Wikipedia

There's an article on History of Psychology , which completely ignores Dixon's arguments. If any of y'all have the time to wade into Wikipedia, here's a perfect opening. There is, of course, an article on emotions , as well as one on Philosophy of Mind . Dixon's arguments aren't reflected in any of these; again, if you have time enough and will, go straighten Wikipidea out!

Dixon and Intelligent Design

Consider this on the imperialism of evolutionary theory, or this on the dangers of crossing Big Science (so-called), and then consider Dixon on page 21:

Secondly, the creation of an academic discipline called `psychology', which is purportedly autonomous from philosophy and theology, and which endorses a very particular set of methodological and metaphysical commitments largely derived from the physical sciences, has reinforced the tendency for fewer avowedly philosophical. metaphysical, or theological psychologies to be produced or to be taken seriously in an academic context. This could be summed up by saying that cultural and academic authority on psychological (and other) questions has shifted from ecclesiastical and theological texts and institutions to more secular ones.

Well, yes. We no longer look to the Bible for inerrant answer about biology; Darwin and those who have expanded on Darwin give us a better framework for figuring out how life on this planet is interconnected. Why would we look to the Bible for ways to think about how our mental lives are constructed? Why should I posit a `soul', and then claim that all my internal states are results of `disorders' within this soul, which, in its most ordered and desired state, is attuned to the Will of God?

In any case, there does seem (to me) to be a bit of a pushback from Christians who want their theories about God to be included within academic pursuits, like history of science and psychology and biology. I wonder when historians will start writing about history revealing the Hand of God again?

Romantics

Having just read a Big Book by Harold Bloom, I am thinking about Wordsworth and Shelley and Keats and Byron, and maybe even about Goethe. Bloom argues (and English professors would know more than me) that poetry changed dramatically with Wordsworth, between roughly 1796 and 1806. The topics of poetry shifted from external affairs to internal feelings. How did this shift affect perceptions of internal states? I went to Project Gutenberg , and searched these poets for the words `emotion' and 'passion'. Wordsworth and Keats used passion, but rarely (if ever) emotion. Byron, in Childe Harold, uses passion but not emotion; in Don Juan he uses emotion occasionally and passion often. In `To Caroline' of 1805, he has:

Mistake not, sweet sceptic, the cause of emotion,

No doubt can the mind of your lover invade;

He worships each look with such faithful devotion,

A smile can enchant, or a tear can dissuade.


Shelley uses emotion quite a lot; his `Revolt of Islam' of 1817 uses the word at least four times. If you search through his Collected Poems at Project Gutenberg, you'll see it come up.

I looked up Goethe; Google told me the German for `emotion' is `Emotion' and the German for `passion' is `Leidenschaft'. Goethe uses `Leidenschaft' quite a lot, but never `Emotion', which makes me wonder if we miss something in Goethe when `Leidenschaft' is translated as `emotion'. Longfellow uses both `emotion' and `passion' quite a bit; does that make him a Christian or not a Christian? And finally, in the Complete Works of Alexander Pope I found emotion once, and passions a whole bunch.

So I wonder about the role of Romanticism and poets in the transition from `passion' to `emotion'. Why did poets like Shelley and Byron start using the word `emotion'? Did it capture something that the old language couldn't say? Were they rebelling against something? How influential were these poets? Did their use of language spill over into the rest of the English-speaking culture?

Christian Apologetics

Consider the first full paragraph on page 5 of Dixon. I think almost every sentence there irks me.

1: While anti-religious and merely non-religious psychologists were not the only ones to use the word `emotions', they did so sooner and integrated the category into their psychologies more readily than did their Christian contemporaries. Geeze, where to begin? Psychologists, perhaps? A bit of an ahistorical word to be applying to the period 1800-1850. Who are these people? How do I tell a psychologist from a moral philosopher, for example? Was Hegel a psychologist? Emerson? Thoreau? The Duke of Wellington? And apparently this undefined group comes in three flavors: Christian, non-religious, and anti-religious. What is Christian at this time period? Were the Mormons Christian? (They don't use the word `emotion' in their Scripture; see here ). Was Emerson a Christion? Harold Bloom suggests that this period was the foundation of the American Religion , a religion distinct from Christianity. And this brings up a bugaboo from the history of science: are the non-religious, at this time, Christian? Christian history of science writers want to claim all scientists who ever expressed any vaguely Christian sentiments as Christians; I wonder how Dixon will differentiate between the properly Christian and the non-religious who live in a Christian society.

2: Influential figures in secular science and psychology in the mid-nineteenth century, such as Charles Darwin, Alexander Bain, and Herbert Spencer, were among these early `emotions' theorists (see chapter 5). Well, I checked Darwin's material at Project Gutenberg ; he never uses the words `emotion', `passion', or `affection' in the 1859 Origin of Species ; The Voyage of the Beagle , published between 1838 and 1843, uses `passion' a lot, but never `emotion'; the 1872 Expression of Emotion in Man and Animal uses all three words quite a bit. It's hard for me to accept, based on this, that Darwin was an early adaptor of the word `emotion', and that he influenced others to use it.

3: Christian writers, especially in the more conservative environments such as Oxford and Cambridge (and some American colleges) continued to use the terms `will', `passions', `affections', and `sentiments' much more than the term `emotion' (see chapter 6). Well, duh. Oxford and Cambridge were notoriously stuffy and traditionalist during the Victorian years (and I was going to say second rate, which is probably false; on the other hand, 1800-1850 was not the grandest fifty years in the history of either of these institutions). Of the three mentioned above, Darwin and Spencer were private scholars and Bain was at Aberdeen. When I think of 19th century British physicists, I think of Faraday (private scholar), Kelvin (University of Glasglow), and Maxwell (who was at Cambridge, starting in 1871). Much of what was new and innovative in Victorian England wasn't being done at Oxford or Cambridge. I see no need to pull in religion to explain that strongly traditional faculty in a strongly traditional milieu used strongly traditional language.

4: There was, then, a correlation betweem the adoption of the new `emotions' discourse on the one hand, and a lack of traditional Christian belief on the other. Well, let's drag out the old chestnut: correlation doesn't imply causation, and, in fact, doesn't even mean the two events are in any way related. Also, this isn't a correlation. Two events are completely correlated if they always happen together. Key words there: `always' and 'together'. Two unique events that happen at the same time ARE NOT CORRELATED! The flu epidemic and the throwing of the World Series both happened in 1919; does that make them correlated? Dixon is high-jacking a well-defined term from statistics and using it in his own special way (he does this again, later in the introduction, with the terms `emotion', `psychology', and `science'). And, finally, `traditional Christian belief' is not well-defined; later (page 10) he says traditional Christian belief involves grace, the fall, sin, Christology, and Trinatarianism. So Jefferson, in particular, is not working in traditional Christian belief, I guess.

5: There was also a correlation, later in the century, when the transition to `emotion' talk had become a fait accompli, between Christian faith and the adoption of cognitive and anti-reductionist theories of emotions. Spare me the gratuitous French. Again, Christian faith is broad and ill-defined; if he tries to speak of a correlation here, he must show that most of the people who are Christians (with whatever definition he has) use `cognitive and anti-reductionist theories of emotions'. I really don't know much about religion in the late nineteenth century, though. I'd suspet that American religion, as practiced by travelling preachers, was probably not particularly theologically or psychologically coherent.

Medieval Rhetoric

I know we're supposed to be moving into the 1800's, but I found this passage in Grendler's Schooling in Renaissance Italy, page 207:

Late medieval oratory had been syllogistic rather than persuasive. When eulogizing a prince, the late medieval orator might enunciate a them taken from Scripture about the greatness of princes and then demonstrate that the dead lord possessed greatness. The medieval orator presented a logical, deductive proof; he tried to convince through reaons rather than move the emotions. The other orations (besides Vergerio's) at Carrara's funeral lacked stylistic ornamentation but added many appeals to authority. In other words, a clear theme, syllogistic reasoning, limited attention paid to style, and an appeal to authorities characterized the late medieval oration. Classical form, the use of ancient rhetorical figures, concentration on style, an attempt to move the listener, and a call to civic action--all these identified the Renaissance oration.

Probably studying the shifts in style of speeches would reveal much about different cultures thoughts on emotions.

And on a completely different tack, misogyny thrives in America:

From Fox News

or

From Pharyngula

An Ugly Election, Getting Worse

And I know that this is supposed to be about our readings and passions and stuff, but I think on occasion I'll drop in some other things, 'cause it is a blog, and blogs are meant to be tangential. Anyway. Sexism in America is appalling, example 1 . Just the fact that Clinton and Obama are serious candidates for the Presidency will stir up the muck and horrifying nasties will surface. Maybe it will be cathartic, maybe it will provoke positive change, but I'm not holding my breath.

Descartes and Viete

Viete was a French mathematician whose `The Analytic Art' of 1591 was a standard text on algebra. Viete starts the book with a description of mathematical analysis, breaking it into three parts: zetetics, poristics, and rhetics, with the following definitions:

1. Zetetics: setting up an equation or proportion between the unknown and the givens
   
2. Poristics: testing the truth of a theorem by means of an equation or proportion
   
3. Rhetics: determining the value of an unknown term in an equation or proportion
   

As an example, suppose I know that 3 doughnuts cost 2 dollars; how much would 12 doughnuts cost? Saying `2 is to 3 as x is to 12' or '2/3 = x/12' is zetetics, while solving for x to find x = 8 is rhetics. I can generalize this to find a general theorem: N doughnuts cost (2/3)N dollars; plugging in values for N to verify this theorem is poristics (although this is a lame example of poristics; I think it's more along the lines of trying to figure out the truth value of a proposed equation, not a derived one).

One would think that Descartes was familiar with this book, and with this sort of analysis. The sixteenth century was a time of re-definition for mathematics, in which mathematicians included these little prefaces about how to practice mathematics; in a sense, they were establishing professional methodology. Descartes and other early moderns would inherit these explicit statements of methodology; would then they seek to carry mathematical methodology over to other fields? Note in particular that mathematicians of the time claimed that their field led to truths whose certainty was unchallenged (it's annoying that `certain' has two meanings; `certain truths' means either `some, but not all, truths' or 'undoubtable truths', and I want the latter). How was the early modern search for axioms and a deductive system (Descartes wanted to start with just `I think, therefore I am' and deduced from there; Hobbes started with a state of nature and deduced from there) influenced by the professionalization program of 16th century mathematics?

And thanks have to go out to Jeff Mullins at this point; this sort of a question wouldn't have occurred to me without having gone through his History 610 course.

Passion and Literature

I've just started Harold Bloom's `Genius', and he insists that literature helped create perceptions of human nature. Bloom is particularly high on Shakespeare, but he also mentions Montaigne, Cervantes, and Milton as early moderns who helped create the idea (as he puts it) of `overhearing oneself'. He suggests that these authors created characters who looked into themselves and found truth there. This shift, from a medieval focus on external sources for truth to an early modern focus on internal sources for truth, seems to be a common feature across many aspects of early modern thought. Descartes certainly does this. Did Descartes read Montaigne? or Cervantes? I don't know whether Shakespeare was in French by that time, but I'm pretty sure the Essays and Don Quixote were available to Descartes. How much of an impact did these authors have on constructions of the passions? Bloom would argue (I think) that the widespread availability of literature gave people new models for themselves, new ways to explain themselves. Maybe someone more knowledgeable about this could fill us in?

The Figure of Descartes

The figure of Descartes is pivotal for DesChene, because his study of his Aristotelians is focused on their discussion with Descartes. It feels, somewhat, that DesChene's book is a glorified appendix, a long summary of the background to the milieu of Descartes thought. This Aristotelian argument doesn't seem to be
interesting to DesChene in and of itself, but only in context of how it influenced Descartes. What would a book about early 17th century Aristotelian thought look like? I would think there would be more than just a handful of Jesuits named, and I think there would be more discussion of other aspects of thought--materialism, the Reformation, experimentalism. The focus of this book, both on the thinkers and on their texts (mostly analysis of De Anima), seems to me to be too narrow.

In any case, Descartes (to me) hovers over this book like a ghost, informing almost all of the commentary.