From passions to emotions

Abstract

Historical research on the emotions can be broadly distinguished in terms of the focus on two very different kinds of object. One strand of research addresses theories or ideas about emotion as these have been developed by philosophers, theologians, psychologists and psychiatrists. This strand is exemplified here by Thomas Dixon. Ideas and theories of 'emotion' as such are relatively recent, as the term was not widely in use before the early nineteenth century. While much historical writing underplays the significance of this terminological point, sometimes to the point of ignoring it altogether, it is central to Dixon's analysis. Dixon proposes that the shift from 'passions' to 'emotions' cannot be understood simply as the employment of a new word to describe the same thing. Passions and affections, especially since Augustine and Aquinas, were terms embedded in a theological semantic web. They resonated with other terms such as the soul and the will, and they operated within a normative moral framework at whose pinnacle stood a transcendental deity. 'Emotion', by contrast, has its provenance in the secularized idiom of the increasingly specialized and autonomous practices of science and medicine. As a concept, it is born of a quasi-empirical distinction between external and internal affections of the mind. As internal affections of the mind, emotions are in turn distinguished from thought or intellect. In this manner, emotions are dissociated from the dimensions of morality and ethics, and construed as non-rational feeling states with evident ties to the body. The text by Dixon included here points to the historical specificity of the concept of emotion, and to the methodological dangers implicit in the historiographical task of mediating between this modern concept and its equivalents in the past. Dixon's argument in this work parallels anthropological deconstructions of Western concepts of emotion, such as the studies by Lutz, which seek to highlight the epistemological and normative assumptions these concepts imply, and the methodological pitfalls of ignoring them. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)