Emotions have become, perhaps, the defining feature of modern life. They provide us with our sense of self and act as touchstones for future action. The weekend papers are filled with columnists urging us to ‘get in touch with our feelings’. Anxious couples pore through self-help books trying to assess their ‘emotional intelligence’. In the service industries, a new generation of employers seek to exploit the ‘emotional labour’ (rather than the physical toil) of their employees, grooming salespeople and receptionists so that they will radiate delight to potential customers. General practitioners, increasingly, are called upon to minister to their patients’ struggles with emotion. The incidence of depression in British adults is now estimated to cost the national economy over £9 billion a year.

Given the centrality of the emotions in contemporary British life, there is a surprising lack of clarity with regard to their meaning and definition. Whilst some celebrate emotions as privileged points of access to our authentic selves, others see them as involuntary physiological processes which frustrate our rational intentions. The philosopher, Robert Solomon and the neurologist, Antonio Damasio have complained that modern Western culture is in thrall to a ‘myth of the passions’: we believe that our emotions stand in opposition to our intellect when they are in fact a central part of our conscious life lending tone and association to our various choices and actions. These authors trace this mistaken apprehension back to the influence of Christianity with its long-standing opposition of the flesh and the spirit. However as Thomas Dixon demonstrates in his engaging new book, this act of historical scapegoating is in fact another myth: a myth that further impoverishes our understanding of the emotions.

Against the claims of Solomon and Damasio, Dixon demonstrates that Christian theology possessed a rich and nuanced language for exploring our emotional lives. In the writings of the Church Fathers, new distinctions were drawn between the passions and affections: the former arising from the animal soul and directed towards the satisfaction of sensory appetites; the latter arising from the higher will and directed towards intellectual objects such as virtue or learning. Whereas the Stoics had deployed a simple dichotomy between reason and passion, patristic theologians such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas developed a much more complex understanding, denigrating the sensual passions whilst celebrating the inspired affections which guided the Christian in his struggle towards God.

Dixon contends that this complex Christian understanding of the affective life remained in place until the end of the eighteenth century. He shows how Georgian divines and moral philosophers fielded a rich vocabulary in their descriptions of human experience: alongside the passions and affections of patristic theology, writers such as Isaac Watts and Frances Hutcheson made reference to appetites, feelings, sensibilities, sentiments and, in passing, to emotions. Yet in the writings of these eighteenth-century authors, affective experiences developed a more distinctive and autonomous role. Instead of being seen as corollaries of will, they were depicted as motivating powers enjoying an independent life of their own. It was this transition in our understanding of the passions and affections which led to the emergence of a secular science of psychology organised around a new theory of emotions.

Psychological science, according to Dixon, belongs to a quite different order of meaning from Christian theology and moral philosophy. He describes the emergence of two separate language networks sustaining different cosmologies through their various vocabularies. Whereas the passions and affections had obtained their meaning through reference to the soul, divine grace, sin and the will; the new secular category of emotion was defined in terms of behaviour and expression, brain, physiology and organism. Dixon traces this transformation back to the work of the Scottish philosopher, Thomas Brown, whose Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1820) rejected the old idea of willed affections and passions in favour of a more mechanical model, in which emotions were seen as the unsolicited results of various mental and chemical reactions. It was this philosophy, inspired by the example of Newtonian physics rather than Christian theology, which, Dixon claims, has led to our modern day ‘myth of the passions.’ The new system and language, developed by Brown, describes a world in which emotions appear as the involuntary product of the interactions between our body and the environment,

The new language of the emotions, championed by Victorian theorists such as Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin, received its final apotheosis in the work of William James. James’s paper, ‘What is an Emotion?’ first published in 1884 is now widely regarded as the founding text of the new science of emotions. In this work, James attacked the common sense idea that bodily movements such as smiles or grimaces were the expression of psychic states and instead insisted that these somatic changes in fact generated our new felt emotions. In this work the separation between emotion and the will was completed. The passions and the intellect were seen as separate domains, only entering into occasional correspondence. And in the turn to this new world view, the older more complex distinctions between passions, sentiments and affections were abandoned. In their place appeared the all inclusive category of emotion defined in simple opposition to the work of the intellect.

From Passions to Emotions offers a cogent, and I think, convincing argument on an issue of crucial public interest. It is a piece of good old-fashioned intellectual history, tracing the transformations in some of our most fundamental ideas across a period of over 1500 years. Like all grand syntheses it leaves one wishing for more detail and opens up areas for further research. Certainly many readers will want to look beyond the representative canon constructed by Dixon, to uncover the role of more minor players, particularly literary authors, in the development of new forms of psychological description. Others might wish for a grounded account which shows how novel models of human agency and nature have arisen out of new social and political practices. Roger Smith’s work on the language of inhibition (oddly ignored in Dixon’s book) provides a good example of this new approach. Fay Bound’s studies of the ways that different ideas of the passions were deployed in English legal argument, demonstrates the importance of linking Dixon’s high intellectual history to more focussed studies in changing popular language.

Finally, despite his admirable courage in providing such a grand narrative, Dixon steers shy of perhaps the most interesting question of all. As historians such as Kurt Danziger and Ian Hacking have shown, psychological objects, such as temperaments or emotions, are very different to natural objects. They are not grounded in the world but change as we change our descriptions of them. If we accept this argument then Dixon’s book becomes something much more exciting than mere intellectual history. It provides an overview of the changing ways that people have managed to be themselves and reminds us of the possibility that our current sense of who we are may one day pass the same way as the old language of the passions.

Rhodri Hayward
Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine
University College London