Hence they did not trust the passions precisely because they were unruly and liable to control us. On the other hand, the "good emotions", called affections - e.g., love, joy, patience etc - were seen to be movements of the mind through the will and hence were objects of the mind.
The third point is that the primacy of the mind was not intellectualism or incipient rationalism, but a way of seeing the ordering of the faculties. Therefore it is a mistake to read this as a "reason vs. emotions" dichotomy. This is because they did not even conceive of "emotions" as moderns do. The mind moved through the will in love, joy etc. These “emotions” were movements of the mind, the mind directing to virtue through the will.
Fourthly, they were opposed to the Stoics and their "apatheia"– i.e., the denial of "emotions" or desires for a state of "indifference" . Augustine and Aquinas taught that proper affections were to be directed to God and not to creatures or created things. This was not because such creatures were evil, but because our relation to them needed to sit under our love and desire for God. Therefore the wholesome way to love creatures and created things was as love to God. That is so to say, we love my neighbour for God’s sake. Well-ordered love is always love for God.
Fifthly, where did evil passions come from? Well, not from a body polluting a pure soul! Quite the opposite, Augustine positioned the passions squarely in the fallen soul, whilst Aquinas attributed them somewhat to the fallen body as well.
The bulk of this book is to unpack the various streams of development in the Scottish tradition of Hutcheson, Hume, Reid, Brown, Chalmers, Bain and McCosh. Of particular interest to me were the discussion of Jonathan Edwards' Religious Affections, of the Free Churchman and Princetonian, William McCosh, who wrote on the emotions, and of scots evangelical and presbyterian pastor and theologian, Thomas Chalmers.
The account ends with William James and the birth of modern psychology based on a largely naturalistic and reductionist understanding of the person. Dixon shows this to be fruit of 19th century positivism, scientific reductionism and naturalism. Over this period "emotions" gradually replaced "passions" and "affections", the mind and soul as entities, and all feelings and emotions were reduced to physical phenomena.
August 8, 2022
Very helpful volume in understanding the classical Christian conception of anthropology, and how that has changed since the 19th century.
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