A Genealogy of Affective Life: Foucault, Wittgenstein, and Historical Aesthetics

This essay outlines a model for extending Michel Foucault’s method and practice of historical-philosophical investigation, or genealogy, to the critical and historical study of affect and emotion, drawing on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein to clarify some of the philosophical issues that this investigation raises. If Foucaultian genealogy historicizes thought in the form of a discontinuous history of rationalities and knowledge-power complexes (or dispositifs), the affective genealogy I describe here historicizes feeling in the form of a similarly discontinuous history of affective discourses or emotional economies. The latter are discontinuous in that they contain alterities, breaks in continuity or changes in the direction of development, that cannot be accounted for in causal terms, and which leave a record of themselves in the form of “archaeological dislocations,” as Maria Muhle describes them (80). Such dislocations have their affective counterpart in the ways the discourses of passion and desire, of sympathy and sensibility, and of emotion and affect, have undergone radical changes, reversals, and displacements of meanings and uses over the centuries.

literary writings of American and other authors during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, I argue that the modern history of affectivity was part of a larger social, cultural, and political history of modernity shaped by the transition from republicanism to liberalism as well as by the rise of two complementary disciplines, political economy and modern biology, which affectively mirrored one another in the modes of regulatory control, biopolitical and governmental, they made possible. Foucault’s terms, “biopower” and “governmentality,” each signify a type of regulatory control or mode of governance of human behavior whose primary “object targets” are, respectively, biological and economic. The parallel formation of these two disciplines, political economy, and modern biology, beginning in the eighteenth century, was accompanied by a continuous transference of medical metaphors into the discourse of the economy and of economic metaphors of “circulation” into the modern biological understanding of the body in terms of its internal, physiological processes.

The key point of similarity between the two is that they are both “governments of life”: their emergence was made possible by a new concept of “life” that arose upon the replacement of natural history by modern biology, and of mercantilism by political economy, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That change, or aporia, entailed a shift from a classical regime of representation concerned more with the classification of life forms based on their external, largely visible features, as in Linnaeus’ taxonomy of plant life, to a more vitalistic quest to discover the nature of “life itself” as a sort of unitary essence embodied within the recesses, physical and mental, of the human animal (Order of Things 134-138). Both modern biology and political economy employed in different ways a concept of “desire” as a kind of life force that was alien to the traditional discourse of the passions from which this concept emerged and each employed a modern discourse of “sensibility” and “sentiment” as a moral, counterbalancing force to such desire, paving the way for a discourse of “emotion” which became dominant only in the late nineteenth century.

Foucault’s methodology provides an alternative way of reading the modern history of emotion that does not presuppose that such history has a transhistorical or ontological basis, as do the methodologies of philosophers from Martin Heidegger to Giorgio Agamben and Gilles Deleuze, the latter being a major source of much contemporary affect theory. In this study, I am concerned not with the answer to the question, “what is an emotion?” as William James asked in the title of his famous essay, but with what the posing of the question itself signified: with the modes, uses, and functions of emotion as “structures of experience” that arose during the modern period. Foucault’s historical-philosophical mode of investigation posits, as a tool to understand the nature of “modernity,” and therefore also ourselves, an epistemic break or rupture centered in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. That break, this essay tries to show, was also a rupture in the ways human beings constituted themselves affectively.

Although the theory of emotion presented in psychologist William James’ paper, “What is an Emotion?” (1884), has been criticized, almost from its inception, as reductive, the paper is nonetheless one of the more widely discussed texts in the history of modern emotion studies and is still cited approvingly today by affective neuroscientists who view it as foundational to their own vastly more sophisticated efforts to “anchor the phenomena of emotion in the physiology of the body,” as Antonio Damasio puts it.1 Much less often noted in these discussions is the fact that when the paper was first published in 1884, the term “emotion” (from the Latin motus, movement, +e, outwards) was relatively new. It was introduced into philosophical discourse by Rene Descartes in his last work, The Passions of the Soul [1]; and was used increasingly by a broad range of thinkers, from David Hume to Charles Darwin, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.2 As Thomas Dixon has observed, it does not appear in any English translation of the Bible (“Emotion a keyword in crisis” 342).

It was not until the late nineteenth century, coincident with the establishment of the modern discipline of experimental psychology, that the term gained the status it has today of being the most common way of referring to feelings. Prior to the nineteenth century, going back to Greek and Roman antiquity, the dominant terms for affective experience had been “the passions”3 (from the Greek pathe, Latin passio: to be subject to, to suffer from), as well as “the affections,” although their dominance began to be challenged beginning in the late seventeenth century by a modern discourse of sentiment, sympathy, and sensibility. Today, all of these terms and many others are generally subsumed under the broader category of “emotion,” but prior to the nineteenth century, no such broader category existed.4 Although such a shift, or what Louis Charland calls “the transition from ‘passions to emotions’ that takes place in Western history between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries,”5 has been increasingly studied in recent decades, understanding of its significance has been baffled by the peculiar obscurity, the blinding visibility, of its object. The discourse of emotion is not only the dominant affective discourse of modern times but seems to cover a wider and more inclusive range of experience than any other affective term, including “passion” and “affection,” in the history of Western thought. So manifold have the meanings and uses of this relatively recent term become that psychologists, since the time of James, have been unable to agree on its definition, while contemporary affect theorists influenced by the neurosciences have focused their attention on “affect,” an ancient term which, however, is usually defined by these theorists in terms of, sometimes in contrast to, “emotion”: as a “pre-linguistic intensity of the body” that is recognized and expressed through “emotion,” an account which fails to evade its status as discourse6. It also adds to the difficulty of viewing older affective categories including not just passion but desire, sympathy, and shame -- categories which have perhaps been transformed and reshaped, but have certainly not disappeared -- except through the lenses, through the discursive modes of affective expression and behavior, of our own modern discourse of emotion, “as if we were afraid to conceive of the Other in the time of our own thought,” as Michel Foucault [2] put it (Archaeology 12).

Such apprehension of alterity is reflected not just in the widespread tendency to conflate affective terms, including “passion” and “emotion,” but in the often-tacit acceptance of an overarching narrative of the modern “repression” of desire. Earlier twentieth century historians of emotion, from Johann Huizinga to Lucien Febvre to Norbert Elias and Robert Solomon, had tended to assume, in keeping with Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) that the innate drives and desires encoded in our bodily and mental processes which motivate and regulate emotional behavior in humans had been repressed, or blocked from free expression, by the exigencies of modern civilization, as contrasted with the spontaneous, violent, or child-like nature of affective life in earlier historical periods7. Although this narrative has come under more critical scrutiny in recent times, and has been attacked by some contemporary historians of emotion,8 it still exercises a pervasive influence.

Its central difficulty is that it naturalizes the affective history it tells, reducing to biology the social and political forces that are constitutive of such history. It misrecognizes, as somehow the product of repression, the explosive growth in affective discourse, of sensibility, sympathy, and desire, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that has long been documented by historians; and it silently installs our own affective discourse, the discourse of emotion8, as normative while discounting the radically contrasting features, the alterity, of earlier modes and practices of affective expression and behavior. It discounts, in the words of historian of psychology Kurt Danziger, “the possibility that the very objects of psychological discourse, and not just opinions about them, have changed radically in the course of history” (Naming 19).

In this essay, drawing on the historical and philosophical methods of Foucault and Ludwig Wittgenstein [3], whose use of “fictitious natural history”9 shares in common with Foucaultian genealogy an effort “to conceive of the Other in the time of our own thought,” I argue that such a radical change in the objects of affective discourse, a change in the nature of human affectivity, is recorded in the complex and multi-leveled transition from the ancient discourse of passion to the modern discourse of emotion that took place between the times roughly of Descartes’ The Passions of the Soul [1] and William James’ “What is an emotion?” [4]. The change effected a transformation of what constituted “activity” and “passivity” in the affective subject, reordering the roles of will and understanding and fashioning radically new kinds of social and personal boundaries between subject and world. A largely moral and hierarchical discourse of the passions shaped by the affective vocabularies of ancient philosophy, literature, and humoral medicine was displaced and marginalized by a modern discourse of emotion shaped by the development of the life sciences,10 as well as by the changes in economic, social, and domestic life attendant upon the Industrial Revolution. This shift entailed a rupture in the modes of what Foucault called “subjectivation,”11 the forming and deforming of subjects, which made available for the first time a “regulatory” or biopolitical understanding of human affective experience as an object of scientific knowledge accessible to technologies of social and political control.12 What the discourse of emotion made available, in particular, was a form of affective “activity,” which Descartes called emotions interieures or “internal excitations” and James states of “excitement”13 that was fueled by basic drives and desires grounded in the body, especially “the neurological body,” as it was sometimes termed beginning in the 19th century: “not just a body with organs and tissues, but a body with functions, performances, and behavior” (Foucault Psychiatric 288). The neurological body, supplanted in the late twentieth century by “the neuromolecular brain,”14 made possible a kind of activity that possessed its own “economy,” and could be understood, and potentially regulated, in causal terms [5-10].

The modern concept of “regulation,” which played an important role in the development of political economy in the eighteenth century, and became dominant in biology and medicine in the late nineteenth century, was central to the account of emotion as a form of activity or excitation, for it posited a type of control that is temporal and adaptive rather than static and mechanical, and which enabled human affectivity, feeling, to become integral to the life process itself.15 Rather than following a binary logic of exclusion and suppression characteristic of the discourse of the passions, emotion obeys a normative logic of inclusion and regulation; it needs to be incited or stimulated, not suppressed, in order to facilitate such regulation. The emergence of this new kind of affective action, emotion, was crucial to the economic and political organization of modern society, for it enabled homo economicus to take form not just as an engine of self-interest, but as an emotive form of life, a homo affectus, whose peculiarly active and at the same time regulated activity, a sort of passive activity, could serve as a constitutive feature of modern liberal and neoliberal governmentalities [10-24].

a discourse of “sensibility” – distinct from though overlapping with that of “sentimentality” – and the radically changed meanings of “desire” and “sympathy” which that history left in its wake, changes which helped to reconfigure human affectivity from the passivity and unpredictability of the passions to the regulated activity of the emotions.16 From its rise in the seventeenth century to the height of its influence in the second half of the eighteenth century in literature, politics, biology, and economics, to its decline during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the history of sensibility is marked by a progressive de-moralization of feeling in which the passions are understood less in terms of the good or bad actions and choices they result in, but are given an autonomy within the “consciousness” of the subject – within what John Locke (1632-1704) called “the mind’s presence room” – which allows human affectivity to become an object, whether neurological or psychological or both, of scientific knowledge (Essay 2.3.1) [25]. Influenced by Locke’s empiricist account of the sources of our thoughts and feelings, as well as by the reactions against such an account reflected in the moral sense theories of Francis Hutcheson, Adam Ferguson, and other philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment,17 sensibility functioned, however tenuously, as both a physiological and a moral discourse until, in the nineteenth century, the threads which had held its conceptual tensions together began to unravel.18

Although “sensibility” and “sentimentality” were often used synonymously, especially in eighteenth century British and American fiction, their usages became increasingly distinct in the nineteenth century. In contrast to the moral and especially political uses of sensibility throughout its history, especially in its association with “civic” or eighteenth-century republicanism, helping to fuel both the American and French Revolutions,19 sentimentality became in the nineteenth century a more purely affective discourse of feelings, a history reflected in the change in meaning that “sentiment” underwent from the eighteenth century, when it was virtually synonymous with “moral sentiment,” to its more radically affective and non-rational, even anti-rational, meaning in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Ann Douglass put it, “Sentimentalism, unlike modes of genuine sensibility, never exists except in tandem with a failed political consciousness” (307) [26- 35].

In contrasting the ancient discourse of the passions with that of the modern discourse of emotion, I do not mean to imply that the former is no longer operative today. Rather, what is at issue, what “above all changes,” in the transition from passion to emotion, “is the dominant characteristic…there is not a series of successive elements, the appearance of the new causing the earlier ones to disappear… [but rather] a series of complex edifices” (Foucault, Security, Territory, Population 8). My focus in this essay is on the “dominant characteristic,” or rather characteristics, of the rupture in human affectivity central to the genealogy of emotion, and not on the “complex edifices” that partly cover over that rupture.

In what follows, in the third section, “Foucault, Wittgenstein, and Historical Aesthetics,” I outline some of the principal features of Foucault’s and Wittgenstein’s historical and philosophical methods that I draw on in tracing the genealogy of emotion. The fourth section, “What is an Emotion” discusses William James’s theory of emotion, and Wittgenstein’s critique of it, as a vehicle to introduce the basic conceptual contrast between passion and emotion that I argue for in this essay. The fifth section, “Will and Passion,” presents a more detailed analysis of the discourse of the passions and the kinds of volitional controls and transformational processes, political and religious, that characterized such discourse. The sixth section, “Internal Excitations,” describes Descartes’ “revolutionary” concept of emotions interieures (“internal excitations”). The seventh section, “Sensibility and Emotion,” examines some of the political and scientific influences that shaped the history of the discourse of sensibility and how that history influenced the rise of the modern discourse of emotion [36].

At issue in the genealogy of emotion is not the analysis of single terms but the network of affective and semantic relationships, the “language games” or “discursive formations,” in which these terms are embedded and gain their significance, formations which are not simply linguistic but the record of processes of subjectivation embedded in larger social and cultural histories. Such records provide tools for the construction of what Ute Frevert calls an “historical semantics” of affective experience (“Defining” 10), but which I will term in this study an “historical aesthetics,” by which I mean not a history of aesthetics but rather the use of literary, philosophical, and scientific texts as tools for understanding the history of affective experience and the larger social, economic, and political forces that have shaped that history. Historical aesthetics shares in common with Foucaultian genealogy “an attempt to move beyond exclusively discursive regimes, by relating their appearance and change to elements external to discourse and knowledge” (Cooter 203) [37-45].

The term, “historical aesthetics,” is adapted from the French analytic tradition of “historical epistemology” that was central to Foucault’s thought. Historical epistemology emerged from the efforts of French philosophers of science, including among others Leon Brunschwig, Gaston Bachelard, and above all, Foucault’s mentor and colleague, Georges Canguilhem, to connect science and philosophy more closely with history.20 These thinkers, operating within a generally neo-Kantian context, attempted to dethrone philosophy from its transhistorical status as philosophia perennis, and view Kant’s transcendental Categories of the Understanding not as fixed conceptual structures but as rooted in historically variable social and cultural processes.21 Foucaultian genealogy radicalizes and partly breaks with the French tradition of historical epistemology through the emphasis it places on historical processes of subjectivation.22 “Continuous history,” Foucault says in the Introduction to The Archaeology of Knowledge, “is the indispensable correlative of the founding function of the subject…[providing] a privileged shelter for the sovereignty of consciousness” (12) [46,47].

Foucault’s critique of the unity and sovereignty of the modern subject brings to light the alterity of the historical layers that underlie, archaeologically speaking, its formations. His concept of history is reflected in his concept of the subject; the discontinuous history of reason presented in his books, the history of rationalities and their accompanying forms of sovereign, disciplinary and bio- or regulatory power, is the complement of a history of the subject marked by a radical alterity in which the subject becomes “other” – and does not return, like Hegel’s subject -- to itself.23 Discontinuous history, for Foucault, is a vehicle of the analysis of the subject; it historicizes “thought” in the form of an ungrounded, not always continuous history of rationalities and knowledge-power complexes or dispositifs.24 In analogous fashion, the historical aesthetics I speak of here historicizes “feeling” in the form of an equally ungrounded, not always continuous history of affective discourses and emotional economies [48-50]. The latter function, like dispositifs or apparatuses, within the power relations and modes of governance of their societies.

For both Foucault and Wittgenstein, language practices are rule-governed forms of action; they come with the territory, the forms of life, in which they are embedded. But what makes such practices open to the singularities and alterities of history and of everyday experience is that, in Wittgenstein’s words, “There is no rule for the application of a rule” (Philosophical Investigations, p. 80, sec. 201) [51-57]. “You must bear in mind that the language game is so to say unpredictable. I mean: it is not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable).” (On Certainty, p. 73, sec. 559). What this means is that our language practices are subject to what Foucault calls the “singularity” of social and historical processes;25 and may be constituted “non-causally,” as Wittgenstein says, by their own “internal relations” with their objects, in which subject and object are relative to, and partly determined by, one another.26 Or, as Foucault put it, “there exist discourses, such as that of madness or melancholia, which each constitute their objects and work to transform them.”27 Such discourses and the social practices associated with them participate in processes of “subjectivation” that subtend historical modes of forming, deforming, and constituting subjects [57,58].

These processes, however, are distinct from those posited in the Althusserian account of the subject as the passive, interpolated product of state power, an account which Foucault was critical of.28 “Subjectivation” in Foucault’s understanding facilitates a sort of verbalization of the subject; it refers to both “passive” and “active” processes that contribute to the formation or deformation of the subject, and can include practices of “self-care” that entail “not the objectification of the self in a true discourse [such as a scientific discourse], but the subjectivation of a true discourse in a practice and exercise of oneself on oneself” (Hermeneutics 333).

These processes, and the modifications and transformations they entail, occur at the level not of the acquisition of theoretical knowledge (connaissance), in which a fixed “subject of knowledge” arises in conjunction with a fixed “domain of knowledge,” but at a level where the grounding of connaissance is put in question (savoir), revealing shifts, breaks, or fractures in the unity and sovereignty of the subject and its related domains of knowledge.29 In this way, Foucault’s methodology seeks to dethrone what Wittgenstein called “the idol of Science,”30 from the privileged role it plays in modern culture, a role which entails for Foucault “the objectification of a self in a true discourse [connaissance],” as opposed to “the subjectivation of a true discourse in a practice and exercise of oneself on oneself.” None of which is to say, of course, that either Foucault or Wittgenstein doubt the value and validity of scientific knowledge. Much in the manner of Kantian critique, neither Foucault nor Wittgenstein seek to throw the legitimacy of scientific method in question. Rather, they seek to trace the limits and boundaries of its functions, applications, and meanings. In Foucault’s case, he does not want to unmask science as “false consciousness,” but rather to describe the ideological functions it serves as a “true discourse.”31 It is scientific “truth,” not error or falsehood, that is at issue [59-65].

Discursive formations and language games, including the discourses of passion and emotion, of sympathy, sentiment, and desire, record historically contingent processes of subjectivation embedded in larger social and cultural histories. Rather than seeking hidden causes of these discourses in the hope of identifying what is “basic” and common to all of them, this study attends to their historical differences without engaging in the metaphysics of asserting or denying universals. It adopts Wittgenstein’s motto, “nothing is hidden” (Philosophical Investigations p. 128, sec. 435), the complement of which is Foucault’s notion of a “positivity” that does not need to be revealed or unmasked;32 and it employs a descriptive methodology capable of recording historical alterities, especially those revealing of the limitations of our own modern perspectives and assumptions. It argues that the alterity of the discourse of passion, in relation to that of emotion, shows that their respective “subjects” are not the same subject: that the two discourses fashioned boundaries between subject and world in incommensurate ways that parallel the different forms of social, economic, and political power that have emerged over the course of modern western history [66-72].

Such a descriptive methodology is neither relativist nor social constructivist, but rather “critical” and “aesthetic” in the Kantianinfluenced senses of these terms reflected in both Foucault and Wittgenstein’s philosophical practices. It is “critical,” in Kant’s sense of “critique,” as a method which draws boundaries, marks limits, between different discourses and domains of knowledge, and suspends metaphysical curiosity about their ontological basis.33 And it is “aesthetic” in Kant’s sense of the term, in the Third Critique, as a type of human experience that has “purposiveness without purpose”; and which, as Jonathan Loesberg argues, characterizes Foucault’s historical methods in that the latter “project purpose without claiming reality” and ascribe value while “undoing…the human sciences’ claim to know being.”34 Both Foucault and Wittgenstein acknowledge the kinship of their philosophical practices with those of literature and the other arts, which engage in just such ontological suspension;35 and both emphasize the therapeutic function these practices can have.36 For Foucault, it is in the light of historical discontinuity and difference that we are able to gain a critical perspective on our own affective experience and contribute to what he called “the history of the present” (Discipline 31), a history which critically separates us from that present, and allows us to make out, through its blinding glare, a glimpse of ourselves. Here it might be noted that the term historia in ancient times could mean simply “inquiry” (Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? 16), thereby linking historical self-awareness and philosophy, a linkage which, in the Socratic tradition, becomes a form of self-critique that is at the same time a critique of one’s historical present, enabling one to act as “a gadfly,” in the famous Socratic image, to one’s community.37 Both Foucault and Wittgenstein’s philosophical practices inherit such a Socratic tradition.

“Probably the principal objective today,” Foucault says, “is not to discover but to refuse what we are…We have to promote new forms of subjectivity while refusing the type of individuality that has been imposed on us for several centuries” (“The Subject and Power” 336). The practice of genealogical description has, for Foucault, a therapeutic, potentially self-transformative function comparable to Wittgenstein’s method of philosophic critique; both cultivate a sense of the contingent, non-necessary grounds of our own modes of reason and thought, critiquing at the same time the efforts of “the human sciences” (les sciences humaines), especially psychology, to turn our life processes into objects of scientific knowledge, like an eye seeing itself, and attempt to acquire knowledge of the interior world of the mind comparable to the knowledge which the “natural” sciences (les sciences naturels) have acquired of the processes of the external, physical world.38 Both Foucault and Wittgenstein’s thought take issue with such hubris, the hubris of assuming, as Foucault put it, that “Man is... a being such that knowledge will be attained in him of what renders all knowledge possible” (Order of Things 318) [73].

According to Foucault, the techniques which made psychology and other human sciences possible were regulative as well as disciplinary; they were forms of power exercised not juridically but biopolitically, as a “conducting of conduct,” an acting on action, that presupposed the libidinal economy and normative functioning, of an affectively naturalized subject, much as political economists presupposed the normative functioning, or self-regulation, of the economy. “The rise of disciplinary power,” as Loesberg summarizes Foucault’s perspective, “is one with the rise of human being as an object of knowledge” (187) [74].

Both Foucault and Wittgenstein’s critical methods draw on the heritage of Kant’s critique of the Cartesian subject. The latter subject, constituted by the cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am), had seemed to possess the very features Enlightenment thinkers, until Kant, had wanted: access to the sources of one’s own being. “The Kantian I think,” by contrast, as Georges Canguilhem describes it, “is a light that opens experience to its intelligibility. But this light comes from behind us, and we cannot turn around to face it” (“Death of man” 86). Although the Kantian “knowing subject,” as Foucault says, provides the structure by which we may gain knowledge of the world, “what we cannot know is precisely the structure itself of the knowing subject” (Hermeneutics 190) [75].

Wittgenstein’s writings perform an analogous critique of the modern subject by locating its alterities not (for the most part) in historical processes but in the metaphysical assumptions found in everyday and especially philosophical discourse that cloud our view of the phenomena lying in front of us. But where Foucault and Wittgenstein depart from Kant is that although we “cannot turn around” to see our own seeing, to see our own thinking and feeling, we can trace the history, the genealogy, of that thinking and feeling, metaphorically speaking, “in the eyes of other people,” as Socrates says in a passage from the Alcibiades analyzed by Foucault.39 Our human capacity for feeling and emotion, our “affective eyes,” cannot see themselves except by what they reflect in the eyes of others.40 We “become” ourselves in the eyes of the other and through the other’s perception. Genealogical history for Foucault, like philosophic critique for Wittgenstein, and in common with what I am calling “historical aesthetics,” are practices, methods, of describing ourselves self-critically through the records of what was seen in the eyes of others. Fiction may be regarded as a privileged tool for such seeing because, however imaginary the realms it creates, what is never imaginary but rather “historical,” are the modes of human affectivity reflected in the creation of those imaginary realms. Modern writers of fiction are among the first historians of affect [76].

Much in the spirit of the experimental psychologists of his time, William James had sought, in his paper “What is an Emotion?” to penetrate what he regarded as the fog, the mystification, of previous philosophical and theological efforts to define emotion, with their long, generally inconsistent lists of different passions and affects that all humans supposedly shared, and cut to the chase: to specify the concrete, empirically definable objects, the physiological processes of the body, that correspond to and cause emotions, thereby enabling us to know “what an emotion is.” His thesis, developed in his later Principles of Psychology [4], was that emotions are perceptions of bodily sensations that we become conscious of as emotions only after the sensation has occurred. “A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity” (Principles 480). James’ theory was distinctive not by virtue of asserting a linkage between emotions and bodily processes, but by insisting that such a linkage was strictly causal: “If we fancy now some strong emotion, and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no “mind-stuff” out of which the emotion can be constituted…” (480). The feeling, the emotion, in other words, gains its authenticity, its “reality,” from its bodily cause. Without such a cause, it could not exist, for there is “no mind-stuff” out of which the emotion can be constituted.” Our emotions are “excitements,” generated by bodily sensations that have no objects outside themselves to which they are directed.41 This thesis was considered revolutionary in its time because it inverted the traditional account of the passions as willful acts that could descend on the agent unpredictably, without having a discreet cause, but which were directed intentionally toward some object. Kate Chopin’s description of a character from her short story, “Desiree’s Baby” (1894), Armand Aubigny, a Cajun aristocrat, exemplifies such passion: “[he] fell in love as if struck by a pistol shot…The passion that awoke in him that day, when he saw her at the gate, swept along like an avalanche, or like a prairie fire, or like anything that drives headlong over all obstacles” (Chopin 242) [77-80].

The images of a pistol shot, an avalanche, and a prairie fire, all of which are represented as coming from nowhere, without cause, reflect at once the passivity of the subject in relation to its passions and the volitional activity of that subject in pursuit of its object. The description expresses characteristic features of the discourse of the passions, including an indifference to accounting for passions in strictly causal terms and a preoccupation with the object of those passions and the desire and will that drive the agent toward that object. Such an account is precisely inverted by James’ theory, which reduces emotions to their causes and in which any discernible “object” of the emotion disappears within the sensation that is its cause. Whereas “the cause of a passion and its object are the same in different respects,” as Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696- 1782), put it, “an emotion...must have a cause; but cannot be said, properly speaking, to have an object” (Elements of Criticism 13). Without an object, emotions could not be principally volitional, expressions of actions in the world, but were rather the product of causal processes, both mental and physiological, occurring within the subject [81,82].

In late writings discussing James’ theory of emotion, Wittgenstein commented: “How necessary the work of philosophy is is shown by James’s Psychology. Psychology, he says, is a science. But he discusses almost no scientific questions. His movements are merely attempts to free himself from the cobweb of metaphysics in which he is caught” (MS 165, quoted in Ter Hark 193-4). James’s theory, according to Wittgenstein, presupposed a “causal theory of meaning” which confused the language games of “causes” characteristic of natural sciences with those of “concepts” and “reasons” characteristic of the human sciences, especially psychology (Ter Hark 192-3). Wittgenstein here draws implicitly on Kant’s critique of Hume’s account of causality, which had skeptically concluded that since a “necessary relation” between cause and effect could never be demonstrated, the concept of causality was not rationally grounded and could be justified only by custom and habit. Kant’s critique had responded by arguing that relations of causality could be rationally demonstrated but only within limits, which is to say only when applied to the subject matter of the natural sciences, grounded in mathematics, in which the objects of study could be defined in a way distinct from the subject that is studying them. But such is not the case, Wittgenstein argued, when the objects of study are affective. “The language game ‘I am afraid’ already contains the object” (RPP II, para. 148, p. 28) in that the utterance of this sentence is performative, is an expression of fear, and not a description of some physiological or mental state that can be separated from “the fear itself” as its cause. Foucault makes a similar point through his distinction between types of knowledge, connaissance and savoir, described in section two above. Both draw on Kant’s practice, in the First Critique, the Critique of Pure Reason, of restricting the use of the word “cause” to phenomenal, nonteleological processes (Borges, Emotion 16). To reduce emotions to their causes, as James does, is from Wittgenstein’s perspective to ignore the affective languages games in which “emotions” have their home and gain their meanings and uses [83,84].

The passage discussed above, from Kate Chopin’s “Desiree’s Baby,” provides an example not just of the extent to which considerations of causes were irrelevant to the discourse of the passions but, read in the context of the ending of the story, an example of something very nearly the opposite. For what we learn at the end of the story is that Armand Aubigny, a Southern aristocrat in a thoroughly racialized community, was not unmotivated when he suddenly fell in love with Desiree and chose her as his wife. He was motivated by the knowledge that he himself was possessed of an African-American racial heritage; and that Desiree, a young girl whose background was completely unknown, would therefore make the ideal marriage partner, since in case they had a baby and the baby turned out to be black, Armand could blame that outcome on Desiree. Which is what happens and what Armand does, immediately sending Desiree and her baby away, to their deaths. It is not that Armand did not actually experience the excited feelings which the narrator attributes to him when he apparently first fell in love. It is rather that those feelings, instead of coming out of nowhere, were carefully produced and regulated. In this way Chopin has cmbodied a traditional discourse of the passions within a modern discourse of the emotions in a way that brings to light their radical differences [85].

If emotion is an affective “activity,” which Descartes called “internal excitations” and James states of “excitement,” that is part of the life process of the subject and can be causally regulated, passions in radical contrast were forms of “passivity” and “suffering,” states of vulnerability to external forces whether natural or supernatural, that were usually though not always threatening to the subject’s virtue and autonomy. A passion or “affection of the soul” was an experience, in Michael Frede’s words, “which we suffer, which comes over us without our active participation, which is not directly in our control, which is not something we can make up our mind to have or not to have, as we please” (“Stoic Doctrine” 97). Passions were involuntary mental and physical states, beliefs or perceptions that had their sources both outside and within the soul and were a product of the soul’s interaction with the world around it. Such interaction included the body, which was part of the soul and not clearly distinct from it as in post-Cartesian thought. Although the passions could be beneficial and in accordance with “nature’s provisions,” much more often they were imaged as diseases, storms, or episodes of madness that had invaded the soul without warning and reduced it to a state of “slavery” akin to being ruled by a tyrannical head of state. Just as “slavery,” in the republican tradition from Livy to Machiavelli, was a condition of being subject to the will of others, a loss of the ability to be self-governing, so too enslavement by the passions meant the loss of self-dependence and virtue (Skinner, Liberty 36-7) [86]. To be enslaved by the passions was to be subject to their unpredictability and therefore also to “the predicament of slaves,” as James Harrington said, who “have no control over their lives and are consequently forced to live in a state of unending anxiety as to what may or may not be about to happen to them” (Quoted in Skinner, Hobbes xii). To withstand the blows of fortune, princes were advised to cultivate virtues that could serve, in the image employed from Machiavelli to Kant, as an “embankment” or “dam” that would prevent “the wild waters” of the passions from overflowing (Skinner, Machiavelli 32).

What made resistance to the tyranny of the passions difficult was not just their power and unpredictability, but the soul’s vulnerability to them, the ways those passions were seen as embedded in, or as carriers of, moral and cosmological forces impinging on and interacting directly and intimately with the individual’s psyche or soul. In the Aristotelian formulation, widely influential until the modern period, especially after the twelfth century, the soul was viewed as three-tiered or consisting of three separate souls: rational-human; sensitive-animal (which itself had three powers, sense-perception, desire, and movement); and nutritive-plant. The rational and nutritive or vegetative souls were both active; only the sensitive soul, the source of our passions, was passive. The plant or nutritive soul was the one most central to all living things, possessed of an “originative power the possession of which leads us to speak of things as living at all…” (On the Soul Bk. II: Ch. 2 413b, p. 557). The human soul consisted of “active” and “passive” functions arranged hierarchically with variable boundaries that allowed, as many critics of Aristotle complained, for no unified center of control. Not only could the sensitive soul be in conflict with the rational soul, which mediated the rational will or “higher appetites,” but the sensitive soul itself could be subject to competing desires and aversions, “the concupiscible and irascible appetites.” Aristotle’s soul was really a “soul-body composite,” as Susan James terms it, in which “the boundary between the passive body and the active soul” is continually “blurred” (38). For Plato and Aristotle (in contrast to the Stoics), such disunity of the soul was one of its essential features; only by positing independent parts of the soul with independent agendas and different “powers” could the full range of non-rational behavior be accounted for.42 What this meant is that the “active” and “passive” nature of physical and mental processes, and therefore also what counted as voluntary and involuntary actions, were often rendered indistinct [87]. Passion could be understood not just as a capacity to be acted on, but also, as in Aristotle’s account, as a potentiality to be changed into something else, to become something different -- and therefore to be in this sense “active,” but an activity or movement arising out of a prior receptivity or passivity, and therefore a sort of active passivity. Our passions act on us by moving us, drawing us away or toward objects perceived as good or evil. They are what Amelie Rorty describes as “cross-substantially predicated, caused by one substance and yet predicated of another,” and for just that reason “there can be no science of the passions” (Essays 524) – not even for Descartes, who invented the category of emotions interieures, “internal excitations,” to provide a remedy for this presumptive deficiency (see section five below).

The indistinctiveness, the blurring, between human passivity and activity, between passion and action, was also a feature of the humoral medical philosophy of Galen (CE 129-201) and of a long line of ancient and medieval philosophers and physicians. In Galenism, the human body was viewed as a microcosm of the universe, a little world whose three main parts, the head (reason); breast and heart (passion); lower body (nutrition and procreation) corresponded to heaven, sky, and earth. Combinations of qualities derived from this cosmos were understood to course through the body or soma in the form of the four basic “humors” (sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic), which were “temperaments” that were influenced by the seasons of the year, stages of life, geographic regions, and occupations, among other factors. The human body was permeable to and malleable by all these forces. (Frevert Emotions in History 32). Diseases were caused by an “imbalance of the humors,” but what counted as balanced (or healthy) and unbalanced (or harmful) was determined by the nature of the universe as much as by the movement of fluids within the body; the center of control lay not in the soul itself but in the relations, in the sympathies and antipathies, of the soul with the world around it.43 Without such a unified center of control within the soul, resistance to the “slavery” of the passions needed to employ methods of volitional control, of willing and choosing, very different from those entailed by the modern concept of “free will” that is crucial to the thought of Descartes but foreign to ancient thinkers. For the latter, eleutheria, freedom, was not a property of a subject or even actor, but a social and political relation, a relation of power, shared with others (Gratton 79).

As Margaret Graver points out, the term “free (eleutheros) was not used with ‘will’ or ‘choice’” (81) in the ancient and Hellenistic periods. “Freedom” was originally a political term, meaning the opposite of tyranny (Bobzien 338; Frede A Free Will 9). One could not be “free” in an unfree state, according to classical republican thought (Skinner, Liberty 60). The modern concept of “free will,” on the other hand, posits a reflexive capacity or faculty within the mind which, in conjunction with understanding, allows “human action to become independent of the network of material causes operating in nature” (Bobzien 411).

According to Foucault, such a will, in freeing itself from all determination, disempowers itself in the process; it is “a pure will. A suspended will at the same time, for it must not predetermine any object; castrated for none of its own determination to remain.”44 In ancient times, on the contrary, the most common term for what we call “will,” found especially in the work of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, was prohairesis, meaning literally “choice,” which signified less a mental capacity or “faculty of will” than an action of choosing, an action or choice that could be beneficial or harmful, good or bad, true or false (Frede A Free Will 44-48). Willing was not a “free” process in the sense of a disinterested choice unconstrained by context, but rather an action based on inclinations and judgments about what was harmful or beneficial to the individual. As Bruno Snell describes the functions of prohairesis in both Socrates and Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics 1139 a31), “Morality, according to this view, is not the good will, but the will, or choice, of the good” (182-3). Which is to say also that immorality is not “the bad will,” but the will, or choice, of the bad, in both cases a choice in the form of an action and not an expression of one’s inner nature. For Aristotle, “We do not have the power to experience passions unaided, but must wait on circumstances to excite them” (Susan James 42).

Because the objects of one’s choosing pre-exist in this sense the choices made, controlling the passions could not be a matter of regulating them, but rather of making the right or wrong choices about them, of giving or withholding “assent” to such “impulses,” as the Stoics put it. And since choosing not to assent to a passion was in most cases the right choice in accordance with “nature’s provisions,” volitional control of the passions was exercised mostly through exclusionary or suppressive methods that maintained virtue or strength of character by actions of withholding “assent” to passions.

These actions were not “repressive” or internalizing, but rather suppressive and externalizing; they effected a separation or distance between the subject and the wrongful and delusional actions the subject was tempted to commit. Such a suppressive or exclusionary method of control is exemplified in the image of virtue as a fortress or dam holding off the incursions of the passions that was common in ancient and pre-modern writings. Such a method of control is also reflected in Socrates’ account in the Apology of his daemon warning him always “what not to do,” never what to do (31c). Because we know, as Socrates tells us, that the daemon’s warnings always turn out to be right, we know also that Socrates’ initial inclinations were always wrong, were delusions or false choices. Virtue or arete here is constituted not by virtuous “sentiments” and “sympathies,” as in modern discourse, nor, still less, by an incapacity to do evil, but rather by a strength of understanding and will that allowed one to refrain from acting on that capacity. “The most virtuous souls,” says Socrates in The Republic, have the capacity for “great crimes and unmixed wickedness…while a weak nature will never be the cause of anything great, either for good or evil” (VI 491e). A similar kind of suppressive virtue is reflected in the political discourse of republicanism, in which the highest acts of virtue, acts which gave to their subject the most honor and glory, were acts of withholding, as in Cincinnatus’ and George Washington’s relinquishments, in 458 BCE and 1783 CE respectively, of the enormous political power they had acquired through their military successes. These refusals played significant roles in the establishment of both the ancient Roman Republic and the modern American one. In all these cases, it is the ability to separate oneself from one’s passions, and not identify with them, that is a mark of wisdom and virtue.

A control which withheld assent to harmful and false passions was also one which could incorporate their power and be transformative for the subject, changing or altering the person for the better. Crucial to the transformative potential of the passions was the passivity of the affective subject. The subject could not be transformed by any form of internal regulation alone but required the mediation of a source other than oneself to aid in effecting such change. The logic of such control was “therapeutic,” in the sense applied to Socratic and Stoic philosophy by many scholars including Foucault: a sense which dispensed with the causal explanations crucial to the discourse of emotion, and focused on practical techniques by which the student might learn not only how to control his passions but how to become a person of arete, of excellence and virtue, a person qualified for political leadership and capable of ruling the passions of others. This would involve not just the acquisition of knowledge, in the manner of modern science and modern philosophy, but the learning of techniques and practices, including spiritual and meditation exercises, practiced under the guidance of teachers, that were potentially transformative. Socratic and Stoic philosophy sought not just “to inform but to form,” as Pierre Hadot put it (What is Ancient Philosophy? 65). In this practice, theoretical and scientific knowledge (connaissance as opposed to savoir in Foucault’s terminology), is subordinated to the practical goal of making oneself a better or different person, which involved suppressing undesirable passions and refraining from immoral actions. In religious and spiritual contexts, the transformative potential of the passions was often imaged as a “turning” of the soul away from, a “journeying” out of, the darkness of error, delusion, or sin to face the light of truth. Such a metaphor informs Plato’s allegory of the cave, which Andrea Nightingale has shown has its roots in the archaic Greek practice of theoria that enacted journeys of conversion and self-transformation both individual and collective.45 What is enacted in these cases is a “seeing through” the delusions of the passions toward an illumination, a gain in insight, about oneself.

The limit case of the transformative potential of the passions was that of madness. Viewed in pre-modern times as delusions of misguided reason, madness, like the passions, could also be beneficial and even the source of wisdom, as when Socrates in the Phaedrus declares: “our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness…provided the madness is given us by divine gift” (244a). Nietzsche similarly expresses admiration for ancient poets’ ability to see themselves as “the mouthpieces of the gods.” For the Renaissance philosopher and follower of Plato, Marsilio Ficino, madness was “a form of alienation mentis, but rather than originating from disease, melancholic furor was bestowed by God, condition of divine inspiration when the rational soul was illuminated and returned to its divine heights.” In the ancient cult of Dionysus, the passion of ecstasis “enables you for a short time to stop being yourself, and thereby sets you free” (Dodds 76).

In essays defending his previous work, The History of Madness, Foucault argues that the loss of such an ability, an ability to be transformed, can be traced in Descartes’ effort, in the Meditations, to establish a self-certain basis for thought and reason through the argument of the cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). What starts out as a meditative text which presupposes “a mobile subject who tries out on himself the hypotheses he envisages” becomes a “deductive discourse” in which “the meditating subject is slowly modified, and… becomes qualified as a subject of certainty” (“Reply to Derrida” 579, 586). One of those qualifications is the subject’s “exclusion of any possibility of madness” (587), the dismissal of the skeptical possibility that the inquirer after truth, the meditator, which is Descartes himself, might be mad. This exclusion is significant for Foucault because it shows that the subject’s nonmadness is being made a precondition of his access to truth – and thus a precondition of reason itself. Madness loses its status as something false or true, an error of reason or a “blessing” of a higher reason, and becomes instead what Foucault calls la deraison, nonreason or Unreason, which eventually takes form in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a pathology or mental illness grounded in the workings of the nervous system. In this way the alterity or transgressive nature of madness as an extreme passion is neutralized by being reduced to causal mechanisms within the mind and body. Reason and its virtues are no longer to be cultivated through virtuous conduct or earned through meditational exercises or ethical lessons – nor, still less, by the tragic process of pathe mathos, the gaining of wisdom through suffering – but rather are inherent properties of the mind or soul given to all humans. The post-Cartesian subject for this reason “does not have to transform himself. The subject only has to be what he is for him to have access in knowledge (connaissance) to the truth that is open to him through his own structure as subject.” (Hermeneutics 190)

If the passivity of the passions, and madness especially, “enables you for a short time to stop being yourself,” emotion, by contrast, prevents you from not being yourself, even for a short time. This is because even when they are unconscious, or on the other hand consciously simulated, emotions cannot be separated, as passions can be, from whom we “really” are. They are “movements” or “excitations” generated by basic life processes, including desires and drives, which happen “within” the subject rather than to the subject, so that they cannot be suppressed so much as regulated through a knowledge of their causes that renders moot the kind of volitional control characteristic of the discourse of the passions. Bolstered by the modern concept of “free will” – a will that is “suspended,” disengaged – volitional choices become peripheral and less important. What counts now is the authenticity or inauthenticity of the emotions, whether they are reflective or not of the person’s “real” feelings.

In a late, aphoristic remark, Wittgenstein asks us to perform the following experiment on ourselves: “Show what it’s like when one is in pain. -- Show what it’s like when one pretends that one is in pain” [3]. Wittgenstein’s point is not that there is no difference between “real” and simulated feelings, but that the difference is defined not by “the feeling itself,” but by the context in which it occurs: even simulated feelings are sometimes “actually” felt, as when professional actors draw on memories of their personal experiences in order to make their performances convincing. As Wittgenstein reminds us, our learning as children of common affective states, what it is to grieve, be in love, be jealous, etc., are always linked to – are in a sense verified by – our simultaneously learning what it is to pretend to have such feelings. “Pretending is, of course, only a special case of someone’s producing (say) expressions of pain when he is not in pain. For if this is possible at all, why should it always be pretending that is taking place – this very special pattern in the weave of our lives?” (Philosophical Investigations, pp. 228-229) [88]. The authenticity of our desires and emotions, in a discourse of the passions, is not a central issue as it is in modern affective disciplines from psychoanalysis to contemporary “affective neuroscience.”46 In classical tragedy for example, what is a genuine feeling is never referred to inner processes, bodily or mental, that guarantee their authenticity. Like the masks worn in such dramas, the feelings represented can be “true” or “false,” but not changed or transformed according to how they are experienced by the subject.

The term emotion first appeared in sixteenth century France, but it referred then to a kind of “excitation” very different from the modern meaning of emotion: it was then “a political agitation, civil unrest; a public commotion or uprising” (OED), a metaphorical description characteristic of the discourse of the passions. Not until the second half of the seventeenth century did it lose its specifically political associations and become a mental experience, an “excitement,” a “commotion or uprising,” from within. This change was influenced by Descartes’ attempt in The Passions of the Soul, “to rewrite” or “revolutionize” the passions (DeJean 149, 81) by reconceiving feeling and affectivity in a way that would place our understanding and control of the passions on an indubitable, self-certain, and therefore scientific basis, much as Descartes had attempted to do for thought and reason in the Meditations. The central target of this effort was the Aristotelian-influenced Scholastic tradition of Thomas Aquinas and others, especially that tradition’s conflation, in its accounts of the passions, of the active and passive functions of the soul. This conflation, according to Descartes, made rational control of the passions difficult or impossible, and left the subject vulnerable to “the distress” and “suffering” of the passions. His remedy was to introduce a category of affective experience, emotions interieures (“internal excitations”) capable of insulating the subject from such distress and suffering by virtue of the uniqueness of its source. Whereas the sources of the passions were external and bodily, “instituted by Nature” or caused by “animal spirits” transmitted through “the hollow tubes” of the nervous system (Passions Articles 90, 94), emotions interieures, although having the same modes of transmission as the passions, “are excited in the soul only by the soul itself – in which respect they differ from those passions that always depend on some motion of the spirits” (Article 147).

By “the soul,” Descartes meant here simply the mind, in both its cognitive and volitional capacities, distinct from the body and not part of a “soul-body composite.” Emotions interieures are excited “in the soul itself” in that they are excited within the mind by the mind’s own volitional capacities: by what Descartes calls “the use of our free will and the dominion we have over our volitions” (Article 52). Whereas the passions “always depend on some motion of the [animal] spirits” (Article 147), and are imposed on us passively and capable of deceiving us, emotions interieures are guaranteed to be authentic because they are generated by a “will” that is no longer limited to choosing, but in combination with understanding and knowledge, “renders us like God in a way” (Article 152), enabling us to view our emotions reflexively in terms of the functions they perform, and thereby also enabling us to shield ourselves “against the passive suffering which passions would otherwise impose” (Tilmouth 29). Emotions are not only more under our control than are our passions; they are also more central to our well-being and autonomy. It is the emotions that provide “a general remedy for all the disorders of the Passions,” and on which “our good and ill principally depend,” according to Descartes (Article 161).

Crucial to Descartes’ notion of emotions interieures was a new understanding of the nature of “desire,” closely associated with that of the conatus (“endeavor,” “striving”) that emerged in the writings of seventeenth century philosophers including not just Descartes but Hobbes, Spinoza, and others. “Instead of a single, comparatively specialized passion,” as Susan James says, “desire comes to be conceived as the central appetitive force which enables us to stay alive and governs all our actions” (296). Traditionally, desire had been treated as one of the major passions, a future-directed state characterized by the objects toward which it was directed.47 Both Plato and Aristotle, according to Michael Frede, distinguished three forms of desire: epithumia (appetite), thumos (“spirit”) and boulesis (“rational desire”). In Tusculuscan Disputations, Cicero, representing the Stoic position, equates boulesis, “reasonable desire,” with volition; “it is by the Greeks called boulesis, and the name which we give it is volition” (4.6.21-22). Frede comments: “Even at the end of the Middle Ages, reason still was regarded as having a desiderative or appetitive aspect” (“Affections” 101). “Reason,” that is, had not yet been split into two distinct parts, the cognitive and theoretical on the one hand and the moral or practical on the other hand, as is reflected in Kant’s division of the first two Critiques.48 As was discussed briefly in section four, in ancient times there was no separate faculty of “the will,” and a fortiori no concept of “free will,” by which our affective laden “desires of reason” could be systematically distinguished from moral reason. Desire in ancient times, like most of the other passions, could be good or bad, beneficial or harmful, even true or false in the sense of reflecting right or wrong choices.

But in the seventeenth century, desire begins to be understood in a way that obviated in large part such choices; it is increasingly described as a vital force, a conatus-like striving or endeavour, which is rooted in the physiological processes of the body and which drives our mental and emotional lives. Desire becomes the vehicle of a modern unification of the soul that can overcome the Aristotelian and medieval conflations of the passive body and the active will and mind that was a feature of traditional accounts of the passions. In the modern concept of desire, the teleological structure of the passions, with their definite ends or objects, is overthrown or at least marginalized. Desire in its modern form, after Descartes, increasingly internalizes and amalgamates distinct passions with distinct objects into a generalized passion or drive, a life force, that “excites” and is the source of our emotions. Although many thinkers, including Descartes, Spinoza, and Locke, rejected faculty theory, during the eighteenth century German philosophers including Kant in the Critique of Judgment (1790) posited a third faculty of feeling or Gefuhlsvermogen, that could mediate between the other two.49 The emotions (Gemutsbewegen) excited by such a faculty of feeling could be real or unreal (either they exist or they don’t), but not good or bad, nor still less true or false. Their authenticity is guaranteed by the desires which produce them.50 In the late nineteenth century, influenced by the development of experimental psychology and psychoanalysis, emotions, whether conscious or unconscious, become objects of scientific knowledge.51 They reflect, in a fashion alien to the discourse of the passions, the persons whom we “really” are. We become responsible for our emotions in ways that we couldn’t be for the passions; they say something “true,” in an ontological sense, about ourselves, in whatever form they present themselves – even as “jokes,” as Freud discovered. Desire itself, unlike the passions which it internalizes and assimilates, can no longer be claimed to be “future-directed,” for it has no object outside itself. It is the passion that cannot be satisfied or brought to a state of fulfillment, to an “end.”52 This was the source of both Foucault’s dissatisfaction with, and Gilles Deleuze’s valorization of, the concept.53 Desire can be repressed, made the basis of an unmasterable otherness or Unconscious, but it cannot be suppressed. To have no desire, as Hobbes maintained, is to be dead: “nor can a man live whose desires are at an end” (Leviathan chap. XI, p. 55). I desire, therefore I am.

This formulation mimics a later one, during the “Age of Sensibility,” which occurs in both French and German writers of the 18th century, “I feel! I am!” (Frevert, Emotional Lexicons 5). But I do not mean to imply by this that desire and feeling or emotion function similarly in modern discourse. Desire is the existential source of our feelings and emotions, but it lacks what the discourse of sensibility will try to restore: a moral basis for feeling. The failure of this effort is what is played out in the two centuries long history of sensibility, which ended when regulative methods of controlling human affectivity displaced suppressive ones by reconceiving feelings as objects of knowledge, resulting in the establishment of the discourse of emotions. What the collapse of sensibility wrought by its own internal tensions was the acceptance of the non-moral nature of affective experience. But there is still a resonant echo, in the history of sensibility, of what that history resulted in extinguishing: the relatively “primitive,” pre-scientific methods of volitional control characteristic of the discourse of the passions. This is true even of the way Descartes tried to marginalize the latter through his notion of emotions interieures. For although that notion “attempts to revolutionize the passions” and anticipates in important respects a larger reconceptualization and transformation of affective life that was to unfold over the next two centuries in the discourse of sensibility, it is nonetheless true, as numerous scholars have pointed out, that Descartes’ “attempted revolution,” his effort to marginalize the passions, continued to be influenced by Stoic and even Scholastic methods of suppression in which “the moral precedence of passion,” as Foucault put it in The History of Madness, holds sway (225). As Foucault goes on to say, “Before Descartes, and long after his influence as a philosopher and physiologist had waned, passion remained the interface between the body and soul, the point of contact between their activity and their passivity, which also served as the place and the reciprocally imposed limit of their communications.”

Descartes’ attempted “revolution,” as DeJean herself says, was undoubtedly a failed one – for a time (79). After Descartes, human affectivity increasingly sheds its heritage of passivity and becomes “active” in a sense that is no longer dependent on the suppressive methods of control of the passions but rather can be regulated in a way that supposedly strengthens our sense of self-identity by rooting the control of our emotions in free will. Human affectivity is given a causal and self-generating role in processes of subjectivation, a role which makes those processes potential objects of knowledge.

It is in the history of the discourse of sensibility that the fault lines of this slow-moving affective rupture between passion and emotion can be traced: from its aristocratic origins in the seventeenth century in the courts of absolutist kings who wished to moderate and “civilize” the impulsive and violent behavior of the nobility; to the period of its greatest influence in the 18th century when it was influential across a wide array of disciplines in economics, biology, literature, and philosophy; to its decline and virtual disappearance by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, having been displaced, but not replaced, by the distinct but overlapping discourse of sentimentality. This complex and multi-faceted history of sensibility was not only a vehicle of the transition from 18th century republicanism to modern liberalism that historians have traced in the development of political economy and the writing of the American Constitution by James Madison and the Federalists. It also played a crucial role in the development of modern biology and psychology, anticipating a new understanding of the human body as an interior neurological space or “neurological body,” a body within the body.54 What links these two apparently disparate facets of the influence of the history of sensibility is their affective core, which created the conditions for the development of a “biopolitics of feeling,” in Kyla Schuller’s phrase, in modern times.

In the eighteenth century, “sensibility” signified generally a heightened sensory and mental receptivity and responsiveness to the external world including other people. It could in some usages be equated with “consciousness” itself; its adjective, “sensible,” meant in this period “to be conscious of,” or cognizant of, something or someone. These usages were influenced by John Locke’s empiricist account of the mind as a “blank slate” formed by the experiences imprinted on it; “sensibility,” as a receptivity and responsiveness, could be seen as enabling the construction of personal identity through the continuity of perceptions. In less empiricist accounts, sensibility was accounted for by positing a “third faculty of feeling” (the other two were reason and will), a Sensibilite or Gefuhlvermogen within the psyche, that was grounded in the natural “sympathies” or movements of the body’s sensory and nervous processes (see note 49). These “movements,” however, were possessed of a crucial ambiguity; they could be regarded as volitional, guided by the will, but also as physiological, possessed of their own causal powers. Sensibility was thus at once a scientific and biological discourse of the nervous processes of the body and the ways those processes fuel our emotions and condition our responses to the external world and to other people; and a moral, political, and literary discourse of sympathy, sentiment, and aesthetic “taste.”

As a biological and physiological discourse, sensibility was strongly influenced by the development of the modern understanding of the nervous system. In the seventeenth century, Thomas Willis (1621-75), whose work influenced Descartes, theorized that our bodily and mental, including affective, processes were controlled not by the fluid exchange of humors, humors which expressed themselves visibly on the body and were reflective of the properties of the larger world around it, but rather by a network of nerves, whether wires or hollow tubes, that ran invisibly throughout the entire body from the inside and whose functions were to transfer sensory information to the brain, which then used that information to control the body. Willis’ theory, which provides an early chapter in the modern history of the nervous system, signaled a shift away from the classification of life forms in terms of structural form and anatomy to an emphasis on the physiology of the body and internal circulatory systems, with their invisible functions: a shift from anatomy to physiology that is associated especially with the work of Georges Cuvier (1769- 1832) (Murison 50; Canguilhem Ideology 41-2). Throughout the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century, however, the nervous system was still often viewed as susceptible and “open” to magnetic and sympathetic influences from the outer world. Popularized through the discourse of mesmerism and electrical psychology in the 18th and 19th centuries, and reflected in the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and many others, this susceptibility meant that the body interacted continually with immaterial forces that entered the body through the environment, trance, or sympathy.55 As a moral and aesthetic discourse, on the other hand, sensibility was a responsiveness and attunement, a heightened passivity, to at least three types of experience. First, it could entail a new appreciative or romantic attitude toward natural beauty that appears in the eighteenth century. Prior to that time, nature was more often portrayed as a wilderness that needed to be tamed and conquered in order to support human settlement. Secondly, sensibility signified a heightened and especially sensuous responsiveness to the experience of art. It was only in the 18th century that the discipline of “aesthetics,” as Alexander Baumgarten named it, was established and some thinkers, including the English moral philosopher Lord Shaftesbury (1671-1713), posited what they called an “aesthetic sense” that was analogous to the other senses and which made people capable of responding to art as well as to nature in a disinterested, yet sensory and sensuous way.56 But perhaps the most important kind of experience which sensibility was supposed to make people responsive to was the experience of other people, especially the feelings of other people, which is why the term was used in close conjunction not just with sentiment and sympathy, but with a host of related terms, including benevolence, compassion, and pity. Sensibility, although individualizing in many ways, was a social emotion, one oriented toward other people in society, especially people less fortunate than oneself. For this reason, it was closely associated with “the moral sense,” a basic human capacity that was a close cousin of “the aesthetic sense” and theorized initially by Lord Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, and Adam Ferguson, becoming influential to varying degrees in 18th century thinkers ranging from Adam Smith and David Hume to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot to Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine.57 The moral sense was like conscience but also akin to a bodily sense that allowed people to respond ethically and compassionately to others, fostering the individual’s capacity to recognize virtue on a visceral level. It had the effect of elevating to a high moral level affections such as sympathy, sentiment, and pity that had been regarded with disdain or indifference as signs of weakness in aristocratic cultures. It also allowed such affections or sentiments to be posited in opposition to, or as complementary with, more self-centered feelings including desire, self-interest, and self-love.

Whether as a moral or a scientific discourse, sensibility not only gave feeling a more central role in accounting for human behavior and the processes of the mind and body than it had ever had before. It also introduced and developed more reliable and systematic methods of controlling such affective processes than the volitionally suppressive methods of the discourse of the passions had allowed for. In its divergent meanings and conceptual tensions, “sensibility was a child of the scientific revolution,” as Gordon Wood says (Radicalism 218). It was part of the Enlightenment dream, or nightmare, that the methods of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton that had yielded important discoveries about the nature of the physical universe could be applied to the interior, moral and affective world of the psyche or mind. Eighteenth century thinkers following Newton were inspired by scientific discoveries about the hidden forces operating in the physical world – gravity, magnetism, electricity, and energy – to posit an analogous moral force operating in the world of human behavior; the term, “sentiment” was synonymous in the 18th century with “moral sentiment,” and “sensibility” was often viewed as just such a moral force. Just as Newton had unraveled the processes of the physical world, transforming them into objects of scientific knowledge, so too the biologists, neurologists, and psychologists of the future would unravel the secrets of this inner, moral and emotional world, making them also objects of scientific knowledge. The effect of this “scientific revolution” was not just to heighten the importance of affectivity in human life but to precipitate a progressive abandonment of the principal features of the discourse of the passions by which such affectivity had been understood before.

When sensibility arose in the 17th century among the nobility in the courts of absolutist kings, according to Norbert Elias (1897- 1990), it did so as part of a “civilizing process” that would moderate the “passionate,” impulsive, and unpredictable behavior that had so often characterized the lives of warring lords in earlier periods.58 The Middle Ages had been dominated by feudalism, which was decentralizing because it distributed power to families of the nobility who often fought with one another and who possessed few checks on their violent or “unruly” passions. With the growth of the power of the monarch and the establishment of standing armies, the nobility lost its warrior or martial functions and was made increasingly to serve within the society or court of the king, a court subject to strict standards of civility and behavior. Accompanied by the development of raison d’Etat theory and the establishment of the institution of “the police,” such a “civilizing process” functioned as a vehicle of a “governmentalization,” as Foucault put it, that placed a premium on the regularization and predictability of social and affective behavior essential to the efficient operations of the state.

In influential writings, Albert Hirschman has described how deeply entwined such processes were with the emergence of a new, non-suppressive method of controlling the passions. What Hirschman called the method of “countervailing passions” (The Passions and the Interests 20) entailed the separation and balancing of opposed passions and affections, including desire and sympathy, self-interest and sentiment, such that their harmful effects would negate or compensate for one another, in a fashion that “would activate some benignant human proclivities at the expense of some malignant ones.” In that way, it would serve as “the most effectual bridle” against “the folly of despotism” (The Passions and the Interests xi), which had traditionally been thought to have its sources in such “malignant” passions. The method involved the “idea of harnessing the passions, not merely as a bulwark, but as a transformer, a civilizing medium” (16). “It was better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow citizens,” as John Maynard Keynes put it in the 20th century (xii).

The case for capitalism, in the 18th century, was made on just such a basis: violent passions could be counterbalanced by or transmuted into beneficial ones by the civilizing effects of what Montesquieu and others called doux commerce (sweet commerce), a term which caused Marx and Engels, in the nineteenth century, much hilarity, but by which Montesquieu meant simply the sympathetic relations between people generated by trade and commerce (Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment 441). Whereas such passions as avarice or extreme greed were regarded in republican discourse as sources of the corruption of the state, they could now become, once balanced against or transmuted into sympathy and sentiment, an engine of prosperity and virtue. The extremity of this logic was provided by Bernard Mandeville’s infamous declaration, in The Fable of the Bees, that private “Vices” are “publick benefits” (10) Although most 18th century thinkers, including Smith and Hume, decried the cynicism of Mandeville’s formulation, its underlying premise or assumption was widely influential and became crucial to the development of political economy: the premise that the passions could be progressively reduced to nonmoral, especially monetary “interests” and “advantages” which were self-regulating and without need of volitional controls. The notion of a “self-regulating system, foreign to previous ages,” as Charles Taylor says, was “a founding move of modern economics” (286).

Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” provides a figure for such a self-regulating system and its “marvelous metamorphosis of destructive passions into virtues” (Hirschman The Passions and the Interests 17; Prindle). The basic function of Smith’s “Hand” is to ensure that the pursuit of self-interest by individuals will benefit society as a whole both materially and morally; it is a helping Hand, a sort of “moral sense” writ large, whose invisible operations are untraceable but whose beneficial consequences are inevitable. By contrast, the Hand of Jupiter, imaged very visibly in Latin literature as thunder and lightning much in the manner of the traditional passions, was a figure of the contingencies of fortune and fate, which could nonetheless be influenced by virtuous or immoral conduct. For Machiavelli, similarly, imaging such contingencies as feminine, virtue was a “quality which enables a prince to withstand the blows of Fortune, to attract the goddess’s favor, and to rise in consequence to the heights of princely fame, winning honor and glory for himself and security for his government” (Skinner, Machiavelli 40).

Smith’s Hand, however, permits of no such godly influence, or that only of a radically deistic God, its invisibility emphasizing the irrelevance of moral conduct to its operations, and thus also the irrelevance of any suppressive method of controlling those passions once they were transmuted into economic terms as “interests” or “advantages. What had traditionally been regarded as the destructive passion of greed or avarice is in this sense tamed, or rationalized, as part of a self-regulating system propelled by the universal desire “to better one’s condition…a desire which, though generally calm and dispassionate, comes with us from the womb, and never leaves us till we go into the grave,” as Smith said (Wealth of Nations 324).59 Prior to the 19th century, the conceptual tensions and contradictions embedded in the discourse of sensibility were held in check by the pliability of its core term, “sympathy,” which could refer to the physiological and especially nervous processes of the body as well as to the moral character of the mind. The notion of “physiological sympathy,” endorsed by vitalists and mechanists alike in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, posited that all of the organs within the body are united to each other through nervous sympathies or “sensibilities” by means of what Scottish vitalist Robert Whytt (1714-66) called an “all-pervading immaterial life force.” As both a moral and physiological process, sensibility “allowed doctors to explain the internal working of the body in relation to the eighteenth-century culture of sentiment” (Murison 23, 18).

But beginning in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the threads which had formerly held together such diverse uses and meanings of “sensibility” began to fray until, by the end of the century, the term virtually disappeared from common usages. I suggest that the decline of sensibility can be accounted for by the exasperation of its tensions, as a discourse at once moral and physiological, sentimental and scientific, that characterized it from the beginning; and that one of the sources of that “dissociation,” as T.S. Eliot called it, was the rising discourse of emotion, especially the different meanings and uses it gave to “sympathy.”60 As Foucault describes in The Order of Things, “sympathy,” from the Greek sumpatheia (“with passion”) was understood during the Renaissance as a principle of attraction between people, or between people and things, that is expressed in the Latin phrase, simile simili gaudet, or “like rejoices in like.” “Sympathy” here is not an interior emotion or sentiment that belongs to one person and is directed toward another. It is rather a force of resemblance and similarity between people or between people and things that can spread itself as “a sort of contagion or infection” and make “a direct imprint onto our own feelings” (Force 31, 32). “Renaissance sympathies,” as Lauren Guilmette says, “existed outside the individual and were able to possess that subject, as opposed to Classical sentiments, which become possessions of that subject to be cultivated” (292).

The Puritan John Winthrop in the 17th century, citing simile simili gaudet, conveys such a pre-modern understanding of sympathy when he describes it as a social knitting force that binds together the members of the community and whose sources lie not within those individual members but are given by the grace of God. This applies also to the bonds between mother and child. Winthrop says: “…the ground of love is an apprehension of some resemblance in things loved to that which affects it…So a mother loves her child, because she thoroughly conceives a resemblance of herself in it. Thus it is between the members of Christ…This sensibleness and sympathy of each other’s conditions will necessarily infuse into each part a native desire and endeavor to strengthen, defend, and comfort the other” (183). The fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne that is set in Puritan times also provides many examples of such “sympathetic forces” and “relations” operating between members of a community -- but of a mostly demonic rather than virtuous nature.

Sympathy in all these cases “is a sort of emotional contagion whereby the feelings of one person affect one or several persons near by…a physiological phenomenon” (Force 29). For eighteenth century thinkers such as Adam Smith, on the contrary, we do not directly feel the feelings of others; what we feel is a mental representation of what others are feeling, a mental representation that can only be based upon our own feelings. “Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations” (Theory of Moral Sentiments I.i.I.I., p. 9) This did not mean, however, that sympathy was not a genuine feeling experienced potentially by all humans. On the contrary, Smith says that the existence of “pity or compassion…is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it,” adding that the emotion is “by no means confined to the virtuous and humane” (I.i.1.3, p. 10). It is not the existence of such feelings which Smith challenges, but whom they belong to and what they are “about”: they belong to the sympathizer, not the sufferer, and are accordingly “about” the feelings of the former, not the latter. For Smith, our feelings toward others are similar to our feelings toward fictional characters; they depend on an imaginary identification with others that is independent of whether the feelings being identified with actually exist or are merely fictive. What is not fictive are the desires of the sympathizing subject. Sympathy and sentiment are understood as expressions of, or rooted in, such desires. Sympathy becomes but one of the “excitations” prompted by desire and no longer has an intrinsically “moral sense,” in Hutcheson’s terms. Although it continues to have its “uses,” in the affective as well as in the political economy, it can no longer be relied on to give moral guidance but is a sort of epiphenomenon of a more basic desire, which is increasingly viewed as a force of life itself (Nealon 22-23). Sympathy, like desire, no longer has a “real” object, other than itself, to which it may be directed. Its object now is imaginary, or fictive, a secondary expression of a larger self-interest.

This rupture in the meanings and uses of “sympathy” visible in the development of political economy finds its biological counterpart in the history of the nervous system. That history in its modern form begins, as recounted above, with Thomas Willis’ rejection of humoral theory and shift from anatomy to physiology in accounting for the sources of our mental and affective lives, a shift which allowed the nervous system to be viewed as susceptible and “open” to magnetic and sympathetic influences from the outer world. But in the second half of the nineteenth century, neurologists and physicians, including George Miller Beard (1839-1883) and S. Weir Mitchell (1829-1914), theorized a different conception of the nervous system that draws on the metaphor of “the closed circuit” and the second law of thermodynamics, or entropy, where the body is possessed initially of a fixed amount of energy that dissipates over time (Thrailkill 126-129). According to Beard, neurasthenia or hysteria, a disease common among women throughout the nineteenth century, and which provided material for Freud’s early writings, is caused by a lack of nerve-force created by the closed circuit of the nervous body. Whereas in the 18th century, physician and scientist John Brown had assumed that “life insofar as it is corporeal consists in the excitation of the nervous system” from external sources (Canguilhem Ideology 49), by the 19th century psychologist and philosopher Alexander Bain could postulate that the nervous system was not a passive conductor of the effects of stimulation but “a store of vital energy that seeks an outlet.” The fluctuations in its “vital energy” were productive of “motions outward” that “are the basic elements of emotion. They define what an emotion is” (Danziger, Naming the Mind 63). In this way, the eighteenth century economic-political discourse of self-interest and desire is affectively mimicked in 19th century biology’s account of emotions as the discharges of a self-fueling organism.

The decline of sensibility and the establishment of the discourse of emotion as dominant in the late 19th century were shaped, in sum, by the rise of a biopolitics of feeling, or regulative control of affect, that first demoralized, then biologized, the traditional passions, marking “the entry of phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species into the order of knowledge and power,” as Foucault said (History of Sexuality 41). Among the “object-targets” (Anderson “Affects and biopower” 28) of the biopolitics of feeling as represented in nineteenth century American fiction, were women and African American men. The emergence of an ideology of biological racism during the nineteenth century that historians have documented (Horsman) is paralleled by the emergence of a biologized ideology of “femininity” centered on women’s reproductive and domestic functions that was largely absent in colonial times, as feminist social historians have long argued (Coontz 98).

Common to this ideal of femininity and the racial stereotyping of African Americans in the 19th century was a normalizing of their affective behavior that treated sexual desire and other traditional passions as unnatural and even “monstrous.” In the writings of authors from Hawthorne to Sarah Orne Jewett, such abnormality in women was often conveyed through the use of botanical metaphors to represent these unnatural passions; the etymology of the Latin term, monstrum, meaning “showing,” is itself botanical (Pfister 64). According to Foucault, the displacement of botany by biology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries entailed a shift from a classical regime of representation concerned more with the classification of life forms based on their external, largely visible features, as in Linnaeus’ taxonomy of plant life, to a more ontological quest to discover the nature of “life itself” as a sort of unitary essence embodied within the recesses, physical and mental, of the human animal (Order of Things 134-138). “In the birth of biology,” as Jeffrey Nealon summarizes Foucault’s view, “the question of life unhinges itself from a practice of representation” (5) Whereas plant life bore its “essence” on its surface and thereby evaded any effort to give that essence an ontological grounding that would be applicable to all forms of life, or even to all forms of plant life, in the seventeenth century human animality gave itself just such a grounding, as we have seen, in the concept of desire as a life force, whose essence, it is increasingly claimed, is to be uncovered in the hidden workings of the nervous system. As Foucault said, “From the moment when… men decided to find their place in the plentitude of the natural order, the animal world lost [its] power of negativity, and assumed the positive form of an evolution between the determinism of nature and the reason of man” (History of Madness 151).

That change was facilitated by the politicization of the economy by the physiocrats and Adam Smith in the eighteenth century. What the ancient Greeks had called zoe, or ordinary, economically based non-political life, became subject to a biopolitical, regulative control by the state. “Life itself,” as Foucault called it, became an object of knowledge: “knowledge of life and life itself [were seen to] obey the same laws of genesis” (Birth of the Clinic 99, 145, thereby impelling the shift from a juridically based sovereign power, centered in “the ancient right to take life or let live,” to a disciplinary and regulatory power, centered in the right to “to foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (History of Sexuality 138). Governmentalization, the extension of the control of the state into the economic, familial, and private lives of individuals and populations, was fueled by such a disciplinary and regulative power, a power that was the source of the biopolitics of feeling. As Foucault said at the end of The History of Sexuality, “For millennia man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question” (143). To speak of a “biopolitics of feeling” is to say that our feelings have become integral to our political survival. Modern homo affectus is an animal whose affective politics “places his existence as a living being in question.”

None.

No conflict of interest.