Welcome back to The Very Short Introductions Podcast. From
public health to Buddhist ethics, soft matter to classics,
and art history to globalization, we'll showcase a
concise and original introduction to a wide range of
subjects, for wherever your curiosity may take you. So here
is today's very short introduction.
Hello, my name is Thomas Dixon and I'm Professor of History at
Queen Mary University of London, where I'm also the director of
the Center for the History of the Emotions. And I have written
The History of Emotions: A Very Short Introduction. I guess the
overall point of the history of emotions is twofold. Firstly, it
is to enrich our understanding of the past, to help us see the
people who lived in the past and all sorts of different societies
and contexts were embodied, passionate, breathing,
pulsating, sweating, physical human beings like us with
passions and feelings. And that gives a new dimension to our
study of the past. But secondly, the history of emotions is
relevant to the present, because it can help liberate us from
some of the more restrictive ways we might have of thinking
about the mind today.
So for example, there is a brilliant movie called Inside
Out, which is an excellent film for children or adults, an
animation where a young girl called Riley has five emotions
running her brain, one of which is joy, the others are sadness,
fear, anger, and disgust. As I said, it's a really good film,
and it gives you one way of thinking about emotions; we've
all got the same five emotions. Well, that is fine for an
animation, for a bit of entertainment. But the history
of emotions is for grownups, and gives us a much more rich and
complex view of how human emotions are very multiple, very
various, and how they've changed over time, and across different
cultures. Whether lust, rage, melancholy, joy, compassion,
love, tears, laughter, all of these incredible diverse human
feelings all have a place in history, and can all give us
this new angle, hopefully, on our own feelings, our own
experiences today.
Now, I'm an academic, and so what first got me interested in
the subject of history of emotions was a sort of scholarly
question, which arose for me when I was doing my PhD, and I
was reading the Confessions of Augustine, the North African
bishop and Christian writer of the fourth century. And he was
writing about his lust and his passions, and he was also
writing about the love of God and the feelings that he should
feel towards God. And I started thinking to myself, well, what
is St. Augustine's theory of emotions? Because I was familiar
with the psychology of emotions, I was trying to apply that to
historical thinkers in the first year of my PhD. And I came up
against this problem, which is St. Augustine does not have a
theory of emotions, because it's not a category that he used. And
it was that problem, and that question, which first got me
into trying to find out more about the history of emotions.
And so the first thing that I found out was that the emotions
as a psychological category didn't exist for St. Augustine
and didn't exist for anybody until relatively recently. In
fact, in my work, I've suggested it was in the 19th century, in
works of psychology and philosophy, that the emotions as
this big catch all psychological category, first came into
existence.
Before the emotions, there were passions, affections,
sentiments, all sorts of other kinds of feeling. And of course,
since the 19th century, our categories have continued to
change, but with this huge, great monolithic thing called
the emotions in the middle. And one of the things I've tried to
get clear about in my own mind, and which I've written about is,
what is the difference between these words, a passion and
affection and emotion, and also something you might have heard
of called affect theory, where do affects and affect theory
come in? And those are things I've tried to answer in what
I've written.
A really key insight for me, which throws a lot of light on
emotions, and the history is the idea that emotions are thoughts,
that what distinguishes emotions from physical sensations, like
feeling pain, or feeling hot or cold, or hungry, is that
emotions have this large element of cognitive content, they are
my beliefs about the world. So my terror of an awful event
happening is my belief that it might happen and that it would
be awful if it did. It's a feeling which is full of thought
and value as well as energy and feeling. To take another
example, if I am perhaps a religious individual in the past
feeling very guilty about my experience of lust and desire,
that is a really complicated feeling state which includes
both a sort of urge of desire, but also a moral framework and a
set of beliefs about what feelings are appropriate or
inappropriate. So I like to think of emotions as thoughts
about the world. There are very particular kind of embodied
thoughts, which tell me what I believe and give me this kind of
complex information through both the words that I might use to
express myself but also through my sweaty palms and my lurching
stomach; my emotions are embodied thoughts.
Something else I think everybody should know about the emotions
and their history is that Charles Darwin wrote an
incredible book about the emotions called The Expression
of the Emotions in Man and Animals, which was published in
1872. The reason I think people should know that is because, of
course, Darwin's hugely famous in the history of science for
the books he wrote about evolution in animals and humans.
But this amazing book, illustrated by photographs in
the 1870s, about emotions, and how they're expressed is perhaps
a bit less well-known, and there's lots we can gain from
studying it, both just to see, yet again, how Darwin is such a
curious and such a brilliant thinker in terms of the way he
gathered his evidence from all around the world of emotions and
animals and children and adults, but also as a sort of staging
post between past and present ways of thinking about the
emotions. We might expect Charles Darwin to believe that
there's a small number of basic emotions, maybe a bit like the
sort of caricature picture in Inside Out, but in fact, he
believes in in a very large number of emotions, and he
doesn't really manage to pin it down to a small number of
universals, despite the fact that I think he would have quite
liked it. Another thing that I personally found interesting in
reading Darwin's book about the emotions as an English man,
myself is that he has this extraordinary statement that
English men rarely cry in chapter six of his book, which
is all about weeping and other special expressions in human
beings. And this really got me thinking about the cultural
history, of the idea of the stiff upper lip, and why is
Charles Darwin, this great Victorian man of science,
claiming that English men rarely cry? And that got me set on a
whole project some years ago, looking at the history of tears
and weeping in Britain, and how it changed over time.
So looking at the really big picture of change, because the
history of emotions, what are the big things that have
changed? And how can studying the past help us live in the
present in a more well-informed, perhaps more active and
constructive, way? I think there's really big picture, and
this itself is a bit of a caricature. It is a world, we
have gone from a world in which in the medieval and early modern
period, there were passions of the soul, which were problems
for people; there was rage, and jealousy, and hatred, and lust,
and passion. And these were problems, they were moral
problems, they were religious problems, they might very well
lead to very unwelcome criminal or immoral activities. And when
we look at emotions in the world today, it's a very different,
much more secular, much more anodyne kind of picture, we're
more likely to come across a meme telling us that our
emotions are valid, and that our emotions are natural, and that
we should definitely express them. So something has happened
in this big picture on the journey from deadly sins to what
we might call expressivism, the idea that men should cry, women
should show their anger. And that expressivism is the sort of
ethos we've lived with for the last 50 or 60 years. So I
suggest that historical research can help us throw some light on
what happened there, and why we live in such a different world
today.
Another area I have a particular interest in which I think the
history of emotions contributes a lot to is understanding mental
health, and the way that ideas have changed about which
emotions are healthy, and which are unhealthy, and when an
emotion like melancholy or sadness can become a mental
illness that we might call a depression or clinical
depression. And the way those words have been used, obviously,
has changed over time. Although the word depression has actually
been used to name an illness, as well as a sort of more vague
feeling state for longer than you might think, and it's then
also interesting to trace depression back to the world of
melancholy in the early modern period, a book like The Anatomy
of Melancholy, and to see what that word meant; literally meant
"black bile," and how we got from the black bile of someone
like Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy, via the depression
of 19th century psychiatry, to the feelings and ideas we have
today about what makes our mind healthy or unhealthy.
I think there's a risk in thinking about the history of
emotions, that we might come to think that the sort of
relatively limited palette of emotional feelings and language
that we have to work with today is somehow kind of impoverished.
And there is an element of looking to the past and seeing
as much more vivid, varied, rich emotional life of passions and
sin and violence and death and tragedy and so on. And they're
looking at today and looking at psychology and thinking, oh,
looks a bit tame. But I don't think we should get too carried
away with that picture. Of course, we, all of us today,
still have, even in a world of anesthetics and antidepressants,
we do have the capacity for huge suffering and huge feeling,
positive and negative. And we have very rich ways of
expressing that, ways which are always changing through new
technologies. So whether it's through emojis, or social media,
or all sorts of other kind of modern artistic and creative
endeavors, we will always continue to change the emotional
expressions that are available to us, and that will only be
enriching. So I expect the history of emotions to continue
into the future and our emotions to have as rich a future as they
have had a past but a very different one, and that history
can give us a perspective on what changes are likely to
happen.
I think I want to finish, as I do in my Very Short
Introduction, with just mentioning love, because love is
is really interesting topic, which is of huge interest to
almost all of us, in one way or another; most of us are looking
for love or hoping for love or driven by love. But that huge
word, of course, can mean so many different things to
different people. And I think it's interesting to look at the
history of very different kinds of love that there are. C.S.
Lewis, famous in the 1960s talked about the four loves;
Martin Luther King, around the same time, was saying similar
things actually in his sermons about looking back to ancient
Greek philosophy to look at the different kinds of love, what's
the difference between "agape" and "philia" and "storge" and
the other kinds of love. And that's another way that we can
get this interesting conversation going, I think,
between the modern science and psychology of emotions, and this
richer, sort of cultural, and religiou,s and philosophical
history.
According to some scientists, love isn't an emotion at all,
which may come as a surprise. It doesn't feature in quite a lot
of lists of basic emotions. But then for others, love is an
emotion and a really important one. But it is defined in quite
a reductive and physiological way. It's about getting a burst
of a certain neurotransmitter, or certain hormone that gives us
a little kind of buzz of feeling good. And again, we might say,
well, that's not really what I mean by love, and history can
help us think about the many meanings of love and how
historians have looked for it.
So I hope that gives you a little flavor of what the
history of emotions is all about. And you'll be interested
to find out a bit more. For me, I think the absolute bottom line
is difference. The reason it's important to study the history
of emotions is to see that people are different from each
other in the present and different from each other across
time and in the past as well. And there's a quotation from an
English doctor, an author called Thomas Cogan, which I really
like. He was talking in the early 19th century about the
huge diversity of passions and opinions and manners that you
find in different parts of the world. And I think his words
also apply nicely to what we find when we study the history
of the feelings and emotions that different people felt in
different periods. He talked about "the inconceivable variety
of sentiments and affections, which incidentally take place
among beings of the same species, inhabitants of the same
sublunary system, conversant with similar objects and
possessing similar powers of mind." We are those people, with
our similar powers of mind, similar but not identical. And
the history of emotions can help us think about all of that.
Thank you for listening to The Very Short Instructions Podcast.
You can subscribe to our podcast on your favorite app, such as
Apple or Spotify, to receive all of our episodes directly in your
feed. All of our episodes, new and old, can also be found on
SoundCloud and YouTube at Oxford Academic.