Representing Emotions: New Connections in the Histories of Art, Music and Medicine [1° ed.] 0754630587, 9780754630586

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REPRESENTING EMOTIONS

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Representing Emotions New Connections in the Histories of Art, Music and Medicine

Edited by PENELOPE GOUK and HELEN HILLS

First published 2005 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX 14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright© The contributors, 2005 Penelope Gouk and Helen Hills have asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this Work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Representing emotions : new connections in the histories of art, music and medicine 1. Emotions - Social aspects - History 2. Emotions in art 3. Expression in art 4. Medicine and art 5. Art and music 6. Art - Psychology 7. Mind and body 8. Emotions - Religious aspects 9. Art and religion 10. Music - Psychological aspects I. Gouk, Penelope II. Hills, Helen 700.4'53 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Representing emotions : new connections in the histories of art, music and medicine / edited by Penelope Gouk and Helen Hills. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7546-3058-7 (alk. paper) 1. Psychology-Miscellanea. 2. Emotions. 3. Emotions in art. 4. Arts-Psychological aspects. I. Gouk, Penelope. II. Hills, Helen. RC480.5.R386 2004 700'.l-dc22

ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-3058-6 (hbk)

2003064039

Contents List of Tables and Figures Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements

7 9 12

Part I: Introduction 1. 2. 3.

Towards Histories of Emotions Penelope Gouk and Helen Hills

15

Is There a Cultural History of the Emotions? Peter Burke

35

Emotions into Words—Or Words into Emotions? Graham Richards

49

Part II: Emotions and Religious Belief 4.

Bodies of Self-Transcendence: The Spirit of Affect in Giotto and Piero Michael Schwartz

69

5.

Architecture and Affect: Leon Battista Alberti and Edification Helen Hills

6.

Spiritual Passion and the Betrayal of Painting in Georges de la Tour Dalia Judovitz

109

Changing Emotions? The Decline of Original Sin on the Eve of the Enlightenment Michael Heyd

123

7.

89

6

Contents

Part III: Emotions and the Body 8. 9.

10.

The Man of Passion: Emotion, Philosophy and Sexual Difference Christine Battersby

139

A Woman Weeps: Hogarth’s Sigismunda (1759) and the Aesthetics of Excess Marcia Pointon

155

Remuer l’Âme or Plaire à l’Oreille? Music, Emotions and the Mind–Body Problem in French Writings of the Later Eighteenth Century Christopher Gärtner

173

Part IV: Emotions and Discipline 11.

12.

13.

Music’s Pathological and Therapeutic Effects on the Body Politic: Doctor John Gregory’s Views Penelope Gouk

191

The Undulating Self: The Rhythmic Conception of Music and the Emotions Charles Brotman

209

Dangerous Liaisons: Science, Amusement and the Civilizing Process Otniel E. Dror

223

Select Bibliography Index

235 247

List of Tables and Figures Tables 3.1

Traditional versus Psycho-medical Emotion language

50

Figures 4.1

4.2

4.3

4.4 4.5

6.1

6.2

Charles Le Brun (1619–1690), Expressions of the Passions of the Soul, ‘Anger’, head three-quarters to the right. Musée du Louvre, Paris, France. Photo: Arnaudet. © Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY.

71

Giotto di Bondone (1266–1336), Lamentation of Christ, c.1305. Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, Italy. Photo: © Alinari / Art Resource, NY

72

Master of Saint Francis (13th cent.), painted crucifix, oil on wood. Musée du Louvre, Paris, France. Photo: D. Arnaudet / G. Blot. © Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY.

73

Cimabue (1240–1302; ?attr.), Lamentation. Upper Church, S. Francesco, Assisi, Italy. Photo: © Alinari / Art Resource, NY.

75

Piero della Francesca (c.1420–1492), Pala Montefeltro (Montefeltro Altarpiece), Madonna and child with saints and Duke Federigo of Urbino, c.1472–4. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, Italy. Photo: © Alinari / Art Resource, NY.

79

Georges de la Tour (1593–1652), The Penitent Magdalene (also known as The Magdalene with Two Flames), c.1640–44, oil on canvas, 133.4 × 102.2 cm. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Mr and Mrs Charles Wrightsman, 1978. 517.

111

Jacques Bellange (c.1575–1616), Magdalene in Ecstasy, c.1611–16, oil on canvas, 60 × 40 cm. Museé historique lorrain, Nancy, France. Photo © G. Maugin.

112

8 6.3

6.4

9.1

9.2

9.3 9.4 9.5

List of Tables and Figures Georges de la Tour, St Peter Repentant (also known as The Tears of St Peter), 1645, oil on canvas, 114 × 95 cm. © The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH, 2002. Gift of the Hanna Fund, 1951. 454.

114

Georges de la Tour, The Denial of St Peter, 1650, oil on canvas, 120 × 161 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes, France. Photo © A. Guillard.

117

William Hogarth, Sigismunda Mourning over the Heart of Guiscardo, Her Murdered Husband, oil on canvas, 1759. © Tate, London 2003.

156

Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792), Mrs Abington as Miss Prue in William Congreve’s ‘Love for Love’, 1771, oil on canvas, 76.8 × 63.8 cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, New Haven, CT.

159

Robert Bonnart, Livie Impératrice, engraving. © Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, France.

162

P. Drevet after Charles-Antoine Coypel, Adrienne Lecouvreur as Cornelia, engraving, 1730. © The British Museum, London.

163

X-ray photograph of Hogarth’s Sigismunda. © Tate, London 2003.

165

11.1 T. Cook after William Hogarth, Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism, engraving, 1798. © The Wellcome Library, London.

195

Notes on Contributors Christine Battersby is Director of the Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature at the University of Warwick. Her major research interests are feminist metaphysics and feminist aesthetics, and following the publication of Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (Women’s Press, 1989; 2nd edn. 1994) she continues to write on this subject, especially in relation to the visual arts, poetry and the sublime. Her most recent book is The Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity (Polity Press/Routledge, 1998). Charles Brotman is currently working on a PhD in American History at the University of Rochester. His dissertation explores the relationship between scientific naturalism and musical practices in Anglo-American culture. He is more broadly interested in the cultural history of music and aesthetics, particularly conceptions of high and popular art in twentieth century America. He has published in Endeavour (2001) and American Music (1998). Peter Burke is Professor of History at Emmanuel College and the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge. His research interests are in European cultural history since 1450 and the history of historical thought. His publications include The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy (4th edn. Princeton University Press, 1999). Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (2nd edn. Ashgate, 1994), History and Social Theory (Cornell University Press, 1993) and A Social History of Knowledge from Gutenberg to Diderot (Polity Press, 2000). Otniel E. Dror, MD, PhD, is Lecturer and Head of the Section for the History of Medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His essay in this collection is part of his current book project, The Science of Passion: Modernity, Excitement, and the Study of Emotions, 1880–1950. Related publications have appeared in Isis (1999), Configurations (1999), Social Research (2001) and Science in Context (2001). His future book project is a study of three major strands of modern life: the history of modern modes of (sudden) death, the emergence of stress research, and the quest for excitement in Western societies. Christopher Gärtner studied History and French at the University of York, History at the Université de Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne) and Musicology at the University of East Anglia (UEA). He has recently earned his PhD in 2002; his thesis examines the relevance of ideas about truthfulness to controversies over opera in late-eighteenthcentury Paris and Vienna. He is currently studying singing at the College of Music and Dramatic Arts in Frankfurt, Germany.

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Notes on Contributors

Penelope Gouk is a Senior Lecturer in the History of Medicine at the University of Manchester. She is currently writing about the changing medical explanations for music’s effects on human nature between the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Her publications include Musical Healing in Cultural Contexts (Ashgate, 2000), Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (Yale University Press, 1999) and The Ivory Sundials of Nuremberg, 1500–1700 (Whipple Museum, Cambridge, 1988). Michael Heyd is Professor at the Dinur Centre for Research in Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His current research interests include the relationship between science and enthusiasm in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, experimental science and religion in eighteenth-century Geneva, and the problem of secularization in the early-modern period. Related publications have appeared in History of European Ideas (1984), Science in Context ( 1990, 1995), and Sceptics, Millenarians and Jews, ed. D. Katz and J. Israel (1990). Helen Hills is Reader in Art History at the University of York. Her current research focuses on the relationships between religious devotion and art and architectural production, practices and uses in early-modern Italy. Recent publications include Marmi mischi siciliani: Invenzione e identità (Messina, 1999), Invisible City: The Architecture of Aristocratic Convents in Baroque Naples (Oxford University Press, 2003) and Gender and the Politics of Architecture in Early Modern Italy (Ashgate, 2003). Dalia Judovitz is National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of French and Italian at Emory University in Atlanta. She is the author of Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes: The Origins of Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 1988), Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit (University of California Press, 1995) and The Culture of the Body: Genealogies of Modernity (University of Michigan Press, 2001) and coeditor of Dialectic and Narrative (SUNY Press, 1993). She is currently working on a book project, Georges de la Tour: The Enigma of the Visible. Marcia Pointon is Professor Emerita at the University of Manchester, where for a decade she held the post of Pilkington Professor of History of Art. She has written and published extensively on European art and visual culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her most recent books are Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (Yale University Press,1993) and Strategies for Showing: Women, Possession and Representation in English Visual Culture, 1665–1800 (Oxford University Press,1997). She is currently writing a book about the display culture of jewels and jewellery in early modern Europe.

Notes on Contributors

11

Graham Richards is Professor of History of Psychology at the University of Staffordshire and Director of the British Psychological Society’s Centre for the History of Psychology in London. His publications include Mental Machinery: The Origins and Consequences of Psychological Ideas, 1600–1850 (Athlone Press, 1992) and ‘Race’, Racism and Psychology: Towards a Reflexive History (Routledge, 1997). He is currently exploring in more depth the whole issue of the relationship between psychology and religion from a historical perspective. Michael Schwartz is a Professor in the Department of Fine Arts, Augusta State University (Georgia, USA). His teaching and research interests lie in the areas of art history, aesthetics, education theory and continental philosophy. Most recently his work has broadened to the study of the world spiritual traditions, with a special interest in Tibetan Bhuddhism. Recent publications have appeared in The Art Bulletin, The Journal of Aesthetic Education and Radical Philosophy. He is currently working on a critical commentary on the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucualt.

Acknowledgements This book arose from a conference, ‘Representing Emotions: Evidence, Arousal, Analysis’, held at the University of Manchester in May 2001. Financial support from the Wellcome Institute, the British Academy and the University of Manchester (including grants from the Bicentennial Fund, the School of Art History and Archaeology, and the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine) made the conference possible. We are indebted to all these institutions and are glad to take this opportunity to thank them. We are grateful to all the contributors to the present volume, all of whom were also participants in the conference, for their hard work and enthusiasm at every stage. We should like to thank also the anonymous reader for her/his very helpful comments and suggestions. We owe Tom Dixon special thanks for invaluable assistance with preparing the manuscript for publication. And our thanks go also to Dr Jeffrey Dean for his efficient and effective copy-editing. Working with Ashgate has been a pleasure. Special thanks are due to Erika Gaffney and Liz Greasby.

PART I INTRODUCTION

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CHAPTER 1

Towards Histories of Emotions Penelope Gouk and Helen Hills

But was it Ulysses? Or was it only the warmth of the sun On her pillow? The thought kept beating in her like her heart. The two kept beating together. It was only day. —Wallace Stevens, ‘The World as Meditation’

This collection of essays examines ways in which emotions have been conceived, articulated and treated in Western art, music, philosophy and medicine, their interrelationships and their bifurcations, in a series of case studies ranging between the fourteenth century and twentieth century and focused on western Europe and the USA. Its origins lie in the symposium, ‘Representing Emotions: Evidence, Arousal, Analysis’, held at the University of Manchester in May 2001, which drew on contributions from historians of art, music and science, and even included some memorable singing. Our starting-point is that ‘the emotions’, unchanging within human nature, transcending historical conditions, do not exist. Rather, ‘emotions’ are brought into being socially and historically, and recognized, encouraged, controlled, particularly in relation to race and colour, social class and gender. The ways in which emotions are articulated and represented are crucial in these processes. The essays collected here do not, and of course could not, constitute a chronological or geographical survey of the representation of emotions in Western Europe since the Greeks. More significantly, we have not privileged those historical conjunctions conventionally identified as crucial for changing patterns in emotional articulation (for instance, the Ancient World, the medieval era and the eighteenth century), nor singled out those thinkers most usually credited with formulating new approaches (for example, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Descartes, Le Brun, Spinoza, Rousseau, Voltaire).1 Instead, our principal aim has been to focus the investigative spotlight on specific moments when one formulation of emotions conflicts or converges with another, or when gaps or ellipses in one discourse on emotion are illuminated by another. In adopting this dual approach, we draw attention both to the necessarily non-disciplinary ways in which emotions have been conceived and to the complex processes by which some ideas eventually achieve authoritative status while others wither, neglected.

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These studies, therefore, investigate particularly fruitful engagements in and interstices between theories of emotions, most specifically discourses about emotions articulated by a range of historical scholars, artists, scientists and music theorists, and discourses within present-day academic disciplines. We have sought to achieve a balance between breadth and focus in relation to the period under discussion, with most of the chapters ordered chronologically, in the belief that the profile of changes and continuities in emotional representation becomes sharper when seen over an extended period. But we have highlighted four dominant themes, which cut across the time-span represented here: emotions and religious belief, emotions and the body, emotions and discipline, and our overarching theme, emotions and representation. We discuss each of these below. Scholarly interest in emotions has intensified over the last two decades, and continues to increase, with several recent interdisciplinary conferences on the subject.2 Within this abundance, the scarcity of historically-contextualized studies is striking. The literature is overwhelmingly dominated by medical, ethical and philosophical publications in which emotions are often assumed to be natural entities amenable to scientific analysis. By comparison, history is practically invisible. Of course, as Peter Burke reminds us in Chapter 2, individual historians have been writing about emotions since the nineteenth century, when the idea that emotions may have a history was first articulated. Anthropologists have also played a key role in situating emotions contextually and in paying careful attention to their social contexts. Nevertheless, professional historians have only turned towards the subject comparatively recently.3 This volume attempts to further collective historical understanding of emotions by focusing on their representations, by bringing together recent insights from within art history and history of medicine with those of historians concerned with changing musical practices and the ‘expression of the passions’. The histories of art, music and medicine have all separately grappled with issues of emotional representation and expression but have not interrogated them systematically in relation to each other. Our book steps towards exploring social and historical connections and disjunctions between all three fields, without assuming that an historical homogeneity can be obtained between them. At every level, the representation of emotions is complex. Even the terminology of emotions is fraught with pitfalls. As Burke emphasizes, there is much historical groundwork to be done on the term ‘emotion’ itself and on all the problems of translation that are entailed in the process. Terminology, betraying ways in which emotions are conceived, is key to their shaping, as Graham Richards and Michael Heyd argue (Chapters 3 and 7). All the essays here fully acknowledge how far emotions are the product of a continuous process of verbal and non-verbal fashioning and interpretation. The term ‘emotion’ early referred not to feelings but to physical movement or migration (it originally came from the Latin emoveo, to move out or move away). Thus Knolles’s History of the Turks (1621) refers to ‘The divers emotions of that

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people’.4 It continued to be used to mean a moving, stirring agitation in a physical sense until the early nineteenth century. Likewise in Old High German the verb ‘leiden’ signified movement in the sense of walking or travelling.5 In Chapter 3 Richards shows how the word ‘emotion’ was used figuratively to refer to an agitation or disturbance of the mind, that is passion, from the late sixteenth century, but was not in common use in this sense until the nineteenth century. There is, therefore, no overarching definition of ‘emotions’ that applies to all periods and all places; nor would a list enumerating specific emotions (fear, anger, and so on) serve to explain how such terms were conceived, and how these constructs were employed. Nevertheless, precisely because emotions are culturally mediated and, therefore, culturally variable, an analysis of the ways in which they were defined, by whom, and for what purposes is an important undertaking. The essays gathered here seek to illuminate what was at stake, to whom, and why, when specific attempts were made to redefine emotions, or to redescribe their relationships to God, to humankind or to social progress and specific social groups. The relationships between feelings and the soul and between the body and soul were central to discourses on emotions from the Greeks to the twentieth century (when, broadly speaking, the notion of the self replaced that of the soul). In Renaissance Italy, the term affetto referred to movements of the mind or soul (Dante, Purgatorio XXV.107–8: ‘Secondo che ci affigono i disiri / e li altri affetti, l’ombra si figura’; Maestro Alberto 37: ‘Gran tumulto d’affetti t’ha posseduto’), as well as to mean love, affection, desire or aspiration.6 In English ‘affect’ early referred to the way in which one is affected or disposed, a mental state (thus Chaucer (c.1374): Troylus III.1342–3: ‘And therto dronken had as hotte and stronge / As Cresus did, for his affectes wrong’); and in Renaissance English ‘affect’ came increasingly to be distinguished from ‘effect’, the first referring to inward disposition, as contrasted with external manifestation or action, with ‘effect’ or result.7 As Dalia Judovitz explains in Chapter 6, whereas the modern sense of ‘passions’ refers to psychological, affective states that imply the expression of sentiment or emotion as forms of subjective agency, these secular notions of sentience or sensibility fail to convey the religious significance of passion that was dominant until the late seventeenth century. In fact the word ‘passion’ derives from the Latin passio, which means to suffer or endure, to sustain action from without—an internal state that remains imperceptible unless there is a movement or a disturbance outwards (in other words, there is emotion) that reveals this inner suffering. From early on this condition became especially associated with the Passion of Christ, but the primacy of the Christological meaning of passion was gradually drained from the word from the late seventeenth century. In secular terms in English, ‘passion’ was used to mean the fact or condition of being acted upon or affected by external force from Chaucer’s time (c.1374). As Thomas Wright explained in his Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604), these mental states are called passions ‘because when these affections are stirring in our minds, they alter the humours in our bodies, causing some passion or alteration in them’. According to Judovitz, it was in late-seventeenth-

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century France that ‘passion’ first came to be defined in physics as a natural body relative to and opposed to an action, or one that suffers the intervention of an agent. This redefinition of passion in terms of physical action and rational agency announced the declining primacy of passion’s spiritual and sacred referents. In this way, ‘passion’ came to mean any kind of feeling, particularly a vehement, or overpowering emotion.8 In Middle High German the borrowed Latin word Passion referred to the history of Christ’s suffering. This extended from theology to the arts (Christ’s Passion was set to music well into the eighteenth century). But, as in French, from the seventeenth century the term lost its resolutely Christological meanings and came to refer to strong inclination and emotions.9 Although we do not believe that emotions are best analysed in terms of an historical account that seeks to trace their development chronologically, with its attendant risks of an imposed teleology, nevertheless it is clear that a conceptual chasm exists between the passions understood by Michael Schwartz’s fourteenth-century painters and their patrons (Chapter 4) and those investigated by Otniel Dror’s twentieth-century experimental scientists (Chapter 13). Schwartz’s actors experience passion as loss of self in the presence of God, while Dror’s experimenters try to manipulate specific emotions to master themselves and others. We suggest that the differences of understanding between the protagonists of these two chapters, which represent the temporal limits of this book, are the result of profound shifts in ideas about what constitutes the self, subjectivity and moral management. However, we have avoided presenting the essays here in terms of periodization, emphasizing instead themes that sometimes span considerable geographical and chronological distances. We have resisted periodization as the dominant mode of presentation because it has several drawbacks. First, such an approach risks producing a teleological account, in which ideas about emotions that are not pursued by later thinkers appear as cul-desacs, irrelevant to those historical processes that have produced present-day configurations. We want to avoid presenting the contingency of history as either inevitable or evolutionary. Second, given that in any one period multiple (and contradictory) histories of emotions could be told, we see no reason why periodization should have dominance over any other presentation of the material. Periodization risks effacing the diverse, often contradictory approaches to emotions held at any one time, which varied by region or language in relation to social class, gender, race and so forth. (As we see in Chapter 6, for example, at the very time when Descartes was developing his ideas on self-mastery through reason, the French painter Georges de la Tour (1593–1652) reaffirmed an alternative notion of self in which spirital passion was the goal.) Third, having deliberately eschewed the ‘great thinkers’ approach to emotions, which is itself often framed chronologically, we did not want to implicitly affirm this method by adopting periodization in its place. A multi-authored, relatively short book like this is far better suited to examine specific problems at specific junctures. The collection shows that debates about passions are driven by fundamental concerns about the precise nature of the relationship between the individual and society; the relationship between ‘nature’ and ‘society’, and the moral values seen to

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inhere in each; assumptions about children’s development; notions of the soul and its relation to the body; and ideas about the body and its relationship to the feeling subject—with concomitant assumptions about gender, age, race, ethnicity and social class. Thus in any discussion of emotions much is at stake. While a discussion of any one of these issues may seem to lie far removed from the other poles, in fact, as these essays expose, other issues are always implicated. In sum, emotions lie at the heart of fiercely-fought controversies over human nature, social governance, morality and identity, which not only divide disciplines but also divide proponents within disciplines from each other. The principal themes emphasized in this collection circulate around a series of crucial and intersecting nodes—emotions and religious beliefs, emotions and the body, emotions and discipline—all of which have a fundamental bearing on the final theme, namely emotions as representation. To these we now turn. Emotions and Religious Beliefs Throughout much of Western history, Christianity has provided a general framework for both understanding and controlling human passions, above all in their relation to the soul. As long as religious belief was central to society, with the Church assuming immense social and institutional power, arguments about emotions or affetti, including how they are affected by visual and auditory stimuli, ultimately revolved around the relationship between the individual and God, with the assumption that salvation (that is, the redemption of the immortal soul) could only be achieved through following Christ. Although this larger frame of reference may not always be articulated, and although there are significant differences between Catholicism and Protestantism, the desire to establish a right relationship with God through appropriate forms of worship and daily conduct is at the root of most medieval and early modern discourses on moral management—as is made clear in the essays by Michael Schwartz, Helen Hills, Dalia Judovitz and Michael Heyd. One of the most important changes in conceiving emotions and their significance, and in the development of new techniques for imposing consequent emotional prohibitions, relates to the ‘fall of God’ within Western society, a process whose origins are conventionally traced to the mid eighteenth century, a period under examination in the chapters by Christine Battersby, Marcia Pointon, Christopher Gärtner and Penelope Gouk. Of course, we are not claiming the disappearance of religious impulse (which clearly underpins controversies explored in those chapters, for example). Rather, our argument proceeds from an acknowledgement that ecclesiastical institutions gradually lost their social dominance during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, even as the State and capitalism increased their power. Within closely patrolled limits, faith became more a matter of private conscience than an overwhelmingly public concern. Emotions were conceived less in relation to the soul’s relationship to God than as directly social, physiological or psychological in origin. Thus, Brotman and Dror show scientists (an occupational category established

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during the nineteenth century)—particularly within the fields of psychoanalysis, experimental psychology and related subspecialisms—asserting an authority over emotions that had earlier been dominated by clerics. Moreover, as Richards notes, it was only from this period that ‘emotions’ properly came into their own as objects of scientific investigation and analysis. Of course, even while the Church was a dominant (albeit divided) force within society, powerful secular institutions, above all princely courts, also exerted influence over proper Christian conduct. Until the impact of the printing revolution in the sixteenth century, most texts about moral management were generated within these patronage contexts and were accessible to a very small (but very powerful) literate minority. Unsurprisingly, the hierarchies of the Church and princely government are often presented in this literature as necessary (and natural) intermediaries between God and the individual, their authority mutually legitimated through divine and human law. Such issues became especially pressing during the Reformation crisis of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Protestant reformers threatened to sweep away all intermediaries between the individual and God. Heyd’s chapter draws attention to the importance of debates over predestination versus free will for shaping early modern discourse about emotions, by considering the longterm effect that shifts in attitudes towards this complex issue could have on the inner life of a particular faith community. Although concentrating on a specifically Calvinist perspective, Heyd nevertheless implicitly draws attention to the broader European context in which such debates were being generated, namely that of war and violent passions unleashed in the name of religious truth and national destiny. Indeed, while the Catholic Church had never enjoyed unrivalled hegemony, the emergence of powerful Protestant states forever transformed the terms of European debate about emotional representation and control, with the differences between national religious traditions becoming a newly important focus. Pointon highlights the discomfort caused in polite London society by Hogarth’s deployment of religious (particularly Catholic) visual imagery in a secular Protestant context; Gouk demonstrates the intimate connection between John Gregory’s concern with the sickening as well as improving effects of music on society, and the relaxation of the Scottish Kirk’s attitude towards public music; while Gärtner’s Parisian intellectuals inhabit a cultural milieu in which these typically Presbyterian anxieties about sacred and secular forms of emotional expression literally have no place. This brings us to another important theme connecting religion and emotions: while acknowledging the importance of written texts, our volume also draws attention to non-verbal techniques of spiritual discipline and moral management. The power of music and visual images to stimulate the passions (especially to give pleasure), and even (apparently) to bypass reason altogether, have always rendered their status problematic in Christian society, even in spheres which are supposedly wholly secular. Aesthetic judgements are framed in relation to long-standing controversies about whether sensory pleasures lead inevitably to damnation, or whether, if properly harnessed, they may legitimately bring one closer to God.

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Thus Alberti justifies good architecture as a metaphor for the spiritual condition, and as a means for securing social order and individual well-being (Hills), while Gregory claims similar cultural benefits will result from good music (Gouk). The chapters by Schwartz and Judovitz offer specific instances of painters’ attempts to explore and deepen the relationship between the individual and God through representations of spiritual passion. Emotions and the Body An important and persistent model of emotions and their communication and representation depends on an hermeneutics of depth within the body. Emotions are presented as occurring spontaneously within the feeling subject (often in relation to the soul) and subsequently either manifesting themselves externally through the body (facial expression or efference, vocal cries, gestures), or communicated socially by other conventional means. Crucial in this conception is the relationship between the soul and the body (through which emotions may be demonstrated to, or hidden from, others). Plato’s conception of the soul as composed of reason and emotion, with emotions divided between the dominating and the lower desires and appetites (together with his advocacy of music to educate the emotions) has been of enormous consequence in Western thinking in this regard. Since Charles Le Brun’s codification of the facial expressions of affetti (1698), the reading of emotions has tended to concentrate on individual feeling subjects, whose external features are assumed to disclose or disguise personal interior states. Emotions are persistently figured as occasioned by external events brought to bear on the self. In short, emotions have often been conceived as spontaneous and natural, and regarded as being acculturated only on their ‘expression’ (including their expression through the body). This is to assume that both emotions and the feeling, emotional subject reside outside of culture, that feelings bypass cultural norms and constraints and are experienced in their free and pure form. This is the model with which in this volume, for instance, Alberti, Gregory, and modern scientific experimenters proceed (Hills, Gartner, Gouk, Dror). The assumption that there exists an intimate (often direct) relationship between feelings and their bodily expression, often figured as ‘authentic’, or culturally and historically unmediated, means that discussion of emotions is necessarily inherently charged with notions about certain bodies in terms of gender, class and race. Neglected by many of the thinkers whose work is explored here (including Dror’s experimenters) is the significance to discourse on emotions of social power and social relations. This relationship we regard as crucial. It is initially tempting to assume that emotions are bodily, unchanging and universal, and that therefore the experiential subject has direct access to authentic emotion.10 However, recent scholarship has shown that even the body and notions of the self are subject to historicity.11 Emotions are anticipated, delayed and traversed by historical and social currents and therefore must be analysed in relation to them.

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Although it is often assumed that the relationship between emotion and reason is an oppositional binary, most of the thinkers discussed in this volume conceive of the relationships between reason and emotions and between experiencing and demonstrating specific emotions as complex. Thus, Hills demonstrates that Alberti’s emphasis on learning as an effective way to harness emotions necessarily precludes certain social groups. This brings us to the question of whose body is under discussion in relation to emotions, their regulation and their control. Although many of the theorists whose work is examined here present their consideration of emotions as if it were necessarily universally applicable, almost always the subject whose emotions are deemed worthy of and suitable for refinement, careful direction and management is the upper-class (educated), white, Western male. Implicit in most representations of emotion is the notion that their management is important to effect social distinction—and that lower social classes, women and non-white peoples are, for a variety of reasons, less able to subject their emotions to control. Emotions and their management therefore become deeply embedded in a gendered, classed and raced social order. Anxieties about masculinities or femininities are explored in the essays by Battersby, Brotman, Hills, Gärtner, Gouk and Pointon. Vital to all these discussions is the issue of social class, since masculinity is presented as vulnerable in relation to lack of either discipline or education, or as a result of unregulated femininity’s dalliance with lower-social-class males. Brotman’s essay alone considers the discussion of emotions in relation to both masculinity and race or colour, an area that is undoubtedly ripe for extended analysis. Just as we must eschew a simple binary opposition between emotion and reason, we should eschew simple oppositions in terms of gender. Christine Battersby’s essay shows that the gendering of emotions is more complex than this. She challenges the traditional dichotomy between male reason and female emotions and suggests that uncritical acceptance of this stereotype may actually hinder feminist efforts to transform methodologies of the Western philosophical tradition. A more fruitful approach may result from considering instances where (male) philosophers themselves have identified particular kinds of emotion as useful for their calling. Hume, for example, regards a violent passion for philosophy as an appropriate check to extreme religious beliefs, since the true philosopher learns to inculcate calm passions within himself. But even though he admits some emotions as essential to philosophy, women are still not allowed entry into this all-male domain. Instead of being excluded on account of having emotions, they are assumed to have the wrong kind of emotions, directed towards inappropriate ends. As Battersby cogently demonstrates, traditional gender hierarchies are not effectively challenged merely by adopting the language of the ‘feminine’ or by simply privileging the emotions above reason.

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Emotions and Discipline: Power Relations and Policing Emotions Many of the thinkers discussed here conceive of emotions as unwelcome but unavoidable, external to the feeling subject, who experiences them as an invasion from without.12 They are figured as internally experienced, invading a private, inner self. Consequently, much of the Western discourse on emotion has concentrated on ways to secure peace of mind and therefore proper health (moral and physical) in the teeth of these adverse menaces (for example Dror, Hills, Gouk, Pointon). In turn, the possession of peace of mind is figured as a sign of distinction. The Platonic notion of the true self as reason surfaces in the discourse of ‘mastery’ of feelings—figured as disruptive—through the discipline of reason. This guides Alberti’s thinking in his ardent advocation of how to live well; it persists in Michael Heyd’s Protestants struggling with their relationship to God, and it still has resonance for Gregory in his model of personal and social refinement. Thus the conceptualization of emotions has played a key part in notions of individuality or the formation of a sense of self, and vice versa. Heyd’s chapter explores a historical juncture of note in this regard in early modern Britain, when the centrality of Original Sin was dislodged by a greater emphasis on the significance of the individual’s actions in defining his or her relationship with God. Just as emotional control has repeatedly been treated as synonymous with the socially desirable subject, so the control of affetti, passions and emotions has been regarded as of particular significance in effecting the desirable society. Groups claiming authority to represent emotions (to speak about, write about or otherwise depict them), to identify them, categorize them, to propose suitable treatments for wayward emotion and so on, have varied through time; their social and political ambitions are never incidental to their claims. While philosophers and artist-intellectuals assumed this role in fifteenth-century Florence, in modern Western cultures emotions have become medicalized and psychologized. Consequently, guidance on how to achieve a healthy emotional balance and to treat aberrant passions is predominantly framed in medical and psychological terms. Since emotions have been regarded as potentially disruptive to both individual and social life, the issue of their control becomes significant for socially dominant groups as well as for those seeking to enhance their social significance. Norbert Elias’s work was early crucial in articulating this approach. He argued that emotional management and conventions were a significant aspect of courtly society and its social dominance.13 Several of the papers here draw upon aspects of his thinking. Thus in turbulent fifteenth-century Florence (Hills), ambitious artist-intellectuals harnessed their emergent claims for the intellectual standing of artistic production to the promise of producing a peaceful and well-ordered society, while in a scientistic age (Dror), scientists seized hold of the discourse with a vengeance and attempted to explain psychology and the structure of mind in terms of physiology. Elias argued that the long-customary explanation of the control to which individual behaviour is subject in society as something essentially rational, founded

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solely on logical considerations, is fallacious. He showed that rationalization itself, and with it the more rational shaping and explanation of social taboos, is only one side of a transformation affecting the whole personality.14 To understand the control of conduct expected from members of society at any time, it is not enough to know the rational goals adduced to explain its commands and prohibitions. It is important also to trace the fears that induce individuals or social groups to seek control in this way. Thus in the experimental laboratories discussed by Dror, strong emotions, beyond the control of the experimenter, were regarded as threatening, potentially anti-scientific, indeed subversive of the whole scientific project. In brief, the experimenters, in spite of their own claims, were less interested in emotions per se than in processes of controlling them. Disorderly emotions were feared because they were seen as disrupting the productive capacities of the labour-force within capitalism, and as signs that the subordinate were appropriating unwarranted power. While the apparent object of the experiments was the emotions of the subject, what was in fact held at greatest stake were the emotions of the experimenters themselves. Thus experiments were regarded as failures when the emotions of the experimenters—even more than the emotions of their experimental subjects—were disrupted (when they lost control). The determinedly blind eye the experimenters turned towards their own emotions, the lengths to which they went to maintain apparent ‘neutrality and disinterestedness’, are crucial in this regard—and again relate to specific constructions of gendered and classed emotionality. Thus the conceptualization of emotions has played a key part in notions of individuality or the formation of a sense of self, and vice versa. Many of the thinkers presented here discuss how the refined or gentlemanly subject should correctly handle his, or more rarely her, emotions. Curing the soul of unhappiness (variously expressed as soul sickness, sadness, melancholy, depression, and so on) is a recurrent theme, explored in several chronologically divergent essays here (Richards, Hills, Heyd, Gärtner, Gouk). By the eighteenth century, anxieties circulating around social class provoked considerable discussion about the non-transparency of the relationship between interior feeling and bodily expression, social deceit or gentlemanly counterfeit, as Gärtner’s paper shows. Thus an important theme is how specific emotions are affected and developed (for example Pointon, Gärtner) in contradistinction to discourses on dispelling or overcoming unfavourable emotions, usually coupled with discussion of those antecedent behaviours or beliefs liable to lead to certain emotional states (Hills, Heyd). Gärtner explores the fundamentally Aristotelian idea that certain emotions are to be lightened or expurgated by first deliberately arousing them in a controlled manner, and that certain emotions may need intensifying in order to achieve the mean.15 By contrast, Dror suggests that the use of modern machines and technology both in pleasure parks and in scientific laboratories allowed utilitarian control of a subject’s emotions, within a specific range (determined by calculations of maximum profitability and aptness for study), to benefit capitalist production. While leisure apparently inverted the engines of work,

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it actually allowed the productive subject to return refreshed to greater productivity at work. In other words, people were everywhere, including at their leisure, becoming more controlled by machinery in relation to profitable and efficient production. Control of emotions made capitalist production more efficient. In general, discourses on emotions in the West have assumed a scientific (although not necessarily always rational) form, and have largely focused on the control and explanation of emotions, which are usually regarded as inherently problematic. It is striking that there has been altogether far less attention paid to stimulating them. Nevertheless, since Michel Foucault’s work on sexuality, it is no longer possible to speak of ‘repression’ in any straightforward sense. Foucault’s work radically subverted the customary acceptance of the notion of ‘repression’ as the individual actor controlling an untamed natural. His work focused particularly on sex and sexuality, but his conclusions must inform debates about emotions. Challenging the hypothesis that modern industrial societies ushered in an age of increased sexual repression, he argued that instead it witnessed a deployment quite different from the law. ‘[Sex] was a thing that was hidden, we are told. But what if, on the contrary, it was what, in a quite particular way, one confessed? Suppose the obligation to conceal it was but another aspect of the duty to admit to it.’16 Foucault saw the seventeenth century as the beginning of an age of repression emblematic of bourgeois societies.17 While new rules of propriety screened out certain words, statements were policed, enunciations carefully controlled; while it became much more strictly defined where and when it was permissible to talk about sex, ‘at the levels of discourses and their domains, practically the opposite phenomenon occurred’.18 Foucault identified as particularly significant the multiplication of discourse concerning sex in the field of the exercise of power itself: an institutional incitement to speak about it, and to do so more and more; ‘a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail’.19 For Foucault, sex, in our society, on a scale of several centuries, was something that was placed within an unrelenting system of confession (thereby transforming sex into discourse). Foucault’s insights may be applied to emotions. First, we suggest that emotions are socially and institutionally produced and amplified, even while—indeed, especially when—they appear to be socially silenced (thus problematizing any simple notion of ‘repression’); second, that this relationship of apparent repression is intimately related to the social institutions of power. Third, that it is to the mechanisms of power for inculcating new emotional and moral imperatives—rather than to moral ideas and ethical prohibitions—to which we need to turn in order to understand the history of emotions in the Western world since Christianity. Thus, if we apply Foucault’s important insights to the histories of emotions, it would be to declare that the new mechanisms of power for inculcating new emotional imperatives are of greater consequence than ideas about the emotions and emotional prohibitions. Rather than tracing the profile of emotions and emotionality (as some scholars have attempted to do), what is of central concern here are the

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mechanisms of power that effect those changes. In this book we have carefully included essays that illuminate those mechanisms, and we have chosen not to emphasize Freud and psychoanalytical perspectives which are concerned above all with tracing emotionality, and the archaeology of emotions from within. Instead, the essays chosen here delineate ways in which historical conditions have shaped the understanding and possibilities of emotions; and it is with its concern with those frameworks that this volume makes its principal contribution. Emotions as Representation Representation is crucial to any analysis of emotions, because emotions cannot be accessed in unmediated form. They are perceived only through their representation, and are articulated only through a range of mediated forms. For this reason, discussion about what emotions are, how they are ‘expressed’, communicated and understood have been central to the discourses within the visual and performing arts, as well as having ramifications within scientific medicine. Historical studies of specific emotions or their representations demonstrate that emotions have a strong cultural dimension.20 Furthermore, the inevitable dependence on representational codes for communicating emotional states means that culture is central not only to their cognition, understanding, articulation and expression but also to their policing, which is in turn intimately related to issues of cognition and articulation. For these reasons, we have isolated the theme of representation for close examination in relation to emotions. The assumption that emotions occur separately from their representation (expression) must be challenged (Richards’s example of the disappearance of melancholy being a case in point). Instead, we suppose that the historically-positioned subject experiences emotions in an historically contingent mode.21 This contingency can be especially well illustrated in the case of music, which since the eighteenth century has been regarded as a language particularly apt for articulating emotions. But this is not always how music has been understood: before 1500 it is hard to find anything written about music’s emotional effects beyond brief commonplaces. It was only in the sixteenth century that composers actually began to reflect on music’s emotional capacity, a period when they increasingly sought to recreate the powerful effects of ancient (especially Greek) music. The best-known results of these experiments to follow the ancient ideal of expressing the ‘affect’ or emotional character of the words are the development of monody (flexible solo song with chordal accompaniment), and the birth of opera around 1600.22 This transition from the symbolic to the mimetic, from the allegorical to the literal, which demanded an entirely new language of musical expression, has been described as the single most important development in the history of Western music.23 During the seventeenth century a comprehensive vocabulary for expressing the affections was developed, with opera being one of the principal sites where the representation of emotions in music was articulated. The first systematic account

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of the ‘doctrine of affections’ appeared in 1650, and by the middle of the eighteenth century it had become normal to consider music itself as an expressive language of the passions.24 Music could now take ‘its rightful place in the world of culture’, assuming a significance unknown in previous centuries and becoming an fashionable subject of discussion in salons, academies and the popular press.25 It was only at this point, when the conventions of musical expression had become entirely ‘natural’— at least to educated Europeans—that the medical profession began to investigate the mechanisms underlying music’s effects on the passions. In this instance we can see a clear example of scientific explanation following artistic representation, but the overall lesson to draw from this example is the need for closer attention to the historical interplay between these domains. The Organization of this Book We have organized the chapters in this book to emphasize its most signal themes, as indicated above. Part I (including this chapter) introduces the main problems of historicizing emotions; Part II addresses relationships between emotions and religious beliefs; Part III focuses on emotions and the body; Part IV deals with emotions and discipline. Although there are overlaps between these sections, this organization of material usefully emphasizes the most important themes the collection addresses. Peter Burke’s chapter asks whether a cultural history of the emotions is possible. He frames his consideration in terms of a rich historiographical survey which enables him to sketch out a typology of approaches to this challenging topic. It emerges that calls for a proper history of emotions have been made since the 1880s, and even in the 1980s professional historians were still lamenting the lack of progress in this area. Nevertheless, Burke identifies a number of English-speaking and Continental scholars who have addressed emotions, usefully drawing attention to work on specific emotions (for instance love, melancholy, and fear) as well as more ambitious projects (such as Norbert Elias on the civilizing process). Despite the comparative wealth of relevant literature, Burke concludes that overall it lacks analytical rigour, and a more robust and critically informed framework is desirable. Key problems confronting those who wish to develop such a framework include questions of terminology and translation, as well as the methods and forms of evidence to be deployed. Fundamentally, Burke argues that would-be historians of emotions must decide whether emotions are essentially ahistorical or historical in nature, since their choice will determine the kind of approach they take. Burke proceeds to distinguish a spectrum of five options ranging between these two extremes, of which he thinks the most innovative is the attempt to study fluctuations in the intensity of emotions at different periods. For Graham Richards, there is no dilemma facing historians, since he considers that the approach to emotions adopted within the discipline of psychology as biologically programmed responses to specific situations is simplistic and leads to a

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concentration on extreme emotions at the expense of more everyday or ambiguous feelings. Even though emotions may be real internal biological states, they are only given structure and meaning by way of public world phenomena, above all through language. To develop his argument, Richards differentiates between subjective emotional experience (common to all), emotional expression (some universal parameters, with cross-temporal and cross-cultural variation), and discourse about emotion; and it is the historical variability in how emotion is conceived and articulated that concerns him here. Two examples of variability that Richards notes are especially relevant to later chapters in this volume. First, the change in meaning of ‘emotion’ itself, as discussed earlier. Second, the changes within emotional language: new psychological vocabulary can be specifically mapped onto changing social and material conditions, which in turn suggests that times of change may also bring new emotions in their train. Richards presses for a more fine-grained approach that acknowledges the evaluative and moral frameworks in which people use emotions to build meaningful lives. In Part II, ‘Emotions and Religious Beliefs’, Michael Schwartz argues that late medieval and early Renaissance painting demands a conception of emotions that is radically different from that prevailing today. An assumption that reason is the highest mode of consciousness seriously limits an understanding of how affetti operated in early-modern European painting. Schwartz proposes that Giotto’s Lamentation (c.1305) and Piero della Francesca’s Pala Montefeltro (c.1472–4) were intended to depict not only personal but also transpersonal modes of emotional world-disclosure, thereby facilitating participation in the cosmic grief experienced at the death of Christ. Such images were created for wealthy patrons who considered mysticism—the surrender of the self to a collective spiritual witnessing—to be a valuable activity. Like other contemplative exercises, reflecting on devotional pictures was a well-established technique for moving one’s soul towards God in the early modern period. Since the eighteenth century, however, such practices have been portrayed as unintelligible or merely metaphorical. Being ‘out of one’s mind’ (in a state of ecstasy or union with the divine) or being ‘possessed’ (in a state of enthusiasm or divine inspiration) is seen as incompatible with rational conduct. Helen Hills focuses on Leon Battista Alberti’s discussion of the relationship between architecture and emotions—a relationship that has received little attention in discussions of visual representation and emotions. She suggests that Alberti saw architecture not only as fundamental to building a moral society but also as a means of achieving spiritual well-being and even salvation. In his De re aedificatoria (c.1450) Alberti makes bold claims about the relationships between architecture, the intellect, the right ordering of society, beauty and delight. Beautiful buildings delight the soul because the viewer recognizes their harmony, which, like that of music, is based on numbers whose beauty can only be experienced through the senses. Moreover, for those capable of being moved by them, such buildings can conjure the equilibrium of the soul, which evokes God. Thus for Alberti being moved by beauty was not a subjective experience but an absolute and intrinsically ethical one.

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Dalia Judovitz’s chapter explores how Georges de la Tour (1593–1652) affirmed the primacy of spiritual passions as vehicles for engagement with the divine, even at a time when Descartes privileged rational agency. She argues that La Tour’s representations of spiritual passion provide an eloquent counterpoint to contemporaneous philosophical attempts to bring both subjectivity and its affective regimes under the aegis of reason. Moreover, she shows how La Tour’s work undertakes this emphasis on spiritual insight pictorially, even while subjecting vision itself to critique. This is a consequence of La Tour’s determination to distinguish the representation of spiritual passion from its worldly counterparts: spiritual insight implies a radical passivity and transfiguration through the divine address. Against the emergent rationalist argument of Descartes that treats expression as a function of manipulation and mastery of emotions in order to enable self-definition and the appropriation of subjectivity, La Tour offers a conception of spiritual passion based on ecstatic dispossession and ultimate loss of self. Michael Heyd’s chapter investigates the emotional significance of some important changes in Calvinist theology that took place around 1700. His evidence, chiefly drawn from memoirs and personal writings of English Nonconformists of Reformed tendencies, indicates that Calvinist conceptions of Original Sin and associated feelings of guilt underwent considerable modification between sixteenth-century ‘Orthodoxy’ and eighteenth-century ‘Enlightenment’. For his seventeenth-century authors, Original Sin was an ontological state, but already by the late seventeenth century this sense of all-encompassing guilt was decreasing, and by the early eighteenth it was replaced by increasing concern with specific moral transgressions. Heyd, therefore, identifies a significant shift in the focus of guilt-feelings from the human condition to specific moral sins, a transformation that was linked to the rise of moral individualism and a sense of individual rational responsibility—the obverse of the process delineated in Judovitz’ chapter. Thus Heyd’s chapter usefully illuminates one of the crucial differences between Catholic (chiefly ontological and public) and Protestant (chiefly individual and private) sensibilities in relation to emotions and their governance. In Part III, ‘Emotions and the Body’, Christine Battersby’s paper interrogates claims within recent feminist accounts of the history of philosophy that the maleness of the Man of Reason lies deep in our philosophical tradition. Battersby argues that, although a range of textual strategies has been used to gender reason as male, those emotions deemed to be philosophically valuable have also been accredited to men. Arguing that the links between ‘reason’ and ‘maleness’ are not as tight as theorists of the feminine suppose, she points out that the association of maleness not only with reason but with specific forms of emotionality that are useful for philosophy necessarily blocks attempts to affirm the feminine through a defence of emotion or a simple opposition to reason. David Hume’s philosopher is not a man of reason, and his impulse to philosophy is born of violent passion. The crucial distinction is that the passion for philosophy is beneficial, while the passion of women’s superstitions

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is harmful. The Humean woman suffers from the wrong kind of melancholy and prefers the wrong kind of emotional violence (socially disruptive and delusional). The weakness and timidity of women attract them to superstition (linked to Catholicism) and enthusiasm (primarily linked to Quakerism), and in turn women encourage men to religion (and away from philosophy).26 Briefly tracing these concerns through Kant in the late eighteenth century and Nietzsche at the end of the nineteenth, Battersby shows that rationality and maleness have not been coincident— that emotions have been graded according to a ‘sexed typology’. Finally, she turns to the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), whose thought provides a possible avenue for a more adequate taxonomy of the passions that can focus on difference. Marcia Pointon concentrates on William Hogarth’s painting Sigismunda Mourning over the Heart of Guiscardo, Her Murdered Husband of 1759 to analyse how the treatment of emotions in history painting was imbued with religious, political and gendered assumptions, focused on the face and body. She demonstrates how Hogarth’s emphasis on female sexuality, erotic love, incestuous desire and cross-class sexual liaison disrupted the decorum of history painting, which was assumed to be concerned with universal moral values and the elevation of moral feelings. She argues that the painting’s hostile reception in mid-eighteenth-century Britain was occasioned by Hogarth’s adoption of a visual vocabulary from Catholic sacred art and its application to a profane subject, by his emphasis on the sexual content, and implicitly by his referencing the struggle over the body of the subject as citizen, all of which were profoundly disquieting. At issue was the measure by which expression could be authenticated and, by extension, how tragic female expression could and should be represented. Emotional authenticity is equally central to Christopher Gärtner’s chapter on lateeighteenth-century French debates on the emotional effects of music, which begins with two influential but also contradictory articles in the Encylopédie (c.1750 and 1765). This contradiction reflects the ambivalent legacy of Cartesian dualism: on the one hand, Jean-Jacques Rousseau—a composer as well as a philosopher—treated the passions as inherent in the soul, conceived of as an affective interiority that eluded theological and medical understandings. On the other, the physician Jean-Jacques Menuret de Chambaud confined his discussion of music’s effects to the body, explaining pleasurable responses to music in terms of the most recent scientific theories on nervous sensibility. Gärtner then turns to the debates on emotional authenticity that raged around the operas of Christoph Willibald Gluck in the late 1770s. This querelle, in which the new style of French opera developed by Gluck was contrasted with the music of his Italian rival Niccolò Piccini, marked the end of a century of literary dispute about the superiority (or otherwise) of French music compared to Italian styles.27 Rousseau himself was a leading figure in the querelle des bouffons sparked by the sensational success of the Italian comic opera in Paris during 1752. Already a passionate advocate of Italian composition, Rousseau launched a crusade for the reform of French music, which he saw as lacking in

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emotional expression. In keeping with his broader philosophical ideals, Rousseau looked back to man in his original state of nature as the model for a truly affective musical language.28 Gärtner shows how Gluck’s supporters believed the composer’s attempts to return music to its natural function were entirely successful, even as his critics saw it as an assault on civilized ears. Penelope Gouk finds a similar preoccupation with authenticity and nationhood, with nature and culture, in the musical writings of the Scottish physician John Gregory (1724–1773), but she emphasizes the degree to which social standing was central and not incidental to the framing of his discussion of emotions. For this reason, her chapter introduces Part IV, ‘Emotions and Discipline’. Gouk shows that Gregory’s social and intellectual position in Edinburgh society—in his various roles as physician, philosopher and highly successful musical entrepreneur— is fundamental to his formulation of ideas about the relationship between medicine and music. Gregory’s ideas about music’s effects on individuals and society were most fully articulated in his Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man with Those of the Animal World (1765), but they are also expressed in his medical lectures, which reflected the most advanced neurophysiological thinking among the European medical elite. Gregory identified the nervous system as the linkage between mind and body and also between self and society, with an individual’s well-being and ‘sensibility’ being dependent on the state of their nerves, which can be refined through music. Gregory’s scientific arguments for music’s capacity to alter nervous states (an effect that could not be observed directly) were reinforced by his anthropological and historical reflections on its capacity to alter social states, its most important function apparently being to establish harmonious relations between members of the body politic. Yet there is a tension at the heart of Gregory’s discourse on music’s affective power, since the lesson he draws from ancient Greek and Scottish examples is that true harmony only exists in a well-regulated society whose leaders are musically cultivated. Where such responsibility has been abdicated, sickness may ensue, as too much stimulation through music may result in nervous disorders, among individuals in particular, and the breakdown of a society’s moral health more generally. Charles Brotman’s essay considers the lasting impact of the evolutionary theories of Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin on late-nineteenth-century music theory, especially as related to the fields of aesthetics, anthropology and educational psychology. Drawing on examples such as Richard Wallaschek’s Primitive Music (1892) and Margaret Glyn’s Rhythmic Conception of Music (1907), Brotman shows how theorists were looking to rhythm (rather than harmony, as in Gregory’s case) as the authentic basis of musical, human and social development, buttressing their claims with the authority conferred by the natural sciences. Rhythm was regarded as a natural phenomenon exhibited by all moving bodies, and emotions were conceived as the consequence of nervous pulsations flowing through the body, subjectively experienced as oscillations in states of feeling. This evolutionary model contributed to new music-education programmes that were developed in early-twentieth-century

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America, while reinforcing prevailing ethnic and racial stereotypes. Brotman not only demonstrates the value of natural science to music theorists but also shows how scientists like Spencer and Darwin appealed to the natural power of music as a means of enhancing their own scientific authority at the expense of religion. He argues that their controversy over the origins of music, as either preverbal (Darwin) or arising from language (Spencer), was rooted in an effort to explain their own deeply-felt emotional responses to music without recourse to metaphysical and theological speculation. In short, the evolutionary conception of music served a number of interests in the nineteenth century and proved a powerful influence on thinking about music, rhythm and emotions well into the twentieth. In the final chapter, Otniel Dror investigates the transformation of emotions into objects of scientific knowledge during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, notably in the field of experimental psychology. Dror argues that this scientific activity did not occur separately from or in opposition to popular leisure culture of the time. Although apparently a site of dispassionate observation, the laboratory nevertheless participated in the construction of a new form of controlled emotional behaviour that was appropriate for late-Victorian industrialized society. Unsurprisingly, the laboratory proved a difficult place to study authentic emotions, and emotionologists took to gathering data in the field, often using themselves as experimental subjects. Among American researchers the football game was a particularly popular setting for trying to measure the effects of nervous excitement on body chemistry. Meanwhile, efforts were made to establish reliable techniques for inducing genuine emotions inside the laboratory itself, in spite of its artificiality. Dror shows how experimenters borrowed technologies from the realm of entertainment and art, even resorting to black humour and elaborately staged deceptions, in their quest to elicit emotions through strict protocols. At times, these bizarre efforts led to disorder, when the delicate balance between control and disruption was lost, and the emotions generated overwhelmed the laboratory. These scientific explorations of the boundaries between order and disorder were on a continuum with those enacted in the football stadium and amusement park, as legitimate sites for the channelling, controlling and release of newly disciplined emotions. These summaries indicate the degree to which representation is the central issue in understanding any historical account of emotions. Further work is clearly needed in many of the areas exposed here. Closer study of terminological changes, including regional and dialect variations, is vital. We need more careful attention to geographical and cultural variations at both micro- and macro-level and to their interrelationships, to sources beyond the well-worn or predictable texts that address emotions directly; and we need ever closer analysis of the reasons why change occurs when and how it does (how we can explain Hume’s approach in historical terms, for instance). Above all, we need greater attention to the relationships between discourses within disciplinary fields. This collection points towards a further relativizing of emotions, historically and culturally.

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Yet the problem has not always been approached in these terms. As Peter Burke’s chapter, which follows next, clearly reminds us, our concern with representation was preceded by courageous attempts to conceptualize and write histories of emotions themselves.

Notes 1

But see the Select Bibliography for some of the more important texts referred to in the essays presented here. 2 For example, ‘Reading the Early Modern Passions’, a special seminar series, was held at the Folger Institute,Washington, DC, in 1999–2000; in June 2001 a conference on the emotions was held in Manchester’s Department of Philosophy, and in the same month another conference on ‘Feelings and Emotions’ took place at the Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam. See also the examples given by Peter Burke, Chap. 2 below. 3 Anna Wierzbicka, Emotions across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and Universals (Cambridge, 1999), offers excellent case studies. For further valuable historical treatments of the emotions, see the material in n. 10 below and Peter Burke’s Chap. 2. 4 OED, s.v. ‘emotion’, 183. 5 Duden Herkunftswörterbuch: Etymologie der deutschen Sprache, 3rd edn. (Mannheim, 2001), 479. We are grateful to Christopher Gärtner for his assistance here. 6 Salvatore Battaglia, Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, s.v. ‘affetto’, 205. 7 OED, s.v. ‘affect’, 210–11. 8 See the discussion in Judovitz’s Chap. 6 below. 9 Duden Herkunftswörterbuch, 592. 10 For discussion of emotions as natural and/or universal, see e.g. Caroll E. Izard, Human Emotions (New York, 1977); Robert Plutchik, ‘Emotions, Evolution and Adaptive Processes’, in Magda B. Arnold, ed., Feelings and Emotions (New York and London, 1970), 3–24; Paul Ekman, Robert W. Levenson and Wallace V. Friesen, ‘Automatic Nervous System Activity Distinguishes among Emotions’, Science 221 (1983), 1208–10. 11 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London and New York, 1970); idem, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth, 1975); ‘Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault’, in Luther H. Martin et al., eds., Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst, MA, 1988), 9–49; Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, 3 vols. (New York, 1978–86); Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ in idem, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans., ed. and with an Introduction by Kurt H. Wolff (Glencoe, IL, 1950); Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, 1993). For a full discussion of notions of self, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, 1989). On emotion as culturally and socially constructed, see J. Averill, ‘A Constructivist View of Emotion’, in Robert Plutchik and Henry Kellerman, eds., Emotion: Theory, Research and Experience, 5 vols. (New York, 1980–90), I. 305–39; Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, Explaining Emotions (Berkeley, 1980); Michelle Z. Rosaldo, Knowledge and Passion: Ilongot Notions of Self and Social Life (Cambridge, 1980); Rom Harré, ed.,

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12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Penelope Gouk and Helen Hills The Social Construction of Emotions (Oxford, 1986); C. Lutz, ‘Emotion, Thought and Estrangement: Emotion as a Cultural Category’, Journal of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, 1 (1986), 287–309; Rom Harré and W. Gerrod Parrott, eds., The Emotions: Social, Cultural and Biological Dimensions (London, 1996); Peta Tait, Performing Emotions: Gender, Bodies, Spaces in Chekhov’s Drama and Stanislavski’s Theatre (Aldershot, 2002). This is fundamentally an Aristotelian view. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford and Cambridge, MA, 1994). Ibid., 518. Aristotle, Poetics, 6. 1449, 27–8 (where he gives his famous account of emotional catharsis as the function of tragedy). Foucault, History of Sexuality, I. 61. Ibid., I. 17. Ibid., I. 18. Ibid. E.g. Jean Delumeau, La Peur en Occident, XIVe–XVIIIe siècles: Une Cité assiégée (Paris, 1978); Alison M. Jaggar, ‘Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology’, in eadem and Susan R. Bordo, eds., Gender / Body / Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing (New Brunswick, NJ, 1989), 145–71. Derrida’s work on speech and writing, in which he reverses the conventional assumption that speech is prior to writing, is germane here. See e.g. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs (Evanston, IL, 1973). Claude V. Palisca, Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought (New Haven and London, 1985). The earliest extant opera is Jacopo Peri’s Euridice, staged during the festivities for the marriage of Henri IV of France and Maria de’ Medici in 1600. Craig Wright, The Maze and the Warrior: Symbols in Architecture, Theology, and Music (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2001), 205. See references in Chaps. 10 and 11 by Gärtner and Gouk. Enrico Fubini, ed., Music and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Europe: A Source Book (Chicago and London, 1994), 1. See Figure 11.1 in Chap. 11 below for Cook’s engraving (after Hogarth’s painting of 1762) of religious and superstitious enthusiasm. Fubini, Music and Culture, chap. 10; also see Gärtner’s Chap. 10 below. Relevant extracts from Rousseau’s Essai sur l’origine des langues (1781) are translated in Fubini, Music and Culture, 91–103.

Chapter 2

Is There a Cultural History of the Emotions? Peter Burke

The idea of an interdisciplinary conference on the history of the emotions appears to have been a timely one. There was a conference on ‘Representations of Emotions’ at Konstanz in 1997 and one on ‘The Historicity of Emotions’ in Jerusalem in 1998, while the annual conference on the Renaissance at Tours chose as its theme for 2000, ‘Les Larmes à la Renaissance’.1 In sociology too the study of emotions is a relatively new field.2 Beyond the academic world, one might note the increasing use of concepts such as ‘emotional literacy’ and ‘emotional ‘intelligence’, although these terms are often used rather loosely.3 All the same, it should be recognized that this is not the first time that emotions have been put on the historian’s agenda. The idea of epochs of feeling goes back to the age of Romanticism. Nietzsche complained in 1882 that ‘so far, everything that has given colour to existence still lacks a history . . . where could one find a history of love, of avarice, of envy, of conscience, of piety, or of cruelty?’ Sixty years later, Lucien Febvre made a similar point when he called for a history of la vie affective. It was the ‘next assignment’ for the President of the American Historical Association in 1958, and ‘still unborn’ according to Theodore Zeldin in 1982.4 That this lack is not a problem for historians alone is suggested by Heinz-Günter Vester, who claims that until recently emotions were ‘a black hole of the sciences’. Indeed, he and others describe our time as a ‘post emotional culture’, not in the sense of lacking feelings but of a culture ‘in which there is no adequate, no reliable system of representing and understanding emotion’.5 Is there a cultural history of the emotions? Has there been one? Could there be one? Should there be one? I began thinking about the possible answers to these questions some years ago while waiting for a flight back to Europe. The airplane was delayed. Appropriately, in the sense that this failure to fly has also been characteristic of historical psychology. I should like to reflect on the reasons why the history of the emotions has taken such a long time to take off. As we shall see, there are a number of obstacles on the runway.

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Historiography of the Emotions I should not wish to deny that there have been some fascinating contributions to this large topic from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards. When Nietzsche made his famous statement, he apparently forgot his friend Burckhardt’s work on Renaissance Italy and the place of envy, anger and love in its history. In fact Burckhardt was not a lonely pioneer in this respect, since nineteenth-century poets, novelists and playwrights such as Wilhelm Heinse, Stendhal, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset and Robert Browning also presented Renaissance Italy as an age of violent passions, including the passion for violence.6 In other words, the idea that the emotions have a history is not a new one. What is relatively new is the turn towards the subject on the part of professional historians. An early academic response to Nietzsche’s challenge came from the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga in his book on the late Middle Ages, first published in 1919 and soon translated into English and German, which discussed what he called ‘the passionate and violent soul of the age’, emotional oscillation and the lack of self-control.7 Huizinga’s conclusions were followed or applied to other periods by a number of later historians, including Martin Nilsson on Homeric Greece, Lucien Febvre on sixteenth-century France and Norbert Elias on medieval Europe.8 However, Elias did considerably more than follow Huizinga. He used Huizinga’s Autumn of the Middle Ages as a base for a social history of the emotions, especially attempts to control the emotions, as part of a wider study of the civilizing process that drew as much on Freud, especially Civilization and its Discontents, as it did on the Weber brothers, Alfred as well as Max.9 Particularly bold and original was his attempt to write a political history of the emotions, for example to interpret the rise of self-control among the upper classes as a consequence of political centralization. It was a great loss that for various reasons the work of Elias took a long time to be noticed by academic historians, even—or especially—in England, the country in which the author, a refugee from Hitler’s Germany, made his home. Today, the history of emotions is often associated with two leading Englishspeaking historians of the nineteenth century. Peter Gay turned from his first passion, the intellectual history of the Age of Reason, to the psychohistory of the loves and hates of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. Theodore Zeldin shifted from the politics of Napoleon III to what he calls (following the Goncourt brothers), the ‘intimate history’ of ambition, love, worry and other emotions in nineteenthcentury France, or more exactly, of conscious attitudes to those emotions. His book, commissioned for a series, the Oxford History of Modern Europe, was originally presented under the austere title of France, 1848–1945, but it was was repackaged in French for a wider public as ‘Histoire des passions françaises’, an example followed by the English publishers for the paperback version.10 So much for generalities. To turn now to specific passions or emotions. Love was studied in the 1930s by the Oxford critic C. S. Lewis, who claimed that it was ‘discovered or invented’ by French poets in the eleventh century. ‘Real changes in

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human sentiment are very rare . . . but I believe that they occur, and that this is one of them’. Denis de Rougemont made similar points at about the same time about the rise of passion in medieval Provence.11 A number of contributions to the history of love have been published recently, including topics such as the love of God, tenderness, the power of love, and love as discipline.12 Jealousy too has been a centre of attention, from ancient Greece to Renaissance Italy and from seventeenth-century France to the United States, thanks to the richness of literary representations of this emotion.13 If there is yet no history of joy, not even from the pen of C. S. Lewis, there have been a number of recent studies in the history of laughter, inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin and especially his work on Rabelais, published in 1965 but written much earlier.14 If there is no history of sadness, there is a cluster of monographs on melancholy, mainly by historians of literature and art.15 There have also been a number of studies of changes in the propensity to shed tears over the centuries. Most of them are recent, but the tradition goes back a hundred years to a scholar in comparative literature, Lucien Beszard.16 On the other hand, despite its role in Huizinga’s book on the late Middle Ages, fear only received monographic treatment sixty years later, notably by the French historian of religion Jean Delumeau, and more recently by contributors to a collection published by Manchester University Press.17 Anger was relatively neglected until it became the subject of a monograph on modern America by the ‘emotionologists’ (as they call themselves) Peter and Carol Stearns. Since then it has been studied in earlier periods as well.18 Boredom has been studied by more than one literary historian, with special reference to the nineteenth century when ennui became fashionable. The lack of earlier studies prompts the question whether people in earlier periods had enough free time to be bored, or whether it was news of the leisure activities to be found in modern cities that made people elsewhere conscious of a boredom they may well have been feeling earlier.19 That question in turn prompts a more general one about the possible predominance of specific emotions in particular historical periods, at least among certain groups. Unfortunately, the piecemeal nature of research on the history of emotions means that a serious answer will have to be postponed. Problems Given this now quite substantial body of empirical historical work, the reader may wonder why on earth I claimed that there has been a failure to take off. However, take-off should be defined not purely in quantitative terms but rather in terms of the capacity to respond to criticisms. Lewis, Febvre and Delumeau have all been accused of exaggerating what might be called the ‘psychological distance’ between our own time and the periods they studied.20 Anxious to avoid the anachronistic projection of modern emotions onto the past, and excited by the idea of major changes in what we

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might call, in the style of Michel Foucault, ‘emotional regimes’, all three scholars treated the particular period they studied as a ‘foreign country’, to repeat the now famous phrase of L. P. Hartley at the beginning of his novel The Go-Between. In practice, the critics argue, when the evidence is studied closely, the illusion of the emotional unity of an age, like that of its cultural unity, dissolves, so that it is more fruitful to frame comparisons and contrasts in terms of a greater or lesser emphasis on a particular emotion, rather than speaking of presence versus absence. Effective responses to these criticisms are still lacking. Returning to the general level, it may be useful to distinguish four main problems in writing the history of the emotions. They might be summed up in four short words: What? Who? Which? How? 1. What? The problem of the definition of emotions, otherwise known as passions, feelings, sentiments, sensibility, affections, affectivity, desires, drives or instincts. Here as elsewhere in the study of human behaviour, we find too many concepts, coined in different disciplines, jostling in the same intellectual space. What counts as an emotion? Is fraternity, for instance, an emotion? Is embarrassment? The psychologist Paul Ekman has claimed that it is possible to identify six basic emotions in all cultures: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust and surprise.21 Reacting against this view, the Polish-Australian linguist Anna Wierzbicka has stressed the difficulty of translating descriptions of emotions into other languages— and the danger of treating the folk categories of our own native language as if they were universal. This problem of the ‘translatability’ of emotions may be even more serious than that of their definition. 2. Who? A history of emotions needs to incorporate a sociology. Burckhardt, Huizinga, Febvre and other pioneers in this field often tried to reconstruct the emotional regime in a particular period as if it were homogeneous, without paying attention, or at any rate without paying much attention or sufficient attention, to variations between social groups: male and female, young and old, upper-class and lower-class, urban and rural, and so on. The situation has changed since their day, but not so much that this warning has become unnecessary. 3. Which? The problem of concepts, methods and theories—in particular, which psychology? Peter Gay, for example, who underwent a training analysis to prepare him for psychohistory, sticks close to Freud. It may sound cynical to comment that ‘he would do, wouldn’t he?’, but undergoing an analysis may result in transference and so lead to a non-rational attachment to one style of interpretation. An alternative to this existential choice is to do what historians usually do when confronted by a range of concepts from other disciplines, and choose the tools that seem to be useful for the topic with which they are engaged. Jean Delumeau, for instance, cites Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich, Anthony Storr and Thomas Szasz. Others prefer Jacques Lacan or R. D. Laing. These solutions in turn raise more problems. Are historians who lack the appropriate training fitted to make the difficult choice of a guide to the psyche on a more rational basis than personal preference? Since the specialists disagree, how can simple historians decide whom to follow?

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If they opt for eclecticism, how can they decide whether or not the theories on which they draw are compatible? 4. How? The problem of sources. How can a historian gain access to the passions of the dead? The kinds of document historians use most do not tell us very much about emotions. No wonder then that the field was more or less abandoned to specialists in literature.22 It is surely no coincidence that two of the pioneers in this field, Burckhardt and Huizinga, were also unusual in their day in their use of the testimony of art and literature. However these two scholars were impressionistic rather than systematic, in the sense that they drew on literature to illustrate readymade arguments rather than (say) sitting down to analyse the full emotional vocabulary of particular texts. In any case, Burckhardt and Huizinga did not confront the problem of the conventions of representation, conventions that change over time, not necessarily in step with the emotions represented. Conventions of this kind were studied by the German scholar Aby Warburg, though he in turn has been criticized, like his associate Fritz Saxl, for the circularity involved in his use of pictures as evidence of emotions. The problem, not unlike that of the so-called ‘hermeneutic circle’ in general, is that the modern viewer ‘reads’ the expression on a painted face as a sign of a particular emotion, anger for instance, and then argues that that particular emotion was prevalent in the period.23 As in the case of the hermeneutic circle, it is difficult to see what else a historian can do, except try to be as acutely aware as possible of the problem, and to try to match different kinds of source— visual and written, literary and documentary–rather than relying on a single type of evidence. For example, when attempting to reconstruct the history of emotions it is only prudent to supplement the more accessible evidence of literary texts with material from judicial archives, since trials for murder, for example, often include statements by witnesses about the anger expressed by the accused, while the records of divorce proceedings or suits for breach of promise of marriage have much to say about declarations of love or expectations of tenderness.24 This kind of evidence is of course biased towards cases in which personal relationships went wrong, but it may be supplemented by other kinds of document, wills for instance, that express the emotions associated with more harmonious relationships.25 Towards Solutions: Maximalism or Minimalism? One of the most impressive recent contributions to the history of the emotions is the work of a husband-and-wife team, Carol and Peter Stearns. Between them they have published a manifesto for historical ‘emotionology’, monographs on anger and jealousy, and a more general study of changes in emotional ‘style’ in the USA in the early twentieth century, American Cool, arguing the case for changes in the emphasis given to emotions in general in different periods, as well as changes in the control or ‘management’ of emotions and in the relative importance of specific emotions.26

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At this point the recent book published by William Reddy, a historian of France who has proposed what he calls a new ‘framework’ for the history of emotions, demands attention.27 Drawing on recent studies in both the anthropology and the psychology of the emotions, attempting to bridge the gap between them, using each discipline to criticise the other, and faulting both for their lack of concern with change over time, Reddy presents his framework as a cluster of connected concepts. Like Carol and Peter Stearns, he emphasizes emotional ‘management’ at both an individual and a social level.28 Linked to this notion is his idea of an ‘emotional regime’. The political phrasing is not purely metaphorical, since it is argued, in the tradition of Elias, that ‘Any enduring political regime must establish as an essential element a normative order for emotions’.’29 Drawing on the work of the philosopher J. L. Austin, as well as on the anthropologists inspired by him, Reddy discusses the language of emotions in terms of ‘performative utterances’, which do not so much describe situations as bring them about. A declaration of love, for instance, may be interpreted as a strategy to encourage, amplify or even transform the feelings of the beloved.30 Standing back from this fascinating recent work, the implications of which have still to be worked out, I should like to suggest that historians of the emotions face a basic dilemma. They have to decide whether they are maximalists or minimalists, in other words whether they believe in the essential historicity or non-historicity of emotions. Either it is the case that specific emotions, or the whole package of emotions in a given culture (the local ‘culture of emotions’, as Stearns and Stearns call it), are subject to fundamental changes over time; or that they remain essentially the same in different periods. Scholars who choose the ‘minimalist’ horn of the dilemma limit themselves to the study of conscious attitudes to the emotions. They write sound intellectual history, but it is not really the history of the emotions. They have not really taken off, although it is always possible for them to say that failure to take off is better than crashing. On the other side, the scholars who choose the ‘maximalist’ option are more innovative. The price they pay is that their conclusions are much more difficult to justify. Evidence of conscious attitudes to anger, fear, love and so on are not difficult to unearth from surviving documents, but conclusions about fundamental changes over the long term are necessarily much more speculative. How, for instance, could we possibly know that the late Roman world was passing through an ‘age of anxiety’? It might be argued that from our point of view, Romans seemed to have even more to be anxious about than usual, but the measurement of past levels of anxiety is impossible. Of course scholars do not cluster around the extreme minimalist and maximalist positions. It is possible to be more precise and to distinguish a spectrum of options, more or less ambitious, more or less experimental, more or less distant from ‘normal history’. Let me briefly distinguish five approaches in order of increasing innovation. 1. The history of attitudes to ‘the’ emotions. This is essentially a variety of intellectual history, focusing on literary texts of various kinds (poems, novels or the treatises of moralists) and analysing the vocabulary and the categories employed,

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the rise of the term ‘tendre’ in seventeenth-century France, for instance, or the term ‘Zärtlichkeit’ in eighteenth-century Germany.31 The risk of essentialism, of assuming that emotions are fixed although attitudes to them change, is particularly great in the case of this approach, although the danger might be avoided. 2. The history of interest in emotions. It might be argued, for instance, that more interest was taken in emotions in seventeenth-century Europe than before, part of a more general rise of what we call ‘psychology’ (the term psychologia goes back to 1575 and was used to describe the study of the soul). This was a time when treatises on the ‘passions’, as they were generally called, multiplied. The most famous was that of Descartes, Les Passions de l’Âme (1644), but other examples are not difficult to find, including in the case of England Edwards Reynolds, A Treatise on the Passions (1640), and Walter Charleton, Natural History of the Passions (1674).32 An interest in describing and analysing emotions was also to be found in a variety of literary genres at this time, including books of aphorisms such as Baltasar Gracián’s Oráculo (1647) and the Duc de La Rochefoucauld’s Maximes (1665), and romances, notably Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves. Painters such as Charles Lebrun and composers such as Claudio Monteverdi were more interested than their predecessors in the representation of emotions in different media of communication. Even the moral criticisms of plays and romances for their vivid representations and consequent stimulation of dangerous passions fit into this scheme, in the sense of showing a more acute awareness of emotions than before. Given this rise of interest in the seventeenth century, historians face the problem of distinguishing it from the better-known rise of ‘sentiment’ or ‘sentimentalism’, the so-called ‘affective revolution’ of the eighteenth century. This might be done in terms of a shift from a relative distrust of the emotions to a greater emphasis on their positive aspects. 33 3. More ambitious are the historians who focus on the changing objects of emotions, as Jean Delumeau did in the case of fear in the sixteenth century, discussing the sea, the dark, the Turks and so on. Delumeau contrasts these preoccupations with later objects of fear, discouraging essentialism and encouraging a view of emotions as historically specific and shifting rather than natural and universal. The idea of ‘object’ might be widened to include the occasions and contexts of emotions. In the case of anger, for instance, the duel might be discussed as an institutionalized outlet for feelings of aggression. Norbert Elias discussed duelling in late nineteenth-century Germany from this point of view in one of his last books, emphasizing the ritualization of aggression but also the palpable violence that remained.34 4. Still more ambitious is the concern with changing attempts to control or manage the emotions, an approach that is followed in one way or another in a number of chapters in this volume. In the 1930s, Norbert Elias was already discussing control of the emotions (Affektbeherrschung) and the idea of the changing ‘threshold’. Since his day the secondary literature on ‘discipline’, whether stoic, Catholic or puritan, has increased at an almost alarming rate.35 The seventeenth century was important

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here too, whether it was a new awareness of emotions that prompted attempts to control them or the other way round. Central to this approach is the idea of rules or codes. Rougemont was already concerned with codes of love or rules of conduct in the twelfth century, at the same time that Elias was developing his ideas about emotional control. Stearns and Stearns have similar preoccupations, although they prefer the milder language of ‘management’ or ‘restraint’, distinguishing the ‘selective restraint’ of particular emotions from an ‘overall restraint’. The psychologists Ekman and Friesen have analysed what they call general rules for ‘affective display’, and James Averill has suggested that ‘Like games and languages, emotions are both constituted and regulated by rules’.’36 However, it is the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann who has made the concept of Codierung most central to the study of emotions and develops it furthest. In my view, Luhmann’s contribution is the most important since that of Norbert Elias: the two German sociologists have helped construct a history of the emotions that is both cultural and social. Two points about Luhmann’s work deserve particular emphasis in this context. The first is his notion of Semantik. A systems theorist rather than a structuralist, Luhmann is concerned all the same with signs of emotions and even with emotions as signs. His notion of code is not limited to social conventions but embraces the idea of a code as a medium for messages. The second important point is that in Luhmann’s work, subcultures such as classes and genders may have their own rules. In this way he helps historians to abandon the traditional assumption of the emotional climate of a particular period as it is found, for instance, in the work of Burckhardt and Huizinga.37 5. Most ambitious of all is the attempt to study fluctuations in the intensity of emotions at different periods. Some of the studies on the rise of sentiment in the eighteenth century interpret this rise as a change in the intensity of feelings, not just a change in vocabulary, awareness or code. To illustrate the problems raised by this kind of statement, let us return to the claim that people were more anxious in certain historical periods than in others. The classicist E. H. Dodds wrote a brilliant book about the fourth century AD as an ‘age of anxiety’, a phrase he borrowed from his friend the poet W. H. Auden.38 Delumeau has written about what he calls ‘la grande montée de l’angoisse eschatologique’ from the late fourteenth century onwards, while William Bouwsma, aware as he is of the difficulty of generalizing in this way, calls the fourteenth and succeeding centuries ‘an age of unusual anxiety’.39 Zeldin too put forward an argument of this kind, suggesting that anxiety may have increased in the later nineteenth century because traditional supports for emotional security had collapsed (Ulrich Beck has made a similar point about anxiety today).40 The obvious problem here is that of measuring the intensity of emotion in the past. There is also a danger of assuming a simple polarity between ‘their’ violence or spontaneity and ‘our’ control, a polarity particularly visible in the work of early-twentieth-century scholars such as Nilsson, Huizinga and Elias.

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A maximalist approach to the emotions assumes major differences between people from cultures that are far apart in time as in space. This raises the fundamental question whether there are universal emotions or whether particular cultures have their own emotional patterns. As we have seen, a number of the grander claims for the emotional specificity of particular periods may be or have been deflated. The multiplicity of ages of anxiety, for instance, in the fourth, fourteenth, nineteenth, twentieth and other centuries leaves us wondering what ages cannot be characterized in this way. At the same time, however, some of the grander claims for universality have also been under attack. The linguistic turn is associated with the idea of the social or discursive construction of emotions.41 The power of words to affect our feelings has been known at least as long as St Augustine, who declared in his Confessions (Book 3, chap. 1) that he was in love with the idea of love. Recently, however, this phenomenon has received closer attention than usual. For example, the comparative studies of Anna Wierzbicka argue powerfully that ‘every language imposes its own classification upon human emotional experience’.42 Ronald de Sousa goes further still by claiming, ‘Which emotions we feel is partly conditioned by which emotions we express. And that, in turn, is largely a matter of which emotions are sanctioned’.’43 Theatrical metaphors pervade recent discussions of emotions in a manner reminiscent of Erving Goffman’s analyses of everyday life in the 1950s and 1960s. Where Harré speaks of the ‘emotional repertoire’ and Sousa of ‘paradigm scenarios’, Wierzbicka refers to what she calls the ‘emotional scripts’ available in a given culture, an idea parallel to that of ‘code’. She also talks about of emotional ‘scenarios’, in other words of associations between situations and emotions.44 The same point has been expressed in the language of performance, already discussed above. As language changes over time, little by little, so do classifications, scenarios, scripts, repertoires and consequently the experiences themselves. Harré has described acedia, for instance, as ‘an extinct emotion’ and melancholy (exaggerating a little, some of us may feel) as ‘an obsolete mood’.45 The challenge for historians is to explain these changes. Despite the problems inherent in constructionism, in this area as in many others (construction by whom, out of what, under what constraints and so on), this linguistic approach to emotions is one of the most promising available, and the immediate way forward is probably in this direction. There is an obvious parallel with the debate on cultural variation in colour-perception. In both cases, different languages offer approximately parallel classifications, but only approximately, encouraging crosscultural misunderstandings. The perception of colour is not a linguistic or cultural fact, but the establishment of categories or boundaries within a continuum surely is. So, to conclude, a relatively modest, viable cultural history of emotions or cultures of emotion is a history of nuances, of moving frontiers between emotions, of changes in the balance between them, of changes in their management, the encouragement or discouragement of their expression, and of changing

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associations between specific emotions and different social groups, objects or situations. Any given nuance might be brushed aside as relatively trivial. But taken together, these nuances matter a great deal.

Notes This essay was first given as a paper to the graduate seminar on ‘The Passions and the Senses’ in Cambridge, and, with revisions, to open the conference ‘Representing Emotions’, 2001. My thanks to the audiences on both occasions for their questions and comments and to the editors of this volume for their comments on the draft. 1

The 1997 conference proceedings have been published as Jürgen Schlaeger and Gesa Stedman, eds., Representations of Emotions (Tübingen, 1999). 2 Cas Wouters, ‘The Study of Emotions as a New Field’, Theory, Culture and Society, 9 (1992), 229–52. 3 The phrase ‘emotional intelligence’ was coined by Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (New York, 1995). 4 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘The Gay Science’ [1882], in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1976), 94; Lucien Febvre, ‘Sensibility and History’ [1941], in idem, A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre, ed. Peter Burke, trans. Keith Folca (New York, 1973), 27–43; William Leonard Langer, ‘The Next Assignment’, American Historical Review, 63 (1958), 283–304; Theodore Zeldin, ‘Personal History and the History of the Emotions’, Journal of Social History, 15 (1982), 339–47. 5 Heinz-Günter Vester, Emotion, Gesellschaft und Kultur: Grundzüge einer soziologischen Theorie der Emotionen, (Opladen, 1991); idem, ‘Emotions in a Postemotional Culture’, in Schlaeger and Stedman, eds., Representations of Emotions, 19–27. Also see Stjepan G. Me˘strovi c´ , Postemotional Society (London, 1997). 6 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy [1860], trans. Samuel G. C. Middlemore, (Harmondsworth, 1990); Wallace Klippert Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought (Cambridge, MA, 1948), 128–32. 7 Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages [1919], trans. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago, 1996). 8 Martin P. Nilsson, ‘Götter und Psychologie bei Homer’, Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, 22 (1925), 363–90; Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process [1939], trans. Edmund Jephcott, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1981–2); Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century [1942], trans. Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge, MA, 1982); cf. Robert Mandrou, Introduction to Modern France, 1500–1640: An Essay in Historical Psychology [1961], trans. R. E. Hallmark (London, 1975), a book based on Febvre’s notes. 9 Johan Goudsblom, ‘Zum Hintergrund der Zivilisationstheorie von Norbert Elias: Das Verhältnis zu Huizinga, Weber und Freud’, in Peter Gleichmann et al., eds., Macht und Zivilisation (Frankfurt, 1984), 129–47. 10 Peter Gay, The Education of the Senses (New York, 1984); idem, The Tender Passion (New York, 1986); idem, The Cultivation of Hatred (New York, 1996); Theodore Zeldin, France, 1848–1945, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1973–7).

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11 C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford, 1936); Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World [1936], trans. Montgomery Belgion (Princeton, 1986). For a critique of Lewis, see Peter Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of the European Love-Lyric, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1965–6). 12 Jean Leclerq, Monks and Love in Twelfth-Century France (Oxford, 1979); Gay, Tender Passion; Maurice Daumas, La Tendresse amoureuse (Paris, 1996); Gabrielle Houbre, La Discipline de l’amour (Paris, 1997); Arne Jarrick, Karlekens makt (Stockholm, 1997). 13 Peter Walcot, Envy and the Greeks (Warminster, 1978); Madeleine Bertaud, La Jalousie dans la littérature française au temps de Louis XIII: Analyse littéraire et histoire des mentalités (Geneva, 1981); Paolo Cherchi, ‘A Dossier for the Study of Jealousy’, in Donald A. Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella, eds., Eros and Anteros (Ottawa, 1992), 123–34. Cf. the sociological analysis by Helmut Schoeck, Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour, trans. Michael Glenny and Betty Ross (London, 1969). 14 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World [1965], trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA, 1968); Philippe Ménard, Le Rire et le sourire dans le roman courtois en France au Moyen Âge (Paris, 1969); Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg, eds., A Cultural History of Humour: From Antiquity to the Present Day (Cambridge, 1997); Rudolf M. Dekker, Humour in Dutch Culture of the Golden Age [1997], trans. idem (Basingstoke, 2001); Guy Halsall, ed., Humour, History and Politics in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2002). 15 Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady (East Lansing, MI, 1951); Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (London, 1964). 16 Lucien Beszard, Les Larmes dans l’épopée (Halle, 1903); William A. Christian, jr, ‘Provoked Religious Weeping in Early Modern Spain’, in John Davis, ed., Religious Organization and Religious Experience (London, 1982), 97–114; Hélène Monsacré, Les Larmes d’Achille (Paris, 1984); Anne Vincent-Buffault, A History of Tears: Sensibility and Sentimentality in France, trans. Teresa Bridgman (London, 1986); Tom Lutz, Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears (New York, 1999); Piroska Nagy, Le Don des larmes au Moyen Âge (Paris, 2000). 17 Jean Delumeau, La Peur en Occident, XIVe–XVIIIe siècles: Une cité assiégée (Paris, 1978); William G. Naphy and Penny Roberts, eds., Fear in Early Modern Society (Manchester, 1997); compare Zeldin, France, 1848–1945, II. 823–4, 844–53. 18 Carol Zisowitz Stearns and Peter N. Stearns, Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America’s History (Chicago, 1986); see also Peter N. Stearns and Carol Zisowitz Stearns, ‘Emotionology’, American Historical Review, 90 (1986), 813–36; Maureen Flynn, ‘Taming Anger’s Daughters: New Treatment for Emotional Problems in Renaissance Spain’, Renaissance Quarterly, 51 (1998), 864–86; Barbara H. Rosenwein, ed., Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY, 1998). 19 Guy Sagnes, L’Ennui dans la littérature française de Flaubert à Laforgue, 1848–1884 (Paris, 1969); Zeldin, France, 1848–1945, II. 854–7; Patricia Meyer Spacks, Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago, 1995); on leisure and boredom, see Peter Burke, ‘The Invention of Leisure in Early Modern Europe’, Past and Present, 146 (1995), 141. 20 Dronke, Medieval Latin; Jean Frappier, ‘Sur Lucien Febvre et son interpretation psychologique du 16e siècle’, Mélanges Lebègue (Paris, 1969), 19–31; Stuart Clark, ‘French Historians and Early Modern Popular Culture’, Past and Present, 100 (1983), 62–99.

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21 Paul Ekman and Richard J. Davidson, eds., The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental Questions (New York, 1994). 22 Beszard, Les Larmes dans l’épopée; Lewis, Allegory of Love; Bakhtin, Rabelais; Babb, Elizabethan Malady; Bertaud, La Jalousie. 23 Carlo Ginzburg, ‘From Aby Warburg to E. H. Gombrich’ [1966], in Myths, Emblems, Clues, trans. John A. Tedeschi (London, 1990), 17–59. 24 Examples of historians working with such material are Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives (Stanford, CA, 1987); Lawrence Stone, Road to Divorce (Oxford, 1990). 25 William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for a History of Emotions (Cambridge, 2001), 257–314; cf. Fay Bound, Emotions in Early Modern England: Performativity and Practice at the Church Courts of York, 1660–1760 (PhD thesis, Univ. of York, 2000). 26 Stearns and Stearns, Anger and ‘Emotionology’, also Peter N. Stearns, Jealousy: The Evolution of an Emotion in American History (New York, 1989), and idem, American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style (New York, 1994). 27 Reddy, Navigation of Feeling. This book was published after the Manchester conference at which a preliminary version of this chapter was delivered as the opening paper, but I have tried to take account of its arguments in the pages that follow. 28 On the concept of emotion management, Stearns and Stearns, Anger; Unni Wikan, Managing Turbulent Hearts: A Balinese Formula for Living (Chicago, 1990); Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 125–8. 29 Ibid., 124. 30 Ibid., 51, 59, 96–111; compare the emphasis on performance and ‘emotional display’ in Victor Crapanzano, Hermes’ Dilemma and Hamlet’s Desire: On the Epistemology of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 229–38; Donald L. Brenneis, ‘Caught in the Web of Words: Performing Theory in a Fiji Indian Community’, in James A. Russell et al., eds., Everyday Conceptions of Emotion (Dordrecht, 1995), 241–50; Judith T. Irvine (1995), ‘A Sociolinguistic Approach to Emotions’, in Everyday Conceptions, 251–65; Bound, Emotions in Early Modern England. 31 The last example is discussed in Nikolaus Wegmann, Diskurse der Empfindsamkeit: Zur Geschichte eines Gefühls in der Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1988), 40–54. 32 Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford, 1997); Marion Müller, ‘Emotion Matters in Early Modern England’, in Schlaeger and Stedman, eds., Representations of Emotions, 57–75. 33 Claudia Henn-Schmölders, ‘Ars conversationis’, Arcadia 10 (1975), 16–73; James, Passion and Action; Michael Bell, ‘The Cult of Sentiment and the Culture of Feeling’, in Schlaeger and Stedman, eds., Representations of Emotions, 87–98; Lynn Avery Hunt and Margaret C. Jacob, ‘The Affective Revolution in 1790s Britain’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 34 (2001), 491–521; Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 141–210. 34 Stearns and Stearns, Anger; Gay, Tender Passion; Norbert Elias, The Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries [1989], trans. Eric Dunning and Stephen Mennell (Cambridge, 1996), 44–119, esp.106–10. 35 Two classics in the field are Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth, 1975), and Gerhard Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, trans. David McLintock (Cambridge, 1982). 36 Ekman and Friesen, eds., Nature of Emotion, 75–8; James Averill, ‘Emotions Becoming and Unbecoming’, ibid., 265–72.

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37 Niklas Luhmann, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones (Stanford, CA, 1982). 38 E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety: Some Aspects of Religious Experience from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine (Cambridge, 1965). 39 Delumeau, La Peur en Occident; cf. William J. Bouwsma, ‘Anxiety and the Formation of Early Modern Culture’ [1980], in idem, A Usable Past (Berkeley, 1990), 159. 40 Zeldin, France, 1848–1945, II. 823; Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter (London, 1992). 41 Rom Harré, ‘An Outline of the Social Constructionist Viewpoint’, in idem, ed., The Social Construction of Emotions (Oxford, 1986), 2–14. For a critique, see Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 35–50. 42 Anna Wierzbicka, Emotions across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and Universals (Cambridge, 1999). 43 Ronald de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge, MA, 1987), 256. 44 On ‘scripts’, Wierzbicka, Emotions, 72–3; Richard A. Shweder, ‘Emotion as an Interpretive System’, in Ekman and Davidson, eds., Nature of Emotion, 38; on ‘scenarios’, Sousa, Rationality of Emotion, 182–4. 45 Harré, ‘Social Constructionist Viewpoint’, 220–24.

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CHAPTER 3

Emotions into Words— or Words into Emotions? Graham Richards

The clichéd injuction ‘get in touch with your feelings’ seems to imply that our emotions are self-evident realities unhealthily masked by inflated intellectual defences. Without denying either that unacknowledged emotions may occur, or that we may fail fully to experience our emotions, this notion that they exist as unproblematic ‘natural kinds’, simply requiring identification, is quite misleading. As knowable phenomena, emotions are structured and given meaning in terms of public-world phenomena and, more immediately, the language used for referring to this public world. Something internal is of course happening. The challenge is to give meaning and structure to what are in themselves fundamentally incoherent biological states. Even their pleasantness or unpleasantness may not be entirely self-evident. The role of language is particularly apparent in the way in which emotions have become medicalized and psychologized in modern Western cultures (see Table 3.1 for some of the more obvious examples). This process began in the eighteenth century, when for example melancholy, by then no longer a medical term, became remedicalized as ‘melancholia’, and the physiological term ‘irritable’ rapidly became assimilated into psychological language, enabling people to become irritable for the first time.1 Three aspects of the topic need to be differentiated: subjective emotional experience, emotional expression and communication, and discourse about emotion. While the primary focus of this paper is the last of these, some remarks on the others are necessary in order to orient our concerns. As far as subjective emotional experience is concerned, it should immediately be stressed that this resists easy or adequate verbalization. It is frequently hard to select the right emotion-label to pin on what we are actually feeling. None the less, the available verbal categories and meanings of emotions do serve to structure this subjective experience and help determine its character. Emotional expression and communication, the second aspect of our topic, seems to be basically behavioural—kisses and tears, hugs and grimaces, screams and sighs. On currently available evidence, we may reliably conclude that there are some fairly clear universal parameters within which variation at this level occurs.2 Even so, there is obviously considerable cross-cultural and cross-temporal

50 Table 3.1

Graham Richards Traditional versus Psycho-medical Emotion language

TRADITIONAL anger boredom despair emotion excitement fascination fear grief happy loneliness love melancholy moody worried, fretful, anxious

PSYCHO-MEDICAL negativity attention deficit severe depression affect (positive, flat, negative) arousal fixation aversion, phobia, avoidance separation anxiety adjusted alienation attachment depression cyclothymic anxiety, stress

variation, reflecting both culture-specific categories and meanings of emotions and norms of etiquette.3 Also, emotional expression and communication is frequently itself verbal in any case (is any verbal communication entirely devoid, in John Austin’s terms, of some emotional ‘illocutionary’ or ‘perlocutionary’ force?).4 Thus when emotional expression involves emotion-language as such, as well as being a matter of intonation, then again this language will play some determining role. Turning now to discourse about emotion, our main concern, it is this that enables us to identify, analyse and generally render meaningful the phenomena that are classified as ‘emotions’ within prevailing systems of discourse. Of course, even the category ‘emotion’ is not universal, being absent in orthodox Buddhist discourse for example.5 The terms in which this is conducted are not something we invent as individuals but are a received repertoire, although we may occasionally introduce innovations. Even so, these are necessarily collectively achieved, since individual innovations require the endorsement of others to have any effect, and the successful innovator has no control over what is subsequently done with them. The scientific study of emotions falls primarily within the province of Psychology.6 However, the discipline’s traditional approaches to the topic seem flawed in several respects.7 One is the failure of Psychology to provide an account that can provide emotional consolation, notwithstanding the fact that this is one of the major cultural demands on the discipline in secular societies. I will return to this briefly towards the end, since it is slightly tangential to the issues with which I am immediately concerned here; none the less it is this demand that ultimately gives the entire enquiry into emotion its point. For the moment we need to spend a little time on some other flaws, since they signify psychologists’ own unreflective acceptance of more widespread assumptions. Psychological attention invariably concentrates on

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a few extreme emotions such as fear, anger and love, providing quite a false picture of our emotional lives. I certainly cannot recall the last time I fled in terror. In fact, such extreme emotions are quite untypical of our quotidian emotional lives, which (notwithstanding temperamental variations) usually oscillate around such emotions as irritation, boredom, impatience, mild amusement, transient frustration, resignation, apprehension, nostalgia, chagrin, contentment, affection, slight feelings of envy and vague dissatisfaction—which are unaccompanied by flushing, trembling, a racing pulse or loss of bowel control. Whether it is its cause or its outcome, this bias reflects the fact that psychologists have principally been concerned with the relationship between emotion and the physiological processes associated with it. This has led them to ask questions about the manner in which environmental stimuli could result in the dramatic physiological changes accompanying extreme emotions, and the precise role that ‘psychological’ processes play in these changes. For the most part, psychologists have been preoccupied with identifying, in a fundamentally dualistic fashion, whether the physical or the psychological has causal priority, a theme to which we shall return later. This has reinforced the tendency of psychologists to treat emotions as discrete, distinct events, when in truth we live, for most of the time, in a continuous and constantly-shifting emotional atmosphere that infuses all our actions and experience. Even Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) saw emotions as episodes in which we choose to quasi-magically transform our view of the world, altering our mode of being, in contrast to a normal unemotional state in which we see the world realistically. ‘Emotions occur when the world becomes too difficult. . . . we transform the world by magic’.8 While Sartre is surely correct that sometimes we choose to have an emotion, judging, as it were, that the situation entitles us to indulge ourselves, this is the exception rather than the rule. It is also unclear quite where the boundaries of ‘emotion’ are to be drawn. Is ‘curiosity’ an emotion? Or only so when qualified as ‘avid’? Or ‘boredom’ (as opposed to the clearly emotional French ennui)? There is, moreover, a clutch of Psychologically neglected phenomena that have a rather problematic status: modesty, sulking, vanity, rudeness, naivety, boorishness, pomposity, impatience and so on. While referring to people’s demeanour from an observer’s point of view, they clearly, as social psychologists would say, ‘attribute’ some kind of internal emotional state to the person so described, while also implicitly expressing the emotional reactions raised in the observer. They are not, however, qualities we ascribe to ourselves (except perhaps retrospectively). Despite the fact that such terms pertain to the very nature of the interpersonal interactions by which emotions are identified, mediated and generated, the phenomena to which they refer have been almost totally disregarded by Psychology. William James (1842–1910), and in more detail William McDougall (1871–1938), mapped the emotions onto instincts.9 They argued that emotions were the psychological concomitants of instinctive behavioural categories, generally occurring either when the behavioural implementation of such instincts was frustrated or as a

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result of the behaviour itself rather than its motivation (the famous ‘James–Lange’ theory of emotion—‘we are afraid because we run’).10 There are numerous difficulties with this, as has long been acknowledged. For example, neither feeling physically hungry nor lack of shelter for the night, two classic instinctively-rooted needs, are recognized as related to distinct emotional states. Nor do the kinds of mild everyday emotional state mentioned earlier easily correlate with ‘instincts’ even if we accept this ‘instinct’ concept. Psychologists have also invoked other causes of emotion, particularly ‘arousal’ and ‘frustration’.11 Again these are of limited applicability. Non-aroused states of contentment, self-satisfaction and serenity are also emotions. Frustration, typically used to explain anger and aggression, merely raises the ‘chicken-and-egg’ paradox: surely people become frustrated because they are angry as much as the other way round. And while ‘frustration’ is in any case an emotion itself, it is not relevant to all categories of aggression. Psychology’s fixation on extreme and simple emotions is somewhat analogous to the fixation on male sacrifice in battle of evolutionary altruism-theorists, variously working within Sociobiology and more recently Evolutionary Psychology. In both cases the extreme has been taken as representative. This is a little odd from the perspective of Cognitive Psychology, since according to cognitivist accounts of categorization we usually take the modal case as representative—thus sparrows are more typical of the category ‘birds’ than emus. In pursuing this tack, psychologists have lost sight of the sheer scale, and indeed enigmatic nature, of ‘emotion’ when taken in its totality. They have failed to confront the extent to which emotions (or emotionality) are, as a knowable topic for discussion, the product of a complex and continuous process of verbal structuring, interpretation and categorization. In sum, as noted at the outset, emotions are not some natural phenomena we can see or experience ‘objectively’, as they ‘really are’, if only we would cast reason aside and ‘get in touch with our feelings’. We might pursue a little further this meditation on the nature of emotion and how we actually talk about it, in order to raise to awareness other aspects of the topic that are, if implicit knowledge in most cases, often ignored (not least by psychologists). Consider the concept of ‘mixed emotions’. This itself suggests that emotions are not mutually exclusive; surely a major difficulty if one is seeking to map them reductively onto emotion-specific biological states. When someone is described simply as ‘emotional’ this often implies that the specific emotion they are experiencing or expressing is unclear (though other games may be being played as well). This is phenomenologically true also—anger, frustration, self-pity and a sense of cosmic tragedy may, in my experience, all be intertwined; while in a milder context, boredom, resentment and slight irritability might be fused together. In any case, emotion-names are a somewhat makeshift resource and do not always refer to the same thing. In the case of ‘worry’ or ‘anxiety’ the object or content of the emotion (or indeed the absence of a specifiable object or content, often described as ‘free-floating anxiety’) determines the full nature of the experienced emotion. Thus worrying or being anxious about your health is not the same kind of ‘worry’ or

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‘anxiety’ as worrying about the outcome of an election (unless perhaps you are the candidate). Exactly the same could be said about the labels of ‘happiness’, ‘anger’, and especially ‘love’, a state in which both the quality and subjective feeling of ‘love’ is thoroughly pervaded by the perceived individual character of the person towards whom it is being felt. Indeed, might one not go further? Surely the actual emotion being experienced, even if easy to identify by a standard label, is always determined by the specific, possibly unique, object or situation to which it is a response? It might be argued that at least emotions have universally-agreed hedonistic tones (as pleasant or unpleasant) or ethical meanings (as good or bad). But while these dimensions themselves may be universal, the placing on them of at least some emotions is far less constant. For instance, extreme wrath is no longer treated as a respectable (that is, ‘good’) mode of expressing moral displeasure, while taking delight in the sufferings of one’s enemies has ceased to be an occasion of honest celebration in Westernized cultures (except possibly in relation to sporting contests!). Let us turn then to the historical variations in how emotion is conceived. To start with, no English speaker before the eighteenth century had any, strictly speaking; what they had were ‘passions’ and ‘affections’.12 Etymologically these offer an interesting contrast to ‘emotion’. Regarding ‘passion’, Arnold noted in the early 1960s that passions, related to ‘passive’ and with connotations of the Crucifixion, are things we passively endure or suffer. ‘Emotions’, however, are are sources of action, ‘movements out’, a sense embodied in the standard undergraduate Psychology module-title ‘Emotion and Motivation’. Later the emphasis was put not on suffering an emotional compulsion, but on being moved to some action, hence the term ‘passion’ was supplanted in scientific terminology by the term ‘emotion’.13 This explanation is somewhat misleading, I believe, even if etymologically plausible. The most extensive account of the relationship between emotions and passions from the transitional period is in Henry Home (Lord Kames)’s Elements of Criticism (1762), where a substantial proportion of volume I is devoted to the topic. For Home, ‘emotion’ refers to feelings of pleasantness or unpleasantness ‘antecedent to passion’, these being directly and instantaneously caused by the ‘properties and qualities’ of objects or persons due to the ‘constitution of our nature’.14 From his account, these seem to be merely a short step away from the pleasure/pain qualities of simple physical sensations. Only when these emotions generate ‘desire’ and spur us to action do they generate ‘passions’. Home makes great play with the distinction between the ‘pleasant/painful’ polarity and the ‘agreeable/disagreeable’ polarity: the latter refers, he argues, to the objects themselves, the former to the emotions they raise in us. However, things are made more complex by the fact that we can reflect on our emotions, turning them into objects of scrutiny, in which case they acquire the properties of objects and can be considered as agreeable/disagreeable.15 A similar move can be made regarding the passions, however, and establishing what passions are agreeable/ disagreeable is more difficult than establishing the pleasantness or otherwise of either passions or emotions. Such a judgment of agreeability ‘must be regulated

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entirely by the moral sense’.16 We can have agreeable ‘painful passions’ and painful ‘agreeable passions’.17 While doing scant justice to his position, the foregoing is sufficient to indicate that Home is not simply conceiving passions as something passively suffered, even though he seems to agree with Arnold’s definition of the emotions as spurs to action (but not always—some are quite transient). In other words, they are not alternatives but complementary components of a quite complex model linking immediate sensations and reactions of pleasure or pain to morality itself. What, I suspect, is actually going on here is that Home is assuming that, because both words are in circulation, there must be two classes of referent to which they naturally refer, and that rather than (as he imagines) expounding the relationship between these two, he is himself effectively constituting them for the purposes of making an original conceptual-cum-‘scientific’ ‘Psychological’ analysis. In fact, Home was not unaware of the linguistic problem, confessing how Lamentable is the imperfection of language, almost in every particular that falls not under external sense. I am talking of a matter exceedingly clear in itself, and of which every person must be conscious; and yet I find no small difficulty to express it in words . . .18

‘Affections’ also implies passive reception (otherwise they would be ‘effections’!) and survives in the technical Psychological term for emotion, ‘affect’.19 ‘Emotion’ only seems to have finally replaced ‘passion’ and ‘affection’, restricting these to ‘strong emotion’ and ‘fond liking’ respectively, during the nineteenth century. It would be an interesting, if ponderous, task to analyse in detail the respective meanings, connotations, interrelationships and discursive roles of ‘passion’, ‘emotion’, ‘affection’ and, indeed, ‘feeling’ since 1600. For the moment we can at any rate plausibly conclude that they have been in constant flux. The meanings of emotions themselves (accepting the term ‘emotion’ for convenience) are certainly fluid in several respects: which are approved or disapproved of, how they are expressed, and what they signify. As an illustration, consider the following passage from the seventeenth-century evangelical Puritan minister John Flavel’s Pneumatologia (first published in 1698): the true uses and most excellent ends for which these affections and passions are bestowed upon the soul of man, are to qualify it, and make it a fit subject to be wrought upon in a moral way of persuasions and allurements, in order to its union with Christ, (for by the affections, as Mr Fenner rightly observes, the soul becomes marriageable, or capable of being espoused to him) and being so, then to assist it in its full enjoyment in heaven. But alas, how they are corrupted and inverted by sin!20

This is so radically different from contemporary ways of construing and experiencing emotion that it requires considerable hermeneutic effort to understand the mentality that produced it.21 An important role in shifting our modes of emotional experience has, as I observed at the outset, been played by what Nikolas Rose calls

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the ‘psy disciplines’ themselves.22 The move from ‘worrying’ and ‘fretting’ to suffering from ‘anxiety’ and ‘stress’ is typical: the former are things we do, the latter things we endure. Psychologists have rarely, to my knowledge, explicitly discussed ‘despair’. This has presumably been subsumed under the medicalized term ‘depression’. And yet despair is not a pathological condition; like grief, it is a normal human response to certain kinds of circumstance. It was also certainly part and parcel of the kind of ‘spiritual pilgrimage’ John Flavel and his like were engaged in, of which passing through what John Bunyan (1628–1688) called the ‘Slough of Despond’ was an integral task.23 This suggests that one crucial factor in play over the last two centuries has indeed been the decline in authority and meaning of the religious frameworks that hitherto supplied the terms in which emotional life was to be understood.24 To the devout, Christian guilt does not just mean feeling psychologically distressed about what one had done, but about one’s profound spiritual wickedness and the risk of eternal damnation. Conversely, the kind of contentment accompanying—indeed signifying—divine blessing, forgiveness, or being in a state of grace, has no precise secular equivalent. As the works and life of that tortured eighteenth-century poet John Cowper testify,25 to be living under the omnipotent eye of God is to dwell in world of radically different emotional possibilities and meanings than those available to those whose world is fundamentally secular—and vice versa.26 It is perhaps worth noting that even among mainstream Christians, such emotional intensity appears to have significantly diminished over the last century, in Britain at any rate. This transition has wider implications for Psychological understanding of the emotions. It implies nothing less than that new emotions can emerge, and old ones disappear, over time. Even when the actual language remains the same, what it denotes may have radically altered (as in the case of ‘guilt’). One striking and curious example is the way in which many mid-Victorians responded to the possibility of humans having a primate ancestry. It is quite clear that many genuinely reacted with disgust at the prospect, but what kind of ‘disgust’ is this? Again, I suggest that it is very hard indeed for most people today (even Creationists) empathically to grasp what this emotion actually was. Another, perhaps related, example is the emotion raised by an ‘insult to one’s honour’ and the cluster of other emotions centering on ‘honour’ and ‘dignity’. These have been of paramount concern to the aristocratic and ‘gentlemanly’ classes for centuries. Yet the whole tradition of ‘honour’ and the profound cultural meanings associated with it have become highly attenuated in contemporary British culture. Self-righteously ‘standing on one’s dignity’ strikes us now as slightly absurd. The nearest equivalent to ‘honour’ is the notion of ‘respect’ as prevalent in urban street culture, but they are hardly synonymous. There is,however, a wider dimension to this: the peculiar way in which different historical periods seem to be pervaded by a unique emotional tone, somehow suffusing all their products from music and literature to dress and furniture design. It is only in retrospect that this becomes apparent, for one would be hard pressed to find evidence, either historical or in one’s own experience, that people were fully

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conscious of it at the time—even while they were expressing it. Yet insofar as these pervasive emotional tones are novel, hitherto unknown emotional ‘atmospheres’ now capable of being evoked as part and parcel of our emotional repertoire, they are surely genuine historical legacies of a psychological kind. The puzzle is how they are created in the first place, since their genesis is apparently invisible and collective rather than a matter of individual innovation. Psychologists have attended primarily to individual, and occasionally crowd, emotions, but few have addressed the nature of such cultural emotional climates, even though they are arguably what gives history it basic appeal.27 Psychological change, in the form of emotional change, is embedded in the succession of historical events and circumstances. Consider the emotion of ‘patriotism’: in the British case this has been created, modulated and defined by such episodes as, in turn, the defeat of the Armada, the battles of Trafalgar and Waterloo, the Victorian expansion of the British Empire, and the Second World War experience of the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. This variation presumably operates cross-culturally too; certainly patriotism in the United States is a rather different emotion to the British variety. Patriotism is perhaps an easy case, since it explicitly refers to a feeling about the collective anyway, but what of the emotion of aesthetic delight? In Western cultures our capacities for this have been changing and expanding continuously since Giotto and Palestrina.28 Exploring this further in the present chapter would involve too wide a detour; the immediate point is only the commonplace one that both artistic works and natural phenomena that shock or horrify one generation can subsequently be seen as utterly charming or awesome, while art extolled by one generation may be patronizingly viewed by the next as high-grade kitsch at best. Why this is important here is because it signifies shifts in the emotional condition of viewers and listeners. Yet because Psychology has been preoccupied with psychophysiological and psychopathological questions relating to emotion, it has not attempted to survey or map, let alone explain, these broader cultural changes in the very phenomenon itself. On the contrary, during the earlier twentieth century it gradually veered away from considering emotion in general to focusing on ‘anxiety’, ‘frustration’ and ‘aggression’, which lent themselves to physiological interpretation.29 While a broader agenda returned in the work of psychologists like Rachman, Plutchik, Ekman and Damasio, the present issue still remains largely unaddressed.30 To tackle it requires taking the language issue seriously. Everybody surely finds the communication, diagnosis and comprehension of their emotions hard work. It may take a whole song or poem, a whole play, novel or film to achieve it, and this done in the end by evocation rather than description. Here music and painting come into their own, but precisely because they are ‘non-verbal’ their ‘emotional’ meanings can remain ambiguous. For instance, during the Second World War, packed British and German concert audiences both felt emotionally stirred by Beethoven in a way that co-opted him to their respective causes (and this was surely not simply a matter of Beecham’s versus Furtwangler’s conducting styles!). The ‘hard work’ arises because every emotional state is, if not entirely unique, at least uniquely flavoured, and thus

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demands verbal work if we wish to discourse about it comprehensibly. The stock emotional vocabulary can only serve as the starting point. How we actually manage this task, it will now be argued, is not so much by ‘putting our emotions into words’ as by discovering them within the public world as our received language construes it. Even the standard emotional vocabulary originated in this way. While this position is clearly in some sense ‘social-constructionist’, it should not be understood as simplistically so. I am not denying that there are indeed raw organic processes going on, especially in the case of the stronger or more extreme emotions, nor am I denying the existence of universals in relation to their physical expression. What I am saying is that our experience of these does not come ready labeled with an emotion-term. ‘Social construction’ refers to the process that renders emotions meaningful and publicly discussable, which in turn determines their character as experienced psychological realities. And never underestimate the number of occasions on which, if asked to report on your emotional state, you would simply have to report, not ‘I’m not in one’ but ‘I don’t know.’ Behind the ‘social’ is indeed the ‘natural’, but it is only knowable through its mediation by the social institution of language. This argument derives from the more general one I proposed in 1989.31 Put simply, this is that in order to talk meaningfully about subjective experience we have to anchor our language for doing so in that used for referring to the external world. Only by such anchoring can the rules for correct or appropriate usage be sustained. Psychological language is thus generated by reflexively applying to our inner world that which we use for talking about the external world (including overt behaviour). Emotion-language is no exception. One might suspect that at least some public world phenomena elicit an almost universal common psychological response from members of our species, thus setting some parameters on the range of relativistic variation. As a case in point, the labeling of emotions by temperature ‘metaphors’ may be as near universal as makes no difference. We will return to such metaphors later. Two brief points should be further noted: first that many basic categories were surely not given psychological meanings by a two-stage process of ‘metaphorical transfer’ but must have been Janus-faced from the outset (for instance hot/cold, hard/soft and so on); secondly that psychological terms in current usage that do not appear to be figurative are precisely those that are surrounded by a penumbra of metaphorical synonyms and amplifiers (for example love, sad, happy). What we never find is a new psychological term entering the language that does not originate in this ‘physiomorphic’ fashion.32 This thesis is not new; it was explicitly stated by John Locke (1637–1704), by Henry Home in the full passage on language cited earlier, and by the nineteenthcentury linguists Max Müller and Dwight Whitney. It was also acknowledged— though the implications fudged—by the eminent American mental and moral philosopher Noah Porter (1811–1892), who was also an editor of Webster’s Dictionary, and more gnomically stated in the Chinese Ch’an (Zen) Buddhist Sutra of Hui Neng, dating from the eighth century CE.33

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My argument goes beyond the basic vocabulary level, however. Almost any statement can be construed in either a psychological or physical sense, meaning something about the speaker’s (or someone else’s) psychology, or about the physical world. Moreover—and this is crucial—the sense in which it is to be taken is up for negotiation between the parties involved, at least in principle. To give an example, suppose a psychoanalytic analysand enters the analyst’s room and says ‘God, it’s freezing in here today.’ The analyst replies (as analysts will), ‘I think you are saying you feel I am rejecting you.’ Despite initial protests that they are simply talking about the temperature, the analysand may well eventually concede the analyst’s interpretation. Entire dramatic dialogues may be constructed on this basis, as the parties fence with one another about the sense (or more technically ‘referential mode’) of one another’s utterances. Indeed, this imagined exchange about temperature can also serve to demonstrate how frequently and systematically emotions are mapped onto the weather and atmospheric conditions. References to the weather are rarely simple physical-world propositions (except in shipping or agricultural forecasts, and even then it is impossible for the tone not to register whether the forecast is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, or even frightening). Statements like ‘Isn’t it a glorious day?’, ‘What a beautiful sunset’, ‘It hasn’t stopped raining all week’ are as much ways of communicating one’s emotional mood as climatic observations.33 We do indeed talk about hostile and friendly ‘atmospheres’ and ‘climates’, signifying our folk-recognition of that collective pervasiveness of emotion referred to earlier. From frosty to tempestuous, it is actually hard to think of any state of the weather that does not have some fairly obvious emotional connotation. This is even more directly true of light-levels (‘gloomy’, ‘bright’). Moving beyond these examples, one might parody factor-analytic approaches, which seek to identify the ‘dimensions’ of emotion, by proposing a variety of dimensions framed in physical terms. For instance, altitude and temperature look promising, providing high cold, high hot, low cold and low hot cells. Rage and passionate love would obviously both be high and hot, hatred high and cold, bitterness low and hot, misery low and cold. High but neither hot nor cold might be serenity, while low but neither hot nor cold could be boredom. Hot, but neither low nor high—irritation? Cold, but neither low nor high—calm indifference? We might add other dimensions such as intense versus diffuse, strong versus weak, light versus heavy, simple versus complex and so forth. My point is only that in mapping emotions we systematically ransack a whole range of world-phenomena and properties, crafts and occupations, including those related to food (bitter), animals (ratty), weaving (on tenterhooks), social roles (imperious, from impero, to command), music (up-beat) and musical instruments (highly strung).34 We even on occasion identify what I term ‘paradigm persons’—real or fictional persons culturally taken to embody a usually somewhat complex psychological state (for example, being Machiavellian, Byronic or Churchillian), though these are less commonly used in relation simply to emotion.

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The ability to utilize public-world phenomena as a template for mapping emotion has yielded a vast linguistic repertoire, but it is a received repertoire. What also happens is that in times of change, especially technological change, novel external-world phenomena provide the resources for emotional innovation. Nobody blew a fuse before electrical house-wiring became commonplace, went into orbit before the Sputnik, or felt shell-shocked before the First World War.35 Changed social and material conditions bring new emotion-terms, and hence in some sense new emotions, in their train, a factor perhaps in the historical shifts in emotional tone raised earlier. In short, our emotional states are inextricably bound up with the physical and social worlds in which we live. This would be a trite observation were it not that most Psychological and other ‘scientific’ discourse on the subject treats emotions as a somehow finite set of potential, more or less biologically programmed, response-categories. Such discourse suggests that the situation we find ourselves in determines which of these is triggered, but has no bearing on its actual character or meaning. The kind of ‘binding’ to which I refer is far more thoroughgoing than this, more as if we are constantly emotionally reflecting the world than simply picking one of a pre-existing finite set of ‘responses’ to it. Emotion is absolutely central to our understanding of the world, giving our lives meaning, purpose and structure, not only a discrete response to specific incidents. We regularly, and legitimately, report emotions even when we are not feeling them at the time, mapping our personal worlds in emotional terms of things we love and hate, fear, enjoy and adore and so forth. This is not just an emotional mapping but, insofar as emotions have ethical connotations, an ethical one as well. Flavel and Home were not wrong in viewing our emotions (or passions) as intrinsically enmeshed with the issue of morality. It is, after all, behaviour or events we believe to be wicked or unjust (or to signify the triumph of righteousness) to which we respond most emotionally. The very notion of morality surely emerged initially as a kind of abstraction from certain kinds of emotion. While any attempt at analysing how this happened would be fruitlessly speculative, the notion that morality and the emotions are intimately bound up with each other has been perennially accepted in ‘moral philosophy’ and ‘ethics’ since antiquity.36 The historical and cultural variability of emotions and their meanings now becomes a little clearer. The emotions of people living in times and places other than ours reflect worlds in certain (though not all) respects different to ours, and this difference is encoded in the very language available for emotional discourse and selfunderstanding.37 Some emotions, like reverence, veneration, certain modes of humility and guilt, and feeling in a state of grace, are only possible for those living within religious cosmological belief-systems that many have now abandoned or never even knew. Others, like ‘awe’ or ‘wonder’, which René Descartes (1596–1650) considered the sole emotion not to involve the body, have to a substantial degree lost the profundity of meaning they possessed in their original religious contexts. Some emotional discourses, for example that of the Aztecs in relation to ritual human sacrifice, never (unless we are Mexican) even formed part of our cultural heritage, and their meanings thus remain almost entirely opaque.

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David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739, 1740) famously stated that ‘reason is, and can only be, the slave of the passions’—which Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) would have endorsed. Hume (1711–1776) and Freud were perhaps right about many things, but I do not believe this is one of them. Far from being their slave, it is reason that identifies, defines, structures, and evaluates the ‘passions’. The ‘get in touch with your feelings’ nostrum can easily lead to emotions being ascribed a kind of intrinsic moral authority that they do not possess, and to reason being treated as a purely defensive agent hindering us from encountering our emotions in their full authenticity. I do not deny that this can occur, but it is a radical misrepresentation of the fundamental relationship between the two.38 Nor did Hume’s predecessors share this view. Late-sixteenth- and seventeenth-century discourse on the passions, such as we find in writers like Edward Reynoldes (1640), Thomas Wright (1601), Jean François Senault (1641) and even Descartes himself, is invariably aimed at enabling us to control them.39 When the Jesuit recusant Wright entitled the third book of his popular The Passions of the Minde in Generall ‘The Meanes to Knowe and Mortifie Passions: What Prudence and Policie May be Practised in Them’, he was (unsurprisingly) in a sense adopting a reverse approach to the typical Growth-Movement one.40 But while both positions assume some kind of necessary tension or split between them, neither, in my view, apprehends the true subtlety of their relationship. This error, as I see it, may again be a consequence of an imbalanced focus on untypical extreme emotions. Arnold ascribes much of the difficulty to what she sees as the misleading consequences of Cartesian dualism. In her view the previous AristotelianThomistic tradition was superior in accepting that emotions, among much else, are acts of ‘the total embodied person’, not events occuring in a soul separate from the body.41 On this view, while (aside from ‘awe’) the Cartesian ‘passions’ originate in the body, they must be ultimately be subordinated to the essentially Divine faculty of Reason, located in the ‘soul’ alone. This is not entirely satisfactory, however, the Cartesian move refining but not replacing previous discourse (including, in Wright, Thomist discourse) on the need to control the passions. The subsequent Enlightenment exaltation of Reason was hardly solely Cartesian in origin, and casting Hume as a follower of Descartes is ludicrous. When Romanticism eventually swings the pendulum back to the authority of the emotions, it does so not by dissolving ‘dualism’, nor by reverting to some pre-Cartesian Thomist position, but in reaction against what it sees as souldestroying materialist reductionism—‘the atoms of Democritus and Newton’s particles of light’, as William Blake had it. Similar inversions of the reason-versus-emotion relationship have recurred periodically ever since, in the arts, music, Psychology (Jung rather than Freud) and, disastrously, politics (in the case of Nazism). A true reconciliation between them has eluded most philosophers and psychologists alike, Mary Midgley’s Beast and Man (1979) being the most thoroughgoing exception. To lay this perennial tension between emotion and reason at Descartes’s door alone is at best crude ‘great-man’ history. Surely what we are seeking is not a philosophical resolution of the problem

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but a psychological one; that is to say we are really seeking a route by which the tension, as a psychological reality, can genuinely be dissipated. This must involve recognizing first that those raw, meaningless biological states associated with our extremer emotions can only acquire the status of emotions in the full psychological sense after they have been processed by reason; and secondly that reason is, conversely, guided in this by the meanings it finds in the world outside, in the terms of which it necessarily undertakes this processing. (Neither the physiological nor the psychological thus has causal priority, and, if unavoidable, the distinction between them should not be taken to imply mind–body dualism.) It is this world, including the social world, that supplies the criteria for ethically evaluating emotions as well as the terms for verbally labeling them. Yet these ethical evaluations are themselves, as we have already observed, reflexively grounded in the emotions. There is a perpetual collective temporal dynamic in operation, in which reason, ethics and emotions are constantly reconstituting and redefining each other by way of the collective discourse about them, which is in turn reflexively changed by the outcome. That this situation is ultimately grounded, in part, in the physical, evolutionary and physiological processes that supply the necessary conditions for anything human happening at all need not be disputed, but these do not supply the psychological meanings for what of what is going on. This is thus not meant as a linguistic-reductionist or crudely social-constructionist argument. It is rather a plea for a more fine-grained and comprehensive approach to the reality of emotion as the basis on which we actually build meaningful lives. Emotions are not discrete phenomena; we are constantly engaged (with varying degrees of effectiveness) in emotionally monitoring, evaluating and participating in the world around us. And our very attempts at disengagement can turn out to be particularly emotionally distressing. One might remark here that for those involved with computer simulation, simulating this human emotional life is barely on the agenda. It will, I predict, prove far more knotty a problem than the simulation of cognition. I would suggest, then, that because of its past inability to grasp the scale and nature of the issue of emotion, Psychology has so far failed in its efforts to produce more than ad-hoc strategies for providing emotional consolation. And this, after all, has been one of the major demands that modernist cultures have placed upon it.42 It is also, as I remarked at the outset, the quest for emotional consolation that ultimately gives the whole inquiry into their nature its point. One cannot help suspecting that it is this failure that lies behind the current rise in the fortunes of more ‘spiritualized’ Growth-Movement therapies and of religion itself. After over a hundred years of promises, by the end of the last century Psychology still had not delivered. The present approach may at least provide a starting point. In fully acknowledging our dependence on language for giving emotions meaning, it also implicitly recognizes the limitations that this situation imposes on our capacities for emotional mutual understanding. The real emotional extremes are not wrath and infatuation but, at least on the negative side, those states of utter emotional hopelessness and desolation beyond our current ability to name or describe in any way that approaches

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their felt nature, states isolating the sufferer from the rest of humanity. Calling these ‘depression’ is pathetically feeble; after all ‘depressed’ is just a fancy way of saying ‘down in the dumps’. Even ‘melancholia’ was better than that. I do not for a moment pretend to have any ready answer to this problem, but perhaps we can close on the reflexive point that the very reason why the issue of emotion is of such importance and urgency is precisely because we feel an underlying moral imperative to share and understand each other’s emotional lives. If conscious, verbalized understanding is limited by our dependence on a received emotional language, then indeed our only strategy in such desperate cases is initially to abandon language in favour of direct behavioural engagement and empathic exposure of our own emotions. Perhaps it is less getting in touch with our own emotional feelings that is the problem, than getting in touch with other people’s. That is when words can truly fail us. Since the trajectory of this paper may seem somewhat scattered, I will close by drawing the various threads of my argument together. The underlying thesis is that psychologists (in particular but not exclusively) have failed to acknowledge two central aspects of emotion and consequently have been unable to provide accounts of emotion that meet not only the need for consolation but also the need for integration of the tension between reason and emotion, both of which appear to be core and longstanding features of the Western psychological condition. These two aspects are, first, that the meanings and even the identities of our emotions are not self-evident givens but are actively constituted by the language we have available for discoursing about them. This ‘emotion-language’ extends far beyond any specific vocabulary of the emotions. In elaborating on this, I drew on my more extended 1989 account of psychological language. The second is that this language nevertheless remains less than fully adequate to the task, and that, phenomenologically, there is a vast hinterland of confusion and feelings about which we can say nothing coherent. Once we begin to take these points seriously, we soon discover further, largely neglected issues such as the somewhat mysterious collective generation of novel emotions associated with particular historical periods and the degree to which emotions change over time, even the category ‘emotion’ itself being unstable. While lacking the temerity to offer any neat new solution to the problem of the nature of human emotion, I have none the less tried to indicate how any such solution must take these two neglected aspects into account, and how a variety of current difficulties may be viewed as ensuing from our past failure to do so. Notes This chapter was supported by a research grant from the Leverhulme Trust. 1

Although the New OED dates the word ‘irritable’ in a psychological sense as early as 1662, ‘irritability’ is only dated to 1755 in the physiological sense and 1791 in the psychological sense.

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5

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See the early work of Paul Ekman, ‘Cross-cultural Studies of Facial Expression’, in idem, ed., Darwin and Facial Expression: A Century of Research in Review (New York and London, 1973), 169–222; also Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Love and Hate: On the Natural History of Basic Behaviour Patterns, trans. Geoffrey Strachan (London, 1971). Consider, for example, the phenomenon of female fainting, which was apparently a standard response to anything shocking among respectable Victorian ladies, but which almost entirely disappeared in Britain during the 20th c. John Langshaw Austin, How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University, 1955 (Oxford, 1962). To oversimplify Austin a little, ‘illocution’ refers to the intentional ‘performative’ aspect of an utterance (e.g. ordering, insulting), ‘perlocution’ to its usually unintended effects (annoying, exciting). See Georges Dreyfus, ‘Is Compassion an Emotion? A Cross-cultural Exploration of Mental Typologies’, in Richard J. Davidson and Anne Harrington, eds., Visions of Compassion: Western Scientists and Tibetan Buddhists Examine Human Nature (London, 2002), 31–45. Throughout this paper I follow my usual practice of capitalizing Psychology/ Psychological when referring to the discipline, retaining lower case for Psychology’s subject-matter. For a useful, if now dated, historical overview of the topic, see Magda B. Arnold, Emotion and Personality, 2 vols. (London, 1961), I, chap. 1. Most subsequent Psychological work on the subject derives from one or other of the numerous theories and models discussed here. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Emotions: Outline of a Theory (New York, 1948), 77. William McDougall, Introduction to Social Psychology (London, 1908). This is expounded in William James, Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York, 1890), II, chap. 25. The behaviourist ‘frustration–aggression’ hypothesis was initially proposed in John Dollard et al., Frustration and Aggression (New Haven, 1939). Physically the term originally meant a ‘moving out’; the New OED identifies two versions of the present sense. 4a ‘figurative’: ‘Any agitation or disturbance of mind, feeling, passion, any vehement or excited mental state’. The earliest given use is by Jeremy Taylor in 1660, next a 1712 use by Steele, followed by some usages by the late-18th-c.Scottish philosophers Lord Kames and Thomas Reid. 4b ‘Psychological’: ‘A mental “feeling” or “affection” . . . as distinguished from cognitive or volitional states of consciousness’. This only dates from an 1808 article in The Medical Journal, becoming commoner as the 19th c. progresses. Significantly, none of the derivatives (emotional, emotionalism, emotionality, emotionally, emotive, etc.) predates 1800, suggesting that it was hardly in routine usage much before the later 18th c. Psychological uses of ‘passion’ and its derivatives, by contrast, date back to Chaucer. Arnold, Emotion and Personality I. 9; italics original. Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, 2 vols. (Dublin, 1762), I. 27–8. Ibid., 78. Ibid., 79. Ibid., 77–8. Ibid., 64. The eminent Princeton-based Scottish mental and moral philosopher James McCosh also used the term ‘affectances’ in his proto-Psychological work The Emotions (London, 1880).

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20 John Flavel, Pneumatologia: A Treatise of the Soul of Man [1685] (London, 1789), 69. 21 This is perhaps a somewhat rash statement; I note that in the United States the ‘Banner of Truth Society’ has recently reissued all Flavel’s works in a 6-vol. set. 22 Nikolas Rose, Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood (Cambridge, 1996). 23 ‘The Dark Night of the Soul’ is the equivalent stage of the quest in Catholic mysticism. 24 A provocative statement of this problem was Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Is Understanding Religion Compatible with Believing?’, in John Hick, ed., Faith and the Philosophers (London, 1964), 115–33. 25 See e.g. his Olney Hymns. 26 See Michael Heyd, Chap. 7 below, for further exploration of the religious aspect of the issue. 27 One of the few mentions of the issue is in Ian E. Gordon, Theories of Visual Perception (Chichester, 1989), 249, where he raises it obliquely in the context of perception, asking how is it that ‘so many things from a particular era seem to have something in common: the period style?’. Even so, the question is left unanswered. 28 See papers in this volume by Michael Schwartz, etc. 29 Arnold, Emotion and Personality, complains of this development, for example. 30 A full bibliography on this would be vast, but note e.g. S. Rachman, Fear and Courage (San Francisco, 1978); Ekman, ‘Facial Expression’. 31 Graham Richards, On Psychological Language and the Physiomorphic Basis of Human Nature (London, 1989). 32 I have co-opted this term from Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London, 1966). 33 For the full case, see Richards, Psychological Language, chap. 1. 33 Do psychologists ever discuss moods as distinct variants of emotions? Arnold, Emotion and Personality, I. 80, for example, simply refers to them in passing as ‘the feeling response to general organismic functioning’, which hardly gets us very far. 34 See also Penelope Gouk, Chap. 11 below. Figure 11.1 shows Hogarth doing exactly this kind of thing, perhaps also parodying the semi-Natural-Philosophical and putatively quantitative approaches in Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (London, 1725), and idem, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections: With Illustrations on the Moral Sense (London, 1728), both originally published anonymously. 35 Regarding the last, they may have suffered from ‘railway spine’ as a result of being in a train accident, but that was viewed as a purely physiological condition. 36 This is explored extensively in Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (New York, 1994); idem, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York, 1999). 37 For an extensive recent review of the topic, see Anna Wierzbicka, Emotions across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and Universals (Cambridge, 1999). 38 See Mary Midgley, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (London, 1979), for a detailed refutation of the Humean position, an analysis that underlies her numerous subsequent works on ethics and ethical issues. 39 Edward Reynoldes, A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soule of Man with the Severall Dignities and Corruptions Thereunto Belonging (London, 1640); Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde (London, 1601); J. François Senault, De l’usage des passions (Paris, 1641); René Descartes, The Passions of the Soule in Three Bookes (London, 1650), esp. art. 211.

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40 Wright’s book first appeared in 1601 and went through four subsequent edns. from 1604 to 1630. I am drawing on The Passions of the Minde in Generall, introd. Thomas O. Sloan (facs., Urbana, IL, 1971), based on the 1630 edn. but ‘modelled’ on the 1604 one. 41 Arnold, Emotion and Personality, I. 96. 42 It is pertinent to remark in this connection that over 90 per cent of the advertisements in the British Psychological Society’s monthly Appointments Bulletin are for Clinical Psychologists.

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PART II EMOTIONS AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF

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CHAPTER 4

Bodies of Self-Transcendence: The Spirit of Affect in Giotto and Piero Michael Schwartz

With regard to painting] there appears a ‘visible’ to the second power, a carnal essence or icon of the first. It is not a faded copy, a trompe l’oeil, or another thing. . . . [As such] I would be hard pressed to say where the painting is I am looking at. For I do not look at it as one looks at a thing, fixing it in its place. My gaze wanders within it as in the halos of Being. Rather than seeing it, I see according to, or with it. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’1

Our ways of thinking about affetti in European painting may not do justice to the picturing of human emotions in late-medieval and early-Renaissance art on two counts: first, by our assumption that emotions are restricted to the individual; and second, that the depiction of emotions must be limited and confined to the signs of the body and to inferences about this body’s interiority. The first of these assumptions, that emotions are proper to the person, is grounded in the well-known, often analysed, but still widely misunderstood levelling in modernity of spirit: that beliefs in God, angels and the like are not provable, that such beliefs cannot enter into the experiments of evidential consideration and hence are the products of magical and mythic modes of cognition that our culture has outgrown through the exercise of reason. While this championing of reason has been a mark of our maturation, it has also proved itself excessive, committing what Ken Wilber has diagnosed as the pre/trans fallacy: The idea [of the pre/trans fallacy] is simple: since both pre-rational and trans-rational are non-rational, they are easily confused. And then one of two very unpleasant things happens: either you reduce genuine, transrational, spiritual realities to infantile, prerational states; or you elevate childish, prerational sentiments to transcendental glory. In the first case you deny spiritual realities altogether, since you think they are all infantile rubbish [the general stance of the academy, science and the liberal intellectual]. In the second case, you end up glorifying childish myth and preverbal impulse [the general stance of religious fundamentalism, major strains of Romanticism and most of the New Age].2

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Modernity has regularly failed to distinguish between prerational dogmas, which are of the matter of mental concepts and beliefs, and more expansive and genuinely spiritual modes of consciousness that transcend, embrace and can come to witness (in pure awareness) the conceptual movements of mind and its weaving of the separate self-sense or ego.3 Our culture’s belief that reason is the highest mode of consciousness, even humanity’s defining characteristic (as in ‘we rational animals’), has led to prejudging claims about spirit as always already irrational and eschewing evidential considerations—an attitude especially dominant in the academy with its stress on language and intellectualism. Modern reason’s missing the marks of authentic spirituality has blinded us from seeing more clearly how affetti operate in early-modern European painting. The second of the aforementioned assumptions, that emotions are ‘in’ the subject, and at best find expression through the outward signs of the body, hence to the subject’s objective status and limits, is by no means wrong but is too confining. It descends from the Cartesian ontology of mental/physical dualism and, with regard to pictorial affetti, received its defining imprimatur in Charles Le Brun’s atomistic codification of the facial expression of the passions, a late-seventeenth-century rationalization of affetti that decontextualizes the situation in which emotions take place (see for example Fig. 4.1). The consequence of this view has been that the picturing of emotions is limited to the individual figure, with facial features in and of themselves serving as the necessary and sufficient index of interior states; affetti thus become less affective and more cognitive, a matter of decoding facial signs. This approach to depicting the passions contrasts strongly with Martin Heidegger’s powerful analysis in Being and Time (1927) that ‘mood’ (Stimmung) is always already disclosive of being-in-the-world, of one’s immediate situatedness and the possibilities of action within the situation.4 In this paper I question these presuppositions about pictorial affetti by returning to late-medieval and early-Renaissance painting, whose aim seems to have been to depict not simply personal but on occasion transpersonal modes of emotional worlddisclosure, where self-transcendence can open into a collective or corporative response. We shall be exploring in detail two great paintings, each centered on the mystical body of Christ: Giotto’s Lamentation, c.1305 (Fig. 4.2), and Piero della Francesca’s Pala Montefeltro (Montefeltro Altarpiece), c.1472–4 (Fig. 4.5 below). Interpretation of these two works will reorient us to the formations of spiritual affect in advanced Italian painting of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance. Giotto’s Lamentation The late Middle Ages was a turning-point in the pictorial cultures of Western Europe. This included the epochal transformation between the late thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries from medieval gold-ground panels, mosaics and the like into Renaissance and later postmedieval modes of pictorial representation. Whereas medieval painting

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Figure 4.1 Charles Le Brun (1619–1690), Expressions of the Passions of the Soul, ‘Anger’, head three-quarters to the right. Musée du Louvre, Paris, France.

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in its many modalities is other-worldly in style, the new painting is more fully thisworldly, as grounded in the re-presentation of the visible world.5 This transformation involved a leap in the intensity of the mimetic imaginary, the capacity of the picture to offer directly imitable models of action and of emotional response.6 In his treatise On Painting from the 1430s, Leon Battista Alberti points towards the affective currents of the new painting when he recommends that a picture include figures who ‘invite us to weep or laugh with them’.7 The new affectivity is brilliantly exemplified in Giotto’s late medieval painting of the Lamentation in the Arena Chapel, Padua. Giotto’s composition takes up and reworks Byzantine scenes of the Lamentation that had recently entered the repertoire of Italian painting. During the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, religious painting in Italy often depicted Christ’s Passion and typically included figures embodying emotions such as grief and sorrow, like those we find in Giotto’s painting (see Fig. 4.3).

Figure 4.2 Giotto di Bondone (1266–1336), Lamentation of Christ, c.1305. Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, Italy.

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Figure 4.3 Master of Saint Francis (13th cent.), painted crucifix, oil on wood. Musée du Louvre, Paris, France.

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Hans Belting, among others, contends that such figures reacting to the death of Christ were models for a viewer’s own response.8 And yet, as surely as Belting is correct, there is a large difference in the affective dimension of such earlier works and that of Giotto’s Lamentation. The earlier medieval examples are pictures that have minimal space and nonvolumetric figures, generating an image-world that negates the ordinary parameters we associate with mundane existence, the image-world pointing upwards, beyond itself, through its other-worldly style.9 The figures expressing emotions in such pictures are therefore unlike us in a fundamental way, establishing a spiritual hierarchy between themselves as holy persons and ourselves as mundane beholders. The various expressions of grief and sorrow are distanced from us by this otherworldliness; the figures are not so much to be directly imitated as offer models, towards which we can aspire but never quite reach, exemplifying ideals of piety that we, because sinful and mortal, shall never fully embody. What was so astounding about Giotto’s Lamentation is that these same figure-types, compositions and emotive states are brought to fuller three-dimensional life, offering an image-world that is more this-worldly, and they therefore insist on direct imitation. In Giotto’s Lamentation, action focuses on the dead Christ, prone and foreshortened, a volumetric body-in-depth. Figures surround him on all sides, some touching the corpse. Women are grouped to the left, men to the right; all mourn the lifeless flesh.10 Body postures, facial features and gestures sound a chorus of grief and sorrow. Within the upper region, originally a uniform and deep blue in hue (a zone that simultaneously registers as sky, heaven and the material wall itself), angels are in flight, responding to the cosmic death, echoing the range of expressions found amongst the human beings. Heaven and Earth jointly mourn the death of the Incarnate God, attesting to Jesus’ singular and incomprehensible status as the perfect embodiment of the infinite in finite form. In Giotto, the Christian image-world has shifted its axis towards the this-worldly, with this picture-world withdrawing from the space of the chapel, the virtual/actual divide articulated through the banded framework that crops figures at left and right. In comparison to earlier and near-contemporary medieval narrative painting (Fig. 4.4), the Lamentation is both more this-worldly in style and more insistently divided from the space of the chapel: a virtual realm located elsewhere, no longer so tightly integrated and substantially woven into the fabric of Creation. Given late-medieval cosmological debates about the status of Creation and the inexhausitible capacities of God to create any number of alternative universes, we may say that the Lamentation initiates a possible world that, by referencing the real, directly reinterprets the actual.11 By opening an imaginary realm that withdraws from the place of beholding, the picture as possible world has the capacity to draw our attention away from our own habitation of the chapel and into virtual depth. Identification with body-mind is loosened, redirected into an image-world that is elsewhere. The absorption of attention into the virtual, aesthetically bracketing our ordinary self-sense, conditions identification with the volumetric figures in the scene. One may come to tacitly

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Figure 4.4 Cimabue (1240–1302; ?attr.), Lamentation. Upper Church, S. Francesco, Assisi, Italy. understand this or that figure as ‘me’, with this pictorial experience having the potential to fold into and contribute to one’s ongoing sense of ‘I’.12 Here we see the mimetic imaginary as it emerged in late medieval painting, the capacity of the picture to induce viewers to more directly identify with and imaginatively mime depicted actions and responses. With regard to the Lamentation, a beholder’s imaginative participation in the narrative action may follow two principal routes. On the one hand, we may ‘weep with the weeping’, participating in the collective mourning of the death of God. On the other hand, we may imaginatively transpose ourselves into the scene itself. The dorsal women in the foreground parallel our own rotation in space as beholders of the image; their proximity to the picture-plane particularly facilitates (bodily) identification. One might imaginatively take their place within the scene, or in analogy to their acts, project oneself into the space between them.13 Either way, we figuratively touch the Body, overcoming the passage of historical time, and

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demonstrate to ourselves the Truth of the Incarnation, that the Word was made flesh. These mimetic paths—the one affective, the other haptic and bodily—focus engagement with the Lamentation, promoting viewers to grieve with the grieving over the death of the Incarnate God. But Giotto takes us further. The mimetic imaginary, at the same time as it induces affective states of mourning, presses the emotional disclosure of the world-situation beyond one’s ordinary sense of being a person, that is, of being a separate self. For many late-medieval and Renaissance viewers, the background understanding of Being, as illustrated in Dante’s Divine Comedy, was that of a finite cosmos, geocentric and hierarchical, where all beings except for God are created substances ordered by means of the correspondences.14 In Giotto, we see this understanding of the cosmos disclosed in the vertical correspondence between the angelic and human responses, a double mirroring demonstrating that angels may grieve (here in the singular case of the death of God) but also that the human responses themselves, in mirroring the angelic, resonate with and participate in this higher order of Being— that the essence of human grief is not simply constituted and contained within any one individual or even within the earthbound sphere itself. To be sure, the humans in the scene are readily identifiable as male or female, and in many cases, as specific historical characters—the Virgin Mary, St John the Evangelist, and so on. They assume stock poses and gestures, with faces all of the same type, character cast in a generalized mould that hints at the universal.15 Intensive individuation is not at stake here. Although these figures can be said to depict ‘persons’, they are not so differentiated and individuated as to constitute wellcontoured ‘personalities’—that is, they do not represent modern psychological subjects possessing singular interior depths.16 Instead, the generalized faces, stock poses and gestures create a common humanity amongst the figures, binding them into an additive-collective response of mourning. The implication, if not the visual achievement, is one of a common ‘spirit’ informing the various affetti—but this is still notional; the actual pictorial effect of an all-infusing spirit was not articulated until the next century. For many, perhaps most, of the historical viewing audience, Giotto’s painting would have operated at a mythic level of cognition, where a viewer’s prerational belief in angels would have reinforced a contraction of oneself as body-mind, as an ego-identified and ego-constituted person in relation to and separate from the angels and indeed, in principle, from all ‘higher’ beings including God, posited (and reified) as the supreme metaphysical Other. But for some, even if only for a small minority, the correspondence of human to angelic grief might well have opened into the transpersonal, a transcending and soulful witnessing of one’s own earthbound constitution as body-mind. Mourning the death of God thus no longer limits itself to disclosing one’s being in the world as a finite subject or self—as in Derrida’s playful, quasi-Cartesian formulation ‘I mourn, therefore I am’—but opens identity towards a sense of transcending earthly constitution and finitude, where participation in the collective grief of earth and heaven no longer discloses loss just for oneself, but for

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All.17 The entire affective dimension unveils itself in a more cosmic, transpersonal expanse of compassion.18 In this regard it is important to recall that the late Middle Ages were a time of growing private devotion, when monastic practices of self-transcendence towards God were increasingly taken up by the wealthy laity.19 It is into this historical context, then, that I recommend we reinsert Giotto’s great painting of the Lamentation over the Dead Christ, where the constitution of affetti challenges our modern assumptions about emotional disclosures of the world-situation as being essentially individuated and strictly ego-bound, and where grief is understood as necessarily restricted to a personal and possessive sense of loss. Piero’s Pala Montefeltro Giotto’s art remains medieval in its compositional typology and in the way that the image-world, especially the upper zone and raised gesso haloes, is consubstantial with the materials of painting. It was only in the 1420s and later in the fifteenth century that postmedieval painting emerged. Briefly stated, medieval paintings are other-worldly in style, and they foreground their materiality as created substances— gold, wood, gems and so on—where such substances are ontologically non-distinct from the depiction itself. As a consequence, the image-world is not separate from but is ontologically woven into the everyday world, and thus into the substantial fabric and order of Creation. In contrast, Renaissance paintings diminish or negate their materiality, opening up virtual realms that are this-worldly in style but ontologically distanced from the immediate environment of beholding; in lieu of direct inclusion and participation in the substances of Creation, the dematerialized picture simulates or re-presents these created substances. More forcibly than we see in Giotto, the image-world of a Renaissance painting manifests a virtual space displaced from the created order of things so to represent that divine order. In On Painting, written in the 1430s, Alberti was explicit that the new painting was to limit itself to representing only what can be seen under natural light, a definition that seems to exclude the truthful figuring of higher realities into pictures.20 Nonetheless, Renaissance paintings have a distinctive spiritual accent. Perspective enabled an enhanced sense of volumetric bodies integrated into space. Within this ambience, a new kind of illumination posits a virtual source-light, indicated by cast shadows and the orientation of the chiaroscuro modelling, where this source-light regularly does not account for the overall internal luminosity and brightness of the image-world. This extra brightness, as a remembrance and sublimation of the medieval gold ground, transcends causal origin and is immanent to the image-world—a self-standing quotient of brightness that manifests a transcendental irradiation of the volumetric bodies integrated into space.21 The image-world evinces a sense of spirit radiantly clarifying the spatial coherence of the world of visual forms. All this had profound implications for picturing affetti.

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In this contex we shall consider Piero della Francesca’s Pala Montefeltro from the early 1470s, a painting that is often said to lack affect. The panel has been cut down; reconstructing its original dimensions and location in the Church of San Bernardino in Urbino would take us too far off topic. The spatial effects of the painting’s visible luminosity, which I discuss below, would have been even stronger in the original format and context than they are today in the Brera Gallery. The altarpiece is a type that modern art historians call a sacra conversazione, where Mary and the Infant Jesus are centrally located, surrounded by saints and angels. Here the patron, Duke Federigo da Montefeltro of Urbino, kneels prayerfully in the right foreground. All the figures except for the angels are situated in what is represented as the crossing of nave and transept, the usual site for the high altar during the Renaissance. The Virgin sits on a chair, itself raised on a platform, her lower body functioning as mensa (altar), the sleeping Infant Jesus on her lap embodying the Eucharist. Of all the figures the Duke is closest to the viewer; as the only mortal and contemporary personage, he provides a model of devotion towards the Mystical Body. Located in front of the mensa, his lateral gaze cannot properly be said to see Mary and Jesus, who are located more deeply; but it is through a planar effect within depth, where space collapses relating motifs two-dimensionally, that his hands and forearms are aligned with the angled body of Jesus, the object of his devotion, while his vision seems to bypass the parameters of mundane space. The content of the Duke’s insight into the mystery of the Body is hinted at by the motifs held in the hands of Saints Francis and John the Evangelist, with the presentation of these motifs encircling the Duke’s head. Francis holds a cross, positioned frontally and located directly above the Duke’s praying hands; while with his other hand the saint, who was known as alter Christus, displays his stigmata above Federigo’s forehead. John holds a book juxtaposed to the back of the Duke’s head, with the folds of the saint’s garment sweeping down through the book and towards the donor’s heart. This arc of hands and motifs, if not quite a halo, contours the invisible aura of the donor’s soul. More than that, they gesture towards, and present external symbols of the Duke’s understanding of the Eucharist: the Infant Jesus is the Word made Flesh (book) who during the Mass miraculoulsy re-enacts both the Crucifixion (cross) and the Resurrection (self-display of the stigmata), promising eternal life. What is so unmodern here is that the donor’s interiority is not posited as autonomous—not as a self-grounded subject (even if subjectivity is a moment of the painting’s perspective, as we shall see)—but relies upon the mediation of a community of saints to inform and empower insight into the mystery of the Eucharist. What are we then to make of the Duke’s vision? Here it may be helpful to distinguish the mentalistic imagination from the reception of inner visions, and consider the relation between the two—terms of analysis lost upon modern psychology.22 As Michael Baxandall and others have made clear, the rise of lay devotion and private spiritual practice in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance included exercising the imagination by, for example, assuming the viewpoint of the Virgin Mary, or visualizing the scenes of the Passion in settings visualized as

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Figure 4.5 Piero della Francesca (c.1420–1492), Pala Montefeltro (Montefeltro Altarpiece), Madonna and child with saints and Duke Federigo of Urbino, c.1472–4.

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contemporary and in which the characters are given faces of people familiar from one’s everyday life.23 This sort of imagining is cognitive, mentalistic and egosustaining; yet when energized through devotion and surrender (comportments out of sorts with modern self-assertion and willfulness), these imaginative exercises may lead to the more spontaneous reception of subtle vision and radiance.24 In the Pala Montefeltro, the donor figure makes concrete a devotional model of imaginatively envisioning the Eucharist as the Body of Christ and conceptually meditating upon this vision’s redemptive significance, spiritual exercises that serve as preconditions for the opening of the eye of spirit and its more subtle glimpses into the Body’s mystery. The grouping of the Virgin, Jesus and the donor performs a double function, both acting as thematic centre of the composition and action, and presenting at the heart of the representation a microcosmic model of the subject–object relation proper to the painting as a whole. Mary’s praying hands, which have been likened to vaulting, are arched over the Sleeping Child; not only is her lap the mensa, but she alludes to ecclesia, the Church housing the Mystical Body. The Duke is presented in profile with one eye, corresponding to the monocular vision of the painting’s perspective. A beholder’s perspectival vision of the scene is not that of a dispassionate rationalist—which modern scholarship sometimes presupposes—but finds its paradigm in the Duke’s devotional and imaginative contemplation. Indeed, the perspective construction is less self-evident than it might at first appear. A standard claim about Piero della Francesca’s work is that his spaces are ‘rational’.25 But the space of the altarpiece is not merely rational. Although the linear perspective produces a recessional ordering and common spatial ambient for the plastic bodies, the measured regularity and integration of bodies into space is by no means seamless. Planar effects amongst bodies suspend or counter ambient depths. The standing saints and angels are isocephalic; the two-dimensional arrangement of heads diminishes the otherwise deep perspectival construction. Such deconstructions of regulated and unimpeded depths allow for a space that is not only geometrizing and rational but also playful and metaphorical, a space that is both rational and figurative—a transrational space that both exceeds while it maintains its own scaffolding as perspectivalgeometric construction. This is not a picture-space expressing the contemporary scholar’s concerns for science, objectivity and reason, but an imaginary environment that evokes the mystical ambience of the church during Mass. The apse is particularly relevant in this regard. The coffering in the vault suggests deep recession, but the foreshortened vertical marble panels below seem to generate far less depth; and the arch embracing the scallop shell does not integrate with the barrel vaulting, especially at the left. Consequently, spatial depth here is enigmatic. The scallop shell is drawn forward ambiguously in front of the shadowed coffers above. The apse area is shaped like many contemporary altarpieces, a vertical rectangle crowned by an arch, with these two shapes readily alluding to earth and heaven. The upper area of the apse might then be something of an analogue to the higher spheres of the cosmos, a sense reinforced by its comparative perceptual instability and immeasurabilty. From the scallop shell hangs an egg, a motif that occasioned a famous

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iconographic controversy about its identity and meaning.26 But if we adopt the reading of space I am offering, the distance in depth of the apse is polyvalent, and consequently the size and type of egg cannot be finalized through schematic reconstructions of spatial perspective. Moreover, the top part of the scallop shell, from the tip of which the egg hangs, and the upward outer folds of the shell at left and right, suggest a foreshortened bird in flight: a metaphor for the Holy Spirit with upper part illumined. The egg hangs from the ‘beak’ of this figure and (through the collapsing of depth) lies directly above Mary and Jesus. This formation, therefore, alludes to the descent of the Holy Ghost during Mass and serves as an emblematic key for seeing the luminous picture-space as radiant with spirit. The secret figure of the Holy Ghost hovers in our understanding between being perceptually present and requiring our imaginative completion of its form, pressing cognition inward, figuring spirit as infusing and transcending the sensible. Perspective posits a viewing position centered in front of the scene; the architecture seems to continue forward, and locates us in the nave as a participant in the Mass. From this station, our point of view is a principal node or source of the visual unity and coherence of the realm of objects; beholding is projected as subjectum, the metaphysical subject of representation that grounds the order of things.27 Yet this point of view, this moment of subjectivity, is an insufficient ground, as it is unable to secure the rational regulation and cohesion of significant facets of the visual world, such as the apse zone that serves as metaphor of the heavens. Playing with spatial depth calls attention to perspective as such—perspective as device and construct. Thus beholding becomes aware of itself as subject, an awareness of subjectivity that comes ‘before’ subjectivity itself.28 The sense of being the subject of perspective located in the nave becomes an ‘’object’ in attention, prompting release of egoic identity into the mysterious void of open, unbounded awareness. Comparable in the radicality of its call to spirit, the anonymous late-fourteenthcentury tract The Cloud of Unknowing recommends the practice of contemplative prayer, which goes beyond the use of thought or the imagination, in order to ‘forget’ all cognitive knowing, surrendering one’s sense of identity to ‘know’ God most perfectly through the path of love: And now also you must learn to forget [to no longer cognize] not only every creature and its deeds but yourself as well, along with whatever you may have accomplished in the service of God. For a true lover not only cherishes his beloved more than himself but in a certain sense he becomes oblivious of himself on account of the one he loves. . . . And so reject the thought and experience of all created things but most especially learn to forget yourself, for all your knowledge and experience depends upon the knowledge and feeling of yourself. All else is easily forgotten in comparison with one’s own self.29

Contemplative prayer, and related spiritual exercises of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, carry the practitioner beyond herself into a resting within the cloud of unknowing. Similarly, in the Pala Montefeltro, the viewer’s identity as the

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subject of the perspective is prompted towards its own self-ungrounding; subjectivity—as the source and ‘master’ of the order of things—releases its hold on the world, dissolving into a spiritual witnessing. It is important to recognize that these concerns for transcending subjectivity are not simply items of the past, nor are they found only in a traditional religious context, but animate some of the most famous and important texts of recent philosophy. A brief comparison with Heidegger’s musings on Gelassenheit (‘releasement’), a term he appropriated from the late-medieval mystic and theologian Meister Eckhart, is instructive. For Heidegger, thinking in modernity is an activity of willing inscribed within the subject–object horizon of representation. Through release, as a letting-go that is beyond activity or passivity (‘surrender’), the subject–object relation can dissolve into a more primordial Open region where all willing ceases, and where thinking comes forth in its essence. Heidegger’s reflections in this text of 1959 are useful because they attest to the kind of ‘stepping back’ before or behind subjectivity advanced in the fifteenth-century Pala Montefeltro; but unlike Piero’s nonconceptual figuring of Silence, the German philosopher’s fascination with and attachment to thinking, even a thinking freed from representation, tends to retain the separate sense of self, preventing full release into the Open.30 This attachment to thinking and languaging, this refusal to surrender and release deeply into the cloud of unknowing and its spirit of love, is not peculiar to Heidegger but is much more broadly symptomatic of present-day philosophical life and its one-sided stress on masterful thinking and language-use. Representation in the Pala Montefeltro, therefore, undoes the subjective grounding of visual order, not as an exercise in deconstruction for its own sake but to release identification of the subjective self-sense into a spiritual mode of seeing, akin to and even surpassing that of the donor, a surrendering of body and mind, both now witnessed as having always already belonged to the manifest world of form. Affect in the Pala Montefeltro needs to be understood in this context. All the standing figures are upright and iconic, symmetrically arranged around the Virgin and Child, as is the grouping of three standing saints on the left and the right. The effect is one of silence and stillness, if not quite of timelessness.31 Through small gestural acts and subtle differences in facial expressions, the emotions of individuals are muted and subdued. Despite the local ambiguities of depth, plastic figures are integrated into a measured space, positioned in relation to each other in an apparently rational manner, with a subtle, very beautiful, soft, luminous glow that exceeds the quotient of brightness that can be inferred from the implied light source casting shadows. Compared to Giotto’s late-medieval Lamentation, there is in Piero’s Pala Montefeltro a more spiritually unified, corporate response to the Body of Christ, a greater individuation of figural types, but also a muting of expression, where affect is not contained within the limits of any individual figure but seems to infuse space

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as spirit. A beholder—especially someone practised in the devotional exercises of the day—is moved to surrender identification with body-mind, transcend the subjective self-sense, and release into a witnessing that realizes incorporation into the spiritual. The painting offers a model for the worshipper’s experience of Mass, a spiritualaffective attunement to and participation within the Mystical Body of Christ. Piero’s altarpiece is an extraordinary example of how Renaissance painters figured pictorial representation beyond its apparent limits, a task that could include depicting transpersonal affetti. In this case personal and individuated responses are subordinated to a more pervasive mood of self-transcending grace, an expansive conjoining of bodies in the silence and stillness of a spiritual witnessing that surrenders and discloses the body-mind as an undulation in the seamless flesh of the world. Reflections In this paper I have attempted to demonstrate that our usual assumptions about affetti in late-medieval and early-modern painting should be amended, because modern scholarship carries much of the rationalistic and atomistic approach to facial expression that one finds in Le Brun, where a Cartesian ontology has no room for the transpersonal. Such an approach betrays modern reason’s incredulity towards direct spiritual experience (not to be confused with religious belief), and the academy’s blindness to transpersonal experience and realization. As Hans-Georg Gadamer has explained, our attending to great historical art is most fruitful when conducted as a kind of dialogue, where the visions and voices of the past are not entombed by objectifying methods of scholarship (methods that are necessary but insufficient conditions for nourishing historical interpretation), but where an engaged explication risks who we are, made vulnerable by dropping the protective armour of ‘objective’ inquiry, welcoming these past visions and voices, to be seen and heard, and with such ethical force, that they may make challenging and potentially unsettling truth-claims upon our current forms of life.32 As Leo Steinberg has cautioned: There are moments, even in a wordy culture like ours, when images start from no preformed program to become primary texts. Treated as illustrations of what is already scripted, they withhold their secrets.33

What we see in Giotto’s Lamentation and Piero’s Pala Montefeltro are not simply mythic visions, pre-modern fictions of the divine that we moderns have grown beyond, but glimpses and sparks of authentic spiritual life that we have often yet to realize—sparks which, in leaping ahead, illumine an unknown future.

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Notes 1

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’ [1964], in Galen A. Johnson, ed., The MerleauPonty Aesthetics Reader (Evanston, IL, 1993), 126 (emphasis of last two sentences added). For discussion of this passage, see Michael Schwartz, ‘Recasting the Art History Survey: Ethics and Truth in the Classroom Community’, Art Criticism, 1 (2001), 112–15. 2 Ken Wilber, One Taste: Daily Reflections on Integral Spirituality (Boston and London, 2000), 5. Authentic spiritual development, while not of the substance of belief, nevertheless satisfies the Kuhnian criteria of being a science (procedural injunctions, experimental evidence and intersubjective verification), for which see idem, The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Religion and Science (New York, 1998), 27–31, 150–75. Throughout the present essay I shall be relying upon Wilber’s pathbreaking studies in the ‘spectrum of consciousness’. 3 Wilber, One Taste, 25–8, distinguishes between translation, where the ego takes on a new set of beliefs and is effectively redescribed, and transformation, which in its radical form releases beliefs and undoes the ego-contraction altogether. For illuminating discussions on and ‘descriptions’ of spiritual witnessing, see ibid., 54–7, 64–70, 80–82, 89–90, 187–90, 199, 255–8, 275, 281–2, 300–301. 4 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time [1924], trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York, 1962), 172–88. For commentary, see Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’, Division I (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1991), 168–83. 5 The word ‘representation’ has wide and diverse currency today. In this paper the term is used in the sense of Vorstellung as analysed by Heidegger in his presentations of the history of Being and as taken up by many subsequent philosophers, including Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York, 1970). For commentary on the relation between these two philosophical histories, which centre on the rise and decentering of representation and subjectivity in modern times, see Michael Schwartz, ‘Epistemes and the History of Being’, in Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, eds., Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters (Minneapolis, 2003). 6 Michael Schwartz, ‘On the Mimetic Imaginary in Late Medieval Italian Painting’, paper presented at ‘Art and the Spectator in Early Italian Art: An International Conference’ (Athens, GA, 25–6 Sept. 1998). 7 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting [1453], trans. John R. Spencer (New Haven and London, 1966), 78. See Helen Hills, Chap. 5 below. 8 Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago and London, 1994), 349–76. See also Anne Derbes, Picturing the Passion in Late Medieval Italy: Narrative Painting, Franciscan Ideologies, and the Levant (Cambridge, 1996). 9 The view presented here of the metaphysical significance of medieval picture styles draws on the art historical writings of Wilhelm Worringer, André Grabar and Wolfgang Schöne, and the philosophical histories of Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Hans Blumenberg and Ken Wilber. 10 Evelyn Welch, Art in Renaissance Italy (Oxford and New York, 2000), 191, notes that the ‘rules and regulations [of Quattrocento funerary rituals] should encourage a re-examination of Lamentation scenes . . . where the controlled grief of the male figures is deliberately contrasted with the feminine lack of restraint’. Perhaps something akin is

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at work in Giotto’s Lamentation. In order not to overcomplicate the argument in this paper, however, I shall be disregarding the important issue of differences in gender response and ritual access to the Eucharist. On the historical development of the idea of possible (or a plurality of) worlds, see Hans Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1983), 145–79. For explication of late-medieval and postmedieval paintings as representing possible worlds, see Schwartz, ‘On the Mimetic Imaginary’. In Wilber’s formulation, the distal sense of self (‘me’) is embraced by the proximate sense of self (‘I’), where the latter is the principal locus of identity. See Ken Wilber, Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy (Boston and London, 2000), chaps. 3 and 4. On the modes of beholder displacement in late-medieval and Renaissance paintings, see Michael Schwartz, ‘Beholding and Its Displacements in Renaissance Painting’, in Alvin Vos, ed., Place and Displacement in the Renaissance (Binghamton, NY, 1995), 231–54. For discussion of this understanding of Being and its epistemic procedures for knowing the truth, see Martin Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York, 1977), 130, 143; Foucault, The Order of Things, 17–45. On the codes of gesture in Giotto, see Moshe Barasch, Giotto and the Language of Gesture (Cambridge, 1987). See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, 1989). Put very coarsely, the premodern understanding of inner depths (following Augustine) entailed not only the metaphorical movement ‘within’ but also ‘upward’, a discovery not so much of a singular self, but of the Light above of the Absolute Other. The sense of inwardness changed in the modern period, beginning most notably with Montaigne and exemplified by the doctrine of the Freudian unconscious; greater depth now meant to discover more essential features of one’s individual character, a sense of inwardness that seems to find its earliest, clear artistic expression during the seventeenth century, as with Shakespeare’s dramas and Rembrandt’s paintings. Jacques Derrida, Points… : Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford, CA, 1995), 321. For suggestive remarks on the psychospiritual levels of affect, see Wilber, Integral Psychology, 120, 198 (chart 1b). See Belting, Likeness and Presence, 409–57. Alberti, On Painting, 43. For discussion, see Victor I. Stoichita, Visionary Experience in the Golden Age of Spanish Art (London, 1995), 78; Michael Schwartz, ‘Raphael’s Authorship in the Expulsion of Heliodorus’, The Art Bulletin, 79/3 (Sept. 1997), 491. See the brilliant discussions of postmedieval indifferentes Leuchtlicht in Wolfgang Schöne, Über das Licht in der Malerei, 4th edn. (Berlin, 1977), esp. 112–13. See William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-’Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination (Albany, NY, 1989), p. ix: ‘In putting complete faith in reason, the West forgot that imagination opens up the soul to certain possibilities of perceiving and understanding not available to the rational mind. . . . [Following the views of Henry Corbin one would say that] the “imaginal” world or mundus imaginalis possesses an independent ontological status and must be clearly differentiated from the “imaginary world”, which is no more than our individual fantasies. . . . The mundus imaginalis is the realm where invisible

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Michael Schwartz realities become visible and corporeal things are spiritualized. Though more real and ‘subtle’ than the physical world, the World of Imagination is less real and ‘denser’ than the [formless] spiritual world, which remains invisible as such’. In the light of Wilber’s elucidation of the spectrum of consciousness, the ‘imagination’, in the usual sense of the term, is thoroughly cognitive, discursive or symbolic, whereas the ‘imaginal’ entails attunement to the more psychic and subtle levels of experience. The former is proper to eye of mind, the latter to the eye of spirit. For profound reflections on how exercising the imagination is not the same as but can condition release into spontaneous spiritual envisioning (which, I am speculating, was at the heart of the transformative power of many late-medieval and Renaissance lay devotional practices), see Ngakpa Chögyam, Wearing the Body of Visions (New York and London, 1995), 115–16. In a related vein, see the abundant evidence that the use of images did open up powerful visionary capacities in later medieval practice, in Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York, 1998), esp. chap. 2. As Hamburger summarizes (ibid., 32): ‘A comparison of devotional practice with devotional theory leads to a reevaluation of the relationship between art and mysticism. Images, far from obstacles to transcendental experience, emerge as indispensable stepping stones.’ Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford, 1972); Marc Fumaroli, L’École du silence: Le Sentiment des images au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1994), 203 ff.; and Welch, Art in Renaissance Italy, 307–11. The release of the imagination into the reception of subtle visions has something to do with the sense of Dante’s phrase alta fantasia. See Purgatorio XVII; ParadisoXXXIII. For an important study that stresses the rational facets of Piero’s picture spaces, see Martin Kemp, The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven and London, 1990), 27–35. About the Urbino Flagellation the author asserts (30): ‘No picture could exude a more pronounced air of geometric control and no painting was ever more scrupulously planned.’ Yet in line with the analysis of the Pala Montefeltro presented in this paper, ‘geometric control’ is only one aspect of the Flagellation’s complex space. This debate, originally between Millard Meiss and Creighton Gilbert, involved attempts to determine the size of the egg as a means of defining the type of egg. See the convenient summary of this debate in Laurie Schneider Adams, Italian Renaissance Art (Boulder, CO, 2001), 199. On the emergence of the subject of representation in the early-modern period, see Heidegger, ‘Age of the World Picture’; Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven and London, 1993), part II. Compare the instructive and stimulating discussions of Renaissance perspective in Karsten Harries, Infinity and Perspective (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2001). William Johnston, ed., The Cloud of Unknowing (New York, 1973), 102. See also Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ [?1441] (New York, 1952), chap. 21, ‘How We Must Rest in God Alone above All Things’. Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking: A Translation of ‘Gelassenheit’ [1959], trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York, 1966), 58–90. On the issue of the later Heidegger’s fascination with thinking, and whether it blocked deep release into the Open, see David Loy, Nonduality: A Comparative Study of Philosophy (Amherst, NY, 1988), 175; Lex Hixon, Coming Home: The Experience of Enlightenment in Sacred Traditions (Burdett, NY, 1995), 1–17.

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See Yves Bonnefoy, ‘Time and the Timeless in Quattrocento Painting’, in Norman Bryson, ed., Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France (Cambridge, 1988), 22–6. 32 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method [1960], trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd edn. (New York, 1994), 300–307. 33 Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, 2nd edn. (Chicago and London, 1996), 106

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CHAPTER 5

Architecture and Affect: Leon Battista Alberti and Edification Helen Hills

Art historical studies of the relationships between aesthetic expression and emotion have concentrated on painting to the neglect of architecture. Architectural history, paradoxically since Modernism, has tended to shrink from the emotional, seeking refuge in the technical, the quantifiable, and a social carefully drained of feeling. Yet Renaissance and early modern writings frequently advert to architecture as propitious in eliciting certain ‘affects’ and effective in suppressing others. Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) goes farther and discusses architecture both as a metaphor for the spiritual condition and as a means for securing both social good order and individual well-being. Alberti’s treatise, De re aedificatoria (On the Art of Building), written in the 1440s and substantially completed by 1450, the first independent architectural treatise of modern times, offers a remarkable opportunity to consider how he relates architecture to affetti. De re aedificatoria, which is concerned with truth and method far more than with subjective response, is usefully complemented by Alberti’s Profugiorum ab aerumna (Escapes from Trouble), also known as Della tranquillità dell’animo (On Tranquillity of the Spirit) of 1441 or 1442, which in Book I uses architectural allegory to describe the mind’s ideal harmony and its response to misfortune, while Book III describes architectural design as a particularly effective means for the troubled to regain peace. The most important writer on architecture of the early Renaissance, Leon Battista Alberti founds his analysis of the role of building on theory, observation, and reflection and forges a new language for the built environment. He emphasizes the significance of the architect and makes ambitious affective, moral, and social claims for his art, in many ways unparalleled until the eighteenth century. Moreover, in relating architectural form to history, Alberti paves the way to a history of emotion, even as he forecloses this by his insistence on an ethos that is universal. Far from conceiving architecture’s emotional impact as dependent on the subjective receptivity of an individual, Alberti recognizes architecture’s emotive capacity while insisting on an aesthetic that when morally correct is also universal.

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Classical and medieval thinkers associated architecture with the development of human civilization but relegated it to a low position in human achievement, consonant with its manual status.1 Their divisions systematically place architecture amongst the mechanical arts serving human physical needs.2 Undertaken in part as a modern version of the late-first-century BC treatise by the Roman architect Vitruvius, Alberti’s treatise departs markedly from both it and his immediate predecessors in his ambitious attempt to integrate architecture with a broad interpretation of the new humanist culture, and, above all, in giving architecture a moral role in producing a moral society.3 This chapter highlights Alberti’s explicit and implicit views on the relationships between architecture and the affetti, architecture and the delight of the senses, and visual pleasure, and on their relationship to beauty. It shows that for Alberti emotions are primarily social, and beauty not only occasions delight but is inherently related to morality, as visual delight depends on moral probity, in both architect (or artist) and beholder, giving architectural affetti intellectual and ethical capacity and potential. At first sight Alberti’s work does not seem promising ground. It is not concerned directly with affetti and provides no systematic treatment of emotions. His exposition of the principles of good architecture include many examples, qualified at most by one or two adjectives of approval, such as ‘dignified’, ‘beautiful’, ‘commodious’, ‘graceful’ and ‘noble’. His advice concerning good design is either practical, and concerned with specific aspects of a building, or abstract and theoretical. Even his Profugiorum focuses on controlling inner perturbations and incorporates architecture principally as metaphor. But closer attention shows that architecture for Alberti is intimately related to state of mind, both as metaphor and as practice, and that he views the architect as occupying a crucial role in the right ordering of society in general and of individuals’ affetti. Like his contemporaries, Alberti assumed that all living matter was animated, ‘inspired’ and ensouled, and that spirit communicated between soul and body, between people, and between person and image.4 ‘There are some movements of the mind called feeling, such as anger, sorrow, joy and fear, desire, and similar’, writes Alberti in De pictura (On Painting).5 These feelings are born from movement and change: ‘the mind is far more born to mobility and variety, more than every wave’.6 Alberti acknowledges that ‘it is extremely difficult to vary the movements of the body in accordance with the almost infinite movements of the heart’, and therefore in painting, ‘inner life is not so much shown as elicited by harnessing the beholder’s power to compare’:7 A ‘historia’ will move spectators when the men painted in the picture outwardly demonstrate their own feelings as clearly as possible. Nature provides—and there is nothing to be found more rapacious of her like than she—that we mourn with the mourners, laugh with those who laugh, and grieve with the grief-stricken. Yet these feelings are known from the movements of the body. We see how the melancholy, preoccupied with cares and beset by grief, lack all vitality of feeling and action, and remain sluggish, their limbs unsteady and drained of colour . . . yet when we are happy and gay, our movements are free and pleasing in their inflexions.8

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Alberti’s empathetic argument shifts subjectivity from object to subject and demonstrates that his primary concern is with the viewer. His discussion of architecture shows that he holds a comparable view of architecture’s capacity and role. In Profugiorum, a fictitious conversation between Nicola de’ Medici, Alberti himself and Agnolo Pandolfini, in an extended architectural description unique in his work, Alberti discusses tranquility, the absence of movement of the mind, in relation to the majestic and harmonious Florence Cathedral.9 He relates the cathedral’s qualities to the pleasures of body and mind of writer and reader. Thus the architecture, described as a setting for well-being, is also both a metaphor for the mind’s tranquil state and a model for achieving it: And certainly this temple has in itself grace and majesty; and, as I have often thought, I delight to see joined here a charming slenderness with a robust and full solidity so that, on the one hand, each of its parts seems designed for pleasure, while on the other, one understands that it has all been built for perpetuity.10

Alberti here attends to the combination of ‘charming slenderness’ and ‘robust and full solidity’. He does not use the abstract terms of firmitas, utilitas, venustas, which he uses in De re aedificatoria to define the beauty of the cathedral; instead, he describes the sensory, bodily experience of being inside the cathedral. The pleasure the architecture’s appearance affords is underpinned by the intellectual understanding that its structure is sound. Contrasting architectural qualities, grace and majesty, fragility and strength, beauty and utility—known as a result of the process of comparison—find equilibrium in the visitor. Agnolo indicates an antithesis between the constancy inside the cathedral and the extremes of nature outside its walls, the opposition between—but also coexistence of—spiritual tranquillity and the variability of fortune: here is the constant home of temperateness, as of springtime: outside, wind, ice and frost; here inside one is protected from the wind, here mild air and quiet. Outside, the heat of summer and autumn; inside coolness.11

Since for Alberti the initial impulse for thought is sensory experience, and since he seems to agree with Aristotle that states of the soul are emotional conditions, Agnolo’s description of the cathedral helps his reader to understand spiritual tranquility by conjuring up a sensory architectural experience.12 Sight, temperature, smell (‘here it is always fragrant’) and sound are all evoked. Architecture as a metaphor for spiritual condition becomes architecture as producer of spiritual fulfilment (apparently according to the needs of the individual’s senses or to his receptivity): and if, as they say, delight is felt when our senses perceive what, and how much, they require by nature, who could hesitate to call this temple the nest of delights? Here, wherever you look, you see the expression of happiness and gaiety.

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Good architecture produces good society, people at ease with themselves and with God, where past and present are fused and where spiritual tranquility, most importantly, occurs within the search for Christian salvation: ‘and, that which I prize above all, here you listen to the voices during mass, during that which ancients called the mysteries, with their marvellous beauty’.13 The experience of Florence Cathedral is also an experience of divine harmony. In turn, in De re aedificatoria, Alberti insists that religious worship requires subjectively pleasing architecture: there is little doubt that for the religious cult it is important to have temples which marvellously delight the soul, and fill it with joy and admiration . . . each part should be designed so that those who enter are stupefied with admiration and cannot restrain themselves from shouting aloud that what they see is worthy to be a place for God.14

Having shown his reader inside this architecture of spiritual tranquility at the start of Profugiorum, Alberti then demonstrates how he may build it for himself. Drawing on Plato’s Phaedrus, Agnolo explains that the soul is composed of two parts: one is tranquil, constant and industrious; the other is lazy, pleasure-loving and subject to passions. It would be better, says Agnolo, if we could dominate that part of our soul subject to disturbance, but this is not possible to us in our frailty. But we can strive to keep the aspects in balance, fortifying ourselves against the blows of fortune. Again adopting architectural imagery, Agnolo says that just as an upright column can support any weight, so the soul opposes adverse fortune with the rectitude of virtue.15 Christine Smith points out that the ‘equilibrium of opposites’ that Alberti finds satisfying in the cathedral reveals an ideal relation whose analogues are in oratory, music and the nature of God.16 This is not, however, because the mind is organized analogously to musical harmony, but because of the work of reason and dedication its composure requires. Spiritual peace is derived directly from the visual and emotional perception of the beholder, and not from an abstract consonance of number or measurement. Thus Nicola rejects the argument that the mind is composed of musical harmonies and consonances. Rather, it is subject to forces that even musicians and philosophers cannot control: ‘sad memories, unfulfilled expectations, harsh insults, come upon us and attack our soul, such that, in spite of ourselves, we must suffer and fear, and take things badly, so to speak, against our every will’.17 Agnolo replies that men, if they really want, do have influence over themselves, in both good and bad, and can be composed not only against slight movements of the mind but also against grave troubles. We can train and prepare our soul against being swayed by the times and adversity, ‘first by contemplating and recognizing ourselves, then by considering and establishing things that are fleeting and fragile, not according to the error of one’s opinion but according to the truth and certainty of reason’.18 The intellect, cognition and reason are infinite and immortal, and in this they link man (Alberti is concerned with the male) to God.19 Idleness nourishes every vice; and nothing perturbs more than vice.

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When Nicola protests that humans cannot determine the ‘fluctuations and tempests of the soul’, Agnolo replies that we can make ourselves less subject to ambush from the soul’s perturbations by closing the ‘windows’ through which they enter our minds and by dedicating ourselves to living free from their molestation, just as we prepare buildings for winter. Although the soul is subject to change and variety, we must construct (‘edificare’) another nature within ourselves. Architecture is here more than a metaphor for humans in the world; we can learn from architecture how to live.20 Florence Cathedral is Alberti’s image of spiritual equilibrium, because we should live in accord with nature, not as we find it, but as we remake it. Spiritual tranquillity is a human creation like a building, built as a moral edifice through human determination and knowledge, and, as we shall see, for Alberti good architecture actually assists this process. Book III of Profugiorum discusses human suffering, when spiritual tranquillity seems unattainable. Agnolo reviews various ways of counteracting unhappiness, such as wine, women, song, friends, and sporting activity, before describing his own solution. It is important not to dwell on past troubles, but to keep busy in mind and body. Agnolo uses intellectual activity, memorizing poetry or writing literary criticism, to regain spiritual equilibrium, but, he says, most effective of all is the invention of mechanical devices and architecture: I am accustomed, most of all at night, when the agitation of my soul fills me with troubles and I seek relief from these bitter worries and sad thoughts, to think about and construct in my mind some unheard-of machine to move and carry weights, making it possible to create great and wonderful things. And sometimes it happens that I not only calm the agitation of my soul, but invent something excellent and worthy of being remembered.21

If this fails, he turns to mathematics, which transports him far from his surroundings. What tranquillity those with greater mathematical ability must possess! If we follow virtue, behave rightly and study worthy subjects, we shall be perfectly tranquil, no matter what pain or adversity we may face, and we shall be strengthened against the perfidy and iniquity of other people. Agnolo’s puzzlings, focused on mechanics and mathematics, undertaken to procure his own spiritual calm, may also be practically useful. The ability to achieve great things lies in our diligence and industry.22 Invention makes us like God, fortifies ourselves against adversity, and improves our lives. Thus the contemplative life is not opposed to the active life but may benefit it. However, Alberti is careful not to equate external achievement with virtue. Only virtue is within our control. Profugiorum ends with an image of pleasurable absorption and tranquillity of the soul, as Agnolo strives to grasp the principles on which a great building is made. For Alberti, a man made in God’s image cannot simply withdraw into the contemplative life or suffer whatever fate hurls at him. The activity of architecture bridges the gap between active and contemplative lives; and the architect himself can be a moral exemplar.23 In relation to the affetti, Alberti speaks in De re aedificatoria above all of delight, of pleasure, which is directly related to beauty, and of awe. Awe, which is primarily

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an emotion of religious respect, does not have its roots in beauty but is achieved through austerity, majesty and darkness—that is, it is beyond the edge of the visible. Beauty is secondary in evoking religious awe. The place where the altar is to be situated should have ‘more of majesty than of beauty’.24 The templum should inspire awe in both priests and the faithful: ‘That horror with which a solemn gloom is apt to fill the mind naturally raises our veneration, and there is always somewhat of an austerity in majesty.’25 But while awe, at the edge of what can be seen, is suitable for temples, it is beauty that Alberti is most concerned with achieving in architecture: Most noble is beauty, therefore, and it must be sought most eagerly by anyone who does not wish what he owns to seem distasteful. What remarkable importance our ancestors, men of great prudence, attached to it is shown by the care they took that their legal, military, and religious institutions—indeed the whole commonwealth—should be much embellished; and by letting it be known that if all these institutions, without which man could scarce exist, were to be stripped of their pomp and finery, their business would appear insipid and shabby. Gazing at the heavens and their wonderful works, we admire the work of the gods more for the beauty we see, than the utility that we recognize.26

It is beauty, not utility, that we admire in nature; and beauty, not utility, that renders humankind’s achievements noble. Is beauty an objective or subjective quality? Christine Smith points out that Alberti’s position on this is more complex than has been recognized, combining Aristotle’s definition of beauty as that which gives pleasure through hearing and sight with the Platonic notion that beauty is a quality possessed by beautiful things.27 Alberti emphasizes that both musical and visual harmony are based on numbers, and that those numbers that provide concinnitas to the ears also give pleasure to the eyes and mind.28 But while beauty may inhere in number, it can be recognized only by the pleasure it brings to the senses and emotions: ‘Whenever the soul is reached through visual or aural or any other kind of perception we immediately recognize harmony’ (IX, 5). The ancients selected the ratio 1:8 (rather than 1:6 and 1:10, drawn from the human body) for their columns, because it pleased ‘the natural sense innate to the mind, by which we feel what is called concinnitas’.29 A common characteristic of sense, shared at least by sight and hearing, is appealed to. The harmony of high and low voices creates an equilibrium between the tones that gives pleasure and conquers the soul; the same dynamic occurs, says Alberti, in every work that aims to persuade.30 While perfect beauty belongs to God, it can only be experienced through the senses. Moreover, beautiful architecture helps to bring about the ideal state of the soul. Alberti’s discussion of beauty in architecture depends on a particular conception of the nature of the pleasure that good building produces in the beholder. The pleasures of architecture are fundamentally social and moral. The social purposes of architecture and the function of a building are determined by social requirements, rather than by the architect alone: ‘architecture . . . gives comfort and the greatest

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pleasure to mankind, to individual and community alike; nor does she rank last among the most honorable of the arts’.31 Alberti holds that buildings reshape those who inhabit them. Architecture is both locus and agent of change. Indeed, civil society is only possible because of the work of the architect: the security, dignity and honour of the republic depend greatly on the architect: it is he who is responsible for our delight, entertainment and health while at leisure, and our profit and advantage while at work, and in short, that we live in a dignified manner, free from any danger.32

Architecture is responsible not only for holding civil society together, but even for forging it: ‘We, considering how useful, even indispensable, a roof and walls are for men, are convinced that it was they that drew and kept men together.’33 Alberti regards eagerness to build as deep-rooted in humankind and one of the major social forces, motivated by pleasure: ‘how much the activity of construction is pleasant to us and deeply rooted in our soul is shown by, among other things, the fact that whoever can allow it always feels the strongest desire to build something’; ‘nor’, he adds wryly, ‘is there anyone who, on making some discovery of building, would not gladly and willingly offer and broadcast his advice for general use, as if compelled to do so by nature’.34 Architecture, then, while apparently concerned primarily with the public good, depends on private affetti. Indeed, good architecture, born from a natural impulse and correctly tamed, not only contributes to personal and civic pleasure but melds a link between the two: When you erect a wall or portico of great elegance and adorn it with a door, columns, or roof, good citizens approve and express joy for their own sake, as well as for yours, because they realize that you have used your wealth to increase greatly not only your own honour and glory, but also that of your family, your descendants, and the whole city.35

Thus architecture occasions joy, not directly through the apprehension of certain forms, but indirectly, through, for example, the recognition of social honour that fine architecture brings. The pleasure occasioned by architecture is aesthetic, civic and social, bringing satisfaction, delight and honour.36 At its best, that pleasure is not circumscribed temporally or historically. It is the enduring capacity of architecture, which enables it to perform the function of reaching forward and backward in time to ensure not only that the good name of the builder will endure for posterity but also that the imagined respect of posterity will increase present honour: in view of the benefit and convenience of his inventions, and their service to posterity, he should no doubt be accorded praise and respect, and be counted among those most deserving of mankind’s honour and recognition.37

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Good architecture is perceived instinctively and affectively by sight: ‘It is remarkable how some natural instinct allows each of us, learned or ignorant alike, to sense immediately what is right or wrong in the execution and design of a work.’38 Yet while the response to beauty is immediate and affective, its recognition springs from an innate reasoning: When you make judgements on beauty, you do not follow mere fancy, but the workings of a reasoning faculty that is inborn in the mind. It is clearly so, since no one can look at anything shameful, deformed, or disgusting without immediate displeasure and aversion.39

Good architecture not only promotes social pleasure, but must be conceived with regard to the rational ordering of society. In discussing the compartition of a city, Alberti argues that roads, squares and individual works must be properly planned and distributed according to use, importance and convenience, ‘for without order there can be nothing commodious, graceful, or noble’.40 Good reason lies behind that which is pleasing to good society. The rational order of beauty is apprehended innately by the senses. It is the pleasure this gives that draws the observer to beauty. Defining the pleasure of hearing and sight (the pleasure of sense) was central to the treatment of aesthetic issues during the Renaissance.41 Aristotle and Plato both claimed that the beautiful gives pleasure through hearing and sight.42 Aristotle argued that sense is a ratio, providing the evidence that extreme brightness and darkness damage the sight and that, generally, the five senses derive pleasure from a mean between extremes. Each of the senses is uniquely aware of a realm of awareness. Thus sight experiences the visible, sound the audible, and so on. By its own nature, each sense distinguishes between the objects it encounters on the basis of the ‘affective’ qualities of its realm of awareness, drawn to some and repelled from others. These ‘affective’ qualities function as contrasts and are learned by comparison. Sight distinguishes between light and dark and searches for a mean.43 Cicero, a vital reference point for Alberti, follows this closely, arguing that the discriminatory power of the faculty of sense is a virtue.44 Alberti’s discussion of ‘comparatione’, deriving from Cicero, is crucial here. Comparatione is the ability to discern contrasts (‘to recognize the presence of more or less or just the same’)45 and to use them to establish a qualitative scale of differences (‘as shade deepens, the clarity and whiteness of a colour becomes less’).46 This includes numerical and affective differences. To determine something ‘beautiful’ or ‘ugly’ is an instinctive judgement based on attraction or repulsion. Opposition is an inevitable part of visual understanding, just as it is a necessary part of conceptual meaning. The scale of comparatione is a relative one, however: ‘if the sky, the stars, the seas, the mountains and all living creatures, together with all other objects, were . . . reduced to half their size, everything that we see would in no respect appear to be diminished from what it is now’.47 Further, a ‘man is the best known of all things to man’ in a more relative sense still: ‘the Spaniards think many young maidens fair, whom the Germans would regard as swarthy and dark’.48

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While, therefore, the principle is one of valuation, the values depend on a community that shares them.49 Moreover, the judgement of beauty depends always on what is appropriate in each case. Alberti’s celebrated dictum that ‘beauty is the reasoned harmony of all the parts within a body, so that nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse’ refers to this process of oppositional comparison.50 Just as in perspectival composition in painting, so in architecture, all values are relative, and size or direction is meaningful only in relation to other sizes or directions.51 Alberti advocates the proper relation of each part to all others in a unified structural whole. For Alberti beauty is affective, and, although difficult to achieve it attracts everyone to it: Now graceful and pleasant appearance . . . derives from beauty and ornament alone, since there can be no one, however surly or slow, rough or boorish, who would not be attracted to what is most beautiful, seek the finest ornament at the expense of all else, be offended by what is unsightly, shun all that is inelegant or shabby, and feel that any short-comings an object may have in its ornament will detract equally from its grace and from its dignity.52

The beautiful attracts instinctively and is subjectively experienced. In a remarkable passage, Alberti claims that beauty can even deter an enemy from making an attack.53 Beauty and dignity are the best defence against destruction, not because they arouse associations of civitas but because beauty acts on the beholder directly.54 That which is properly designed elicits natural pleasure, so its destruction would cause concomitant pain. Although he allows that the experience of beauty is subjective (experienced by the subject), Alberti is careful to insist that beauty is not relative: Yet some would . . . maintain that beauty, and indeed every aspect of building, is judged by relative and variable criteria, and that forms of buildings should vary according to individual taste and must not be bound by any rule of art. A common fault this, among the ignorant—to deny the existence of anything they do not understand.55

Alberti follows Cicero’s embrace of the judgement of the ear in his acceptance of the judgement of the eye. It was through their energetic subjection of historical architecture and nature to the eye’s judgement that the Greeks achieved the beautiful, he claims.56 The eye rejects faults or excess, even in something worthy and wellintentioned. Pleasure and judgement are one. While the visual perception of faults in particular may be quick, building a pleasing building is far from straightforward.57 The multifarious functions of architecture preclude simplistic prescription. Alberti distinguishes between various sorts of buildings—public, private, sacred, profane, necessary, for the adornment of the city, temporary or permanent.58 Buildings will only be agreeable if they follow decorum (governed partly by art and partly by nature, and understood as the

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intelligible order of nature) and are appropriate to their function and to the social standing of their patron.59 Rather than prescribing certain forms to achieve honour and grace, Alberti emphasizes the desirability of creating certain relationships in architecture. Thus the part, which should correspond to a larger whole, is also simultaneously seen as a whole to which smaller parts correspond: The parts ought to be so composed that their overall harmony contributes to the honour and grace of the whole work, and that effort is not expended in adorning one part at the expense of all the rest, but that the harmony is such that the building appears a single, integral, and well-composed body, rather than a collection of extraneous and unrelated parts.60

Analogous argument allows Alberti to see the city in terms of the house and individual rooms as entire buildings. Following from this, a graceful room enhances a city, which serves all its citizens.61 These connections are important in Alberti’s thinking, both in determining how society functions and in demonstrating that architectural design must be guided by common aesthetic criteria, within the necessary variations of design suitable for differing functions. ‘Partitio’ or compartition is the process of dividing up the site into smaller units, so that the building is treated as composed of integrated smaller buildings, joined together like parts of the body: in terms of its nature, utility, and methods of operation, everything should be so defined, so exact in its order, number, size, arrangement, and form, that every single part of the work will be considered necessary, of great comfort, and in pleasing harmony with the rest.62

The process of division, paradoxically, allows the whole to assume greater importance than the part, by emphasizing the relationships of part to whole. No matter how remarkable the materials or astounding the construction technique, a building will not be beautiful unless the composition is governed by order and measure.63 Alberti emphasizes that only ‘some sure and consistent method and art’ is capable of achieving beauty, which in architecture requires rigorous application, dependent on the work of countless others, since ‘the arts were born of Chance and Observation, fostered by Use and Experiment, and matured by Knowledge and Reason’.64 Beauty, ‘reasoned harmony’, organizes the rational in an holy enterprise, and is ‘a great and holy matter’, which is not readily achieved: all our resources of skill and ingenuity will be taxed in achieving it; and rarely is it granted, even to Nature herself, to produce anything that is entirely complete and perfect in every respect.65

But Alberti also indicates that buildings depend on their effect on the people who use them. Thus there is a tension in his writings between the purist absolutist and the relativist contextualist. Delight can be achieved in private architecture by ‘a degree

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of licence . . . taken according to taste’. It should ‘seek delight rather than any form of pomp’ and can indulge in witty or playful departure from the ‘calculated rule of lineaments’.66 This licence must, however, never violate concinnitas, a crucial conceit in Alberti’s conception of beauty, to which we shall return. Alberti makes clear that good architecture, capable of bestowing such benefits, will incorporate firmitas, utilitas and venustas (mass or firmness of construction, usefulness of function, and grace or beauty of design). To make his point, he provides a lesson in architectural history. The architecture of the Asiatic kings was characterized by great size and impressiveness; the Greeks, who were poorer and wiser, produced architecture that was more refined and carefully planned; but the Romans, who came to wealth through modest origins, constructed buildings that combined all qualities, not sacrificing one for another: they preferred to temper the splendour of their most powerful kings with a traditional frugality, so that parsimony did not detract from utility, nor was utility sacrificed to opulence, but could also incorporate anything that might be devised to enhance comfort or grace.67

Krautheimer argues that it is the restraint of the Romans that Alberti admires: an architecture of mass (firmitas) born in Asia merges in Greece with grace (venustas) and finally in Rome with usefulness utilitas. Utilitas achieves greater importance for Alberti than firmitas and venustas, because it is Roman and shows a higher achievement by man.68 The superiority of Roman architecture is seen by Alberti as a suitable (even necessary) complement to Rome’s superiority in other matters:69 because . . . the art of building had long been a guest in Italy, and because the desire for her was so evident, she seems to have flourished there, so that Italy’s dominion over the world, already famous for every other virtue, was by her ornament made still more impressive. She surrendered herself therefore to their understanding and possession, thinking it a disgrace that the leaders of the world, the glory of all nations, should be rivaled in the splendour of their works by peoples surpassed in every other virtue.70

Roman architecture is characterized by Alberti chiefly by its moral quality (due to the Romans’ moral society).71 Roman virtù ensured that Roman architecture, neither parsimonious nor extravagant, was able to focus on the problem of utility, while enhancing its elegance and beauty.72 Imitating nature effectively allies beauty to utility: The Italians, because of their natural frugality, decided for the first time that buildings should be like animals. For they noticed that those horses whose limbs seemed suited for particular functions usually proved most efficient for those same jobs. Hence they thought that beauty of form could never be separated from function and utility.73

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Architecture therefore shares the moral character of the society that nurtures it. In turn, beauty enhances the dignity of humankind, beyond the merely necessary.74 Consequently, Alberti sees ancient architecture as a potential source of wisdom and beauty, which can too easily be ignored: Examples of ancient temples and theaters have survived that may teach us as much as any professor, but I see—not without sorrow—these very buildings being despoiled more each day. And anyone who happens to build nowadays draws his inspiration more from inept modern nonsense rather than proven and commendable methods. Nobody would deny that as a result of all this a whole section of our life and learning could disappear altogether.75

The consequences of ignoring the lessons of architectural history are not only practical but intellectual, moral and social. All these qualities are also for Alberti emotional qualities, capable of bringing pleasure and delight. But it is not chasing delight for itself with which Alberti is concerned—since delight can only properly be secured intellectually and with moral and social rectitude. A society’s moral values are present in its architecture; consequently its architecture can bestow good social values. When Alberti discusses beauty as an independent attribute of a building, he lists three properties every building must satisfy: it must be lasting in structure, appropriate to its use and ‘pleasant and delightful in appearance’.76 Distinguishing between beauty and ornament, Alberti emphasizes beauty’s immanence: ‘beauty is some inherent property, to be found suffused all through the body of that which may be called beautiful’.77 While ornament can make something already pleasing more delightful or render the displeasing less offensive, it cannot produce beauty: ‘Beauty is that reasoned harmony of all the parts within a body, so that nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse.’78 In Book VI Alberti defines beauty in the individual building: ‘a harmony of all the parts in the whole, fitted together with such proportion and connection ratione concinnitas, that nothing could be added, diminished, or altered but for the worse’.79 Westfall argues that the effect of this definition is to cause man to delight in objects of nature and in acts of mankind.80 It is perhaps more precise to say that it causes delight in a certain relationship between man, architecture and nature. Beauty produces pleasure in the beholder. It is the combination of intellectual, manual and natural qualities that produce pleasure in a beautiful building (just as in any beautiful object). Beauty produces pleasure through dignity (achieved intellectually), grace (produced through manual skill), and admiration (derived from natural properties): The pleasure to be found in objects of great beauty and ornament is produced either by invention and the working of the intellect, or by the hand of the craftsman, or it is imbued naturally in the objects themselves. The intellect is responsible for choice, distribution, arrangement, and so on, which gives the work dignity; the hand is responsible for laying,

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joining, cutting, trimming polishing, and such like, which gives the work grace; the properties derived from Nature are weight, lightness, density, purity, durability, and the like, which bring the world admiration.81

Alberti assumes that when an artist fashions material, he reforms it from its natural form through assiduously exercized ingegno, continued intellectual effort. Three elements are involved in giving form to matter: the mind designs, the hand works on the material, and nature supplies the matter of the material. These three elements operate in relation to each other; the superior work of the mind depends on its close conjunction with nature.82 In other words, the architect understands both natural and social possibilities and limits. He must understand nature’s processes and society’s requirements, and in successfully ordering these he provides access to beauty. Through beauty the architect affects society, because a beautiful building affects the citizens. Beauty in architecture, as in painting, is didactic and functions like istorie, the painter’s highest products, moving the beholder to forsake vice for virtue. But while the painter addresses citizens individually, architecture addresses citizens collectively and thereby acts as a sort of societal index.83 Alberti discusses criteria for individual architectural elements—the orders, parts of the building, palaces, temples, precious materials, machines—before turning again to the question of whence beauty comes (‘wherein it is that beauty and ornament universally considered, consist, or rather, whence they arise’).84 In other words, beauty is occasioned, not objectified. Beauty does not consist of specific forms but of a quality that can assume different forms. In making a beautiful building, nature must be imitated. How does an intellect produce beauty; what is that property which ‘in its nature makes a thing beautiful’?85 Alberti introduces three principles of design—number, measured outline and collocation—and a supremely important element, integral to their interrelationship, concinnitas. We will return to concinnitas after a brief discussion of the three principles of design. Number is defined as the correct or appropriate quantity of elements based on correspondences to what is found in nature. Certain numbers are noble, as indicated by God’s adoption of them in the creation of the cosmos. The number of supports (even) and openings (odd) in a building should correspond to those in animals. Other numbers such as 5, 6, 7, 9 are especially favoured by nature.86 Finitio, or measured outline, is Alberti’s term for ‘a certain mutual correspondence of those several lines by which the proportions are measured’ in length, breadth and height. Measured outline controls number and allows proportions in the three-dimensional space of a building. For Alberti, proportions have their source in number rather than in nature. Musicians delight our ears with numerical, proportionate relationships of sounds, which are the same proportions that delight our eyes.87 Collocation, the third principle, ‘relates to the situation and position of the parts’ of a building one to another, and depends largely on virtù or an innate ability of the architect, rather than on method or learning. The architect must be innately able to collocate the properties

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of architecture, the principles of nature and the principles of philosophy, and to bring them into an ordered relationship to one another.88 To return to concinnitas. While, number, finitio and collocation provide the foundation of beauty, ‘arising from the composition and connection of these three is a further quality in which beauty shines full face’:89 This we call concinnitas which we say is the product of grace and decorum. Yet it is the task and function of concinnitas to compose by a perfect proportion the parts which by nature are otherwise separate in such a way that they mutually correspond to one another.90

Concinnitas is a structuring principle essential both to the mind and to nature, which guides nature as nature produces beauty recognized by the mind. In other words, concinnitas is the result of a mode of proceeding, a relationship between nature, man and beauty.91 Westfall suggests a translation of ‘congruity’ for concinnitas, as it is intrinsic to bodies of nature and to the members of those bodies, a part of every action of man’s life and of every production of nature, but this does not go far enough.92 As Westfall himself emphasizes, concinnitas brings together the intentions and abilities of the architect and the intentions and achievements of God in creation and of man in society. Through his concern with concinnitas the architect enters society.93 While it is clear that without concinnitas the architect cannot contribute usefully to society, concinnitas is less intrinsic to natural bodies qua bodies than to their relational nature. Thus Alberti says, ‘it is the task and aim of concinnitas to compose parts that are quite separate from each other by their nature, according to some precise rule, so that they correspond to one another in appearance’.94 To claim, as Alberti does, that concinnitas ‘moulds the whole of Nature’, and that ‘Everything that Nature produces is regulated by the law of concinnitas’, is not to say that concinnitas is actually embedded in the things of nature. 95 Concinnitas is a regulatory or overarching principle of nature determining the nature of its products rather than locked within them. Concinnitas and the judgement of the eye indicate the harmony between the sensing mind and the order of the world. Alberti describes concinnitas as relating nature to society and as the necessary mode by which beauty can be reached. Concinnitas is the result of the correct relationship between nature and society, such as to produce beauty. Alberti’s celebration of Brunelleschi in the dedication of his Della pittura of 1436 shows also that, when nature is ‘exhausted’ or society impoverished, prodigious talent can repair the break in the tradition of learning.96 Concinnitas is ‘instantly recognized’, whether it reaches us by sight or sound, and we are attracted to it instinctively; ‘It is our nature to desire the best, and to cling to it with pleasure.’97 Sight is particularly susceptible to concinnitas: The eyes are by their nature greedy for beauty and concinnitas, and are particularly fastidious and critical in this matter . . . Nor do I know why they demand what is absent more keenly than they appreciate what is present . . . Indeed, they sometimes find it impossible to explain what it is that offends us, apart from the one fact that we have no means of satiating our excessive desire to gaze at the beautiful.98

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Beauty, then, is a form of sympathy and consonance of the parts, organized by concinnitas: ‘This is the main object of the art of building, and the source of her dignity, charm, authority, and worth.’99 Alberti took this goal from poetry: ‘the very same numbers that cause sounds to have that concinnitas, pleasing to the ears, can also fill the eyes and mind with wondrous delight’.100 As in poetry something—some harmony of sounds, some ‘music’ that is in poetry itself—moves the hearer directly, so in architecture such a harmony is provided by the second principle of design, finishing or proportions. Just as in music, where deep voices answer high ones, and intermediate ones are pitched between them, so they ring out in harmony, a wonderfully sonorous balance of proportions results, which increases the pleasure of the audience and captivates them; so it happens in everything else that serves to enchant and move the mind.101

The proportions visible in buildings in the finishing allow a building to convey a meaning that can move the viewer directly and soothe and stir the heart and soul. The viewer perceives these proportions and harmonies of architecture through his senses, especially sight: ‘It is remarkable how some natural instinct allows each of us, learned and ignorant alike, to sense immediately what is right or wrong in the execution and design of a work. It is precisely with regard to such matters that sight shows itself the keenest of all the senses.’102 For Alberti, the architect makes an ordered environment in which men will be moved to desire virtue, because they are moved by beauty and ornament. The accessibility, even inescapability, of architecture means that the task of the architect is imbued with enormous, unparalleled social and moral importance. The architect discovers form through his own observation of nature (far from a position in which the artist is to uncover a pre-existent, universal order).103 His source of beauty and order is in the intellectual process that he as liberal artist follows, and it is related to the ordering of nature and of morality, which are independent of him but in which he participates. In effect, Alberti sees pleasure, accorded by beauty, as resulting from a correct relationship between beholder, object and nature. Rather than conceiving the intellectual and the emotional as necessarily in conflict, he sees them as intimately connected, and never more evidently so than in relation to good art and architecture. Good architecture elicits pleasurable emotion in the spectator, who, enchanted by wonder at the excellence of the work, is stimulated to an intellectual judgement of its qualities. Alberti’s work is important in drawing new connections between architecture, the intellect, the right ordering of society, beauty and pleasure or delight. His approach to architecture is ethical, and, although it is an ethics that is restricted to educated males, it outstrips in ambition the more practical architectural treatises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Virtue is examined in its moral dimension as a disposition of the soul, and therefore as an emotion, perceived in a particular time

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and place by an individual. Alberti sees the past always in the light of appropriate action in the present, the possibility of human progress, measured by the possibility of new invention, the belief that men can perfect the inner self as well as nature. Equilibrium is hard for men to sustain, subject as they are to mobility and change; but they are able to create works that provide ideal conditions for this. Moreover, because, in turn, such works can evoke that balance of the soul within those able and willing to be moved by them, man’s works are able to conjure up God. In a sense, it is only through his own creations that man can know God. Notes I am indebted to Mary Pardo and Michael Schwartz for their advice on this paper. 1

2 3

4

5

6 7

Cicero regarded architecture as serving human necessity, a manual art like agriculture or sewing. Seneca placed architecture in the lowest of four categories of arts, ‘vulgares’ and ‘sordidae’. See Christine Smith, Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism (New York and Oxford, 1992), 29. See E. Whitney, ‘Paradise Restored: The Mechanical Arts from Antiquity through the Thirteenth Century’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 80 (1990), 45–63. For the circumstances in which Alberti wrote his book, see Anthony Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance (New York, 2000), esp. 266–86. For Alberti’s relationship with Vitruvius, see especially Richard Krautheimer, Studies in Early Christian, Medieval, and Renaissance Art (London, 1969), 257–73, 323–32. A rich discussion of Alberti’s relationship to humanist culture and that of his writings to antiquity is provided by Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition 1350–1450 (Oxford, 1971). For the dating of Alberti’s work, see Cecil Grayson, ‘The Composition of L. B. Alberti’s Decem libri de re aedificatoria’, Münchner Jarhbuch der bildenden Kunst, ser. 11, 3 (1960), 152–61. Pneumatic physiology and the close relation between movement of the body and movement of the soul and mind means that in Renaissance images we see a higher spiritual inwardness in external forms. See Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford, 1988), 59–71; David Summers, The Judgment of Sense (Cambridge and New York, 1990), 110–15. ‘Sunt namque motus alii animorum, quos docti affectiones nuncupant, ut ira, dolor, gaudium, timor, desiderium et eiusmodi.’ My translation is based on Cecil Grayson’s in Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting; and On Sculpture: The Latin Texts of ‘De pictura’ [1452] and ‘De statua’, ed. and trans. Cecil Grayson (London, 1972), (De pict. II, 43), 82. ‘Molto più l’animo, nato a mobilità e varietà, più che ogni onda’. Leon Battista Alberti, Profugiorum ab aerumna libri III, in idem, Opere volgare, ed. Cecil Grayson, 3 vols. (Bari: 1960–73), II. 107–83. Alberti, On Painting (II, 42), 81; see also Mary Pardo, ‘On the Identity of “Masaccio” in L. B. Alberti’s Dedication of Della pittura’, in Joseph Marino and Melinda W. Schlitt, eds., Perspectives on Early Modern and Modern Intellectual History: Essays in Honor of Nancy S. Struever (Rochester, NY, 2000), 239.

Architecture and Affect 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30

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Alberti, On Painting (II, 41), 81. For the participants in his dialogue, see Smith, Architecture, 3–4. Translation by Smith, ibid., 5–6. Alberti, Profugiorum, 107. Smith, Architecture, 11. Ibid., 6. Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1988), (VII, 3), 194. The ethical interpretation of a column as a symbol of balance, purity, and incorruptibility may derive from Proclus’ commentary on Euclid’s Elements; see Smith, Architecture, 7. Smith, ibid., 6, claims that these are ‘opposite’ qualities. In fact, it is not their opposing nature so much as their differentiated nature that matters to Alberti. ‘Grazia’ and ‘maiestà’ are borrowed from definitions of the stylistic differences between rhetorical styles (ibid., 84). Aristotle recognized two types of expression, the plain and the adorned, and recommended the mean between the two. Cicero defined three styles: the full, yet rounded; the plain which is not devoid of vigour and force; and the style which stresses the middle course by combining elements of the other two styles. ‘le triste memorie, le ingrate espattazioni, le dure offensioni ci si presentano e attancasi all’animo, tale che a nostra malgrado ci conviene dolere e temere, e male averci, si può dire, contro a ogni nostra volontà’. Alberti, Profugiorum, 170. ‘in prima col premeditare e riconoscere noi stessi, poi col giudicare e statuire delle cose caduce a fragile, non secondo l’errore della opinione, ma secondo la verità e certezza della ragione’. Ibid., 175. ‘Questo intelletto, questa cognizione e ragione e memoria, donde venne in me sì infinita e immortale se non da chi sia infinito e immortale?’ Ibid. Compare Alberti’s description of architecture in terms of the body, On the Art of Building (III, 14), 86: ‘with every type of vault we should . . . bind together the bones and interweave flesh with nerves’. Alberti, Profugiorum, 181–2. Alberti values the mechanical engineering of Brunelleschi’s dome, for which there was no model or prototype, even more than works following in a tradition: Alberti, Della pittura, dedication. See Pardo, ‘On the Identity of “Masaccio”’, 226. See Smith, Architecture, 3–18. Alberti, On the Art of Building (VII, 12), 223. Ibid. Ibid. (VI, 2), 155. Smith, Architecture, 92 Alberti, On the Art of Building (IX, 5), 305. Thus, as Summers, Judgment of Sense, 134–5, adeptly points out, the mean is formulated, and the mathematicians are imitated at the behest of the sense of concinnitas, by means of which we apprehend numerus. ‘The definite ratios of music and mathematics in architecture stand in the same immediate relation to sensed architectural forms as the definition of a view by perspective stands to the real forms it at once describes and transposes to a higher level of clarity and physical intelligibility’. Alberti, On the Art of Building (I, 9), 24.

106 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60

Helen Hills Ibid. (Prologue), 3. Ibid., 5; see also, Grafton, Alberti, 287. Alberti, On the Art of Building (Prologue), 3. Ibid., 4. Ibid. Ibid., (Prologue; II, 3), 3, 37. Ibid. (Prologue), 5. Ibid. (II, 2), 33; see Summers, Judgment of Sense, 48–9. Alberti, On the Art of Building (IX, 5), 302. Ibid. (VII, 1), 191. See David Summers, ‘Contrapposto: Style and Meaning in Renaissance Art’, Art Bulletin, 59 (1977), 346 and Summers, Judgment of Sense. Plato, Hippias major, 298a; Aristotle, Topics, 146a21. See Summers, Judgment of Sense, 54–62. Aristotle, De anima, 418–26. Summers, ‘Contrapposto’, 346. Cicero sees iudicium, the ability of sense to discriminate, as a mark of the special abilities of the human soul. Ibid., 347. Alberti, On Painting, (I, 18), 53. My thanks to Mary Pardo for clarification here. Ibid. (I, 10), 47. Ibid. (I, 18), 53. Ibid. The dark side of this is that we only know what is like ourselves. Summers, Judgment of Sense, 170. Alberti, On the Art of Building (VI, 2), 156. Perspective turned Alberti’s attention from ontically ‘fixed’ appearances, from visible qualities in and for themselves, to the relations that constitute the structure of appearances. The costruzione legittima is a geometrically inspired conception of artistic space—a continuation of the space of the beholder. It offered a ‘critical’ appreciation of visual experience: not of visible things or appearance per se, but of how their structure is known and formed by the human subject. See Joan Gadol, Leon Battista Alberti (Chicago and London, 1969), 65–7. Alberti, On the Art of Building (VI, 2), 155. Ibid., 156. Jan Bialostocki, ‘The Power of Beauty: A Utopian Idea of Leon Battista Alberti’, Studien zur Toskanischen Kunst: Festschrift für Ludwig Heinrich Heydenreich (Munich, 1964), 14–15, suggests that here Alberti follows Cicero, De oratore, III, 50: ‘All men, even if they do not know art and its principles, know with some hidden sense, how to judge what is good and what is bad in art and its principles’. Bialostocki’s argument that beauty is ‘a kind of “golden mean”, the aurea mediocritas which plays some role in the social and moral philosophy of Alberti’, is to regard Alberti’s claim that beauty cannot be tampered with without deforming it in excessively arithmetical terms. Alberti, On the Art of Building (VI, 2), 157. Ibid. (VI, 3), 158. Ibid. (II, 1), 35. Ibid. (I, 2), 8. Ibid. (II, 2), 37. Ibid. (I, 9), 23–4.

Architecture and Affect 61 62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

107

Ibid., 23. Ibid. (VI, 5), 163. Ibid., pp. 163–4. On the same theme in painting, see Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators, 48, 92. Alberti, On the Art of Building (VI, 2), 157. Ibid., 156. The term ‘lineamenta’ is difficult. It refers to what can be perceived in definite unalterable measures and therefore is sometimes regarded as referring to a drawn ground-plan. See S. Lang, ‘De Lineamentis: L.B. Alberti’s use of a technical term’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 28 (1965), 331–5. However, a measured ‘space frame’ is also conceivable. Alberti, On the Art of Building (VI.3), 158. Krautheimer, Studies in Early Christian, Medieval and Renaissance Art, 327. John Onians, ‘Alberti and ϕιλαρετη: A Study in Their Sources’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 34 (1971), 97–8. Alberti, On the Art of Building (VI, 3), 158–9. Onians, ‘Alberti’, 97–8. Alberti, On the Art of Building (IX, 1), p. 291. Ibid. (VI, 3), 158. Ibid. (VI, 2), 156. Ibid. (VI, 1), 154. Ibid., 155. Ibid. (VI, 2), 156. Ibid. Ibid. Carroll Westfall, ‘Society, Beauty, and the Humanist Architect in Alberti’s De re aedificatoria’, Studies in the Renaissance, 16 (1969), 68. Alberti, On the Art of Building (VI, 4), 159. Westfall, ‘Society, Beauty and the Humanist Architect’, 63. Ibid., 72 n. 47. Alberti, On the Art of Building (IX, 5), 301. Ibid. Ibid., 303–8 Ibid., 305. Music is not the source of these proportions, but shares them with architecture. Ibid. (IX. 7), 309. Ibid. (IX, 5), 302. Ibid. For Alberti’s dependence on Cicero for his idea of concinnitas, see Summers, ‘Contrapposto’, esp. 348–9, and Judgment of Sense, 134. Westfall, ‘Society, Beauty and the Humanist Architect’, 66. Ibid., 66. Alberti, On the Art of Building (IX, 5), 302. Ibid., 302–3 Pardo, ‘On the Identity of “Masaccio”’, 226. Alberti, On the Art of Building (IX, 5), 302. Ibid. (IX, 8), 312. Ibid. (IX, 5), 303.

108 100 101 102 103

Helen Hills Ibid., 305. Ibid. (I, 9), 24. Ibid. (II, 1), 33. Westfall, ‘Society, Beauty and the Humanist Architect’, 79.

CHAPTER 6

Spiritual Passion and the Betrayal of Painting in Georges de la Tour Dalia Judovitz

Passion precedes knowledge. Tears precede ontology; shed tears weep for the unaware. —Nicholas of Cusa

A rapid perusal of the horizon of meanings associated with the word ‘passion’ today stands in marked contrast to its French seventeenth-century designations. Most notably, whereas the modern sense of passions refers to psychological, affective states that imply the expression of emotion or sentiment as forms of subjective agency, these purely secular notions of sentience or sensibility no longer reflect the original religious significance of passion that was dominant until the later part of the seventeenth century. The word ‘passion’ derives from the Latin passio (signifying suffering or agony) and it designates the original sacred meaning of ‘passion’ as the Passion of Christ, insofar as he suffered death and passion to redeem the human race. In the latter part of the seventeenth century, the primacy of this Christological meaning of ‘passion’ began to be eroded. This cultural development can be seen in Antoine Furetière’s (1619–1688) definition of ‘passion’ in his Universal Dictionary (The Hague and Rotterdam, 1690), which was based on René Descartes’s (1596–1650) rationalist account in The Passions of the Soul (Paris and Amsterdam, 1649).1 Passion was first defined in a secular modality as signifying a term in physics relative to and opposed to an action, designating a natural body that suffers the intervention of an agent. It is only in the context of the second definition of ‘passion’ as physical suffering, that the original Christological meaning was evoked. Capturing the secularizing impact of Descartes’s philosophical redefinition of the passions, Furetière’s dictionary account marked a turning point in the representation and understanding of human sensibility.2 This redefinition of ‘passion’ at the end of the seventeenth century in terms of notions of physical action and rational agency announced the declining primacy of passion’s spiritual and sacred referents. It is important to keep in mind, however, that the philosophical elaboration of rational subjectivity and the passions in the earlier half of the seventeenth century

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coincided with a period of spiritual and artistic renewal fuelled by the Catholic Reform. While Descartes privileged rational agency and the capacity of the soul to master its passions, artists such as Georges de la Tour (1593–1652) affirmed the primacy of spiritual passions as vehicles for engagement with the divine. What is compelling about La Tour’s pictorial representations of spiritual passion is that they provide an eloquent counterpoint to the philosophical attempts to bring both subjectivity and its affective regimes under the aegis of reason. His devotional paintings are unusual to the extent that their emphasis on spiritual insight is framed by a critique of vision, which tests the representational limits of painting as a visual medium. Operating largely as a regional painter in the duchy of Lorraine who gained significant recognition in his time, La Tour’s works were ignored by posterity until his rediscovery by Hermann Voss in 1915. Very little is known about his life and artistic education. A few extant official documents and letters attest to the fact that although the son merely of a baker of some means, he was able to attain through his artistic talents and marriage a comfortable position as a burgher and property-owner in Lunéville. He was eventually awarded royal patronage and a pension after his presentation of a night-painting to the King Louis XIII. Apparently, the king held La Tour’s work in such high regard as to have all other paintings removed from his room.3 Additional mention of La Tour’s paintings in inventories of the belongings of such notables as Cardinal Richelieu, the Marshal La Ferté (Governor of Lorraine), Claude de Bullion (Superintendent of Finances) attest to the their importance and value at the time.4 Focusing on Georges de la Tour’s paintings, this chapter explores his privileging of a spiritual understanding of passion insofar as his works suggest a critique of secular attempts to portray the passions through manifest expression, display and mastery. It is based on the observation that the expression of repentance, as attested by the presence of tears and folded hands in prayer in St Peter Repentant (also known as The Tears of St Peter, 1645; Fig. 6.3 below) represents gestures of spiritual denial and betrayal. In his other devotional paintings such as the ‘Repentant Magdalene’ cycle (1635–44), Mary Magdalene’s spiritual passion is suggested through her contemplative, monocular profile gazing off into space. Lacking tears and dramatic displays of affect (see Fig. 6.1), her representation marked a departure from the pictorial and iconographic traditions of the time (as for example Fig. 6.2).5 Instead of exteriorizing Mary Magdalene’s repentance through exaggerated facial and gestural displays, La Tour deliberately eclipsed the expressive qualities of her face, thereby emphasizing her spiritual insight and communion with the divine. His decision to minimize the expressive manifestations of passion when depicting Magdalene’s repentance stands in marked contrast with its explicit figuration in St Peter’s denial of Christ. While both Mary Magdalene and St Peter are emblematic figures of the Catholic Reform’s insistence on the sacrament of penitence, Mary Magdalene’s passage from sin to conversion is untainted by the denial that follows St Peter’s conversion and apostolic calling. I have argued elsewhere that La Tour’s refusal to translate the Magdalene’s repentance into expressive facial and gestural

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Figure 6.1 Georges de la Tour (1593–1652), The Penitent Magdalene (also known as The Magdalene with Two Flames), c.1640–44, oil on canvas, 133.4 × 102.2 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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Figure 6.2 Jacques Bellange (c.1575–1616), Magdalene in Ecstasy, c.1611–16, oil on canvas, 60 × 40 cm. Museé historique lorrain, Nancy, France.

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signs indicates his reluctance to reduce her spiritual contemplation to passions that abide uniquely in the visible.6 This resistance to represent the embodiment of spiritual faith through visual analogies harks back to St Augustine. In his Confessions, the Divine address is experienced through hearing, an encounter with the Word through voice that cannot be circumscribed to the sphere of the visible.7 If La Tour’s paintings question the pre-eminence of vision and the visible realm, this is because the representation of faith as a blind act of love takes place in a register that challenges the visual realm of painterly expression. The impact of the Catholic Reformation and the dissemination of the Tridentine decrees in northern France in the early part of the seventeenth century generated significant debates in ecclesiastical circles regarding the role of religious imagery as a stimulus towards the cultivation of piety. These debates suggest efforts to renew the figurations of spirituality by questioning the cult of images and their didactic functions.8 Moreover, the mystical literature of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries emphasized the blindness of faith and privileged the heart as the vehicle for spiritual devotion. The introspective focus of these spiritual writings called upon a radical dispossession and exile of the self from its worldly conditions in order to become a privileged locus for the divine address. Spiritual reflection was intended to open up the heart and body to an address by God, in order to offset worldly temptations and an engagement with oneself. Drawing on the writings of St Theresa of Avila and St John of the Cross, Michel de Certeau has argued that it is precisely this radical dispossession, involving the giving over of oneself to the divine, that marks the ecstatic nature of spiritual experience.9 The devotional paintings of Georges de la Tour explore tangibly the problem of visualization, of representing spiritual insight in a visual register. In La Tour’s paintings, vision’s aspirations to seek insight are challenged by the primacy of hearing, as the other mode for witnessing divine truth (recalling St Augustine’s insistence of the primacy of the voice as medium for the divine address).10 This appeal to verbal modes of address is also indebted to the influence of emblembooks during this period, insofar as they inform and illuminate the iconography and visual imagery of La Tour’s works.11 This is to say that what the eye discovers in its attempts toward understanding what it sees is mediated by reference to the word, as heard rather than just seen. It is only with the advent of the classical period in the late seventeenth century that the eye and the ear will emerge as independent faculties bracketing the horizon of perception into distinctive and autonomous realms.12 In La Tour’s devotional nocturne St Peter Repentant, also known as The Tears of St Peter (1645; The Cleveland Museum of Art; Fig. 6.3), St Peter is depicted as an elderly man weeping, consumed by guilt, grief and regret, his hands folded in a gesture of penitential prayer. The expressive power of Peter’s outpouring of emotion is magnified by the illumination of his face and hands by a light of hidden source that seems to shine down on him from a vent above.13 The only source of illumination explicitly figured in the painting, however, is a large burning lantern whose luminous ambience (despite its hidden flame) illuminates Peter’s feet.14 La Tour’s visual

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Figure 6.3 Georges de la Tour, St Peter Repentant (also known as The Tears of St Peter), 1645, oil on canvas, 114 × 95 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH.

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emphasis on Peter’s feet, which competes with the illumination of his face, alludes to Christ’s gesture of washing his disciples’ feet at the Last Supper, which Peter strongly resisted (John 13. 8): ‘Peter saith unto him, Thou shalt never wash my feet. Jesus answered him, If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me.’15 As the subsequent passages (John 13. 9–15) suggest, the gesture of cleansing Peter’s feet anticipates his future betrayal and thus contamination, by sundering bonds of faith that indebt the disciples in service to Christ and the Lord. This emphasis on Peter’s spiritual adhesion through physical ritual that binds him in community with Christ is reiterated by La Tour through the presentation of a barely perceptible vine rising over the head of the cockerel sitting above and to the left of the lantern. This minute visual detail that has no formal or larger pictorial significance recalls Christ’s words to his disciples (John 15. 5): ‘I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing.’ Significantly, these visual details (Peter’s feet and the vine) do not yield their meaning unless activated by the inscription of the word. The very act of seeing the painting is staged to emphasize the limits and implicit blindness of ordinary vision in order to mandate the intervention of the word. It is apparently only through the resonant echoes of the Scriptures, through hearing rather than seeing, that sight is transformed into spiritual insight. When considered from a pictorial perspective, the two sources of illumination in St Peter Repentant create a competing focus for the attention of the beholder. How are we to explain this reiterated figuration of light, which stands in contrast to La Tour’s other contemplative nocturnes, dominated by a single light-source such as a burning candle, a flaming brazier, and so on? This painting is unique since it is both a diurnal and nocturnal work.16 It deliberately combines two genres of painting that La Tour had often kept apart, since the diurnal works represent primarily worldly subjects, while the nocturnes mostly depict moments of spiritual contemplation and repentance. The presence of the two sources of light marks the competing spiritual and worldly meanings associated with Peter’s spiritual love and worldly guilt. La Tour’s doubled representation of light attests to his efforts to renew the figurations of spirituality by inscribing the possibility of insight, a way of seeing that would challenge the predominance of vision and the vanity of painting. To evoke the vanity of painting here is not merely to have recourse to a figural conceit. In the Mary Magdalene painting-cycle, mirrors are emblematic of both spiritual love and worldly vanity. Moreover, given their representational powers, they also refer to painting’s illusionist conceits. In St Peter Repentant the mirror theme and the source of light are conflated in the representation of the burning lantern. When examined more closely, the lantern’s glass panel gives visual access to the flame within, thereby alluding to the conceit of transparency to which painting aspires when it purports to act like a window onto the visible. In so doing, La Tour attests to the seduction of vision and the vanity of painting insofar as it reflects the visible. However, this apparent initial affirmation of the power of painting is accompanied by its denial, since the lantern’s dark back-panel barely reflects the traces of the flame.

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La Tour thus stages both the conceit of painting and its denial, through its eclipse into darkness, marking the crucial distinction between ordinary sight and insight. Standing next to Peter is a cockerel, whose visual presence bears witness to Christ’s words predicting Peter’s denial of association with his master. Despite Peter’s protestations of loyalty and his expressed readiness to follow Christ to prison and death, Christ predicted (Luke 22. 31–3): ‘I tell thee Peter, the cock shall not crow this day, before that thou shall thrice deny that thou knowest me.’ The ringing words of Christ’s prediction of Peter’s denial are inscribed into the contemplative muteness of La Tour’s painting. The sound of the cock’s crow heralding the approach of dawn is the audible reproach and reminder of Peter’s major spiritual lapse, since he thrice denied knowing Christ. By marking Peter’s failure to bear witness to the divine address, the cockerel’s crow makes audible the voice of conscience that heralds Peter’s shedding bitter tears of repentance. Let us now look more closely at Peter’s face, the manifest locus for the expression of passions and the visible canvas of his sense of betrayal and regret. Peter weeps, his eyes brimming with tears, while his mouth slightly ajar lets escape a sigh or perhaps a sob. Weeping implies defacement, a disfiguration of the outward countenance or appearance of a person. It bears witness to and exteriorizes human affect through physical expression. Weeping attests to the presence of an emotion, or conviction, by mobilizing the visual and vocal apparatus of the body. It can act as the voice of conscience, or erupt as bodily expression, before consciousness has time to express its intent. To weep is to obscure the clarity of consciousness as figured through the seeing eyes by covering them with a veil of tears. This momentary blindness that robs the eye of its capacity to see unveils its capacity for address, for communing with another in a manner that exceeds the constraints of vision. As Jacques Derrida has noted in Memoirs of the Blind, weeping reveals the very truth of the eye in so far as it is destined for imploration, rather than just vision: ‘Deep down, deep down inside, the eye would be destined not to see but to weep. For at the very moment that they veil sight, tears would unveil what is proper to the eye . . . to have imploration rather than vision in sight, to address prayer, love, joy, or sadness rather than a look or a gaze.’17 The gaze veiled by tears thus attests to the power of address implicit in the eyes, to its apocryphal blindness and revelatory impulses that exceed the objectifying grasp of sight. St Peter’s weeping thus emerges as the testimony of his address to Christ, appealing to him through penitence and prayer. The effacement of his sight through weeping figures the potential exteriorization of his being insofar as it traces through imploration the address to someone beyond its grasp. Why then does St Peter weep so bitterly? Why is his repentance so painful and enduring that in his old age he found not just the chants of cockerels but those of all other fowl unbearable and had to them put to death?18 At the end of his life, he could no longer tolerate the sounds of children playing or those of ritual chants. Abhorring the intrusion of sounds, he sought to shut off his ears with woollen ear-plugs to reduce the world about him to the primordial silence he had so enjoyed as a fisherman.19 The

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reason why Peter’s repentance is so bitter and painful emerges from an examination of La Tour’s last signed, dated and documented painting, The Denial of St Peter (1650; Musée de Beaux-Arts, Nantes; Fig. 6.4).20 St Peter’s denial of his association with Christ, prompted by the questions of the maid holding a candle, to the left, is framed by the larger scene in the foreground representing soldiers throwing dice for Christ’s clothes. Peter’s absorption in his exchange with the maid disengages and blinds him to the dice-game to his right. The soldiers’ downward gazes and impassioned involvement, figured by the leering face of the soldier seated on the right, refocus the beholder’s attention on the dice. But the vigilant gaze of the soldier on the far right redirects the beholder’s look back to Peter’s exchange with the maid. The similarity between the gesture of Peter’s left hand and the hand of the soldier throwing the dice connects these otherwise disjointed scenes. Like St Peter, the soldiers too are blinded by their passions and unaware of the spiritual risks of their game. The juxtaposition of these two scenes places Peter’s spiritual betrayal in a secular context, where the gamble for the vestments of Christ becomes a figure for Peter’s spiritual lapse and bad faith.21

Figure 6.4 Georges de la Tour, The Denial of St Peter, 1650, oil on canvas, 120 × 161 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes, France.

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La Tour’s decision to depict Peter’s denial in the secular context of a gambling scene participates in a long-standing pictorial tradition that goes back to tenebrist artists such as Gérard Seghers, Gerrit Van Honthorst, Nicholas Tournier and Valentin de Boulogne.22 However, when examined in the light of La Tour’s other secular moralizing works such as The Dice Players (1650; Preston Hall Museum, Stocktonon-Tees) and his earlier The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs (1630–34; Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth) and The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds (1630–34; Musée du Louvre), his depictions of gambling scenes open up to a broader reflection on vision, expression and pictorial representation.23 Notably, gambling and trickery raise issues of blindness and betrayal, essential to La Tour’s pictorial project in so far as they allude to the illusionist and deceptive qualities of both vision and painting.24 In the nocturnal The Dice Players, the eclipse of candlelight coincides with the blindness of the player on the right, whose passion for the dice prevents him from seeing that he is being relieved of his purse. This almost imperceptible gesture of deception is principally apparent from the thief’s detached posture and gaze. However, what makes this gesture initially hard to see is the painter’s seductive focus on the fractured reflections of candlelight on armour, which are visually arresting in their own right. In his earlier diurnal paintings The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs and The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds, which are illuminated to the point of overexposure, the blindness of ordinary vision is also at issue. While the faces are largely blanched out and reduced to the consistency of masks, the minute depiction of costumes in all their gleaming ostentation captures the viewer’s eye. These surfaces of ‘willfully glittering superficiality’ comment on the seduction of worldliness and on the virtuosity of the painter’s hand.25 The viewer’s fascination with this display of worldly and pictorial vanity initially impedes a deeper understanding of the scene. The viewer finds him- or herself in the same position as the young gambler depicted on the right of the painting. Impassioned by his cards, he is shown as blind to being duped. He looks at his cards and thus fails to see the complicitous glances of the other players who orchestrate his deception. Intercepting and establishing complicity with the look of the beholder, the cheat on the right shows off his hand. His gesture of showing his cards resonates with the deliberate display of painterly virtuosity. By deliberately pointing out his deception as a visual trick intended to dupe the unsuspecting player, the cheat’s gesture alludes to the manipulable nature of human passions and to the blindness inherent in ordinary vision and faith in the visible world. Enacted through highly choreographed eye and hand gestures, these gambling works stage scenes of social betrayal that highlight the arbitrary and deceptive nature of human passions. Manipulating the expressive quality of their eyes through oblique looks, the cheats gamble upon and subvert the spiritual meaning of the face as a ‘mirror of the soul’ and of the eyes as ‘doorways to the soul’.26 These works represent moments of moral lapse, when human passions become subject to worldly speculation and negotiation. The moral betrayal that these works display relies upon the complicity of painting with vision and the beholder, thereby revealing painting’s visual conceit and potential for betrayal as a medium for portraying spiritual passions.

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The presence of two different sources of light in The Denial of St Peter recalls the treatment of light in St Peter Repentant.27 However, the representation of light in this work has purely secular connotations, insofar as its sources are deliberately obscured. The light of the burning candle is eclipsed by the maid’s hand, while the candle illuminating the faces of the Roman soldiers is hidden by the body of the soldier in the foreground. This deliberate eclipse of light, whose suggested presence is perceptible only through the shards of its radiant reflections on pieces of armour and clothing, lends a tenebrous atmosphere to the painting. By suppressing spiritual associations with light through its eclipsed presentation, La Tour illuminates Peter’s spiritual lapse in so far as he was blinded by worldly concerns. But this attempt to visually highlight Peter’s spiritual lapse runs up against the difficulty of representing a verbal exchange in pictorial representation. The beholder can only gain access to Peter’s denial through hearing or rereading the Gospels. This demand for the word, as a condition for seeing the painting, pits the evidence of the word against the visual conceit of painting. Before we examine in more detail the nature of Peter’s denial, it is important to keep in mind that, before denying knowing Christ in front of public witnesses, Peter had already denied the possibility of Christ’s passion, that of his upcoming agony, sacrifice and resurrection. This denial took the form of a rebuke: ‘this shall not be unto thee’. But he was severely reprimanded by Christ (Matthew 16. 22–3; Mark 8. 32–3): ‘Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence to me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men.’ Christ’s offence at Peter’s denial of his forthcoming passion and agony reflects his understanding of Peter’s spiritual weakness. Peter’s blindness, his incapacity to comprehend and assume Christ’s sacred destiny, is denounced in terms of his temptation by worldly concerns.28 Subsequently, Peter went on to remind Jesus of the sacrifice he and the other Apostles made in answering his call, and asked Jesus about their expected rewards (Matthew 19. 27, Mark 10. 28, Luke 18. 28). Thus, even before his explicit denial of Christ, Peter’s lack of spiritual insight and his fallibility are revealed in terms of his incapacity to address spiritual issues other than through a worldly language of risk and reward. But in what sense is Peter’s denial a gamble? And in what way are the meanings attached both to the divine and the human endangered through the submission to calculated risk? Does the impetus for manipulation and gaming endanger and betray spiritual insight into the sacred? A closer look at the Gospels reveals the dangers inherent in Peter’s denial. In St Matthew’s Gospel (26. 69–75), we are told that Peter followed Christ from a distance to the high priest Caiaphas’ palace, where he watched the attempts to seek false witness against Christ. After Christ’s condemnation to death for blasphemy removed the need for further witnesses, Peter was approached by a maid who addressed him by saying that he also was with Jesus of Galilee. Peter proceeded to deny before all: ‘I know not what thou sayest.’ Attempting to avoid bearing any witness at all, Peter claimed not to understand what was said. His first denial entails a betrayal of the question, negating the very grounds of the address. When questioned by another maid, who also saw him with Jesus, he

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denied with an oath: ‘I do not know the man.’ When accused that his mode of speech (his language, dialect or expression) revealed his association to Christ (‘thy speech betrayest thee’) Peter began to curse and swear, saying, ‘I know not the man.’ Betrayed by his own tongue, by a speech whose expression undermines its own disavowal, Peter’s third denial was emphasized by curses and oaths. Intended to blind his hearers to the deception he enacted upon them, Peter’s vociferous and emphatic denial suggests a disavowal of any knowledge of Christ, thereby marking his failure to bear public witness. Peter’s secular lapse, his denial of the maid’s address in terms of what is said, is echoed by his spiritual lapse, his denial both of knowing and also of recognizing Christ in both human and divine terms. St Peter’s gamble to avoid giving testimony against Christ through deliberate deception thus ends in a betrayal of both Christ and himself. Having wagered his word, Peter is betrayed by his expression, since his speech eludes his intent and argues against his deception. Blinded by worldly temptation into trying to manipulate appearances, St Peter unwittingly performs an act of spiritual betrayal. Having placed his faith in his own capacities for deceptive expression, he loses sight of Christ’s prophetic words regarding his imminent betrayal. Referencing a verbal denial that stands for and figures a spiritual lapse unrepresentable in the visual realm of painting, La Tour’s Denial of St Peter confronts the beholder with the limits and blindness of ordinary vision. The painting attempts to express visually a spiritual reality that exceeds its representational purview, thereby revealing itself as a deceptive mirror. Painting’s illusionist gamble holds out the seduction of worldly sights, while risking the betrayal or eclipse of spiritual insight. La Tour’s insistence on the blindness of ordinary vision, in order to celebrate the illumination of faith in response to the call of the divine, reflects his attempts to distinguish the representation of spiritual passion from its worldly counterparts. The spiritual impulse of La Tour’s works attests to a dispossession of subjective agency in so far as spiritual insight implies a radical passivity and transfiguration through the divine address. By situating spiritual insight in the regime of the voice, a mode of address that defies the representational sphere of painting, La Tour eludes vision’s seductive grasp of appearances. This may explain the distinction between his depiction of Mary Magdalene’s spiritual passion, defined by blind receptivity and ecstatic loss of the self, and St Peter’s denial, defined by his conceit to risk deceit by manipulating worldly appearances, thus despite himself performing an act of spiritual betrayal. Echoing the Gospels, La Tour suggests that the expression of spiritual passions is not open to manipulation or speculation, since it involves receptivity and submission to the command of the divine address. Counter to the emergent rationalist discourse in Descartes, which posits expression as a function of manipulation and mastery of the passions in order to enable the self-definition and appropriation of subjectivity, La Tour presents a notion of spiritual passion based on the ecstatic dispossession and ultimate loss of the self.29 By denouncing the manipulation of the passions for deliberate effect, he affirms mystery rather than spiritual mastery, thus sustaining alterity as a defining condition for the existence of subjectivity.

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Notes 1 2

3 4 5 6

7

8 9 10

11 12 13

14 15

René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, trans. Stephen H. Voss (Indianapolis and Cambridge, 1989); Antoine Furetière, Dictionaire universel (The Hague and Rotterdam, 1690). Descartes’s secularizing intervention is not limited to the passions but is already visible in the theological foundation of subjectivity in the Meditations; see Dalia Judovitz, Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes: The Origins of Modernity (Cambridge, 1988), 173–83. This incident is mentioned in a historical summary of illustrious men; see Dom Calmet, Bibliothèque Lorraine, ou Histoires des hommes illustres qui ont fleuri en Lorraine (Nancy, 1751), quoted in Jacques Thuillier, Georges de la Tour (Paris, 1992), 296. For descriptive summaries of these documents, see ibid., 296–7. See Alain Tapie, Les Vanités dans la peinture du XVIIe siècle (Caen, 1990), 138; Françoise Bardon, ‘Le Thème de la Madeleine pénitente au XVIIe siècle en France’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 31 (1968), 274–306. See Dalia Judovitz, ‘Georges de la Tour: The Enigma of the Visible’, in Thomas Frangenberg, ed., The Beholder: The Experience of Art in Early Modern Europe (forthcoming). La Tour’s treatment of expression stands in contrast to Charles Le Brun’s presentation of the passions in Conférence sur l’expression générale et particulière, delivered to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1668. See The Confessions of St Augustine, Book VIII, chap. 12. For an analysis of the primacy of the voice and the word in his conversion, see Louis Marin, ‘Echographies: The Crossings of a Conversion’, in idem, Cross-Readings, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1998), 238–51. See Paulette Choné, Emblèmes et pensée symbolique en Lorraine (1525–1633) (Paris, 1991), 484–98; Philip Conisbee, ‘An Introduction to the Life and Art of Georges de la Tour’, in idem, ed., Georges de la Tour and his World (Washington, DC, 1996), 72–6. See Michel de Certeau, ‘Mystic Speech’, in idem, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. B. Massumi, foreword by W. Godzich, (Minneapolis, 1995), 88–100. See Pierre Courcelle’s analysis of voice and hearing in St Augustine, ‘Les Voix dans les Confessions de Saint Augustin’, Hermes: Zeitschrift für klassische Philologie, 80 (1952), 31–46. For a 16th-c. account of the superiority of voice over sight as reflecting the primacy of the biblical word over light, see Thomas Frangenberg, ‘Auditus visu prestantior: Comparisons of Hearing and Vision in Charles de Bovelles’s Liber de sensibus’, in Charles Burnett, Michael Fend and Penelope Gouk, eds., The Second Sense: Studies in Hearing and Musical Judgement from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century (London, 1991), 85–9. See Choné, Emblèmes, 493–520. See Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses (Paris, 1966), 50. Conisbee, ‘Introduction’, 114, has suggested that this light may have issued from a possible divine source outside the painting. Pierre Rosenberg and François Macé de l’Ipinay have suggested that there may be a third source of light emanating from the right that illuminates the cockerel; see Georges de la Tour (Fribourg, 1973), 158. Choné, Emblèmes, 537, interprets the presence of this lantern symbolically as an emblem of Peter’s burning heart, whose ardour is concealed by the pain of guilt and denial. All biblical quotations are from The Holy Bible [King James Version] (New York, 1974), chapter and verse.

122 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28

29

Dalia Judovitz See Jean-Pierre Cuzin’s comments in idem and Pierre Rosenberg, Georges de la Tour, introd. Jacques Thuillier (Paris, 1997), 224. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago and London, 1993), 126. For an account of these remarks attributed to Cneius Mammeius, see Pascal Quignard, La Haine de la musique (Paris, 1996), 112–13. Ibid., 92–3. Documentation shows that a ‘Denial of St Peter’ was offered by the town of Lunéville to the Marshal La Ferté, governor of Lorraine in 1651. His inventory in 1653 describes the subject of this work as represented ‘en nuict’; see Cuzin, Georges de la Tour, 272. Jean-Claude Le Floch, Le Signe de contradiction: Essai sur Georges de la Tour et son œuvre (Rennes, 1995), 20, suggests that the religious and profane scenes are deliberately juxtaposed so that they function as extensions of each other. See François-Georges Pariset, Georges de la Tour (Paris, 1948), 287, plate 44; Thuillier, Georges de la Tour, 228–9. Also, for the indebtedness of these gambling scenes to Carravaggio, see Leonard J. Slatkes, ‘Georges de la Tour and the Netherlandish Followers of Caravaggio’, in Conisbee, ed., Georges de la Tour and his World, 207–8. For a study of the pictorial origins and iconography of gambling in these works, see Gail Feigenbaum, ‘Gamblers, Cheats and Fortune Tellers’, ibid., 150–68. Alain Jaubert, Palettes (Paris, 1998), 84, has noted that cards during this period are used not just for gambling but also divination, and that players and cheats could risk excommunication and prison. This phrase is burrowed from Conisbee’s eloquent description of La Tour’s pictorial technique in his ‘Introduction’, 67. For an analysis of the physiognomy of the face as a metaphor for the soul, see JeanJacques Courtine and Claudine Haroche, Histoire du visage: Exprimer et taire ses émotions, XVIe – début XIXe siècle (Paris, 1988), 59, 73–4. The dispersal of light and La Tour’s complexification of space indicates the possible intervention of his workshop and his son Etienne de la Tour; see Thuillier, Georges de la Tour, 228–9. Peter’s involvement with worldly, and in particular monetary concerns is made explicit in Jesus’ discussions with him regarding the temple tax. Payment for this tax was miraculously settled when Jesus sent Peter to catch a fish in whose mouth was found the gold coin that settled their debt (Mt. 17. 23–6). However, it is the Cartesian interpretation of expression based on the mastery of the passions that will prove to be decisive not just for philosophy but also painting, as we can later see in Charles Le Brun’s Conférence sur l’expression générale et particulière (1668). For an analysis of this influential text and its accompanying illustrations, see Jennifer Montague, The Expression of the Passions (New Haven and London, 1994).

CHAPTER 7

Changing Emotions? The Decline of Original Sin on the Eve of the Enlightenment Michael Heyd

I have had this evening my dear child with me in my closet, conversing with her, endeavouring to awaken her, and convince her of her sin and misery, by nature and practice. The child was seemingly affected and melted into tears, and in distress; so much that I was fain to turn my discourse, and tell her that God was good, and willing to pardon and receive sinners, especially those children that were willing to be good betimes, and in their younger days set themselves to love and serve God.1

This passage, written in 1732 and taken from the diary of Mrs Housman of Kidderminster, is moving and interesting on several accounts. On the theological level, it expresses the delicate Calvinist balance between the sombre doctrine of Original Sin and the promise of divine pardon. At the same time, it hints at a tacit, yet crucial modification of the Calvinist doctrine in shifting the onus onto the will of the children who ‘set themselves to love and serve God’. On the more personal level, however, it is an illustration of an intimate mother–child relationship in the early eighteenth century, and it manifests the affective, indeed emotional underpinnings of the doctrine of Original Sin. The problem that I wish to pose in this paper concerns indeed both the changing theological views of Original Sin in the Protestant world on the eve of the Enlightenment and, more importantly, the emotional significance of these changes.2 The seemingly ‘smooth’ transition in the Protestant world from the period of Orthodoxy to that of the Enlightenment can divert our attention from deep changes in religious sensibility taking place in that transition. In the historiography dealing with this subject, not enough attention has been given, in my opinion, to the crucial issue of Original Sin. The view of man as an irremediable sinner was, after all, the point of departure for Reformation theology and a principal motive in its critique of Roman Catholic doctrine, ritual and hierarchy. How then to explain what seems to be a gradual transition in Protestant societies from Orthodoxy to the Enlightenment in

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the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries? How to account for that revolutionary change in the conception of human nature? The changing views of Original Sin touch, however, upon more than purely theological issues. They have implications for political theory and the investigation of nature (can fallen man recognize in nature the glory of the creator, can he understand at all the secrets of nature?), but they also have implications for educational theory and practice, for attitudes towards children in general, and indeed for the history of emotions. Broader anthropological and theoretical questions are also involved. Was Original Sin merely a theological concept, part of a doctrine, even a type of ‘norm’ set by clerics, or was it also a personal experience, causing actual guilt feelings, and if so, how to explain its decline?3 Can guilt feelings refer to collective guilt, let alone to actions done by others before one was born, that is, by Adam, the first person?4 Do guilt-feelings need a specific reason, a concrete object about which to feel guilty?5 Finally, and most relevant to the historian, do feelings, in our case guilt-feelings, change from one society to another, from one period to the next? Like shame, guilt-feelings seem to be more susceptible than other emotions to the norms of specific cultures. In what sense, then, can one talk about change in guiltfeelings from one period to another? Needless to say, I can hardly hope to answer all these questions, surely not in a short paper. All I wish to do is to raise some of the issues and attempt tentative answers. Let me first say a few words on the history of the theological concept. The concept of Original Sin was one of the central theological ideas in the Christian West from St Augustine in the early fifth century until at least the late seventeenth century. It was based on Chapter 5 of St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, verses 12–19, which posed a clear analogy between Adam’s Original Sin, entailing all subsequent generations in sin and death, and Christ’s sacrifice, promising salvation to all his subsequent believers. In fact, Original Sin was what made Divine Grace an indispensable necessity on the way to salvation, according to both Catholics and Protestants. The debate between them centred on the means by which such divine grace may be obtained and on the role of human free will and good deeds in obtaining such grace. The Reformation clearly radicalized the consciousness of Original Sin, seeing man as guilty and sinful even after Baptism, and no matter what good works he had done. Most Catholics, by contrast, while continuing to adhere to the notion of Original Sin, including original guilt, regarded the sacramental system, particularly Baptism and Confession, as a way of ‘cleaning’ man from this stain and its consequences. By the late seventeenth century, however, there was a marked decline in Protestant theological discourse in the importance of Original Sin, and farreaching changes in the way it was conceived. Growing emphasis was put, even in Calvinist sermons, on individual moral responsibility.6 The sense of sin, as we shall presently see, did not necessarily diminish, but it was focused more and more on specific transgressions, rather than on the somewhat abstract yet all-encompassing notion of Original Sin.

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How far, however, does this change reflect changing sensibilities and changing emotions? Were there emotional correlates to this theological transformation? Can one talk about change in guilt-feeling in this period? In order to answer this question we need to look at other types of historical sources, not just sermons or theological tracts, on which my previous discussion has been based. Not being able to interview, let alone psychoanalyse people of previous generations, the most appropriate sources are what historians have recently called ‘ego-documents’: diaries, memoirs and different sorts of autobiographical notes.7 In this paper I shall focus mostly on such documents of one specific group in a well-defined period: English Nonconformists of Reformed tendencies in the second half of the seventeenth century and the early eighteenth. (I am not including the Baptists, Quakers and other radical sects, whose theology and conception of Original Sin was very different from that of the Calvinists and requires a separate study.) I shall also cast a glance at their Calvinist brethren in Scotland. Even within this body of documents, the references to Original Sin are usually not explicit. One example is that of Oliver Heywood, an ejected Nonconformist preacher from Lancaster. Listen to what he has to say (retrospectively, of course) about his own childhood: But tho my parents were godly yet my birth and my nativity was in sin, and so was my conception [Psalm 51. 5: ‘Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me’], for they were instruments to bring me into the world not as saints but as man and woman, not after gods but their owne image, not as children of god by adoption, and regeneration, but of Adam by natural generation [Genesis 5. 3: ‘And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, after his image; and called his son Seth’] . . . therby I am by nature a child of wrath [Ephesians 2. 3], a limb of satan, exposed to shame and ruine despoiled of gods image, having satans superscription, and guilt with propensity to sin, and contrariety to good incorpurated in my primitive constitution. . . . I cannot remember the time or age, state or place wherin I was free from sin or perpetrating therof, what peevishnes, untowardnes, stubbornes doe I see in mine wch is a glasse to represent my frame when of their age. . . . since our first parents aspired to be as gods we al became as beasts that perish,—when I was a child I spake as a child [1 Corinthians 13. 11], yea rather like a devil incarnate, oh the desperate wickednes of my deceitful hart.8

No less interesting is his testimony concerning his own children: and now I am a father, I desire to dedicate my children to god, and to train them up for god. I am sensible I have begot them in mine owne image, in a corrupt state, and see they wil be undone without regeneration, therfore my soul breaths after the repairing of gods image in them, and gods embracing of them in a covenant way, and making use of them for his glory, rather than to know they should be princes. I am apt to over-love them, but their inward deformity by the fal [sic] checks my too much dealing on their due proportion and desirable beauty.9

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This last testimony is rather exceptional, because it is hard, perhaps understandably so, to find an explicit view of Original Sin in one’s own children. True, Heywood was a minister (and so, by the way, were many, perhaps most, of the writers of diaries and autobiographies at that period). For that reason, it might be legitimately asked whether the above passages are indeed expressions of authentic feelings or have more of the nature of round-about sermonizing. I tend to think that, given the tone and very specific personal references, they are more than just vicarious sermons. Moreover, and this is perhaps my main methodological point, the distinction between consciousness (theological in this case) and emotions should not be drawn too sharply. Emotions are formed by culture, just as much as they inform it. As I hinted already, there are dozens of similar diaries, journals, and autobiographical documents of Protestant ministers in that period. Usually, they are not as explicit in expressing personal feelings as Oliver Heywood, but their implicit thrust is in the same direction. They refer to themselves, and sometimes also to their children, as sinful from birth, and regard sin as a condition, as a state, rather than a specific act. Guilt seems to be an existential feeling for them, or so at least do they express themselves. It is especially important, however, for reasons I have just mentioned, to look at ‘ego-documents’ of laymen, with no pastoral intentions, explicit or implicit. Take for example Justice Thomas Rokeby, who had kept a religious journal and was indeed influenced by Heywood. His entry on 11 July 1688 begins as follows: Oh eternal and infinitely glorious and gracious Lord . . . I doe humbly acknowledge and heartily bemoan the defilement of my nature, and my great actuall guilt, and am apprehensive and sensible of my lost and undone condition by reason of my original and actuall sin, whereby I have lost the favour of God, and am become justly obnoxious to His displeasure.10

Another example is that of the merchant, collector and antiquarian Ralph Thoresby from Leeds (1658–1725), who quoted in his diary a sermon of Archbishop John Sharp’s, according to which even pious parents propagated original corruption to their children, and that corruption was definitely regarded as sin from the very beginning.11 Scottish Presbyterians have similarly adhered to the traditional Calvinist conception. The landowner Walter Pringle, for example, saw himself as ‘the chief of sinners’, and his description of his adolescent years is highly revealing to modern ears: In the year 1639 [he was then 14 years old], I was at Leith school; then did youthful lusts and corruptions begin to prevail over me, being stronger in me than the grace of God. I will not mention my particular abominations; for what God hath hid and covered, I will not reveal; only to my own shame, and to his praise, who spared me, and who had mercy upon me, I confess that for ten years together, I was the chief of sinners . . . .12

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What is typical, and highly important, in all these texts, is the conception of Original Sin as something objective and external, to which the person is subjected. Indeed, the ‘ego’ or the ‘I’, so to speak, is hovering between two domains that are external to him: the reign of Sin and Satan, and the reign of Grace and Christ. Original Sin is thus an ontological state in which the person finds himself.13 A similar notion of sin as an objective, impersonal force may be found in the memoirs of Marion Veitch, the wife of another Scottish Covenanter preacher, William Veitch. She often prayed ‘that I and mine might be kept from the evil of sin’.14 Sin is not any specific moral deed, but rather the very distance between man and God, between polluted nature and pure divinity.15 For that reason, I would take exception to some recent philosophical discussions of ‘guilt-feeling’ that argue that such feelings are concerned ‘with the wrong done, not with the kind of person one thinks one is’.16 Feelings of guilt, in the case of Original Sin, can similarly relate to vicarious guilt, pace the argument of those philosophers that ‘[G]uilt itself cannot be vicarious’.17 To return to our diaries: even in the lay diaries and autobiographies we have just described there is, however, an implicit ‘sermonizing’ thrust, whether towards oneself or towards one’s children, for whom these ‘ego-documents’ had often been written. The question thus comes back again: are we witnessing here the internalization of theological norms or the spontaneous expression of feelings? The question is highlighted by a case in which Original Sin was clearly a norm, confessedly not internalized. Isaac Archer, an East-Anglian student at Trinity College in 1659 (later to become a conforming minister), writes the following lines in his diary: I found in prayer, and other dutyes my heart so hard and dull that I had no sense of sin, especially originall sin; neither could I feel my sin as a burden too heavy for mee, nor found I strength to lay my burden upon the shoulders of Christ Jesus. In this was I most miserable that I knew not my owne misery and wretchedness.

And in the next entry: ‘I prayed to have sense of sin, and my lost estate by nature, but I found no answer’.18 Indeed, one could claim that Original Sin to begin with was a theological concept internalized, more or less successfully, by generations of Christians owing to the forceful preaching (not to say ‘brainwashing’) of numerous theologians and ministers. But if this line of argument is pursued consistently, one needs to ask how the consciousness (and feeling!) of Original Sin arose in the first place, and more importantly, how to account for the changes in its role and nature throughout the history of Christianity? Once again, can one separate so sharply between internalized social (or religious) norms and existential feelings? I have dealt so far with the experiential and emotional dimension of the consciousness of Original Sin. Can we detect, on an emotional level, the transformations, or even decline in that consciousness by the early eighteenth century? Here we are inevitably running up against further serious methodological problems. The first is that of the selection and representative nature of the sources. Even if one went over all the diaries and autobiographies of English Nonconformist (let alone European Calvinists in general)

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in that period, printed and in manuscript, the question remains how representative they are of changing emotions within that group. The writing of such ‘ego-documents’, and even more their survival, is largely a matter of chance. Secondly, there is a problem of argumentum ex silentio. To what extent can we draw conclusions from silence, in this case silence over the issue of Original Sin? The way to overcome these hurdles, it seems to me, is to pay attention not so much to the absence of sin in these documents of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as to the way the writers dealt with the issue of sin, especially in such strategic places in diaries and autobiographies as those relating to their own birth or the birth of their children, or to death in the family, as well as those sections, so typical of Calvinist texts of this kind, dealing with ‘self-examination’. Here one finds a significant if subtle shift in many of the Nonconformist diaries and autobiographies of the generation that grew up between 1680 and 1720. This is by no means true for all of them. Some Nonconformists remain very traditional in their religious outlook and feelings concerning Original Sin.19 Even they, however, are sometimes conscious of the impending change. Take Sarah Savage, for example, the daughter of a well-known Restoration Nonconformist preacher, Philip Henry. For her, Original Sin is an existential state, one is born under its reign, and this fact determines even her attitude towards her own children. Yet she is apprehensive lest they themselves may ‘go out of God’s way, and be a reproach to the holy profession which we have made’.20 Yet, among many other Nonconformist ‘ego-documents’ of that period, one notices an important change of emphasis, which at first may look misleading. If anything, they focus more on their various daily sins. They enumerate them very specifically and in concrete terms. It’s a tendency one finds already in Baxter’s autobiography, Reliquiae Baxterianae, in his story of his youthful sins, among them that of stealing fruit from other people’s orchards, a story that may be modeled on Augustine’s description of similar sins in Book I of his Confessions.21 In the next generation, the recounting of particular transgressions, not just as topoi but as a concrete individual report, becomes more prevalent. Take, for example, George Trosse (1631–1713) from Exeter. Trosse was a sort of ‘born-again’ Presbyterian minister, and his diary is replete with lists of sinful actions committed in his youth and with strong feelings of remorse.22 On the face of it, one may see here a heightening of a sense of sin and of guilt-feelings. Yet, these are guilt-feelings concerning very specific moral sins, not concerning the condition humaine in general. Original sin has disappeared almost entirely from his Life. The diary of a younger Presbyterian minister (and physician), James Clegg (1679–1755) from Chapel-en-le-Frith in Devonshire, is another case in point.23 It is strewn with consciousness of his sins, especially his youthful sins, but once again these are specific moral sins (especially the temptation of women and drink) rather than any existential state of Sin. Indeed, he was chiefly concerned with personal discipline and saw the antinomian streak of some early Methodists as highly dangerous.24 The concentration on specific moral sins rather than on the ontological

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state of Original Sin had its theological correlate too. In his autobiographical notes, written at the end of his diary, Clegg recorded his ‘conversion’ to Arminianism, the anti-Calvinist trend in Reformed Protestantism, which rejected Predestination and played down the significance of Original Sin.25 Whether the theological ‘conversion’ preceded the moral sensibility or vice versa is hard to tell (Clegg started writing his diary nine years after reading Episcopius, the leading Dutch Arminian theologian of the first half of the seventeenth century). The important point is that the decline of ‘rigid’ Calvinism, often discussed in the historiography of the period, had its emotional dimension. Let me bring one example of an Anglican layman. I refer to William Coe (1662–1729), gentleman and farmer from Suffolk, who kept a diary from 1693 until his death.26 In his diary, he often mentioned various sins he had committed: ‘sinns against my owne conscience, ignorant sinnes, youthful sins, sinnes of my riper yeares, those which I have so long endeavoured to hide from others, that I have now hid them from my owne memory, and that I cannot now call to mind.’27 The psychological insight sounds highly modern, almost ‘Freudian’. In any case, whether petty or more significant, these were always specific sins that he was careful to enumerate, as he says in his entry on 15 May 1719: ‘Upon examination I find my selfe guilty of these following sinns and failings.’ Among these failings, he says ‘I have been drowsy and sleepy at church and often talking of worldly and other buisiness at other tymes of the Lord’s day. . . . I have often mispent my pretious tyme in play and idleness, and have drawn others into the same sinn by my example and importunity.’28 The transition from the consciousness of sin as a state to an emphasis on concrete sins is a manifestation of what one Church historian has called very appropriately (though somewhat derogatorily) ‘the rise of moralism’.29 Less an ontological state (predicated upon the infinite gap between the perfect God and corrupt human being), sin and its accompanying guilt-feelings became increasingly related in England to specific moral transgressions. This is similarly manifest in the emergence of the various Societies for Reformation of Manners after the Glorious Revolution. Indeed, one historian who has written the history of those societies spoke of ‘The Moral Revolution of 1688’.30 While stressing the specific moral degeneration of their period (referring mostly to drinking, sexual lewdness, curses, card-playing and other profane behaviour),31 these reformers hoped for moral renewal and tended to ‘forget’ the natural depravity of man. As Edmund Leites has pointed out in his book on Puritan Conscience and Modern Sexuality, ‘Moral Constancy’ became a key theme in Puritan spirituality of that period. It served to break the cycle of sin, leading to guilt and thence to repentance, grace and forgiveness.32 What is perhaps still more important, the guiltfeelings concerning specific moral transgressions referred to the individual rather than to humanity as a whole, to all the descendents of Adam. The decline of Original Sin was clearly linked with what I would call ‘the rise of moral individualism’ (rather than ‘the rise of possessive individualism’ or ‘the rise of political individualism’)

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in that period. And such a process involved also changing emotions, change in the nature (and in the object) of guilt feelings.33 From guilt-feelings with respect to one’s very being they seem to have changed to guilt-feelings concerning specific moral actions, at least on the level of consciousness.34 Such a transformation, indeed, gave these guilt-feelings not just a more individualistic nature but also a more ‘rational’ one. As one philosopher of emotions has noted, ‘the more thought-dependent an emotion, the more specific its object’.35 This transition was by no means simple and linear, however. I should like to conclude with the famous Life and Errors of John Dunton, considered to be a milestone in the emergence of modern autobiographies. He was born to an Anglican minister of strong Parliamentarian tendencies, but in spite of his father’s hopes young Dunton chose to be a printer’s apprentice rather than a minister. His master was Thomas Parkhurst, the noted Presbyterian bookseller (who was also Oliver Heywood’s publisher), and he married the daughter of another prominent Presbyterian, the minister Dr Annesley. Dunton was also very active among Whig apprentices in the early 1680s. Nevertheless, throughout his life he struggled with dissolute tendencies. Highly successful as a printer and publisher for some twenty years (publishing the famous Athenian Mercury magazine), he became laden with debts, illnesses and an unhappy marriage by the end of the century. He turned to Arianism and ultimately to Deism. His notoriously licentious life-style notwithstanding, Dunton’s Life and Errors (published in 1705) was a type of confession and expressed alleged repentance.36 There is some controversy over how sincere were his feelings of remorse as expressed in his autobiography.37 The extent of his sincerity, however, does not affect the significance of what he thought to be convincing feelings of remorse. These are indeed characterized by detailed enumeration of his particular sins and ‘errors’ (itself a significant term!), similar to those in other ‘ego-documents’ to which I have referred above. Dunton was also an important figure in the Societies for Reformation of Manners mentioned earlier. At the same time, he had (or at least expressed) a sense of Original Sin typical of his Presbyterian upbringing.38 Yet he imbued it with educational, emotional and individualist implications similar to those expressed in Mrs Housman’s diary, with which I opened this paper: One wou’d think it shou’d be no less the Practice, than it is the Duty of Parents, in the most familiar words, to tell their Children of their dreadful State, seeing they know it as well, as if they saw the Inscription in real characters upon their Foreheads, YOU ARE CONDEMN’D. What Ingenious Child upon this Information, but wou’d weep out these or the like Expressions? Is it a Thing impossible to be sav’d? . . . With what satisfaction cou’d I play, eat, or sleep, or go to School, seeing I was all the while a Condemned Malefactor. . . ? How cou’d I reconcile my Thoughts to my Condition, seeing it admits of nothing as yet, but either blind security, or wild Despair?39

On the fact of it, these words are set as preparation for the Good News of the Son of God, who by his sacrifice has made satisfaction for our sins. Yet, against the overall

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irony of the autobiography, one should probably read in these lines an implied critique of the Calvinist view of Original Sin.40 Such a critique was quite prevalent among English Protestants like Dunton who were moving gradually away from the traditional Christian camp, first into Arianism (the denial of the Trinity, which itself, it seems to me, is profoundly linked with a decline in the sense of Original Sin, because the divinity of Christ was meant primarily to solve the problem of Original Sin) and later into Deism and even atheism. The most famous revision of the traditional view concerning Original Sin was, of course, that of John Locke in The Reasonableness of Christianity. One of Locke’s earlier followers on this issue was Thomas Chubb, an artisan turned intellectual who moved from Arianism to Deism and wrote an explicit critique of the doctrine of Original Sin in 1717.41 These texts testify to the change in intellectual perspective, indeed to the growing predominance of an individual moral outlook. Yet they do not document the gradual change in feelings. Nor do they document reliably the extent of social change involved in this theological transformation. For these purposes, ‘ego-documents’, for all their limitations, are crucial. By looking at them, we can try and gauge the nature of a profound emotional change in Europe on the eve of the Enlightenment. Let me finally return to a broader conceptual point relevant to this volume, a point to which I alluded already in the course of the paper. From the historian’s point of view, emotions can hardly be dissociated from the culture and society within which they are embedded. Without making any reductionist claim, I tend to side with the social-constructionists who emphasize the role of society in forming emotions, surely in forming the objects to which they relate and the means—linguistic or other—by which they are expressed. I would agree wholeheartedly with the point made by Claire Armon-Jones: ‘to the extent that emotions reflect and sustain the religious, moral and political beliefs, interests and values of a community, then . . . the analysis of these interrelated systems should be prior to our analysis of the emotions which feature in, and support such systems’.42 Indeed, as Graham Richards similarly argues in his paper in the present volume, one cannot sever the links between emotions and their cognitive, conscious, and cultural referents.43 For this reason, I believe, emotions can and surely should be historicized. Notes 1

2

Mrs H. Housman, The Power and Pleasure of the Divine Life: Exemplified in the late Mrs. Housman, of Kidderminster, Worcestershire, as extracted from her own papers. Methodized and published by the Rev. Mr. Richard Pearsall [1744] (London, 1789), 560. Italics mine. I am confining myself to the Protestant world, since the change of attitudes in Protestant societies concerning the sinful nature of man between the Reformation and the Enlightenment seems to me especially dramatic. Nevertheless it is definitely worth

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pursuing parallel developments in Roman-Catholic societies (especially Jansenist circles), to some of which developments I shall have occasion to allude. There is indeed much scholarship in recent years on the history of sin, confession and moral control in post-Tridentine Catholicism, though less, as far as I can see, on the role of Original Sin in post-Tridentine spirituality, except again in the case of the Jansenists. 3 On ‘experimental Calvinism’, and the experimental dimension of key Calvinist theological terms, see Tom Webster, ‘Writing to Redundancy: Approaches to Spiritual Journals and Early Modern Spirituality’, The Historical Journal, 39 (1996), 33–50, esp. 36, though he does not mention Original Sin in that context; R. T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford, 1979), 1–13. 4 Psychologists have examined quite a bit the question of collective guilt. See for example, Bertjan Doosje et al., ‘Guilty by association: When one’s group has a negative history’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75 (1998), 872–6. For a recent philosophical discussion of the possibility of collective guilt-feelings, see Margaret Gilbert, Living Together: Rationality, Sociality, and Obligation (Lanham, MD, and London, 1997), chap. 16: ‘On Feeling Guilt for What One’s Group Has Done’. Professor Gilbert does not address, however, the question of the Christian notion (and experience?) of Original Sin. I am grateful to Professor Frank Stewart from the Hebrew University for directing my attention to this article. 5 The psychologist Lawrence Thomas, ‘Morality, the Self, and Our Natural Sentiments’, in K. D. Irani and G. E. Meyers, eds., Emotion: Philosophical Studies (New York, 1983), quoted in Ronald de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1987), 322, points out that ‘A person who feels guilty, though he has no reason to, is not having an insincere experiencing of guilt feelings.’ 6 I hope to deal with this issue in greater detail elsewhere. See also Christopher FitzSimons Allison, The Rise of Moralism: The Proclamation of the Gospel from Hooker to Baxter (London, 1966). 7 On the relevance of these sources for gauging the history of feelings, see, among others, the important article of Tom Webster, ‘Writing to Redundancy’, cited above. The term ‘ego-document’ was coined by the Dutch historian Rudolph Dekker. See e.g. his ‘Egodocuments in the Netherlands from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century’, in Erin Griffey, ed., Envisioning Self and Status: Self-Representation in the Low Countries, 1400–1700, ‘Crossways’ Series, 5 (Hull, 1999), 255–85. The term ‘ego-document’ is convenient in encompassing a variety of documents: diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, etc. On the other hand, it is also somewhat anachronistic as far as the seventeenth century and early eighteenth are concerned, in assuming a modern concept of the ‘ego’. See the pertinent remark of Webster, ‘Writing to Redundancy’, 35–6 n. 14. 8 The Rev. Oliver Heywood, B.A. (1630–1702): His Autobiography, Diaries, Anecdote and Event Books, ed. J. Horsfall Turner (London, 1882), I. 153–4. 9 Ibid., 146. 10 Thomas Rokeby, A Brief Memoir of Mr. Justice Rokeby, Comprising his Religious Journal and Correspondence, The Publications of the Surtees Society, 37 (Durham, 1860), 26; my italics. Rokeby was avowedly influenced on that point by John Sharp, Archbishop of York. 11 The Diary of Ralph Thoresby, ed. Joseph Hunter, 2 vols. (London, 1830), I. 222–3: ‘children do not naturally walk in the ways of their pious parents; the best do propagate

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13 14 15

16 17 18

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original corruption’. It should be stressed, however, that apart from this quotation from John Sharp’s sermon, which he heard on 22 May 1692, there are no other references to Original Sin in Thoresby’s Diary, so far as I could see. Thoresby was ultimately to return in 1699 to the Anglican church under the influence of Sharp, who had been in close touch with both Nonconformists and Nonjurors. See ibid., 326–7, and on Sharp, Dictionary of National Biography (henceforth DNB), XVII. 1346–9. On Thoresby as a collector, see also P. C. D. Brears, ‘Ralph Thoresby, A Museum Visitor in Stuart England’, Journal of the History of Collections, 1 (1989), 213–24. The Memoirs of Walter Pringle of Greenknow, ed. Walter Wood (Edinburgh, 1847), 6. It is worth mentioning that in his instructions to his children, for whom these Memoirs were largely written, Pringle stressed their own responsibility for their fate and salvation, with yet another hint at adolescence as a crucial age (ibid., 2): ‘But if any of you perish, being come of age, your destruction will be of yourselves. For you must look to receive according to your faith and works; by faith we are saved; and where faith is, there will be works also.’ This, indeed, has been the theological conception of Original Sin, at least since Thomas Aquinas. Marion Veitch, ‘The Memoirs, Life and Times of a Scots Covenanting Family (1639–1732)’, in Kenneth W. H. Howard, ed., Scotland, England and the Americas (Ossett, West Yorkshire, 1992), 277; see also 198. See e.g. An Account of the Life and Death of Mrs. Elizabeth Bury . . . Chiefly Collected out of her Own Diary (Bristol, 1720), esp. 62, and 53–87 on ‘self examination’ in general. Elizabeth Bury (1644–1720) lived in Clare, Suffolk, and kept her religious diary from August 1693 until April 1720; it was collected and edited by her husband. See also DNB III. 476. Gabrielle Taylor, ‘Guilt and Remorse’, in Rom Harré and W. Gerrod Parrott, eds., The Emotions: Social, Cultural and Biological Dimensions (London, 1996), 60. Ibid., 61. ‘The Diary of Isaac Archer, 1641–1700’, in Matthew Storey, ed., Two East Anglian Diaries, Suffolk Records Society, 36 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1994); the quotation is from entries 36/1659 and 37/1659. The original manuscript is Cambridge University Library, Add. MS 8499. This is especially true, as we have seen above, for Scottish Presbyterians. Sir John Bickerton Williams, ed., The Life of Mrs. Savage (London, 1848), 178–9. The passage is worth quoting in full: ‘Lord help me here: that which my own conscience accuses me to be the sin that most easily besets me, is too much love of, and too many cares for, my children. Lord, turn it into the right channel—into care and concern for their precious soul. Methinks, as my dear father’s grandchildren increase and grow up, I cannot but have many fears lest any of them should go out of God’s way’. Earlier, following the death of one of her brother’s little children she says (ibid., 144): ‘Satureday. About noon she died. A short race soon run. Not quite three weeks old. The first that I ever saw die. Oh that I may by it learn the sinfulness of original sin!’ Sarah Savage lived in Cheshire. Her brother Matthew Henry, the biblical commentator and preacher at Chester, had similar traditional views of Original Sin. See his commentary on Romans 5:12 inMatthew Henry’s Commentary on the Whole Bible in One Volume, ed. Leslie F. Church (London, 1960), 563; Matthew Henry, A Scripture Catechism in the Method of the Assembly’s, 4th

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22 23

24 25

26

27 28

29

Michael Heyd edn. (London, 1720), 30–38; J. B. Williams, ed., Memoirs of the Life, Character, and writings of the Rev. Matthew Henry [1828], rpt. in The Lives of Philip and Matthew Henry (London, 1974), 49, 59. Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, or Mr. Richard Baxter’s Narrative of the Most Memorable Passages of his Life and Times (London, 1696). One of the publishers of this text, it is worth noting, was John Dunton, who had written an autobiography to which I shall return below. For Augustine’s puerile sins, see his Confessions, Book I, § 19. George Trosse, The Life of the Reverend Mr. George Trosse, ed. A. W. Brink (Montreal and London, 1974), esp. 54 ff. The Life was first published posthumously according to his order in 1714. The Diary of James Clegg has been edited and published by Vanessa S. Doe in three parts in the Derbyshire Record Society, 2, 3, 5 (1978–81). See also the review article by Geoffrey F. Nuttall, The Journal of the United Reformed Church History Society, 2 (1979), 112–16. See introduction Vanessa S. Doe, introduction to The Diary of James Clegg, Part 1, pp. xxxix–xl, and numerous references to his own sins in his Diary, from the very first page onwards. That conversion took place in 1699, upon his reading the works of the Arminian theologian Simon Episcopius, in the Public Library of Manchester (The Diary of James Clegg, Part III, App. I:1, 913): ‘I admird [sic] the clear and strong reasoning of Episcopius and after that could never well relish the doctrines of Rigid Calvinism’.It is worth noting that Clegg’s predecessor and mentor in Derbyshire, William Bagshawe, ‘the Apostle of the Peak’, while stressing native guilt and depravity, seems to have taken a certain distance already from ‘strict Calvinism’ by seeing predestination as a special decree of God, distinguished from his general providential decree. In this he was close to the Saumur School, if not to that of Arminius. On Bagshawe there is a rather superficial biography by John M. Brentnall, William Bagshawe, The Apostle of the Peak (London, 1970). See also William H. G. Bagshawe, The Bagshawes of Ford: A Biographical Pedigree (London, 1886), who reprints also some of Bagshawe’s texts. The original diary of William Coe is kept at the Cambridge University Library, Add. MS 8499. I am grateful to the CUL for letting me use this manuscript and for providing me with photocopies of some of its pages. The diary has recently been published in a scholarly edition, Storey, Two East Anglian Diaries. On Coe see the Introduction, 23–30. ‘The Diary of William Coe’, fol. 3v; in Two East Anglian Diaries, 205. ‘The Diary of William Coe’, fol. 63r–v; see also, the earlier entry for 2 April 1708, which was Good Friday (ibid., fol. 34r): ‘Being Good ffryday I fasted being to receive the Blessed sacrament of Christ’s body and blood, and upon Examination [of my selfe, del.] I found my selfe guilty of these sinns following: I have often talked of worldly buisiness and used other vain discourse on Sundays and when I have been att Church my mind and thoughts have been too often wandring and I have not been so devout and intent in what I was about as I ought to have been, or as I purpose to be for the future. God’s grace assisting me.’ Allison, The Rise of Moralism. For a similar—if slightly later—development in RomanCatholic France, see Jean-Robert Armogathe, ‘Les Catéchismes et l’enseignement populaire en France au XVIIIe siècle’, in Images du peuple au dix-huitième siècle, Centre Aixois d’études et de recherches sur le dix-huitième siècle (Paris, 1973), 103–21. I am

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32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40

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grateful to Dr Christopher Gärtner for directing my attention to this highly interesting article. Dudley W. R. Bahlman, The Moral Revolution of 1688 (New Haven, 1957). Ibid., 41, referring to John Ryther’s sermon preached before the Society for Reformation of Manners in 1699. Some of the sins these reformers referred to, especially sexual laxity, were traditionally linked to Original Sin but were now regarded more as prevalent transgressions to be corrected than as indications of man’s corrupt nature. Edmund Leites, The Puritan Conscience and Modern Sexuality (New Haven and London, 1986), esp. 10, 146–8, 155. On the importance of the object of emotions in determining their character, see Graham Richards, Chap. 3 above. This change may parallel the transition from ‘Faith’ to ‘emotions’ and the rise of affects on the eve of the Enlightenment, but the issue clearly needs further study. Ronald de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1987), 137. On Dunton and his ‘repenting’ autobiography, The Life and Errors of John Dunton, see especially Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and SelfIdentity in England, 1591–1791 (Cambridge, 1997), chap. 6. For Mascuch, Dunton represents a crucial stage in the emergence of a new sense of self on the eve of the Enlightenment, an important point to which I shall return below. On Dunton in the context of the origins of the English novel, see J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York and London, 1990), 99–106. See also G. A. Starr, ‘From Casuistry to Fiction: The Importance of the Athenian Mercury’, The Journal of the History of Ideas, 28 (1967), 17–32. Also on Dunton’s ‘Athenian Mercury’, see Gilbert D. McEwen, The Oracles of the Coffee House: John Dunton’s ‘Athenian Mercury’ (San Marino, CA, 1972); Beverley C. Southgate, ‘“Removing Epidemick Ignorance”: An Attempt to Promote Popular Learning in LateSeventeenth Century England?’, History of European Ideas, 11 (1989), 645–51. On his role in the English book trade of the time, see Stephen Parks, John Dunton and the English Book Trade: A Study of his Career with a Checklist of his Publications (New York and London, 1976). On a comparison between Dunton and Bentley, see Robert Adams Day, ‘Richard Bentley and John Dunton: Brothers under the Skin’, in O. M. Brack, jr, ed., Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 16 (Madison, 1986), 125–38. An old article by C. A. Moore sees him as an impostor: ‘John Dunton: Pietist and Impostor’, Studies in Philology, 22 (1925), 467–99. Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self, by contrast, tends to take his remorse more seriously. Maschuch, ibid., 140–41, indeed characterizes the first part of Dunton’s Life and Errors as a typical Presbyterian autobiography. John Dunton, The Life and Errors of John Dunton (London, 1705), 29–30. Maschuh, Origins of the Individual Self, 136, indeed links printers and journalists such as Dunton with the emergence of ‘a new form of self-consciousness: the concept of an active, independent, and secular personality—the kind of character perceived as unique and more importantly, individually responsible for what passed in public (sometimes in print) as his “life”’. Thomas Chubb, Two Enquiries: One of them Concerning Property, in Which is Considered Liberty of Conscience; and the Other Concerning Sin, Wherein is Consider’d Original Sin (London, 1717).

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42 Claire Armon-Jones, ‘The Social Functions of Emotion’, in Rom Harré, ed., The Social Construction of Emotions (New York, 1986), 81. 43 Graham Richards,Chap. 3 above. In this respect, the present paper may serve as one particular case study for the general argument Richards presents here. Nevertheless, my principal aim, needless to say, is to understand a specific historical phenomenon, namely the change in the nature of guilt-feelings and consciousness of sin in the Protestant world on the eve of the Enlightenment.

PART III EMOTIONS AND THE BODY

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CHAPTER 8

The Man of Passion: Emotion, Philosophy and Sexual Difference Christine Battersby

In this essay I will be entering into a dialogue with Genevieve Lloyd’s The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy (1984), an extremely influential text in terms of contemporary feminist accounts of the history of philosophy. I will analyse the implications of Lloyd’s claim that ‘The maleness of the Man of Reason’ is not just a grammatical accident, but ‘lies deep in our philosophical tradition’.1 Lloyd argues that at least since the time of the Pythagoreans (c.530 BC) and Plato (c.428–c.348 BC), philosophers have privileged reason above passion and have associated the (apparently genderless) philosopher with reason, whereas ‘femaleness was symbolically associated with what Reason supposedly left behind’. For Lloyd, within the Western tradition of philosophy ‘Rationality has been conceived as transcendence of the feminine; and the “feminine” itself has been partly constituted by its occurrence within this structure.’2 The emotions were part of what needed to be mastered or transcended by reason. They blocked ‘a clear determinate mode of thought’ and were portrayed as oppositional to the ‘active, determinate form’ with which maleness was aligned. Passion was passive, aligned with nature and the ‘indeterminate matter’ of the female, prior to the imposition of shape and essence, which early biology and metaphysics linked to the male.3 The chaotic, the unsystematic, the heterogeneous and the irrational have been feminized, and so also have the passions, which have been represented as disorderly, turbulent or irrational states that require reason as their master. As Virginia Held remarks about the oppositional model of the reason–passion relationship that Lloyd finds, This has, of course, fundamentally affected the history of philosophy and of ethics. The split between reason and emotion is one of the most familiar of philosophical conceptions. The advocacy of reason ‘controlling’ unruly emotion, of rationality guiding responsible human action against the blindness of passion, has a long and highly influential history, almost as familiar to nonphilosophers as to philosophers.4

Lloyd’s own philosophical concern is to undermine this tradition. If her analysis of this history of Western philosophy is correct, the consequences of Lloyd’s intervention will be profound.

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In this essay I am not seeking to diminish the overall power of Lloyd’s analysis in The Man of Reason. I will, however, seek to show that although Lloyd was right to claim that a variety of textual strategies have been used to gender reason as male, emotions that have been deemed philosophically useful or valuable have also been assigned to the male sex. This is an important modification to Lloyd’s thesis because Lloyd has been read as providing what Rosi Braidotti has termed ‘the anatomy of a myth: that of the coincidence of the rational with the masculine’. Furthermore, although Braidotti registers that Lloyd herself seeks to reform philosophy from within through a ‘reasoned critique of philosophical reason’ that does not reject reason but ‘claims it back for women philosophers’, for Braidotti Lloyd’s feminist reformism is not enough. Instead Braidotti advocates a more ‘radical alternative’: one that gives us ideas and texts that are ‘resistant to systematization, detached from the subtext of war and conquest that sustains the classical philosophical discourse’.5 Trying to destabilize a symbolic system that links the male to order and to reason, some feminists have opted ‘to turn the negative to a positive and valorize a specifically feminine style of speaking or writing as a remedial alternative to masculine logic’.6 This ‘feminine’ style of writing and speaking has been variously described, but it draws upon ‘the rediscovered underside of logic and all that rationality imagines it must cover, reject or fear’. ‘Feminine’ language becomes a ‘language without authority, a language which makes no assertions, a language which cries and communicates but cannot establish or prescribe’.7 It is thus, in part, a language of emotions, at least if ‘emotions’ continue to be regarded as anarchic, undisciplined forces that slip away from reason, just as they were in the masculinist tradition of philosophy that Lloyd outlines. Lloyd herself has strong reservations about any feminist strategy of reversal or destabilization that remains trapped within the old polarities. However, although Lloyd does not herself advocate a non-rational ‘feminine’, she recognizes that her work has been appropriated by others who argue that the future for feminist philosophy lies ‘in the affirmation of a new feminine, free of the disagreeable results of the exclusions implicit in previous hierarchical oppositions’.8 Thus, looking back on the response to The Man of Reason from the perspective of 1993, Lloyd comments critically on subsequent developments within anglophone feminist theory that seek to deconstruct the symbolic links between ‘reason’ and ‘maleness’ by an uncritical miming of reason’s exclusions: The heart of the problem remains how to articulate the implications of the fact that the male–female distinction has been used to symbolize the distinction between reason and its opposites. My concern is that feminists may, in the name of deconstructive strategies, be perpetuating a symbolic use of sexual difference which it would be better to expose and leave behind.9

In this essay I will argue against those who read Lloyd as having established the coincidence of ‘reason’ and ‘maleness’ or who identify a ‘feminist philosophy’ with

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a ‘philosophy of the feminine’. Lloyd’s later work also circumvents any such move, as we shall see. My strategy is different from Lloyd’s, however, in that I am arguing that the links between ‘reason’ and ‘maleness’ are by no means as tight as theorists of the feminine suppose. If the ‘feminine’ can be identified with emotion, then a feminist strategy of reversal or destabilization that involves upholding the ‘feminine’ will involve an affirmation of emotion. On the other hand, if maleness is associated not only with reason but with specific forms of emotionality that are useful for philosophy, then the temptation to affirm the feminine through any simple opposition to reason or taking up of emotion will be blocked. The philosophical system of David Hume (1711–1776) constitutes a moment in the history of philosophy that complicates any simplistic account of the reason–passion dichotomy and the way it has been symbolized by reference to the markers for sexual difference. The prominence given to emotion in Hume’s account of mental functioning means that he has been praised by some contemporary women philosophers, such as Annette Baier, for developing a moral philosophy that is more compatible with ‘women’s moral sense’ than is the case with most philosophers in the history of Western thought.10 This is not Lloyd’s position, since she also considers Hume and recognizes that, although he does provide a critique of reason, he nevertheless carries on associating women with processes of thought that philosophy needs to correct. Lloyd does, however, fail to provide an accurate description of the means whereby Hume genders the philosopher as male, and this has implications for those who have attempted to use her analysis simply to reverse the reason–passion hierarchy and to develop a ‘feminist’, ‘female’ or ‘feminine’ philosophy that privileges emotion above reason. Towards the end of this essay I will also make some brief comments on the links between emotion and philosophy in the writings of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), who are generally portrayed as antithetical, at least in so far as the links between philosophy, reason and emotion are concerned. Nietzsche argues that all philosophy is disguised emotion,11 whereas Kant’s account of moral and aesthetic philosophy famously stresses the transcendence of emotion. Like Hume, however, both represent the philosopher in terms of health, emotion and the ‘manly’ conquering of disease; each writer makes the philosopher a male, but not simply a man of reason. In gendering and grading types of passion and feeling, Hume is by no means an isolated figure in the history of philosophy. In The Man of Reason, Lloyd does register that Hume adopts a different strategy for gendering philosophy than is the norm in the history of philosophy. As she notes, for Hume reason is ineffectual. It lacks the force—the ‘vivacity’—to act as a check to the passions. For Hume, a passion can be blocked only by another passion; but, as Lloyd goes on to observe, ‘Hume does not pursue his reconstruction of the Reason–passion distinction for male–female relations.’12 Lloyd does not explore the details of Hume’s account of the passions, but she registers that Hume makes a distinction between ‘calm’ and ‘violent’ passions and that he argues that a calm, reflective passion can block a violent passion. This happens when the calm passion

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is sufficiently ingrained, so that it has become part of a person’s character or acquired disposition. Interpreting these ‘calm passions’ as a form of enlightened self-interest that recognizes (through the use of reason) that it is to the individual’s advantage to put the good of the community above the good of the individual, Lloyd maintains that Hume associates women with the ‘private passion’ of self-interest. For Lloyd, although Hume’s system does not require the ‘maleness’ of reason, it continues to secure the links between ‘reason’ and ‘maleness’ and ‘passion’ and ‘femaleness’, and it does this by linking women (in Hegelian fashion) with the domestic, the private and the amoral or pre-moral.13 But Lloyd’s account of the way that the reason–emotion and the male–female divides operate in Hume will not do. Although Hume does link woman with tooviolent, undisciplined emotions, he is not against violent passions per se and nor is he always on the side of enlightened self-interest. The Humean philosopher is a playful melancholic, not a ‘man of Reason’, and what is the matter with the Humean woman is that she suffers from the wrong kind of melancholy. She also prefers the wrong kind of emotional violence. What is wrong about it is not that it is directed to the private, but that it is socially disruptive and delusional. Hume complains that women have a passion for revenge and are also powerhungry. He asserts, ‘Revenge is a natural passion to mankind; but seems to reign with the greatest force in priests and women.’14 We are also told that ‘no passion seems to have more influence on female minds, than this for power’.15 Hume’s most potent criticism of women is, however, that they are the ‘timorous and pious sex’: What age or period of life is most addicted to superstition? The weakest and most timid. What sex? The same answer must be given. The leaders and examples of every kind of superstition, says Strabo, are the women. These excite the men to devotion and supplications, and the observance of religious days.16

According to Hume, the origin of superstition is ‘Weakness, fear, melancholy, together with ignorance’, and superstition is linked with ‘ceremonies, observances, mortifications, sacrifices’ and similar practices that reveal evidence of ‘a blind and terrified credulity’.17 Hume tells us that ‘enthusiasm’ involves an analogous set of distorted beliefs and religious practices that have their origins in ‘Hope, pride, presumption, a warm imagination, together with ignorance’. He links enthusiasm primarily with Quakerism, whilst ‘superstition’ is linked with the acceptance of ‘priestly authority’ and Roman Catholicism.18 Although in The History of England he does make some ironic comments on the part played by women in the ‘gloomy enthusiasm’ of Quakerism, it is fear-based (and anti-individualistic) superstition that is treated as both the more pernicious and as the quintessentially ‘female’ vice.19 Far from women’s passions being condemned because they are limited to the domestic as Lloyd maintains, they are regarded as a threat precisely because they operate in the public sphere and incite the men to religion—and away from philosophy.

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Blocking the excessive and distorted passions of religious belief is, for Hume, part of philosophy’s function, ‘there being nothing but Philosophy able to conquer entirely these unaccountable Terrors’.20 Hume pits the philosopher against women (and priests) whose minds have been weakened by an over-emphasis on romantic love (in the case of women) or wilful hypocrisy (in the case of priests). Hume’s philosopher is not, however, a man of reason, and, as we shall see, even the impulse to study philosophy is itself, for Hume, the result of a passion that is violent. But the violence of the passion for philosophy is beneficial; the violence of women’s passionate superstitions is harmful. It will be necessary to explore Hume’s account of the passions in more detail to understand in outline how this analysis works. As we see in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), in the Humean model of the mind ideas are copied from impressions and strung together by the imagination through the processes of association. Reason is an inferior power and can do no more than order the ideas already provided by the imagination. Reason lacks the necessary force to block desires, passions, or even ideas that have become powerful through contact with the passions. Like sensations, passions are impressions and have a vivacity or force that can become attached to ideas as the imagination and the emotions function together.21 This means that passions play an important role in the construction of the ‘real’. Where passions (like hope and fear) add force to beliefs that cannot be rendered coherent with our other beliefs, the knowing subject can become trapped in a form of delusion. This is exemplified by Hume above all by monotheistic religious belief, which involves ideas that are literally incredible and incompatible with the associative patterns that build up the everyday world that we take to be ‘real’. As a consequence, faith can only be maintained by hypocrisy or by self-deception: ‘Men dare not avow, even to their own hearts, the doubts, which they entertain on such subjects.’22 Priests and women are particularly prone to this failing of ‘men’. For Hume, all beliefs are produced by associative mechanisms, which as far as ideas are concerned involve the three ‘forces’ of resemblance, contiguity and causation. With regard to the passions, however, association operates according to slightly different principles. First, Hume claims that the only associative force that operates on the passions is resemblance.23 Secondly, he claims both in A Treatise and in the identical phraseology of A Dissertation on the Passions that whereas in the association of ideas the mind is like ‘a wind instrument of music, which, in running over all the notes, immediately loses the sound when the breath ceases’, in the association of passions the mind is like a string instrument, ‘where, after each stroke, the vibrations still retain some sound, which gradually and insensibly decays’.24 This metaphor is pulled to the front of A Dissertation—Hume’s rewrite of Book Two of A Treatise—which was published together with The Natural History of Religion in 1757, so that the implications of Hume’s account of the way that the passions blend and mix to produce distorted (religious) beliefs would have been clearer to an eighteenth-century audience than it is to philosophers writing today.25 Also pulled forward to the start of A Dissertation is Hume’s claim that passions change less easily and quickly than ideas and that one passion can blend with

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another passion. Here Hume adopts the metaphor of the blending of coloured light from Newton’s Opticks.26 What will be produced by this blurring and blending process will be new compound passions that are more than the sum of their parts, or alternatively ‘mixed’ passions, like hope and fear. In a switch of metaphor, Hume compares these mixed passions with oil and vinegar, which will temporarily amalgamate—given sufficient shaking or force—but will eventually separate back out into two distinct fluids.27 According to The Natural History of Religion, it is the combination of hope and fear—passions that are inherently unstable even before combining—that drives mankind from polytheism gradually towards monotheism, then back towards scepticism and then back towards polytheism again. By heating the imagination until it is ‘inflamed’, these two passions give enough force and vivacity to ideas to give them the status of beliefs, as opposed to merely wished-for fantasies or fearful imaginings. Hume is claiming that religious belief is necessarily temporary and changeable: it is only passion that manages to conceal from mankind the impossibility of maintaining a consistent belief in a monotheistic God.28 This is why he claims that priests become professional hypocrites; this is also why he maintains that the passions of fear and hope that are common in women are socially destructive, and not simply vices that affect the domestic sphere. The drive to philosophy is, however, also a product of violent passion, according to Hume. To see this, it is useful to contrast Hume’s account of passion and the will with that of Descartes, who claims in The Passions of the Soul (1649) that there are six primitive passions: wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy, sadness. It is through wonder—and surprise encounters with new objects—that an impression is first made on the Cartesian mind and the animal spirits are set in motion. But wonder, although of the greatest importance, does not produce ‘any change which occurs in the heart and blood like the other passions’. For Descartes, desire is a specific passion: one directed towards the future. Although Descartes claims that passions can only bring about action ‘by the intervention of the desire which they excite’, desire does not direct the will in Descartes, since he also thinks that the will can direct our actions and control our thoughts by assenting or withholding assent from our desires.29 In Hume’s Treatise and Dissertation on the Passions, by contrast, the will is a byproduct of passion. Those objects that ‘produce immediately an agreeable sensation’ or are ‘naturally conformable’ to passion are called ‘good’, and those objects that produce an immediate ‘disagreeable sensation’ or are naturally ‘contrary to passion’ are called ‘evil’. These sensations produce desire, and the will ‘exerts itself’ when the good or evil can be ‘attained by any action of the mind or body’.30 Hume’s taxonomy of the passions divides those that are produced by agreeable or disagreeable sensations in an immediate way—the so-called ‘direct’ passions— from the so-called ‘indirect’ passions where the agreeable and disagreeable feelings arise indirectly, through the medium of ideas that generate new passions. Direct passions include desire, aversion, joy and grief, along with fear and hope that involve a ‘mixture’ of joy and grief. Hume seems unsure about lust, hunger and

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the will to revenge one’s enemies and reward one’s friends, which are simply described as ‘unaccountable’ in that they produce pleasure and pain instead of arising from pleasure and pain. The four basic indirect passions are love, hate, pride and humility, which form a ‘square’ of opposition. Love is agreeable and directed towards others; pride is agreeable but directed towards one’s own self; hate is disagreeable and directed towards others; humility is disagreeable and is directed towards the self.31 Hume then posits other secondary passions that result from the blending of indirect passions or from the conjunction of passions and ideas. These include our esteem for the rich and powerful, the love of fame, malice, envy, respect and contempt. The whole process is further assisted by the mechanism of sympathy—by which he means what we would now term ‘empathy’—which is not itself a passion, but which lets the other person’s miseries and joys affect me as if they were my own. It is certainly not identical with compassion, which Hume classifies as a secondary social affection that is generated by the mechanism of sympathy.32 Hume treats the mind mechanistically, as responding directly to our passions and our appetites. Although he keeps a place for ‘will’, this comes to mean little more than the disposition to act on the energized impulses of passions and passion-energized or sensation-energized ideas. Neither ‘will’ nor ‘reason’ can act as a block to passion on the Humean account, but new passions may nevertheless be produced through the way that the imagination orders or reason reorders our ideas. Hume’s system has been read as a heightening of Locke’s, in which, as Susan James puts it, ‘Unless we experience some uneasiness, some desire, we will not act’, and where action is caused by ‘one overarching passion which moves us to action: uneasiness or desire’.33 But Hume is in some ways closer to Descartes—despite their differing accounts of will—in that Hume makes desire a distinct passion and also allows that we might sometimes be driven to maximize our unease, particularly with regard to the ‘direct passion’ that he calls ‘curiosity, or the love of truth’, and which does, in effect, substitute for the Cartesian passion of ‘wonder’.34 Hume uses this passion to address the problem that famously emerged in the final chapter of Book One of A Treatise: namely, why should one get involved in philosophy at all—or care about the ‘abstract’ and ‘abstruse’ answers that metaphysics provides—given that the imagination is inertial and will follow the ‘easy’ paths of ideas. In the final chapters of Books One and Two of A Treatise, we see Hume trying to reconcile an inertial model of mental functioning with his own drive to philosophize, which has rendered him mentally and physically ‘uneasy’. Thus, at the end of Book Two we are told, where the mind pursues any end with passion; tho’ that passion be not deriv’d originally from the end, but merely from the action and pursuit; yet by the natural course of the affections, we acquire a concern for the end itself, and are uneasy under any disappointment we meet in the pursuit of it.35

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The pleasure of philosophy (and hence the drive to philosophize) is said to be identical with that of the pleasure of the hunt. What gives pleasure in both cases is ‘the motion, the attention, the difficulty, and the uncertainty’.36 And here we need to register a further difference between the operation of the mind in terms of ideas and passions that Hume assumes, but nowhere makes explicit. In the case of ideas, and hence also beliefs, the mind follows as inertial train of thought and comes to take as ‘real’ that which it is easiest to believe.37 However, in the case of passion, what characterizes the activity of the mind, on Hume’s account, is a tendency to avoid unease (or pain), but this is by no means the same thing. The inertial tendencies of the imagination and the conflicting emotional drive to eliminate unease produce an oscillation of ideas and passions that renders the mind unstable. The difficulties and discomfiture of the philosophical chase after truth mean that Hume’s brain has been ‘heated’, leaving him ‘inviron’d with the deepest darkness’, unable to answer such questions as ‘Where am I, or what?’ This is nothing like the Cartesian passion of ‘wonder’ that produced no effects on the animal spirits, since the pain produced by curiosity or the love of truth is so acute that the body of the Humean metaphysician is said to be racked by the physical and mental disturbances characteristic of ‘melancholy’ and ‘spleen’.38 It is not reason that provides a cure for the Human madness; instead, philosophy is part of the illness that has been generated by the ‘intense view’ of the many contradictions and imperfections of human reason.39 The remedy comes neither from reason nor from philosophy, but rather from the fact that man can only believe ideas that are ‘easy’: Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when . . . I wou’d return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.40

Turning to the reader in ‘the same easy disposition’ as himself, Hume suggests that philosophy should be undertaken as a diversion—but one that fulfils a useful purpose through countering the effects of ‘superstition of every kind or denomination’. Although superstition seizes ‘more strongly on the mind’ than philosophy, true philosophy presents us with ‘mild and moderate sentiments’. Whereas a false philosophy is ‘extravagant’ and ‘ridiculous’, it is not harmful. On the other hand, ‘the errors in religion are dangerous’, and the danger arises precisely because of the way passion enters into the mix.41 Hume is using the tension between two related—but also different—models of ease and unease to introduce a dynamism into his model of the mind. It is not ‘reason’, but ‘nature’ that controls what men believe and what men (and women)

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enjoy. The melancholic passions of the philosopher will be tamed by what it is natural to believe, and, as such, his extravagances are not harmful but will be treated as analogous to the playful games of backgammon and over-dinner conversation that function as the ‘cure’ for philosophical spleen. Indeed, the philosopher’s playful speculations are beneficial to society as a whole, since they can throw up ideas that counter the violent passions of superstitious religion that are also ‘melancholy’, but in a manner that is rooted in fear. In Hume we find a gendered account of philosophy. It is the male philosopher who ‘hunts’ down truth, and this is a matter of passion—not reason—and his pride in his achievements is directly proportional to the difficulties of the endeavour and the rarity of his prey.42 Hume retains a notion of sexual difference, but locates this at the level of different modes of violent passion. Women’s drive to religion is also a product of passion. Although Hume does condemn passions that are ‘too violent’ as well as those that are ‘too remiss’,43 what counts as excessive violence is largely determined by the fact that the passions concerned are directed to the wrong objects. And the wrong object is not the one in the private (as opposed to the public) sphere, as Lloyd supposes, but a passion-inspired delusion that unhinges the mind of the individual and disturbs the balance of forces that constitutes society and the state. Women’s lack of mental balance is both represented as innate—as linked to their ‘tender and amorous’ disposition—and as exacerbated by an education that does not sufficiently guard women against the effects of ‘Gallantry and Devotion’.44 Education could improve women’s minds, but since Hume argues that women require a different set of virtues—including the entirely ‘artificial’ virtues of chastity and modesty, which need to be acculturated for the benefit of (patrilineal) society—it seems that Hume would not wish for an educational system that would treat men and women in the same way.45 Thus we see that Hume places the man of philosophy in an oppositional relation with the woman of superstition; but this is not done by allying the male with reason or woman with the private or domestic as Lloyd suggests. Surprisingly, Immanuel Kant—often presented as the ‘embodiment’ of philosophical reason—can also be found portraying himself not as the ‘man of reason’ but as having an inclination to ‘hypochondria’, a disease historically linked with ‘melancholy’ and also explicitly linked to melancholy and mania by Kant. Like Hume, Kant recommends a certain set of bodily routines and practices as a cure for his disease. These include dining in company (never alone) and are strongly reminiscent of Hume’s ‘cure’ for philosophical melancholy that includes dining in good company and playing backgammon with friends. Kant also claims ‘manly courage’ as the antidote to the ‘Anxious fear, childish in character, of the thought of death’ that ‘nourishes’ the disease of melancholic hypochondria to which he is prone.46 This is particularly significant, given Kant’s explicit linking of the attainment of full moral personhood and rational self-determination with the transcendence of fear, whilst simultaneously registering women’s need to remain timorous and fearful in order to protect the unborn foetus in the womb.47 Kant’s (unenlightened) views of women are influenced by Rousseau, but also by Hume,

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whom he quotes on this topic.48 For Kant’s male philosopher, health is not a given, but is an achievement that is also linked to the avoidance of boredom: ‘a state of inactivity can not prevail over the intellectual life of man because death would follow inevitably’.49 As in Hume’s account of philosophical ‘hunting’, so for the Kantian philosopher inertia and boredom are debilitating, and pain is necessary for a healthy and flourishing life. A century later Nietzsche would push this view to an extreme. Asserting that ‘there are few questions that are as attractive as that concerning the relation of health and philosophy’, he contrasts his own attitude to philosophy to those who use it ‘as a prop, a sedative, medicine, redemption, elevation, or self-alienation’.50 Nietzsche expresses ‘gratitude’ for the time of ‘severe sickness’ that feeds his sickness: We philosophers are not free to divide body from soul as the people do . . . we have to give birth to our thoughts out of our pain and, like mothers, endow them with all we have of blood, heart, fire, pleasure, passion, agony, conscience, fate, and catastrophe. . . . And as for sickness: are we not almost tempted to ask whether we could get along without it? 51

For Nietzsche, the great philosopher is not a man of reason but a man of passion— one who is like a mother in giving birth out of pain. For him health is not stasis but a new kind of health—‘the great health’—which ‘one does merely have but also acquires continually, and must acquire because one gives it up again and again’.52 But Nietzsche’s philosopher who seeks out danger and pain is still not a woman: ‘Man should be educated for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior; all else is folly.’53 It is Nietzsche’s male philosopher who practices philosophy in a way that can productively synthesize playfulness and tragedy, melancholy and despair. As in the structure of Nietzsche’s text The Gay Science, the Nietzschean philosopher moves from hope through the deepest despair and ‘melancholy’ to a state of transformed— cheerful—acceptance that is linked with music and even with dancing: ‘I would not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more to be than a good dancer.’54 Hume’s game of backgammon and Kant’s dinner with friends that help ‘cure’ the philosopher have been replaced by more emotionally stirring pleasures. The philosopher, it seems, in this alternative tradition is not ‘the man of reason’ but the ‘man of health’, who with ‘manly courage’ negotiates the dangers of philosophy and conquers the melancholy and sickness that philosophy produces. In Hume we see already elements of this alternative tradition, which revalues passion whilst retaining the traditional gender-hierarchies. My analysis suggests that rationality and maleness have not been coincident, as Braidotti maintains on the basis of her understanding of Lloyd’s ‘anatomy of a myth’. Emotions have been graded according to a sexed typology, as also have madnesses and different kinds of fantasy and delusion. This means that ‘miming’ the irrational and adopting the language of the ‘feminine’ that has acted as the ‘soft underbelly of reason’55 can never be enough for a feminist philosophy that seeks to

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transform the methodology and ideals of the traditions of Western philosophy in ways that register the ontological and evaluative significance of sexual difference. We can see the dangers of an approach that equates a feminist philosophy with one that prioritizes ‘feminine’ emotion by noting that the most celebrated misogynist in the history of Western philosophy, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), manages to combine an explicit contempt for women with a moral philosophy that privileges the emotion of compassion and is also anti-reason.56 As others before me have noted,57 Schopenhauer’s ethics of compassion is, in its emphasis on empathy and ‘care’, uncannily close to the twentieth-century ‘ethics of the feminine’ put forward by Carol Gilligan in her extremely influential In a Different Voice (1982).58 What Schopenhauer privileges is the ‘feminine’ that was constituted in the history of philosophy as the underside of reason; this is by no means the same as registering female life-patterns and differences. Although the task of Lloyd’s The Man of Reason was to expose the unnecessarily dichotomous mode of thinking that underlies the dominant Western philosophical tradition of reasoning about reason, in her later books and writings Lloyd makes none of the ‘feminine’ moves, but instead returns to the philosophical monism of the seventeenth-century Jewish philosopher, Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), to rethink the reason–passion relationship in less dichotomous terms.59 In The Man of Reason, Lloyd does not discuss Spinoza, although she has subsequently commented on his shadowy presence in that book: When I wrote The Man of Reason . . . I was already quite fascinated by Spinoza, although in the book Spinoza is handled in one sentence. . . . I was looking at the more negative points of the philosophical tradition, where reason had polarized from emotion. Spinoza already struck me, at that stage, as a moment in the philosophical tradition where polarization didn’t occur.60

For Lloyd, Spinoza represents one of the byways of philosophy—an almostforgotten opening and a path that, if followed, could have provided a richer (non-oppositional) model of the mind–body and reason–passion relationships, and an alternative to the overly narrow view of reason and the excessively uniform— and disembodied—view of the self that came to dominate contemporary debates, partly through the influence of Cartesian dualism. For Spinoza, passion is no disorderly, turbulent or irrational state requiring mastery by reason, since passion is inherently cognitive and reason is itself a kind of passion that involves a drive to understand one’s place in the whole. For Spinoza, reality is not hidden behind the realm of appearances, as it was for Plato or Kant, but is dispersed through nature. Spinoza’s goal is to free man from passion, but this does not involve the intervention of will or the directives of reason. Reason and passion are not separate forces or powers. It is through understanding that we become free, since understanding involves a changed relation to passion—and to the underlying state of conatus, which is a kind of will-to-life, involving a striving to persist and

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enhance being. For Spinoza, understanding how the self fits within the whole transforms reason; from being confused and inadequate, it attains the power of an active emotion or affect. Specific emotions such as hilaritas—a kind of reflective joy generated by the mind’s understanding of itself in relation to the whole—are also produced as the individual understands (and hence also changes) her relationship to the whole of which she is a part.61 Despite the unfamiliarity of Spinoza’s premodern grammar of the emotions, I do not wish to dissent from Lloyd’s assessment that Spinoza’s way of handling the reason–passion relationship is more productive than that of Hume or Descartes. Hume has a basically mechanistic understanding of emotion, which has the capacity to explain all human passions, but without an ability to sufficiently analyse human specificities and differences. Hume starts off with a framework of universal psychological laws, and then has to struggle to explain difference, including sexual difference. For Spinoza, by contrast, we are all parts of one whole and differentiated from it in terms of the modes of relationality that constitute our specificity; difference and communality have to be thought in tandem. We are all part of one whole, yet also unique. As such, he is better able to explain individual—and female or racial— difference, including emotional and dispositional differences. It seems to me no accident that Spinoza has provided a resource not only for contemporary women philosophers such as Genevieve Lloyd, Moira Gatens62 or Susan James, but for women philosophers and philosophical novelists of previous generations, such as George Eliot (1819–1880)63 or May Sinclair (1863–1946).64 According to Lloyd, we can find in Spinoza a different (non-oppositional) model of the reason–passion relationship that can serve as a correction to the pernicious dualism of Descartes. For Gatens, it is Spinoza’s recasting of the public–private divide that is most admired; for James, we can find in Spinoza a counter to the contemporary ‘Humean’ model of desire that dominates contemporary analytic philosophy.65 But what is valuable about Spinoza’s account of the passions is also the framework that his philosophy supplies for dealing adequately with difference, including sexual difference. The return to Spinoza provides one of a number of possible openings for a more adequate taxonomy of the passions that can focus on difference. Alternatively, one might look to the more historical account of the emergence of specific modes of feeling provided by Michel Foucault (1926–1984) or, alternatively, to the developing field of the phenomenology of difference.66 As Sandra Bartky has remarked, after analysing the emotion of shame in relation to women’s (culturally mediated) experience of their bodies, ‘We are now in a position to tear the veil of universality from the abstract agent of moral psychology.’ Bartky goes on to imagine ‘a political phenomenology of the emotions’ that can reveal the relationship between particular emotions and the structures of oppression.67 Whether or not we adopt the Spinozist route or that of the phenomenologist or Foucault, any new philosophy of affect will need more than ‘feminine’ reversals or strategies of destabilization. After tearing aside the veil of universality, it will need to move on to reimagine the links between

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reason and affect in ways that are attuned to the political typology of the emotions and their links to embodied differences. I hope this essay has begun to show not only the traps in the strategies of the ‘feminine’, but also the importance of the political and feminist tasks that remain as we map the logic of the heart and the feelings of the head.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20

Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and Female’ in Western Philosophy (London, 1984), p. ix. Except where noted, all further citations of Lloyd’s work will be to this 1984 edition. Ibid., 2, 104. Ibid., 3. Virginia Held, Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society and Politics (Chicago and London, 1993), 43. Rosi Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women in Contemporary Philosophy (Cambridge, 1991), 189, 190, 279. Andrea Nye, ‘Semantics in a New Key’, in Janet A. Kourany, ed., Philosophy in a Feminist Voice (Princeton, NJ, 1998), 265. Andrea Nye, Feminist Theory and the Philosophies of Man (New York and London, 1988), 211. Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy, 2nd edn. (London, 1993), p. ix. Ibid., p. x. Lloyd exempts Luce Irigaray from her critique. Irigaray’s moves beyond deconstruction are analysed in Christine Battersby, The Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity (Cambridge and New York, 1998), 15–37, 98–121. Annette Baier, ‘Hume: The Women’s Moral Theorist?’, in Eva Feder Kittay and Diana T. Meyers, eds., Women and Moral Theory (Totowa, NJ, 1987), 37–55. See e.g. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil [1886], trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1966), § 6. Lloyd, Man of Reason, 56. Ibid., 50–56, 80. David Hume, ‘Of National Characters’, in idem, The Philosophical Works, ed. Thomas Hill Green and Thomas Hodge Grose, 4 vols. (Darmstadt, 1882; repr. 1964), III. 246 n. For priests and power, see also idem, ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’, Philosophical Works, III. 146–9 and nn. (hereafter cited as ‘Superstition’). Hume, ‘Of Love and Marriage’, Philosophical Works, IV. 384. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion [1757], ed. A. Wayne Colver, pub. together with idem, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion [1776], ed. John Vladimir Price (Oxford, 1976), 37. Hume, ‘Superstition’, Philosophical Works, III. 145. Ibid., 145 and ff. David Hume, The History of England, 10 vols. (London, 1808–10), VIII. 392 ff. Hume, ‘Superstition’, Philosophical Works, III. 146 n., 147.

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21 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature [1739–40], ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1978), 1–13, 413 ff., 275 ff. 22 Hume, Natural History of Religion, 74; see also 56–8, 68, and idem, History of England, VIII. 392. 23 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 11, 283. 24 Ibid., 440; Hume, A Dissertation on the Passions, in Philosophical Works, IV. 140. 25 There has been so little interest in Hume’s account of the passions—dismissed by analytic philosophers as committing the sin of ‘psychologism’—that we lack any good modern edition of A Dissertation on the Passions, and Book II of A Treatise of Human Nature is little studied or taught. 26 Isaac Newton, Opticks [1704], based on the 4th London edn. of 1730 (New York, 1952), Queries 12–16, pp. 345–7. 27 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 443–4; idem, A Dissertation on the Passions, Philosophical Works, IV. 141, 143. 28 For Hume on hope, fear and monotheism, see the following texts: Natural History of Religion, 51–2; Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, 258–9; ‘Superstition’, Philosophical Works, III. 144–50; for hope and fear as mixed passions, see A Treatise of Human Nature, 441–7; A Dissertation on the Passions, Philosophical Works, IV. 139–43; for hypocrisy, see Natural History of Religion, 74. 29 René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul [1649], in Philosophical Works, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1969), Vol. I, art. LXIX, p. 362; art. LXXI, pp. 362–3; art. LVII, p. 359; art. CXLIV, p. 395. I am indebted to Susan James for these points about Descartes, although her analysis is flawed in that it offers a critique of ‘the Humean model’ of desire, but without adequately signalling that Hume’s own model of desire has little in common with that of the modern philosophers of mind ‘often labelled Humean’. Susan James, ‘Explaining the Passions’, in Stephen Gaukroger, ed., The Soft Underbelly of Reason: The Passions in the Seventeenth Century (London and New York, 1998), 17–33. 30 Hume, A Dissertation on the Passions, Philosophical Works, IV. 139. 31 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 276–7, 439, 333. 32 Ibid., 277, 368–94, 575 ff. 33 James, ‘Explaining the Passions’, 30, 31. 34 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 448 ff. 35 Ibid., 451. 36 Ibid. 37 On ease, see e.g. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 99, 204, 220, and Christine Battersby, ‘Hume, Newton and “The Hill called Difficulty”’, in S. C. Brown, ed., Philosophers of the Enlightenment (Brighton, 1979), 31–55. 38 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 268–9, 270. 39 Ibid., 268. 40 Ibid., 269. 41 Ibid., 271–3. 42 Ibid., 451–2. 43 Hume, ‘The Sceptic’, Philosophical Works, III. 220. 44 Hume, ‘Of Essay Writing’, Philosophical Works, IV. 370. 45 On the different virtues for males and females, see Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 570–73, and Christine Battersby, ‘An Enquiry concerning the Humean Woman’, Philosophy 56 (1981), 303–12.

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46 Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View [1798], trans. Victor Lyle Dowdell (Carbondale, IL, and London, 1996), 109, 110; for Kant’s own hypochondria, see Susan Meld Shell, The Embodiment of Reason (Chicago, 1996), 264–305. 47 Kant, Anthropology, 219, and Christine Battersby, ‘Stages on Kant’s Way: Aesthetics, Morality and the Gendered Sublime’, in Peggy Z. Brand and Carolyn Korsmeyer, eds., Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics (University Park, PA, 1995), 88–114. 48 John H. Zammito, Kant, Herder and The Birth of Anthropology (Chicago, 2002), 125–8; Kant, Anthropology, 223. 49 Kant, Anthropology, 136, and see 133. 50 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science [1887], trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1974), 33. 51 Ibid., 35–6. 52 Ibid., 346. 53 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra [1883–5], in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1968), 178. 54 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 325, 346. 55 Gaukroger, ed., The Soft Underbelly of Reason. 56 See Arthur Schopenhauer, ‘On Women’ [1851], in idem, Essays and Aphorisms, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, 1970), 80–88; idem, On the Basis of Morality [1839], trans. E. F. J. Payne, rev. edn. (Providence, RI, and Oxford, 1995). 57 David E. Cartwright, Introduction to Schopenhauer, Basis of Morality, p. xxviii n. 58 Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, MA, 1982). 59 See Genevieve Lloyd, Part of Nature: Self Knowledge in Spinoza’s ‘Ethics’ (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1994); eadem, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Spinoza and the ‘Ethics’ (London and New York, 1996); eadem, ‘Rationalizing the Passions’, in Gaukroger, ed., Soft Underbelly of Reason, 34–45; Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present (New York and London, 1999); Susan James, ‘The Power of Spinoza’, interview with Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd, Hypatia 15 (2000), 40–58. 60 Lloyd in interview with James, ‘The Power of Spinoza’, 44. 61 Hilaritas is analysed by Lloyd in ‘Rationalizing the Passions’ and her Routledge Guidebook to Spinoza. 62 Gatens in interview with James, ‘The Power of Spinoza’; Gatens and Lloyd, Collective Imaginings; Moira Gatens, ‘Feminism as “Password”: Rethinking the “Possible” with Spinoza and Deleuze’, Hypatia 15 (2000), 59–75. 63 Eliot’s 1854 translation of Spinoza’s Ethics remained unpublished until 1981, but Spinoza’s influence on her novels is traced by Dorothy Atkins, George Eliot and Spinoza (Salzburg, 1978). 64 See especially May Sinclair, Mary Olivier: A Life (London, 1919). 65 See James, ‘Rationalizing the Passions’, 17–18, and Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth Century Philosophy (Oxford, 1997), 15, which identifies what has gone wrong in philosophy in terms of theorizing passion and action with the influence of Hume—instead of with analytic philosophers’ neglect of Hume’s account of passion, which has been too frequently dismissed as logically and methodologically uninteresting, so-called ‘psychologism’. 66 See, for example, Gail Weiss, Body Images (New York and London, 1999); Sandra Bartky, Femininity and Domination (New York and London, 1990). 67 Ibid., 97, 98.

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CHAPTER 9

A Woman Weeps: Hogarth’s Sigismunda (1759) and the Aesthetics of Excess Marcia Pointon

Body fluids bathe the imagery of Sigismunda Mourning over the Heart of Guiscardo, Her Murdered Husband (Fig. 9.1) and amply lubricate the critical opprobium that it generated when exhibited in 1759. Tears roll from the corners of Sigismunda’s eyes, while her brow is furrowed, her gaze distractedly off-centre, her lips parted in grief. Pearls—in fluid and serpentine manner—seep out of the jewel-box, rhetorically instantiating tears and semen, the expenditure of precious bodily fluids in extremes of emotion. She clutches to her breast, with fingers that were once bloody (Hogarth repainted them to appease his critics), a chased goblet containing the heart of her lover, Guiscardo, murdered by her father and delivered to her as a gift. William Hogarth (1697–1764), the artist responsible for this work, was at the time of its execution highly respected for very different genres. His reputation had been established throughout a long, metropolitan practice in portraiture and in the representation of low-life scenes with a sharply humorous bent. The latter reached a very wide audience through engravings both authorized and pirated, and earned for Hogarth fame as a consummate pictorial story-teller. His source here is one of England’s revered classical authors, John Dryden (1631–1700). According to the story, which Dryden based on the Italian Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75), Sigismunda’s tears have been heroically pent up. Refusing to yield to her father’s authority, she has sworn ‘like a Man to die, without a Tear’, and it is only when she lifts the lid of the goblet and realizes her father has murdered Guiscardo, a page at her father’s court, that she weeps. These very visible tears will mingle with her lover’s blood and the poison she has added to the goblet to produce that potion with which she will, the story tells us, terminate her life, so eliminating all emotion and all expression. The sequence of events that produced this horrific scene are explicit and primal. King Tancred’s love for his daughter is all-consuming, Dryden tells us.1 Although she was ‘ripe for marriage’, he ‘kept her long a Maid, / As envying any one else should share a Part / of what was his, and claiming all her Heart’. He only found her a husband, Dryden tells his readers, when ‘Publick Decency requir’d’ and ‘his Vassals eagerly desired it’. Tancred ‘rather underwent / His People’s Will, then gave his own consent’.

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As a consequence, when Sigismunda finally married she was ‘torn’ from her father ‘as from a Lover’s Side, / And made almost in his despite a Bride’. Quickly widowed, Sigismunda, who had youth, health, ease and a ‘most amorous mind’, desired a lover. Sexually aroused through marriage, she wished to find someone to share her bed. In Dryden’s scarcely veiled phrase, ‘former joys had left a secret Sting behind’. Her father, however, left this, ‘her only want’, unsupplied, and as a chaste woman she had no choice but to hide her desires. Dryden’s language for the passion of Sigismunda and her lover Guiscardo is explicit; Sigismunda’s lust is described as ‘the raging fire that burn’d within her Breast’, and as Sigismunda and Guiscardo exchange looks across her father’s hall, ‘their twisted Rays together met’. In other words, their illicit love-affair is predicated upon sight, upon the unspoken expression of the gaze—the tacit process of seduction. Their ‘greedy love’ is all the more pleasurable for its stealth and for the fact that it ‘look’d so like a sin’. When

Figure 9.1 William Hogarth, Sigismunda Mourning over the Heart of Guiscardo, Her Murdered Husband, oil on canvas, 1759. Tate, London.

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Sigismunda sent a note secretly to Guiscardo declaring her passion, she concealed it in a hollow cane which she tossed to him as if in sport, saying: ‘when your Needs require / This little Brand will serve to light your Fire’. Dryden chose to satisfy public morality by introducing a friar to marry the lovers, but none the less makes great play of eroticized body-imagery in his description of the cavern in which Sigismunda and Guiscardo first met and made love as a ‘blind Grot’, a ‘safe Retreat’ accessed by a winding passage and with an outlet blocked by brambles, through which Guiscardo has to push until ‘the choak’d Entry of the Cave he found’. The discovery of the lovers enacts a scene of psychic generational drama when Tancred, who has fallen asleep concealed in his daughter’s bedroom, finds himself an involuntary voyeur of her sexual acts. Tancred’s rage and accusations are met by Sigismunda with dry eyes and eloquent self-justification. She proclaims her right to choose her mate (‘State-Laws may alter: Nature’s are the same’) in language that late-eighteenth-century readers would have readily understood. Most importantly, she berates her father (whose portrait she wears on her wrist in Hogarth’s painting) with failing to recall his own sexually active youth, with having bred her to luxury, which inflamed her natural appetites, and with failing to provide for her sexual needs (‘And am not to be blam’d, if I renew, / By lawful Means, the joys which then I knew’). Sigismunda’s mistake here is to think that her father is driven by pride and that his rage stems from the insult to his family line cast by a daughter who has allied herself with an inferior. In fact, Dryden makes it clear that it is his incestuous jealousy that requires the death of a rival. He does not believe his daughter’s threat ‘like a Man to die, without a Tear’, and rips the faithful heart of Guiscardo from his breast, a ‘bloody sacrifice . . . to glut the Tyrant’s Eyes’. Let us deal first with the question of blood. It is blood, as in ‘blood-line’, that is at the root of the tragedy of Sigismunda. Had she taken as a lover a man of noble blood, it would have been hard for her father to have murdered him. Her offence was an offence against lineage and family honour. Moreover, the heart—by this time well recognized as the muscle responsible for the circulation of the blood—is the means whereby Tancred conveys to his daughter the death of her lover and the object that she, through rhetorical art, transvaluates into an abstraction signifying undying love. Narrative and compositional imperatives demand that it is the centre-piece of the image. But Sigismunda too has a heart, and, though not visible, its action is also written into the image. Hogarth’s attention to detail invites us to recognize the heart in the goblet, with its visible veins, as a human organ (though in fact it was probably based on a pig’s heart). Reviewers found this particularly disgusting and described it as a sheep’s ‘pluck’ bought on St James’s Market.2 Sigismunda’s own veins are still visibly dilated and stand out on her forehead and on the bridge of her nose, while her red-rimmed, tear-filled eyes have blue shadows beneath them. The model for Sigismunda was said to have been the artist’s wife Jane, griefstricken at the death of her mother. Her slight squint and half-open mouth add to the air of desperation and distraction, demonstrating Hogarth’s familiarity with the physiognomic theory of the seventeenth-century French academician Charles Le Brun

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(which since its introduction into England 1701 had revolutionized the understanding of facial expression and its representation)3 and his ability to exploit eighteenthcentury enthusiasm for the theatre as a ‘place for tears’.4 Tears not only endowed women with a charming beauty but could, in the case of great female heroines from Lucretia to Clarissa, also be a sign of sublime strength. In the novels of Richardson, the tears of virtuous heroines are a major form of expression, empowering Clarissa and Pamela by reproaching their persecutors with their mute but expressive language, and serving to guarantee for readers the authenticity of their emotions. Hogarth, who was a great enthusiast for the theatre, stated that painting was a ‘bewitching’ art and that in Sigismunda he explicitly wished to ‘fetch a tear from the spectator’.5 The figure of Sigismunda is, surely intentionally, assymetrical—leaning toward the left and cut off at the knee. Hogarth uses the visual vocabulary of continental Europe to stress the figure’s agitation: fluttering draperies, curved scagliola table-top and rococo support, turbulent and agitated lace. Stripes of gold thread are woven into the gauze of Sigismunda’s veil.6 Rich gold tassels ornament the lower borders of her sleeves. A barely distinguishable curtain-cord, a dark looped curtain, and grey-green columns break up the space behind Sigismunda’s left shoulder but do nothing to diminish the sense of lowering, ominous darkness stretching out behind her. The veil flutters against this darkness, and Sigismunda’s arms and hands, mysteriously eloquent, emerge from a froth of lace, with a rounded sensuality that recalls the figuration of the erotic through this moment of fleshly emergence, staged so effectively two years earlier in Hogarth’s figure of Mrs Garrick seductively leaning over her husband (Garrick and his Wife, 1757, Royal Collection), and anticipates Reynolds’s Mrs Abington as Miss Prue (Royal Academy 1771; Fig. 9.2). In their suggestion of mobility, of fingers anxiously moving, caressing and touching, these hands makes us feel as if they might just have been lifted from the clavichord. The lace casts shadows on the area of skin where the arm emerges from its sleeve, enhancing the elegant lines of a pose adapted from the traditional figure of melancholy. For the cognoscenti of mid-eighteenth-century London, the highest accolade for expression in art was reserved for Italian late-sixteenth- and seventeenth-century artists, especially for the hugely popular Correggio, Domenichino, Carlo Dolci, Carlo Maratta and Guido Reni. The language of Horace Walpole, speaking of the great collection of his father Sir Robert Walpole at Houghton, is exemplary. He refers to ‘the graceful air of Guido’, ‘the attractive delicacy of Carlo Maratta’ and the ‘grace and sweetness of Correggio’.7 Hogarth produced an image that, in terms of subject and composition, accorded with all that was admired. But he simultaneously challenged this canon of taste in three ways. First, he imported a visual vocabulary admired in the predominantly sacred imagery of Italian art and applied it to a profane subject. Secondly, he paid explicit attention to material detail, which in the Italian art so admired by his contemporaries was stylishly circumvented through those expressive generalities that Walpole sums up as ‘grace’ and ‘sweetness’. Thirdly, by emphasizing the sexual content of a story that culminates in bloody anatomization, Hogarth confronted audiences with a painting that addressed in relatively explicit ways what a cultural amnesia had

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Figure 9.2 Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792), Mrs Abington as Miss Prue in William Congreve’s ‘Love for Love’, 1771, oil on canvas, 76.8 × 63.8 cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, New Haven, CT.

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struggled to suppress in the interests of politeness, namely the struggle over the body of the subject as citizen. It is a struggle articulated in debates over body-snatching, in controversies over marriage laws, the age of majority, habeas corpus, chastity, male midwifery and many other matters of a juridico-medical kind.8 Sigismunda’s plight is represented by Hogarth as a heroic theatrical concept—not a portrait of an actress, but a figure staging the panoply of emotions. Elocution, rhetoric and physiognomics conjoined in a range of widely-circulated manuals, intended for actors but read promiscuously. Hogarth reminded himself that in history-painting ‘the figure is the actor’, in direct contradiction to the Renaissance theorist Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), who had advised that history-painting should not be guided by actors because they display false emotions.9 Hogarth was distinguished among contemporary artists for the way in which he mixed with people from many professions and social classes. He was a friend of James Parsons and must have known Parsons’s Human Physiognomy Explained (1740).10 He would also have been familiar with the ideas of writers like Aaron Hill and Thomas Sheridan on the theory of expression. The belief that the soul, vested in the brain, sends its messages through the nerves to affect facial expression regardless of the will, and that these effects could be gathered and formulated as a language, was as commonplace as the parallel knowledge of the circulation of the blood by the time Hogarth painted Sigismunda. As Aaron Hill put it in The Art of Acting (1746): ‘No Visage can conceal, what the mark’d muscle bids the spirit feel.’11 This recognition could, as Thomas Sheridan argued in British Education (1757), draw on the egalitarian and ancient art of oratory, through which national heroes could be celebrated. ‘To give exact portraits of such persons requires able hands . . . To expect they should be handed down to posterity, requires that the colours should be striking and the materials durable. This can never be the case in a fluctuating language’.12 Historypainting, which was above all concerned with universal moral values and the elevation of moral feelings among those who owned and viewed it (ideas that would receive in England their consummate expression in Reynolds’s Discourses),13 could thus form an alliance with the theatrical and rhetorical in the interests of sublimity, both in its more general religious sense and within the more particular repertoire of emotional response (terror, horror and repulsion), to which Edmund Burke was, at this time, in the very process of drawing the attention of the educated classes.14 Within Hogarth’s oeuvre, the figure of Sigismunda may be seen as the summation of a long-standing interest in historical figures who use hands and facial expressions to lend force to the communication of their predicaments. Similar open-ended gestures—hand- and arm-movements that are not instrumental but rhetorical—are seen in the altarpiece The Three Marys at the Tomb (1755–6) for St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol, in A Scene from The Tempest (c.1755), and as an exercise in the representation of terror in Garrick as Richard III (1745). Sigismunda is, as I have suggested, Hogarth’s most ambitious attempt to claim a position of equality with seventeenth-century Baroque painters of tragic half-length female figures of selfsacrifice and redemption. But Hogarth’s attention to detail and to surface finish is unlike that of the most admired seventeenth-century painters.

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None the less, the grandeur of scale and composition in Hogarth’s Sigismunda owes a great deal to a tradition popularized through engravings, in which female semiallegorical, mythological or quasi-historical heroines, famed for their emotionally turbulent lives, were represented as single figures. Robert Bonnat, for example, published such series entitled Les Vertus, Les Graces, Les Mois, Femmes mythologiques and Femmes illustres d’Antiquité.15 The last of these collections included Agrippina, Calpurnia, Fulvia and Livia, presented in a format by no means dissimilar to that selected by Hogarth for the equally powerful Sigismunda (Fig. 9.3). And Hogarth, as Friedrich Antal established, possessed a collection of engravings as well as having access to a considerable range of Old Master paintings and engravings through his father-in-law Sir James Thornhill.16 Sigismunda owes much to Guido Reni, engravings after whose works Hogarth owned, and to grand French stage-effects as cultivated by Charles Antoine Coypel in his celebrated portrait of Adrienne Lecouvreur as Cornelia in Corneille’s Death of Pompey, engraved by Drevet in 1730 (Fig. 9.4).17 But the ambience of Hogarth’s Sigismunda—the glistening tears, the highly naturalistic veins carrying blood coursing round the body—and the important part played thematically in the image by the details of furnishing and accoutrements are unlike Guido, Correggio or Domenichino, whose work was so avidly collected by English cognoscenti of the period. The events surrounding the production of the painting illuminate this relationship.18 Hogarth tells us that Lord Charlemont commissioned a picture, leaving to him the subject and price. This was Piquet, or Virtue in Danger.19 Sir Richard (later Lord) Grosvenor heard about the picture and saw it in Hogarth’s studio in 1758. Being infinitely rich, Sir Richard pressed Hogarth, much against his inclination, to do whatever subject he would upon the same terms.20 On 23 November 1758 Hogarth told his friend William Huggins that he was working on both paintings, so we may infer that they were in production simultaneously between 1758 and 1759.21 His chosen subject of Sigismunda was, Hogarth stated, one he had once wished to paint, indicating that his interest in the tragic heroine was longstanding.22 But his choice was also provoked by the astonishing £405. 5s. that Sigismunda Weeping over the Heart of Tancred [sic], attributed to Correggio but now thought to be by Furini, had fetched at a sale in 1758.23 Paulson suggests that Hogarth, having painted a comedy for Lord Charlemont, now chose a tragedy for Sir Richard and, convinced both that the Correggio attribution was false and that connoisseurs were wasting their money purchasing dubious foreign ‘Old Masters’, pegged his price to the sale picture.24 In Hogarth’s words: ‘My price for it was what had been at that time bid for a picture of that Subject painted by a freinch [sic] master falsely said to be corregion [sic]’,25 He pressed the argument further in March 1761, when he issued his engraving of Time Smoking a Picture (a print that lampoons the taste of connoisseurs for dirty Old Master pictures) as the subscription ticket for the projected engraving of Sigismunda. The outcome for Hogarth of his aggressive intervention into the world of virtuoso collecting was disastrous: Sigismunda was rejected by his patron and widely ridiculed in the press. Plans to engrave his work collapsed; the subscription-list for an engraving by James Basire was withdrawn, and the painting remained unsold at Hogarth’s death.26

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Figure 9.3 Robert Bonnart, Livie Impératrice, engraving. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, France.

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Figure 9.4 P. Drevet after Charles-Antoine Coypel, Adrienne Lecouvreur as Cornelia, engraving, 1730. The British Museum, London.

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With hindsight, Hogarth’s mistrust of the Correggio attribution was well founded, and he was, in any case, by no means alone. An anonymous contemporary claimed that it must be a copy, and that there was ‘nothing in the character of Sigismunda but sorrow to recommend it’. The painter, the author continues (raising the issue of social class that is endemic to the story and to the critical response to Hogarth’s interpretation) might have used ‘his cook-maid’ as a model, there being ‘nothing elegant or delicate in her appearance’ but that the ‘virtuosi ran it up to £400’.27 Walpole admired it but, also after the event, attributed it to ‘Furino’: ‘but no matter by whom . . . it is impossible to see the picture or read Dryden’s tale, and not feel that the same soul animated both’.28 Sir Richard Grosvenor gave his reasons for declining to accept Hogarth’s Sigismunda: ‘I really think the performance so striking and inimitable, that the constantly having it before one’s eyes would be too often occasioning melancholy ideas to arise in one’s mind, which curtains being drawn before it would not diminish in the least.’29 The curtains sometimes used to protect pictures in domestic interiors in the seventeenth century had by now yielded to gilt frames; the implication here is, therefore, that the painting would be classed with salacious cabinet pictures or religious subjects that aroused suspicions of popery in Protestant England, genres only shown to intimates.30 Hogarth displayed Sigismunda at the Society of Artists’ second annual exhibition in May 1761 but withdrew it after ten days.31 It may have been that Hogarth, already seriously offended by Sir Richard, was further upset by adverse press reviews. But one contemporary suggests that he had already made changes: ‘it was so altered, upon the Criticism of one Connoisseur or another; and especially when relying no longer on the strength of genious, [Hogarth] had recourse to the feigned tears of fictitious woe of a female friend, that, when it appeared at the exhibition in 1761, I scarce knew it myself.’32 Hogarth suffered considerably from the lampooning of a subject that was dear to his heart and from the manner in which the painting was subsequently dragged into his controversy with Wilkes and Churchill.33 It is with John Wilkes, Charles Churchill and Horace Walpole that the perjorative criticism commences.34 One of the things that most outraged Churchill and Walpole was Hogarth’s apparent disregard for the characteristics with which Dryden had endowed Bocaccio’s heroine and the improper way in which the figure is shown expressing her feelings. In Churchill’s words: Poor Sigismunda! what a fate is thine! Dryden, the great high-priest of all the Nine, Reviv’d thy name, gave what a Muse could give, And in his numbers bade thy mem’ry live; ... Gave thee that virtue which could curb desire, Refine and consecrate love’s headstrong fire; . . . How totally depriv’d of all the pow’rs To shew her feelings, and awaken ours, Doth Sigismunda now devoted stand, The helpless victim of a dauber’s hand! 35

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Walpole first reports on Sigismunda in a letter to George Montagu on 5 May 1761, in which he described the figure of Sigismunda as ‘a maudlin whore tearing off the trinkets that her keeper had given her, to fling at his head. She has her father’s picture in a bracelet on her arm, and her fingers are bloody with the heart, as if she had just bought a sheep’s pluck in St. James’s market.’36 The critical discourse continues in this mode, contemptuously attempting to rob the painting of dignity by associating it with the inferior and scatalogical. In the ‘Anecdotes’, Sigismunda is ‘a maudlin strumpet just turned out of keeping and with eyes red with rage and usquebaugh, tearing off the ornaments her keeper had given her’.37 This description of the painting is incomprehensible unless we look at the X-ray of the image (Fig. 9.5), which shows that Sigismunda has been substantially repainted and that she was originally heavily be-jewelled. ‘Usquebaugh’ means ‘whisky’, whether as a coarse tipple or a nostrum for reviving the faint.38 Walpole complains about the bloody fingers and concludes:

Figure 9.5 X-ray photograph of Hogarth’s Sigismunda. Tate, London.

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None of the sober grief, no dignity of suppressed anguish, no involuntary tear, no settled meditation on the fate she meant to meet, no amorous warmth turned holy by despair; in short, all was there that such a story would have banished from a mind capable of conceiving such complicated woe; woe so sternly felt and yet so tenderly. Hogarth’s performance was more ridiculous than any thing he had ever ridiculed.39

A vulgar joke in the early part of Walpole’s letter reinforces the sexual connotations: ‘the true frantic oestrus resides at present with Mr. Hogarth’, Walpole tells his correspondent.40 Although ‘oestrus’ means a frenzy or a frantic mood associated with creative acts, it is also applied to animal sex and literally means to be on heat. At one level, the crisis over Sigismunda is part of the keenly debated dilemma over how human tragedy is to be represented in visual form. The orthodox view, most famously and influentially articulated by Winckelmann in his essay on the Laocoön, that grandeur and nobility were incompatible with violent expressions of grief, was consistently eroded by the culture of sentiment and, as the century neared its close, by an ever-increasing interest in horrific and violent ‘Gothick’ events.41 But in Hogarth’s painting Sigismunda conforms to all the requirements of grief, keenly felt, but not permitted to disrupt the body’s decorum. The problem is that Walpole is unable to perceive in the image an ‘amorous warmth turned holy by despair’. Hogarth has included what should have been banished. The apparent exaggeration and the irrationality of Walpole’s reaction suggests the return of some profoundly repressed material, not of course unique to himself but something disturbing and occluded within cultural discourse. Hogarth’s inclusions have, as I earlier suggested, brought to the fore those elements in Boccaccio’s tale that, even when managed by Dryden’s elegant translation, were profoundly disquieting for Walpole’s generation. Walpole’s indignation stems from the fact that emotions that were admissible, or indeed welcomed, in other genres and other media were in Hogarth’s representation of Dryden’s interpretation of Bocaccio’s story disrupting the decorum of a history painting. How could this much-loved painter of the English vernacular, old enough to know better, have so offended? Underlying the outrage was also probably the fact that Hogarth’s work manifested a seepage of religious visual vocabulary into the Protestant institutions of contemporary British art, which since the Reformation had carefully policed the boundaries between secular and religious image-making. While foreign Old Master paintings of religious subjects might be collected by grand tourists, it was quite another matter for a contemporary English artist to parade the stylistic charateristics of such paintings while inverting their subject-matter. For, unlike the repentant Magdalene, whose mournful and abject figure as painted by Italian artists had become a feature of English aristocratic picture-galleries, Sigismunda rejoices in her sexuality and defies her father. Furthermore, in staging female sexuality bejewelled and seductively attired as the core (the heart) of the story alongside the disintegration and the bloody decomposition of the masculine body, Hogarth effectively and explicitly brought together two kinds of luxury and two kinds of wastage—the sexual and the economic—within a representation of the public sphere and within the public sphere itself.

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In this chapter I have alluded to two connected senses of expression: the manner in which artists were expected to convey an overall tone to an image, and the communication of an internal state of mind through changes to the form of the face. In conclusion, I want to draw together a number of threads that have run through my paper. Hogarth’s Sigismunda, not only as an image but also as a historical event, highlights some key issues concerning the management and functions of emotional expression in mid-eighteenth-century England. Academic theory required artists to produce legible narratives containing figures whose gestures and facial expressions would be universally recognized in a republic of taste. But it was imperative also that the body, central to discussions of order and government, should be contained, in the Bakhtinian sense, within its borders.42 The story of Sigismunda revolves around bodies that spill out in disorderly fashion, threatening decorum and governance public and private. Thus it needed the kind of pictorial management that could turn a wilful, sexualized heroine into a penitent magdalen. It is no coincidence that Furini’s Magdalene in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna is almost identical to his Sigismunda in Birmingham—only the heart is missing. Tears exemplify a paradox of expression both literally and within representation. And this paradox exists both for the image and for its audience; tears are the immediate evidence that the subject is moved, but in excess they denote weakness or hysteria (Walpole’s ‘oestrus’). Tears are admirable, but abandoned sobbing destroys the face, dismantles the gaze by which the love of Sigismunda and Guiscardo was first fired and communicated, and renders inoperable the screen that is required for further emotions to be registered, which will in turn enable the story to move on. Faces were understood to be legible. As Hogarth put it in The Analysis of Beauty: The face will bear a constant view, yet always entertain and keep our curiosity awake, without the assistance either of a mask or view; because the vast variety of changing circumstances keeps the eye and the mind in constant play, in following the numberless turns of expression it is capable of. How soon does a face that wants expression, grow insipid, though it be ever so Pretty.43

But faces might also be masked, that is, be inauthentic. The episode of Sigismunda that I have analysed in this paper demonstrates that emotional expression is bound up in this period with questions of access to the ‘real’. Face-painting (as in cosmetics) could provide an illusory surface, fraudulently deceiving the gaze and lending allure to what in its natural state either repelled or lacked substance. At the same time, an artist who painted faces could fall short of an adequate expression for authentic emotion—producing feigned tears and so disempowering the figure in representation and denying an audience, in turn, access to that emotion.44 The measure by which expression could be authenticated was, crucially, at issue. In the case of Sigismunda, the gold-standard by which expression could be judged was itself (rightly) suspected of inauthenticity. The Correggio was not by Correggio, and that artist’s model was all too clearly not a princess but a kitchen maid. Expression in high art was supposed to

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endow a subject with universal grace and lift an image above particularities. Hogarth—whose hallmark in his best-known work was an unrelenting adherence to the ‘real’ and the contemporary, and who campaigned tirelessly against the importation of modern art—sought guidance for the representation of emotion not in a professional model but in his wife, seen in an authentic fit of weeping. The resulting image, when publicly displayed in 1759, triggered a crisis that was far wider than the artist in his indignation could have recognized. It challenged the very notion of an authentic canon of expression enshrined in the Italian Baroque, introduced the notion of the ‘real’ into the debate about the purposes of high art, and posed for artists of the next three decades in England the question of how should, and could, tragic female expression be represented.45 Notes This essay is an expanded and diversified presentation of research that was published in Marcia Pointon, Sigismunda in Focus, published by the Tate Gallery, London, in 2000 to accompany the display of that title. I would like to thank Penelope Gouk and Helen Hills for their perceptive editorial observations. 1

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John Dryden, Fables Ancient and Modern: Translated into Verse, from Homer, Ovid, Boccace, & Chaucer; with Original Poems by Mr. Dryden (London, 1700); idem, ‘Sigismonda and Guiscardo from Boccace’, in Douglas Grant, ed., Dryden: Poetry, Prose and Plays (London, 1964). All references are to the latter edition. Letter from Horace Walpole to George Montagu, 5 May 1761, in W. S. Lewis, ed., The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence (New Haven and London, 1941), IX. 364–5. Charles Le Brun, Conférence . . . sur l’Expression génerale et particulière (Paris, 1698); idem, The Conference of Monsieur Le Brun . . . upon Expression General and Particular (1st Eng. trans., London, 1701). Le Brun’s systematic approach, based on observations from life and art, caused a major shift from the theories of Giovanni Battista della Porta (1535–1615), which were based on animal comparisons. There is much written on the history of physignomic theory. For an overview, see Barbara M. Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 84–120. Anne Vincent-Buffault, The History of Tears: Sensibility and Sentimentality in France (Basingstoke, 1991), chap. 3. What she has to say applies also to aspects of English metropolitan culture. Michael Kitson, ‘Hogarth’s “Apology for Painters”’, The Walpole Society, 91 (1966–8), 415; William Hogarth, ‘Autobiographical Notes’ (British Library, Add. MS 27,991), transcribed and printed in idem, The Analysis of Beauty [1753], ed. Joseph Burke (Oxford, 1955), 220. All subsequent references are to this edition. One of the curiosities of Benjamin Smith’s engraving, published by J. and J. Boydell, 4 June 1795, is that this veil appears tartan. Horace Walpole, Aedes Walpolianae, or A Description of the Collection of Pictures at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, 2nd edn. [1752], quoted in Frank Herrmann, The English as Collectors (New York, 1972), 83–92.

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On male midwifery see e.g. Roy Porter, ‘A Touch of Danger: the Man-Midwife as Sexual Predator’, in G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter, eds., Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment (Manchester, 1987), 206–32; on habeas corpus, see Anselm Haverkamp and Cornelia Vismann, ‘Habeas Corpus: The Law’s Desire to Have the Body’, in Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds., Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination (Stanford, CA, 1997), 223–35. Hogarth, ‘Autobiographical Notes’, 203. I am grateful to Helen Hills for drawing my attention to the deviation from Alberti’s authority. See Kitson’s editorial discussion in ‘Hogarth’s “Apology for Painters”’, 79; and Friedrich Antal, Hogarth and his Place in European Art (London, 1962), 242. [Aaron Hill], The Art of Acting (London, 1746), p. iv. Thomas Sheridan, British Education, or The Source of the Disorders of Great Britain (London, 1757), pp. viii–ix. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (London, 1975). The discourses were delivered to students at the Royal Academy during Reynolds’s presidency from 1768 to 1789. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London, 1756). As Paulson points out, Hogarth had carefully distinguished sublimity from beauty in his Analysis and would have been unlikely to have endorsed a treatise that located the sublime in words and the beautiful in pictures. See Ronald Paulson, Hogarth (New Brunswick, NJ, 1993), chap. 3, ‘Art and Politics, 1750–1764’, 240–44. I do not concur with Paulson’s view (244) of Sigismunda as a painting expressing Beauty under attack from a Burkeian Sublime. Robert Bonnat was born in 1652 and died some time after 1729. His engravings were many times reprinted. Antal, Hogarth and his Place, 139. Ibid., 156–7. Antal also suggests (246 n. 68) that Hogarth especially admired Drevet. It is described as a catastrophe in David Bindman, Hogarth (London, 1981), 200. Exhibited at the Society of Artists in 1761 and afterwards engraved as The Lady’s Last Stake, by which title it has since come to be known. It is now in the Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo. Hogarth’s account is contained in his ‘Autobiographical Notes’. The Earl of Charlemont in correspondence with Hogarth’s widow, with Edward Malone and with Henry Addington in the 1780s uses the title ‘The Lady’s Last Stake’, indicates that the price paid was £100, and that Charlemont, who regarded Hogarth as a friend, subsequently thought the price was too low: The Manuscripts and Correspondence of James, First Earl of Charlemont, 2 vols., Historical Manuscripts Commission: Commissioners’ Reports to the Crown, 12 app. 10, 13 app. 8 (London, 1891–4), I. 383–4, 385–7; II. 26–7, 364. See also Paulson, Hogarth, 220–21. Hogarth’s ‘Autobiographical Notes’, quoted in Paulson, Hogarth, 223. Hogarth gives the date of painting Sigismunda variously as 1758 and 1759. A summary of the various accounts of the origins of this painting may be found in E. Einberg and J. Egerton, The Age of Hogarth: British Painters Born 1675–1709, Tate Gallery Collections, 2 (London, 1988), 140–44. Hogarth, ‘Autobiographical Notes’, 220. The sale of Sir Luke Schaub’s distinguished collection took place 26–8 April 1758. A priced copy of the catalogue is in the British Library, 7805.e.5 (6), and the sale was reported in The Gentleman’s Magazine, 28 (1758), 225–7. Lot 59 is Sigismunda weeping

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Marcia Pointon over the Heart of Tancred [sic], ‘a most excellent picture’, bought by Sir Thos. Seabright for £404. 5s. 0d. It is now on long-term loan to Birmingham City Art Gallery. The naming in the title of Tancred, Sigismunda’s father, is an error, and this act of illiteracy may also have provoked Hogarth. It might also be regarded as an interesting Freudian slip, supporting my contention concerning the psychic elemental character of this family drama. For Sir Luke Schaub and his collection, see Iain Pears, The Discovery of Painting: The Growth of Interest in the Arts in England, 1680–1768 (New Haven and London, 1988), many refs. Most of the paintings in the collection fetched between £6 and £33. A Guido Reni, bought by Hogarth’s patron Sir Richard Grosvenor for £328. 13s., and ‘a large and capital picture of the Holy Family by Raphael’, bought by the Duchess of Rutland for £703. 10s., were exceptions. Paulson, Hogarth, 224. Hogarth, ‘Autobiographical Notes’, 220. For its subsequent history, and the eventual engraving, see Einberg and Egerton, The Age of Hogarth. An extra-illustrated copy of the Royal Academy catalogues assembled by James Anderdon and now in the Department of Prints and Drawings of the British Museum, II. 388, includes notes on the subscribers. Hogarth’s biographers state that the artist ‘pasted’ his correspondence with Lord Grosvenor and a proof of James McArdell’s print after the Furini (as Correggio), suggesting that the artist kept by him a constant reminder of the challenge he had taken on and of his failure; see John Ireland and John Nichols, Hogarth’s Works: With Life and Anecdotal Description of his Pictures [1791], 3 ser. (London, 1874), III. 144. The documents are not in with the Hogarth MS material in the British Library, and we must assume that this scrap-book compilation is lost. Monthly Register of Literature, 2, quoted in Ireland and Nichols, Hogarth’s Works, III. 157, who suggest the author may have been Joshua Kirby. The British Library periodicals index does not list a journal under this title, and vol. 2 (?1758) of Monthly Record of Literature, which might be the source of the quotation, is destroyed. For the present we must take the authors at their word. Walpole, Aedes Walpolianae, 11. It seems that Walpole is the first to suggest Furini. As David Ekserdjian has kindly pointed out to me, the attribution is confirmed by Gustav Friedrich Waagen, Galleries and Cabinets of Art in Great Britain (London, 1857), 508; he lists the Furini in the crimson drawing room at the Duke of Newcastle’s seat, Clumber Park. But the attribution of Schaub’s painting to Correggio may not have been an isolated aberration. Ekserdjian also points out that Correggio scholars continue to confuse the two artists, as manifest in Massimo Mussini, Correggio tradotto: Fortuna di Antonio Allegri nella stampa di riproduzioni fra Cinquecento e Ottocento (Reggio and Milan, 1995), 262, no. 597, where a print by Jean Eugène Alberti (1777–1850) after a supposed Correggio corresponds to the Furini composition, and there is an alternative version of the composition in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna that was given to ‘Fourino’ in Storffer’s catalogue of 1720. This is unlikely to have been known to Hogarth—who must have been relying on his own judgement (hence his attribution to a French artist)— but may have been known to Walpole. Antal, Hogarth and his Place, 246 n. 65, points out that the poet Matthew Prior owned a Furini. Ireland and Nichols, Hogarth’s Works, III. 153. The correspondence between Hogarth and Sir Richard (later Lord) Grosvenor is transcribed in Paulson, Hogarth, 230–31. On frames and curtains, see Jacob Simon, The Art of the Picture Frame: Artists, Patrons and the Framing of Portraits in Britain (London, 1996), 13–14. A painting of this kind can be glimpsed in Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode, plate 2, ‘Early in the Morning’, where

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immediately to the left through the arch, a foot on a bed is glimpsed in a painting across which a curtain has been almost, but not fully, drawn. Chairing the Member (1754, from The Election series, Sir John Soane’s Museum, London), a more traditionally Hogarthian subject, was substituted. Society of Artists of Great Britain (London: Spring Gardens), 1761, no. 43: ‘Sigismunda mourning over the heart of Guiscardo, her murther’d husband. vide, Dryden’s Fables.’ The copy of the catalogue in the National Art Library (200.B.401) contains the following marginal annotation: ‘about the 19th or 20th this Picture was taken away & another of the same hand placed in its stead—ye Subject Chairing a Member in an Election’. John Nichols, Biographical Anecdotes of William Hogarth, with a Catalogue of His Works [1781], ed. R. Lightbown (London, 1971), 74, quoted in Jennifer Uglow, Hogarth (London, 1997), 640. Hogarth’s anti-Bute engraving The Times, plate 1 (1762), precipitated a row that resulted in Hogarth being mercilessly attacked in The North Briton; Hogarth retaliated with John Wilkes Esqr. in 1763 and was subsequently vilified as an enemy of liberty and as a sterile and decrepit artist. The sequence of events is summarized in Paulson, Hogarth, 400–412. Much of the dispute focused on the question of humour and its legitimate parameters. Hogarth was put firmly in his place with the first salvo (‘To Mr. Hogarth, On some late Political Productions’, 14 June 1762), which advertised Churchill’s forthcoming verses in which, it promised: ‘In lively Colours shall be shewn, / (Colours more lasting than thy own,) / That mimic Wit has no Pretence / To trespass on the Ground of Sense’ (quoted in Paulson, Hogarth, 401). In The North Briton, 18 (21 May 1762), 88, Wilkes wrote that ‘we all titter the instant he takes up a pen but we tremble when we see the pencil in his hand’. When Hogarth ‘has at any time deviated from his own peculiar walk’, states Wilkes, ‘he has never failed to make himself perfectly ridiculous. . . . the favourite Sigismunda, the labour of so many years, the boasted effort of his art, was not human’; if it resembled anything on earth it was what he had seen of ‘his own wife in an agony of passion.’ No. 18 is placed between 18 Sept. and 2 Oct. 1762 in the sequence of The North Briton bound together and published (London, 1763), I. 154–65; BL, PP. 3585 ab.), which has led to confusion. See e.g. Einberg and Egerton, The Age of Hogarth, 143, who wrongly give the date as 25 Sept. 1762. Ibid., 96–7. 5 May 1761, in Walpole’s Correspondence, IX. 364–5. Nichols, Anecdotes of Walpole, 11. OED, s.v. Nichols, Anecdotes of Walpole, 11–12. 5 May 1761, in Walpole’s Correspondence, IX. 364–5. Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s History of the Art of Antiquity was published in German in 1764; Gotthold Ephraim Lessing published his response, Laokoön, in 1766. Both works rapidly acquired international status. For a detailed discussion, see Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven and London, 1994), esp. 136–7 and nn. I am referring here to the influential work of Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), and in particular to Rabelais and His World [1965], trans. H. Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN, 1984), in which the author explores culturally represented hierarchies of the body in relation to political order and disorder across European culture. Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, 36. Face-painting elicits major debates in the period, e.g. Sheridan, British Education, 365:

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‘Too long have the beauties of the British muse, like those of our ladies, been concealed, or spoiled, by foreign modes and false ornaments. The paint and patches of the French, the fantastical head-dresses and squeezing stays . . . only spoil the bloom of her complexion’. For contemporary debates on emotional authenticity in musical expression, see Christopher Gärtner, Chap. 10 below. 45 According to Richard D. Altick, Painting from Books: Art and Literature in Britain, 1760–1900 (Columbus, 1985), 171–2, in Gustav Waagen’s time (in the mid 19th c.) English collections contained a profusion of paintings of Cleopatra, especially the scene of her death. Many of these were acquired in the later years of the 18th c. Moreover, in the year following Hogarth’s death there were two Sigismunda paintings at the Society of Artists exhibition. To these must be added Reynolds’s great exploration of tragic femininity, Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse (RA 1784, Huntington Art Gallery, San Marino).

CHAPTER 10

Remuer l’Âme or Plaire à l’Oreille? Music, Emotions and the Mind– Body Problem in French Writings of the Later Eighteenth Century Christopher Gärtner

In this chapter, I examine the different ways in which French writers in the second half of the eighteenth century conceptualized the effects of music on the emotions of listeners. During this period, the belief in music’s extraordinary capacity for emotional immediacy gained widespread currency.1 For this reason, I am interested in how ideas about music and emotions were expressed in a variety of discourses and across diverse cultural fields. It is necessary to look at the relationship between those fields because musical thought did not constitute an autonomous realm, distinct from or transcending the culture within which it was embedded: it was not a body of knowledge that was generated chiefly for and by composers and musicians. In fact, the writers referred to in this chapter did not generally practise music for a living. While one of them practised as a doctor, the others were all professional writers: journalists and authors of treatises, novels, plays or poems. My aim is to show that, when treating the emotional effects of music, these writers drew on and shaped notions that were contingent upon developments in the fields of philosophy and medicine in particular between 1750 and 1780. These notions concerned human nature and the soul–body problem more specifically. I proceed in two steps. First, as the starting-point for my discussion, I consider two entries on music contributed to the Encyclopédie (1751–80) of Denis Diderot (1713–1784) and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (1717–1783). The Encyclopédie was one of the most striking and significant contributions to the Enlightenment project of the advancement of knowledge; and the entries in question illustrate well the possible differences in approach in this period to the problem of how music affected emotions. Secondly, as people were still mostly concerned with operatic music when thinking about this problem, I focus on the controversy over the operas composed by Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–1787) in Paris in the late 1770s. This controversy caused a considerable stir, even outside France. It is relevant to this paper because it raised the question of what constituted appropriate and effective resources in the

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musical representation of emotions. It also suggests that writings about musical emotions by men who were not professional composers could have as much power to shape these emotions as musical compositions themselves. In the Encyclopédie, two entries deal directly with music: one by the writer JeanJacques Rousseau (1712–1778), and another by the physician Jean-Joseph Menuret de Chambaud (1739–1815). In his entry ‘Musique’, which he produced around 1750, Rousseau stated that music had lost its cultural significance as a moral medium and especially its power over the affections of the soul (‘affections de l’âme’), two qualities it had possessed in Greek antiquity. In modern times, according to Rousseau, the impact of music was restricted to bodily senses. In a later passage of the article, Rousseau recast this idea as an antithesis between the expressive quality of ancient music, with its ability to touch the soul, and the merely pleasurable effect of modern music on the senses, an effect that was not transmitted directly to the soul.2 From at least the early 1760s, this antithesis came to feature prominently in Rousseau’s musical thought. Rousseau contended that music could only truly affect the listener if it possessed the power to evoke strong emotions and thereby to stir the soul. It is significant that Rousseau placed great emphasis on strong emotions in this context, and that he tended to refer to such emotions as passions. Indeed, the very term ‘affections de l’âme’, which he used in his contribution to the Encyclopédie, appeared frequently in the definitions of the passions put forward by medical and philosophical writers in this period. As affections or movements of the soul, the passions were believed to go beyond mere feelings in terms of their intensity: they constituted strong desires for, or aversions to, specific objects on which the soul fixed its attention.3 Rousseau explicitly established a relationship between music and passions in his famous and widely-read epistolary novel Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), which included reflections on hotly-debated contemporary themes. In one of his letters to his lover Julie, the principal character St Preux wrote about an experience that had changed his attitude towards music. This experience had led him to oppose the notion of music as an art that appealed to the senses alone and mechanically caused certain reactions in the nervous system to one where music affected directly the realm of the soul: How wrong I have been until now about the productions of this charming art! I felt their lack of effect and attributed it to its weakness. I said: Music is but an empty sound that can gratify the ear and acts only indirectly and lighlty on the soul: the impression of chords is purely mechanical and physical; what has it to do with feelings? . . . I did not perceive, in the accents of melody applied to those of language, the powerful and secret bond between the passions and sound; I did not see that the imitation of the diverse pitches with which feelings animate the speaking voice endow the singing voice in turn with the power to agitate the heart; and that the vigorous painting of the movements of the soul on the part of him who makes himself heard is what constitutes the real charm for those who listen to him.4

In this passage, Rousseau vigorously insisted on the fact that the passions—and sensibility, the capacity for feeling, more generally—should be attributed to man’s

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moral rather than his physical being. For Rousseau, the passions could not simply be explained with reference to the sensory apparatus of the body. To be sure, this was not in itself exceptional. As implied above, most writers in this period acknowledged that, even if the passions showed physically, they were phenomena somehow inherent in or related to the soul.5 That the soul could only do this by virtue of the external impressions received from those objects by the senses was precisely what rendered the conceptual engagement with the passions a difficult matter. What was special about Rousseau’s approach in this respect was the fact that he circumvented this problem by excluding any consideration of the possible physical causes and manifestations of the passions. Indeed, his concern with the soul did not encompass an interest either in the physiological processes of the body or in the problems of sense-perception. Nor did he make an attempt to define precisely the relationship between the soul and the body. But what did Rousseau mean in this context by the term ‘soul’, to which he attached so much importance? Rousseau’s notion of the soul differed from those prevalent at the time. Rousseau did not conceive of the soul as that spiritual substance that awaited punishment or reward in the life after death, as defined in Catholic dogma.6 Nor did he understand the soul as either an immaterial substance that interacted somehow with the body in order to maintain its vital functions, as was common in medical discourse,7 or as mind, as it was redefined in eighteenth-century sensationalist philosophy, designating the faculties of the human understanding.8 I would argue that, at least in his musical thought, Rousseau’s conceptualization of the soul differed from those generally held in the realms of Christian dogma, medicine and philosophy. As the extract given above implies, Rousseau meant by the soul an inner world of feelings clearly distinct from the external, material world, and in this respect Rousseau’s ‘soul’ corresponded to the ‘heart’, to which many writers in this period referred as the locus of true affective interiority. If Rousseau restricted the most profound effect of music to the soul, conceived of as affective interiority, we might speculate why he insisted so much on doing so. One reason might lie in the tenor of medical writings in this period. Although Rousseau displayed the reluctance typical of medical thinkers to define precisely the interaction between the body and the soul, the implications of the more or less deliberate vagueness common to their writings were diametrically opposed. Whereas Rousseau was almost exclusively concerned with the soul, medical thinkers avoided metaphysical speculation and, with the increasing significance of naturalistic frameworks for the explanation of human existence, focused on empirically verifiable laws by which the human body could be seen to function. Given this difference in focus, it is perhaps not surprising that, in the second contribution on music to the Encyclopédie, Jean-Joseph Menuret de Chambaud engaged with the effect of music on the body rather than the soul. In what constituted an exercise in Enlightenment rhetoric, Menuret questioned the credibility of tales from antiquity about the striking effects of music: in his view, they distorted the facts about the real characteristics of music and spread ignorance among people.9 For this

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reason, Menuret focused on empirical data concerning the impact of music on substances and bodies, inanimate and animate, in their pure physicality. He posited that sounds caused a movement of air that could be transmitted to nearby objects and living beings.10 Due to the complexity of their physiological constitution, animals and human beings were most susceptible to the various impressions caused by music and most capable of feeling the pleasure produced by it. Menuret contended that music could either effect the human body in the same way as inanimate bodies, or stir passions.11 Two related points need to be highlighted in this context. First, although Menuret referred to passions here, in the subsequent discussion he did not, unlike Rousseau, deal with strong affections of the soul at all. He was much more interested in feelings: in the pleasurable sensations caused by music in the body. Secondly, Menuret did not have a strict soul–body dualism in mind but only conceived of two forms of physical effect. He juxtaposed the purely mechanical impression of music on the ear with an effect that could be explained by the inherent sensibility of the human body: One can distinguish in music two principal ways of producing effects: one that is purely mechanical, dependent on the property of music, like sound, of propagating itself and setting the air and the surrounding objects in motion, especially when they are in unison; the other way of producing an effect, which is strictly reducible to the first, is linked more particularly to the sensibility of the human organism; it is a result of the agreeable impression that the pleasure excited by modified sound, or music, creates in us.12

In what followed, Menuret elaborated on his distinction between mechanical impression and sensibility. Menuret contended that, conceived of as a totality of different liquids and fibres, the body reacted to the movement caused by sounds in the air like any other inanimate body or substance. The susceptibility to such movement was contingent upon the degree of elasticity in the case of fibres and the degree of heterogeneity in the case of liquids. Moreover, if one posited the existence of a nervous fluid that transmitted sensations through the body, one could assume, according to Menuret, that nervous diseases such as hysteria could be healed through music because it agitated this fluid. However, the human body was more than just a composite of fibres and liquids; it constituted an organism distinguished by its capacity for life, and for this reason, the effect of music on it was stronger than that on inanimate bodies. What was significant in Menuret’s conceptualization of sensibility was that he regarded it as a physical property that, at the same time, somehow transcended the realm of the mechanical. This seeming paradox can be understood in the light of the ways in which both the engagement with sense-perception and the empirical inquiry into physiology led thinkers in this period to imagine a possible bridge between the body and the soul. In the realm of philosophy, from the 1740s, French thinkers such as Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715–1780) began to creatively rethink ideas put forward by John Locke (1632–1704), adopting his analogy of impression. This attributed an important role to ideas as intermediary objects of consciousness that

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represented the external world to the soul defined as mind. Just as one body impressed its action on another, external objects were thought to impress themselves on the sense-organs, which in turn impressed ideas of these objects on the mind.13 The realm of medicine saw similar developments. With the rise of experimental physiology in the 1740s, medical writers came to insist on the qualitative differences between animate and inanimate bodies, on the irreducibility of life to inanimate motion.14 Particularly, it was the physiological property of sensibility—the capacity for feeling—that they considered as ‘la base & l’agent conservateur de la vie’, as it was defined in the Encyclopédie.15 In physiology, sensibility—and, by implication, the nervous system where it was believed to manifest itself in particular—constituted a bridge that linked bodily functions and mental phenomena, just as in sensationalist philosophy ideas functioned as intermediary objects of consciousness that mediated between the external world and the soul as mind.16 Thus, the nerves—or alternatively the fluid that ran in them—were construed as the means by which movements caused in the sense-organs were transmitted to the soul.17 The advantage of the concept of sensibility was that it could be taken to both partake of the soul as an immaterial life-principle and to be located in the body. This concept allowed Menuret to perform the manoeuvre of restricting the emotional effect of music to the body and simultaneously elevating this effect above it. In this context, we can identify further ways in which Menuret’s article on music was embedded in contemporary medical thought about sensibility. Menuret’s affiliation with the Faculty of Medicine at Montpellier University, and particularly his association with the prominent physician and thinker Théophile de Bordeu (1722–1776), explain why Menuret championed many of the leading ideas of what was emerging as the so-called ‘vitalist’ school of Montpellier.18 As a vitalist, Bordeu dismissed the notion of the direct control of the soul over the organism, believing that living organisms had unique characteristics specific to the matter composing them.19 In his Recherches anatomiques sur la position des glandes et leur action (1751), Bordeu posited, for example, that glandular activity was due to a force inherent in the material of the glands, a force that he described as sensibility, as a faculty independent of the soul.20 What in Bordeu’s eyes defined sensibility was the capacity of specific parts of the body for self-control and action within the limits imposed by the organism.21 In his article on music, Menuret also conceived of a self-regulating physiological system when he described the balance between the air that was external to the body and the air that had been taken in through the lungs and then absorbed by the bodily liquids: If one considers the human organism for a moment as endowed with exquisite sensibility, what power will music not derive therefrom? . . . will one not see, in the efforts made by the air inside to balance itself with the air outside and to share its impressions, a new reason for the effects of music?22

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The entries on music contributed to the Encyclopédie show how, in dealing with the emotional effect of music, writers after 1750 focused either on the passions as strong affections that can be attributed to the soul as an immaterial inner world, or on feelings produced by virtue of the particular physiological constitution of the human body. The underlying problem here was the relationship between the soul and the body. Precisely because of the conceptual difficulties in defining this relationship, writers tended to focus on either the body or the soul as the site where emotions—be they passions or pleasurable feelings—manifested themselves in particular. This difference in focus also structured the controversies about Gluck’s operas between the 1760s and the 1780s, albeit in ways that were far more complex than the juxtaposition of Rousseau’s and Menuret’s entries in the Encyclopédie might imply. These controversies centred on, among other things, the question of which kinds of musical representation were appropriate and effective in moving listeners. The frame of reference writers used for thinking about this question was sensationalist philosophy rather than medicine, although these were very closely related fields. Consequently, they engaged primarily with the problem of how the sensations produced by music in the ear were presented to the mind. In this context, one of the implicit bones of contention between Gluck’s adherents and his critics in Paris in the 1770s was how a notion of the soul could be accommodated within this theory. The controversy over Gluck’s operas resulted from divergent views on the nature and function of music. On the one hand, Gluck’s adherents regarded him as a musical genius and elevated his operas to the status of masterworks. They claimed a relationship between the composer’s genius for truthful representation, which was due to his insight into the human soul, and the ability of his music to move listeners profoundly. Gluck’s critics, on the other hand, adopted a censorious attitude both towards specific aspects of his compositional practice and towards the enthusiastic reception of his operas.23 Let us consider first two pamphlets by an adherent of Gluck’s, the writer and journalist François Arnaud (1721–1784). In a similar vein to Rousseau, Arnaud conceived of the soul as affective interiority. An essay produced by Arnaud in the 1760s reveals that, in his eyes, the capacity for sensibility was located in the soul. In this essay, which discussed the origins of and the relationship between the arts, Arnaud posited that the source of true knowledge lay in the human soul. However, as the soul devoted its attention to a multiplicity of specific objects, it was not able to identify simultaneously the processes occurring within itself. Arnaud concluded that our only possibility of becoming cognizant of our soul was by feeling the phenomena excited in it, and by analysing the sensations produced by these phenomena. The arts were particularly effective in exciting such phenomena and thus in facilitating soulsearching.24 In his pamphlet Le Souper des enthousiastes, Arnaud showed how Gluck’s Parisian version of Alceste (1776) facilitated such soul-searching. To be sure, in this pamphlet Arnaud deployed the term ‘passions’ in conjunction with other terms such as ‘sentiments’ and ‘emotions’ that did not necessarily evoke notions of intensity or

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depth. However, he repeatedly stressed that Alceste did not simply produce a pleasurable effect; rather, it affected the listeners’ souls profoundly because of Gluck’s ability to represent vigorously human affectivity in all its diversity and complexity. Importantly, Arnaud suggested in this context that Gluck’s music did not have this effect automatically, but actually required specific skills on the part of the audience. Indeed, this was the central thesis of Le Souper des enthousiastes. It described the conversion of a group of critics to Gluck’s cause. This conversion resulted from an intelligently-designed educational project undertaken by one of the fictional characters, an abbé, who displayed a superior understanding of the originality and sublimity of Gluck’s music. According to the abbé, the ears of Gluck’s critics were still too accustomed to traditional French opera; they had not been able to develop the faculty for appropriately valuing the novelty of Gluck’s music. Acquired habits could only be discarded through frequent exertion, and the abbé therefore invited the critics to attend Alceste several times in order to learn how to engage properly with this work. The concept of habit played a significant role in this argumentative manoeuvre. That sensibility required exercise and was not simply inherent was implied by Arnaud in another pamphlet, La Soirée perdue à l’opéra (1776), which presented a dialogue between opera-goers. In a footnote, Arnaud drew attention to the fact that having simply been endowed with sense-organs does not constitute a sufficient prerequisite for judging the arts. Rather, we must exercise and cultivate these organs, for the validity of our ideas depends on the health of our senses, from which the ideas derive after all.25 Arnaud’s claim that the existence of sense-organs does not suffice per se for a proper engagement with the arts is significant; it is indicative of his intention not to restrict the effect of music to sensations alone. However, unlike Rousseau, Arnaud acknowledged the central role of the senses in the perception of music. As we saw above, Rousseau dismissed the mere sensory pleasure of music and omitted to tackle the problem of how the soul could actually receive impressions from the external world. Arnaud, by contrast, seems to have been aware of this problem. To be sure, he did not consider the body in its mere physicality, nor did he offer an explanation of how the sense-organs function physiologically. Still, he can be taken to have integrated elements of eighteenth-century French sensationalist philosophy, which redefined the soul as mind and centred on man’s cognitive capacities in particular, into his conceptualization of the soul as an inner world of feelings. We see this integration at work when we return to the pamphlet Le Souper des enthousiastes, in which Arnaud considered the notion of attention. ‘Attention’ was another important concept in eighteenth-century thought about the mind; it designated a faculty integral to various forms of mental operations, from the attraction to specific objects that impressed themselves on the senses to the imagination and memory.26 The abbé in Arnaud’s pamphlet claimed that Gluck’s critics were untrained in focusing their attention; they were thus overwhelmed by the multiplicity of effects in Gluck’s music that stirred their senses.27 This music did not only, by virtue of its vigour, stimulate the sense of hearing in rather novel ways, but also, and precisely because of this, necessitated cultivating the sense.

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Such cultivation would, in the abbé’s eyes, result in the acquisition of the property of ‘sensibility’; it would allow the listener to feel genuinely, and therefore understand, Gluck’s music. Arnaud did not explicitly use the term ‘soul’ in this context, and although he related sensibility to man’s sensory apparatus, I would argue that, for Arnaud as for Rousseau, sensibility constituted a quality that could be attributed primarily to the soul, not to the physiology of the human body. To put it differently, even if the senses featured prominently in Arnaud’s notion of exercise, he was ultimately interested in the effect of music on the soul. He conceived of the soul in the manner of Rousseau as an inner world of feelings, but, unlike Rousseau, as one that was not radically distinct from the body. Given Arnaud’s notion of cultivation, it is not surprising that, after having attended several performances of Alceste, the first-person narrator of Le Souper des enthousiastes, albeit one of Gluck’s critics at first, finally succeeded in experiencing the emotions that this opera was supposed to arouse in him according to the abbé. The narrator described this experience as a revolution that the other critics too, and indeed the majority of the audience, underwent.28 The implication of this collective acquisition of sensibility is that only one genuine form of experiencing Gluck’s music was conceivable. This view was corroborated by the abbé’s authority: I felt very well that it was impossible for us to be of different opinion for much longer on beauties that are not less natural: your first disgust had derived from the fact that you had not heard the music enough; it was a language that you did not know enough.29

Arnaud’s insistence on the cultivation of the senses as a prerequisite for soulsearching constituted a manoeuvre by which he could attribute censure of Gluck’s music to a lack of aural training. Furthermore, he could claim truth and universality for his own emotional response—a response that could only be elicited by the powerful musical devices deployed by Gluck in the representation of emotions as they really were. It was precisely this claim that Gluck’s critics attacked, in the context of their more general campaign against the enthusiasm for Gluck’s operas displayed by his adherents. Ironically, in order to corroborate their criticism, Gluck’s critics, like Arnaud, drew on concepts and vocabulary borrowed from sensationalist philosophy. But whereas Arnaud came to it from the point of view of the soul, Gluck’s critics approached this philosophy while focusing on the body. In their eyes, Gluck’s allegedly unmediated musical representation of human emotions did not enable the listeners to discover their souls; rather, it threatened the human sensory apparatus. If Gluck’s adherents treasured Gluck’s representation of human affectivity, his critics deemed this very form of representation as unrefined. In the writings of the renowned authors Jean-François Marmontel (1723–1799) and Jean-François de la Harpe (1739–1803), we find the most articulate and sophisticated expression of the thesis that the function of specific musical forms consisted in embellishing emotions, in veiling their vigour, or indeed their explosive force, and thus in rendering them

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pleasurable. In a vein similar to that of Menuret’s entry in the Encyclopédie, Marmontel and La Harpe stressed the sensual pleasure of music rather than its power to unsettle listeners. In his much-cited Essai sur les révolutions de la musique en France (1777), Marmontel put forward an idea of musical beauty that was related to his vision of enlightened progress. He posited the increasing complexity of people’s emotional responses to cultural creations throughout history: just as cultural creations themselves were perfected, the ways in which they affected the audience became more refined, too.30 In Marmontel’s view, the function of music in an enlightened and polite society was not to render human emotions as they really were; rather, it was to please enlightened civilized ears through its very refined form and, by this means, to provoke an emotional reaction: The object of the arts that move the heart is not only emotion, but the pleasure that accompanies it. It is therefore not enough that emotions should be strong, they must also be agreeable . . . With screams, roars, heartrending or terrible sounds, one expresses passions; however, these accents, if they are not embellished in the imitation, will only create the impression of suffering, as in nature . . . The point of the pain by which one is affected in a performance must leave some balm in the wound. This balm is the pleasure of the mind, or that of the senses; and the cause of this pleasure is, in poetry, the sublimity of thoughts, feelings and images, the noble elegance of expression, the charm of beautiful verses. In music, the same sensual delight has to be blended with painful impressions . . .31

Marmontel believed that Gluck’s music lacked refinement, elegance and beauty. It sounded hard, was structurally discontinuous, and did not display what generally constituted beauty in a cultural creation: a harmoniously ordered structure. Marmontel referred to visual and tactile qualities—roundness and softness—in order to describe the characteristics through which a musical form achieved a pleasurable effect on the ear. It was the Italian aria that possessed these qualities; its clearly articulated phrases created continuity and unity and stood for refinement.32 Marmontel contended that, with its lack of unity and finish, Gluck’s music failed to achieve the two principal aims of music in general: to please the senses and hence to touch the soul. Gluck’s attempt at authentic expression was too unmediated: the representation of cries through cries was, in his eyes, not music because it failed to please the civilized senses of an audience in a civilized age. In the wake of the first performance of Gluck’s Armide on 5 September 1777, Jean-François de la Harpe made similar points. In an article contributed to the Journal de politique et de littérature in October 1777, La Harpe stressed the pleasurable aspect of music: the composer had to be able to represent painful accents without displeasing the listener’s ear. He remarked somewhat sarcastically that the convulsive groaning in Gluck’s operas might be truthful, but it was so truthful that he would not attend the opera again.33 La Harpe therefore stressed the importance of conventions or mediations in the representation of emotions and argued that a disruption of the sensory apparatus could never truly touch the soul. Referring to a duet in Armide, he singled out what he perceived as cries:

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There they are, the screams of pain that are one of the great resources of Mr Gluck, and that, well placed and well handled, provide recitatives with an expression that they did not have before him. But where these screams return too often, where one hears them at every turn, as in Iphigénie and Alceste; . . . then one is deafened rather than moved; this rude shaking of the organs harms the emotion of the soul; one realizes that the composer has put his whole expression too often into noise, and all his means into screams. This affectation to mimic nature is very different from an art based on embellished imitation, which must please by likeness.34

Periodically recurring, well-articulated musical phrases constituted a device for counteracting the rapidity and fleetingness of sensations produced by sound: music could only make a strong impression on the listener if the variety of forms did not harm the unity of design. The ear anticipated and enjoyed repetitions, and this explained the importance of melody.35 We already find the insistence on clearly articulated phrases (‘chant périodique’, ‘période musicale’) as the structuring principle of music in the Essai sur l’union de la poésie et de la musique (1765) by François-Jean, Marquis de Chastellux (1734–1788). Chastellux did not contribute any writings to the controversy over Gluck’s operas, but it was publicly known that he was among his critics.36 In his Essai, Chastellux posited that music should not be subordinated to poetry, and that singing was generically different from theatrical declamation. In his view, the problem with French airs lay in the lack of periodically recurring phrases.37 The pleasure of listening to music derived from the ability of the ear to identify the relations within a given musical piece, and structural periodicity precisely facilitated such identification.38 Like Marmontel and La Harpe, Chastellux generally highlighted the sensual effect of music on the ear rather than the power of music over the soul. That this focus on bodily sensations did not, however, preclude an engagement with man’s mental faculties becomes evident when we turn to another writing produced by Chastellux. In an article published in the Mercure de France in September 1771, Chastellux developed a musical theory that complemented the notion of pleasure produced by musical periods that he had put forward in the Essai. According to Chastellux, in the state of social interaction, the organs of the human understanding required stimulation through emotions, which promoted sensations up to the point where they were united and presented to the mind.39 Just as beautiful scenery attracted our attention, melodic accents produced pleasure in our senses, and this was true originally of both poetry and music. On the basis of these ideas, Chastellux distinguished three stages in the history of people’s ability to appreciate the arts, and he conceived of these stages as a progression from the capacity for sensations per se to the refinement of mental faculties. Thus, if people at first indulged in the simple pleasure of the senses, they came to add the pleasure of judgement to the pleasure of sensation, by subjecting the arts to specific rules and by conceiving certain forms in which they should be presented. The more the human mind was perfected, the more avid it became for sensations; and in the third stage, the stage of the understanding, the arts were therefore supposed to affect all of

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people’s mental faculties—the entire apparatus of perception—and to evoke the greatest number of ideas. In the same article, Chastellux subsequently applied these ideas to the realm of music. He contended, like Marmontel and La Harpe in the late 1770s, that the end of music lay not in the simple imitation of natural sounds but in the creation of forms, which did not confront the listeners with reality but, through the mediation of the sensory apparatus, stimulated their minds and allowed them to create an inner imaginative space.40 Musical forms such as the aria, characterized by periodically recurring phrases, constituted devices for producing pleasure in listeners whose complex sensory and mental make-up demanded complexity in the arts. In order to lend weight to his idea about the sensually-rooted pleasurableness of music, Chastellux concluded his article with an anecdote of a merchant who had spent his youth in the Levant. The merchant had once met a eunuch there who was seeking women for the governor of Syria, but who did not succeed in his task: the governor never desired the women the eunuch had chosen for him. On one occasion, the merchant recommended a particular woman to the eunuch, a woman who then immediately aroused the governor’s desire. At their next encounter, the eunuch asked the merchant how he had been able to make the right choice, and the merchant replied that he had desired this woman himself. On leaving the merchant, the eunuch mumbled that he would never possess knowledge in this field. Clearly, Chastellux’s anecdote established a parallel between (male) sexual desire and the appreciation of the arts.41 Unlike the sexually potent merchant, the eunuch, by virtue of his castration, was unable to feel sexual attraction for women and was therefore doomed to disappoint his master. Chastellux implied that, likewise, the appreciation of the arts depended on the stimulation of the senses, which in turn rendered possible more complex mental operations such as judgement.43 It is worth highlighting the point that, although Chastellux clearly related bodily sensations and mental phenomena, he did so with a focus on the sensory apparatus of the human body and without recourse to the notion of the soul as an inner world either radically distinct from the material world, as posited by Rousseau, or at least clearly distinguishable from it, as in Arnaud’s thought. In the light of Chastellux’ ideas, we can understand why Marmontel used the powerful image of a wound that did not heal through Gluck’s music. This wound could, quite literally, be taken to imply an injury to the sensory apparatus.43 By way of conclusion, two points should be highlighted: one bearing directly on the issues raised in this paper, and another related to the broader culture of the period. First, we have to define precisely the ways in which, in the later eighteenth century, French writers interested in the effects of music conceived of the genesis, nature and divers manifestations of emotions. Rousseau and Arnaud, for example, were interested primarily in the capacity of music to bring about intense, profound emotional reactions: passions rather than gentle feelings. Menuret, Marmontel and La Harpe, on the other hand, stressed the production of pleasurable sensations through music. This difference in opinion about what kind of emotions music could and should evoke was inextricably linked with divergent approaches to the soul–body

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problem. Writers focused on either the soul or the body as the site where, in their eyes, emotions manifested themselves in particular. What underlay this divergence was nothing less than a struggle for truth. Most of the men referred to in this chapter were professional writers—or gens de lettres, as they were commonly called in this period. Due to their allegedly superior talents in the exercise of the mind and their ingenious use of the written word, the gens de lettres claimed the right to speak in the name of the educated élite, thus making a pretense to pronouncing authoritative judgements.44 However, conflict arose among them because of differences in opinion about how truth could actually be established.45 In this context, it is significant that both Rousseau and Arnaud adopted a critical attitude towards the group of writers known as the philosophes, to which Marmontel and La Harpe belonged.45 Secondly, underlying the issues discussed in this paper was a concern with truthfulness. A powerful subtext of the public controversies over music was the question of what a person’s true nature was like, and hence of how this true nature could be revealed and/or affected. To be sure, the possible discrepancy between inner being and self-presentation—between who people were and who they pretended to be, between what they were really like and what they appeared to be like—had already featured in a wide variety of discourses in the seventeenth century.47 In the second half of the eighteenth century—a period both fascinated with and critical of disguise—the perception of, and anxieties about, the impossibility of distinguishing between appearance and reality as a result of dissimulation grew particularly acute.47 This gave rise to a prevalent, albeit contested, wish for transparency, and to calls for the abolition of masks in favour of an unmediated, truthful correspondence between interiority and exteriority.49 In an age in which the capacity for feeling was discovered as a quality integral to man’s physical and moral being, emotions directly raised the problem of the relationship between interiority and exteriority. They were regarded both as signalled by the body and as pertaining to one’s innermost being.50 In this respect, it is notable that, although the actors in the controversy over Gluck’s operas attributed to music a privileged role in the refinement or development of people’s inner faculties, they disagreed over the degree to which musical forms could or should affect the listeners in the true core of their being.51 Notes 1

2

See for example Georges Snyders, Le Goût musical en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1968); Béatrice Didier, La Musique des Lumières (Paris, 1985); Enrico Fubini, Gli enciclopedisti e la musica, 2nd edn. (Torino, 1991); Christine Zimmermann, Unmittelbarkeit: Theorien über den Ursprung der Musik und der Sprache in der Ästhetik des 18. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt, 1995); Downing A. Thomas, Music and the Origins of Language: Theories from the French Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1995). Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Musique’, in Denis Diderot et al., eds., Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 35 vols. (Paris, 1751–72), X. 899–903.

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See e.g. [Jean-Jacques] Hoin, Discours sur l’utilité des passions, par rapport à la santé; avec Un Éloge de M. Petit, et L’Art de conserver sa santé, réduit à un seul principe (Dijon, 1752), 53–5; [Jean-Baptiste] Lallemant, Essai sur le mécanisme des passions en général (Paris, 1751), pp. i–iii, 1; Charles Bonnet, Essai analytique sur les facultés de l’âme (Copenhagen, 1760), 243; idem, ‘Passions’, Encyclopédie, XII. 142. ‘Dans quelle étrange erreur j’ai vécu jusqu’ici sur les productions de cet art charmant! Je sentais leur peu d’effet, et l’attribuais à sa faiblesse. Je disais: la musique n’est qu’un vain son qui peut flatter l’oreille et n’agit qu’indirectement et légèrement sur l’âme: l’impression des accords est purement mécanique et physique; qu’a-t-elle à faire au sentiment . . . ? Je n’apercevais pas, dans les accents de la mélodie appliqués à ceux de la langue, le lien puissant et secret des passions avec le son; je ne voyais pas que l’imitation des tons divers dont les sentimens animent la voix parlante donne à son tour à la voix chantante le pouvoir d’agiter les coeurs et que l’énergique tableau des mouvements de l’âme de celui qui se fait entendre est ce qui fait le vrai charme de ceux qui l’écoutent.’ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Œuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, 5 vols. (Paris, 1969), II. 131–2. All translations in this chapter are my own. See the works cited in n. 3 above. On the definition of the soul by Christian apologists in France in this period, see John McManners, Death and the Enlightenment: Changing Attitudes to Death among Christians and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford, 1985), 121–4. The conceptualization of the soul as a life-principle is discussed e.g. in Fernando Vidal, ‘Psychology in the Eighteenth Century: A View from Encyclopedias’, History of the Human Sciences, 6 (1993), 91–2. Roger Smith, The Fontana History of the Human Sciences (London, 1997), 158–9 Jean-Jacques Menuret de Chambaud, ‘Musique, effets de la’, Encyclopédie, X. 903. See also Penelope Gouk’s discussion of Dr Gregory’s views in Chap. 11 below. Menuret, ‘Musique’, 904. Ibid., 905. ‘On peut dans les effets de la Musique distinguer deux façons principales d’agir; une purement mécanique, dépendante de la propriété qu’a la Musique, comme le son de se propager, de mettre en mouvement l’air & les corps environnans, sur-tout lorsqu’ils sont à l’unisson; l’autre maniere d’agir rigoureusement reductible à la première, est plus particulièrement liée à la sensibilité de la machine humaine, elle est une suite de l’impression agréable que fait en nous le plaisir qu’excite le son modifié, ou la Musique.’ Ibid., 906. See, for example, Condillac’s Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines of 1746, repr. in Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Œuvres philosophiques, 3 vols. (Paris, 1947), I. 10–11; idem, ‘Sensation’, Encyclopédie, XV. 34. For a stimulating discussion of the analogy of impressment, see Karl Figlio, ‘Theories of Perception and the Physiology of Mind in the late Eighteenth Century’, History of Science, 13 (1975), 196. On Condillac, see Isabel Knight, The Geometric Spirit: The Abbé de Condillac and the French Enlightenment (New Haven, 1968), esp. chaps. 2, 4. Thomas Hankins, Science and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1985), 119; Roy Porter, ‘The Eighteenth Century’, in Lawrence Conrad et al., The Western Medical Tradition: 800 BC to AD 1800 (Cambridge, 1995), 391–3. ‘Sensibilité’, Encyclopédie, XV. 38. Figlio, ‘Theories of Perception’, 200.

186 17

18

19

20 21

22

23

24

Christopher Gärtner See e.g. Hoin, Discours, 53–5; Claude-Nicolas Le Cat, Œuvres physiologiques, 3 vols. (Paris, 1767–8), III. 203–4; Pierre Fabre, Recherches sur la nature de l’homme considérée dans l’état de santé et dans l’état de maladie (Paris, 1776), 16–17. On ideas about nerves and the nervous system in the long 18th c., see e.g. Kurt Danziger, ‘Origins of the Schema of Stimulated Motion: Towards a Pre-History of Modern Psychology’, History of Science, 21 (1983), 186–98; G. S. Rousseau, ‘Nerves, Spirits and Fibres: Toward the Origins of Sensibility’, in idem, Enlightenment Crossings: Pre- and Post-Modern Discourses Anthropological (Manchester, 1991), 122–42; G. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in EighteenthCentury Britain (Chicago, 1992), chap. 1; Anne C. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore and London, 1998), chap. 1. See also Penelope Gouk, Chap. 11 below. On Menuret’s association with Bordeu and Lacaze, see Frank Kafker, The Encyclopedists as Individuals: A Biographical Dictionary of the Authors of the ‘Encyclopédie’ (Oxford, 1988), 254–5. On the Montpellier Faculty of Medicine and ‘vitalism’ more generally, see Elizabeth Williams, The Physical and the Moral: Anthropology, Physiology, and Philosophical Medicine in France, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 1994), chap. 1, esp. 25–31; Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford, 1997), 427–31; Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology, chap. 2, esp. 43–52. Elizabeth Haigh, ‘Vitalism, the Soul, and Sensibility: The Physiology of Théophile Bordeu’, Journal of the History of Medicine, 31 (1976), 37. See also William Bynum, ‘Vitalism’, in idem et al., eds., Macmillan Dictionary of the History of Science (London and Basingstoke, 1983), 440. This treatise is discussed in Haigh, ‘Vitalism’, 30–41; François Duchesneau, La Physiologie des Lumières: Empirisme, modèles et theories (The Hague, 1982), 364–70; Williams, The Physical and the Moral, 33–6; Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology, 65–73. Théophile de Bordeu, Recherches anatomiques sur la position des glandes et sur leur action (Paris, 1751), 513 f. See also Sergio Moravia, ‘From Homme Machine to Homme Sensible: Changing Eighteenth-Century Models of Man’s Image’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 39 (1978), 54–5; Duchesneau, La Physiologie des Lumières, 71. ‘Si l’on regarde à présent la machine humaine comme douée d’une sensibilité exquise, quelle activité la Musique n’empruntera-t-elle pas de-là? . . . ne verra-t-on pas dans les efforts que fait l’air intérieur, pour se mettre en équilibre avec l’air extérieur, & pour partager ses impressions, une nouvelle raison des effets de la Musique?’ Menuret, ‘Musique’, 907. On this controversy, see e.g. Julian Rushton, ‘The Theory and Practice of Piccinnisme’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 98 (1971–2), 31–46; Robert Isherwood, ‘The Third War of the Musical Enlightenment’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 4 (1975), 223–45; Maryvonne de Saint-Pulgent, ‘La Querelle des Gluckistes et des Piccinnistes: Revanche ou avatar de la Querelle des Bouffons?’, L’Avant-scène opéra, 61 (1984), 66–70; Jacques-Gabriel Prod’homme, Christoph-Willibald Gluck, ed. JoëlMarie Fauquet (Paris, 1985), chap. 5; Elisabeth Schmierer, Die ‘Tragédies lyriques’ Niccolò Piccinnis: Zur Synthese französischer und italienischer Oper im späten 18. Jahrhundert (Laaber, 1999), 7–44; Christopher Gärtner, Of Masks and Music: Opera and Truthfulness in Late-Eighteenth-Century Paris and Vienna (PhD thesis, Univ. of East Anglia, 2002), chaps. 1, 4. François Arnaud, ‘Réflexion sur les sources & les rapports des beaux-arts & des belleslettres’, in idem and Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Suard, Variétés littéraires, ou Recueil de

Remuer l’Âme or Plaire à l’Oreille?

25 26 27 28 29

30 31

32 33 34

35 36 37 38 39

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pieces tant originales que traduites, concernant la Philosophie, la Littérature & les Arts, 4 vols. (Paris, 1768), I. 141–3. François Arnaud, La Soirée perdue à l’opéra (Paris, 1776), 6 f. On ‘attention’, see e.g. Condillac, Œuvres philosophiques, I. 10–11; Charles Bonnet, Essai de psychologie, ou Considérations sur les operations de l’âme, sur l’habitude et sur l’education (London, 1755), chap. 7; Bonnet, Essai analytique, chap. 11, esp. p. 105. François Arnaud, Le Souper des enthousiastes [1776], repr. in François Lesure, ed., Querelle des Gluckistes et des Piccinnistes: Textes des pamphlets (Geneva, 1984), I. 68. See also James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley, 1995), 60–69. Arnaud, Le Souper des enthousiastes, 69. ‘Je sentois bien qu’il étoit impossible que nous fussions long-temps d’opinion différente sur des beautés qui ne sont pas moins naturelles: votre première répugnance étoit venue de ce que vous n’aviez pas assez entendu cette Musique; c’étoit une Langue que vous ne connoissiez pas assez . . .’ Ibid. Jean-François Marmontel, Essai sur les révolutions de la musique en France (n.p., 1777), 1. See also Charles Brotman’s discussion of 19th-c. theories of musical progress in Chap. 12 below. ‘L’objet des Arts qui émeuvent l’ame, n’est pas seulement l’émotion, mais le plaisir qui l’accompagne. Ce n’est donc pas assez que l’émotion soit forte, il faut encore qu’elle soit agréable. . . . Avec des cris, des hurlemens, des sons déchirans ou terribles, on exprime des passions; mais ces accens, s’ils ne sont embellis dans l’imitation, n’y feront, comme dans la nature, que l’impression de la souffrance. . . . Il faut que la pointe de la douleur, dont on est atteint au Spectacle, laisse du baume dans la plaie. Ce baume est le plaisir de l’esprit, ou celui des sens; & la cause de ce plaisir est, en poésie, la sublimité des pensées, des sentimens & des images, la noble élégance de l’expression, le charme des beaux vers. En Musique la même volupté doit se mêler aux impressions douloureuses . . .’ Marmontel, Essai, 13–5. Ibid., 16. Jean-François de la Harpe, ‘Opéra’, Journal de politique et de littérature (5 Oct. 1777), 164–5. ‘Il y a là de ces cris de douleur qui sont un des grands moyens de M. Gluck, & qui, bien placés & bien ménagés, donnent au récitatif une expression qu’il n’avoit pas avant lui. Mais quand ces cris reviennent trop souvent, quand on les entend à tout moment, comme dans Iphigénie & dans Alceste; . . . alors on est assourdi plutôt qu’ému; ce rude ébranlement des organes nuit à l’émotion de l’ame; on s’apperçoit que l’Auteur a mis trop souvent toute son expression dans le bruit, & tous ses moyens dans les cris. Cette affectation de contrefaire la nature, est fort différente d’un art fondé sur une imitation embellie, qui doit plaire en ressemblant.’ Ibid. Ibid., 168–9. Jean-François de la Harpe, Correspondance littéraire, adressée à S.A.I. Mgr le grand duc, aujourd’hui Empereur de Russie, et à M. le Comte André Schowalow . . . depuis 1774 jusqu’à 1789, 5 vols. (Paris, 1801), II. 153. François-Jean, Marquis de Chastellux, Essai sur l’union de la poésie et de la musique (Paris, 1765), 17–20. Ibid., 46–7. François-Jean, Marquis de Chastellux, ‘Observations sur un ouvrage nouveau intitulé Traité du Melo-Drame ou Réflexions sur la musique dramatique’, Mercure de France (Sept. 1771), 148–9.

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40 Ibid., 153–4. 41 On emotions and gender in the 18th c., see the contributions by Christine Battersby and Marcia Pointon, Chaps. 8 and 9 above. 42 Chastellux, ‘Observations’, 158. 43 See the passage from Marmontel’s Essai quoted above at n. 31. 44 On the socio-cultural role of writers in this period, see e.g. Eric Walter, ‘Les auteurs et le champ littéraire’, in Henri-Jean Martin and Roger Chartier, eds., Histoire de l’édition française, 4 vols. (Paris, 1982), II. 390–91; Daniel Roche, Les Républicains des lettres: Gens de culture et Lumière au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1988), 219–23; Roger Chartier, Les Origines culturelles de la Révolution française (Paris, 1990), chaps. 2, 3. 45 See particularly Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1994), chap. 5. 46 For a definition of the term philosophe, see Pierre Lepape, Voltaire le conquérant: Naissance des intellectuels au siècle des Lumières (Paris, 1994), 303. On the relevance of Rousseau’s and Arnaud’s critical attitude towards the philosophes to the controversies over Gluck’s music in the 1770s, see Gärtner, Of Masks and Music, chap. 1. 47 See particularly Ursula Geitner, Die Sprache der Verstellung: Studien zum rhetorischen und anthropologischen Wissen im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Tübingen, 1992), chaps. 2, 3. 48 Daniel Roche, La Culture des apparences: Une histoire du vêtement (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècle) (Paris, 1991), part IV. 49 Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: la transparence et l’obstacle (Paris, 1971), has explored the quest for transparency in relation to the figure and writings of Rousseau. 50 See e.g. Nikolaus Wegmann, Diskurse der Empfindsamkeit: Zur Geschichte eines Gefühls in der Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1988); Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility; Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology. 51 On ideas about Gluck’s operas, emotions and truthfulness, see Gärtner, Of Masks and Music.

PART IV EMOTIONS AND DISCIPLINE

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CHAPTER 11

Music’s Pathological and Therapeutic Effects on the Body Politic: Doctor John Gregory’s Views Penelope Gouk

The influence of Music over the mind is perhaps greater than that of any of the fine arts. It is capable of raising every passion and emotion of the soul. Yet the real effects produced by it are inconsiderable. This is in a great measure owing to its being left in the hands of practical musicians, and not under the direction of taste and philosophy. For, in order to give music any extensive influence over the mind, the composer and performer must understand well the human heart, the various associations of the passions, and the natural transitions from one to another, so as they may be able to command them, in consequence of their skill in musical expression. 1

These lofty views were first aired by the Scottish physician John Gregory (1724–1773) at a meeting of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society on 9 August 1763. They soon reached a wider audience through the publication of his Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man with those of the Animal World in 1765, the same year Gregory took up a professorship at Edinburgh’s Faculty of Medicine.2 The expression and control of the passions were central to Gregory’s discourse on music, which was implicitly organized around three issues that will be interrogated in this chapter: first, the proper relationship between music and philosophy; secondly, music’s role in the civilizing process, including its harmful as well as beneficial effects; and thirdly, music’s association with national identity, especially in relation to Scotland.3 My paper shows these concerns were fundamental to Gregory’s own social and professional identity, which over his lifetime embraced various roles as a physician and Professor of Medicine at Edinburgh, as a Professor of Philosophy at King’s College, Aberdeen, as a founder member of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, and, most notably in the context of this paper, as a passionate amateur violinist and founder-member of the Aberdeen Music Society. As colleague of the celebrated William Cullen (1710–1790), Gregory and his contribution to Scottish medicine have been thoroughly investigated.4 However,

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the fact that Gregory wrote about music and was also an accomplished musical amateur has received almost no attention from medical historians. Indeed, Scottish musical life is never mentioned in analyses of its medical culture or in studies of Scottish science more generally.5 As a consequence, Christopher Lawrence’s article on ‘The Nervous System and Society in the Scottish Enlightenment’ overlooks the role that music played in the emergence of a distinctively Scottish physiology taught in Edinburgh, a theory of the human body that shared formal similarities with prevailing models of the social body. According to Lawrence, these parallel theories of human and social organization were generated in, and at the same time gave validation to, the common social context of mid-eighteenth-century Edinburgh.6 As Lawrence explains, these theories of personal and social ‘sensibility’ mediated through the nerves reflected the concerns of the upper classes, who saw themselves as custodians of civilization struggling to exert control over disruptive elements in their society, a process that included a campaign for the ‘improvement’ of Scottish life.7 Indeed, Scotland’s ‘medical renaissance’ from the 1760s onwards had its origins in the 1720s, when a small group of Whigs and religious moderates sought to revitalize Edinburgh’s economy by remodelling the university and founding a Medical School (1726) to attract both Scottish and foreign students.8 Over the next forty years a programme of intellectual and moral improvement developed, which included the creation of clubs, debating societies and other institutions for the cultivation of manners. Physicians were key figures among the city’s cultural leaders, and it is not surprising that their physiological theories also deployed the polite language of integration and refinement. Through focusing on Gregory, who came from one of Scotland’s most distinguished academic gentry families, this chapter shows that Lawrence’s analysis of the medical and philosophical theories of Edinburgh’s ruling elite overlooks one of the most important forms of cultural exchange that gave meaning to this discourse.9 To be a gentleman in eighteenth-century European society, it was necessary to be able not only to talk politely but also to comport oneself gracefully and to be cultivated in music: as Sir John Clerk of Penicuick (1676–1755) observed in the late 1690s, ‘there was no keeping of good or vertuous company in either Holland, France, or Italy, and far less in Germany, without as much of the practice of musick as to enable one to bear a part in a Concert’.10 For reasons that will shortly be made clear, Gregory and his circle were perhaps unusually sensitive to the effects that making music can have on society, as well as on individuals. Indeed, I would argue that it was precisely because Gregory knew about these effects through his own experience that he was moved to speak about them philosophically. Independently from historians of science and medicine (and apparently unknown to them), musicologists have developed a parallel narrative explaining the remarkable ‘musical renaissance’ of the late eighteenth century.11 Between 1760 and 1780 Edinburgh achieved European stature as a centre of musical excellence, during which period there were at least thirty composers (native and foreign) active in lowland Scotland, chiefly centred on Edinburgh and Aberdeen.12 This phenomenon

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required sustained patronage by a large body of musically-educated amateurs willing to support first-class professional musicians as well as to engage in music-making themselves. It also indicated a move away from the austere Scottish Calvinism of the seventeenth century, which for the most part had discouraged people from becoming musically proficient.13 According to David Johnson, the greatest impetus for this transformation of Scottish musical life came from the knowledgeable gentlemen amateurs who constituted the Music Societies of Edinburgh and Aberdeen, founded in 1728 and 1748 respectively. It was no coincidence that Edinburgh’s Medical School and Musical Society came into being within two years of each other.14 The fashion for consort music first seems to have been introduced to Scotland in the early 1700s by a handful of students who had studied on the Continent, particularly in the Low Countries. 15 These musicallyliterate graduates notably included Alexander Monro I (1697–1767), a founder of the Edinburgh Medical School, and the physician David Foulis (1710–1773), who was also a composer and later a prominent member of the Music Society. Both of these men had studied medicine at Leiden, and their musicianship may well have been encouraged by Leiden’s famous Professor of Medicine Hermaan Boerhaave (1668–1738), an accomplished lutenist who made the cultivation of music a central part of his private life.16 According to Boerhaave’s medical system taught at Leiden, it was essential for scholars to counterpoise intellectual pursuits with sensory experiences, as a means of achieving a balanced state of mind. In fact, his entire medical curriculum was framed around the belief that learning is best achieved through experience rather than reason, since dogmatic principles cannot control the passions or guide morals.17 This pedagogical theory was rooted in Boerhaave’s eirenic religious position, which sought to reconcile conflicting doctrines and to promote peace and harmony. It has been argued by Andrew Cunningham that the adoption of Boerhaave’s system at Edinburgh arose from a similar desire to transcend sectarian differences among the city’s medical community and to promote civilized values within Scottish society at large.18 Although not part of the formal curriculum, the cultivation of music—at least within certain boundaries, such as those of the Music Society—was an integral part of this moral and medical agenda. The place of music in John Gregory’s own life indicates the extent to which such values had beome institutionalized in Scotland by the mid eighteenth century.19 Although no details of his musical education are extant, he had reached a competent standard of performance in violin, cello and flute by adulthood. We know this because three years into his medical career (at the age of 24), Gregory and six friends who were in the habit of ‘consorting’ regularly with each other in a local tavern drew up rules to put their society onto a more formal footing. 20 Typically for gatherings of this kind, the original group comprised a mix of professional musicians (including Andrew Tait, the organist from the local Episcopalian church, and Francis Peacock, the town’s 17-year-old dancing master) and gentlemen amateurs (including the Rev. Dr Pollock, Professor of Divinity at Marischal College, and Gregory, who at the time also held a Chair of Philosophy at King’s College).21

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The Aberdeen Music Society was initially limited to thirty people (sixty, including ladies), who were entitled ‘to meet for their mutual Entertainment in Musick once a Week’ for a private two-hour concert. By 1751, however, the Society’s concerts were becoming so popular that restrictions on numbers were lifted, and the weekly performance was effectively becoming a public entertainment. This development was largely due to the efforts of Gregory, who was repeatedly elected as the Society’s Preses (President) during its early years.22 By the time he gave his music lecture in 1763, the Society had grown from around twenty members to well over a hundred— including most of the faculty of Marischal and King’s Colleges—and the cream of Aberdonian society was clamouring for tickets to attend its weekly concerts, now given for charity, in the Town Hall.23 What had begun as a private pleasure had become a public and almost embarrassingly commercial enterprise. While its founders originally played for their own enjoyment (guests, including ladies, being admitted on exceptional occasions), now most members were not musicians, and took a more passive role by listening to performances that mostly involved professionals.24 A similar phenomenon was being experienced by the Edinburgh Musical Society, which had just opened a new purpose-built concert-house in 1762. Over the next twenty years the winter season at St Cecilia’s Hall attracted composers and performers not only from London but also Rome, St Petersburg and other far-flung European cities.25 The centrality of music to the Scottish social elite during this period is vividly captured in the following extract from Edward Topham’s Letters from Edinburgh: The degree of attachment which is shewn to Music in general in this country exceeds belief. It is not only the principal entertainment, but the constant topic of every conversation, and it is necessary not only to be a lover of it, but to be possessed of a knowledge of the science, to make yourself agreeable to society. . . . Music alone engrosses every idea. In religion a Scotchman is grave and abstracted; in politics serious and deliberate; it is in the power of harmony alone to make him an enthusiast.26

Topham’s observation reminds us that this ‘enthusiasm’ —a term contemporaries mostly associated with religious fanaticism (Fig. 11.1)—did not stop at playing and listening to music. To be agreeable in polite society it was necessary to talk about music and to be possessed of a knowledge of the ‘science’ of music, a term that covered every aspect of its theory, not just the principles of composition and performance.27 It appears that members of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society were well qualified to reflect on the proper relationship between philosophy and music, since all but two of its sixteen members were local university academics (variously holding chairs in divinity, mathematics, philosophy, Hebrew and classics), and nine were also members of the Music Society, of whom three, Gregory, Alexander Gerard (1728–1795) and James Beattie (1735–1803), are definitely known to have been performers.28 In other words, some members may have been meeting more frequently to enjoy music (on a weekly basis) than to discuss philosophy (fortnightly), and it

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Figure 11.1 T. Cook after William Hogarth, Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism, engraving, 1798. The Wellcome Library, London.

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was a practice that had already been established for a decade before the ‘Wise Club’ itself was founded in 1758.29 As is well known to historians of philosophy, the regular debates held by the Wise Club over the next fifteen years made a significant contribution to the development of the ‘Common Sense’ school of Scottish philosophy, whose principles were first laid down by Gregory’s cousin Thomas Reid (1710–1796) in his Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764).30 An appreciation of the values embodied in this approach to knowledge provides an essential context for Gregory’s 1763 music lecture, and the ideas about emotions contained within it.31 According to Stephan Conrad, the Wise Club’s unusually integrated philosophical and social agenda was generated within a distinctively Aberdonian intellectual tradition, whose origins lay in the Reformation.32 In brief, Aberdeen and the NorthEast region proved resistant to Presbyterianism over the seventeenth century, and succeeded in maintaining a tradition of conservative Episcopalianism that was effectively recognized by the Scottish Kirk in the eighteenth century. Thus, although Aberdeen could be characterized as a Presbyterian town by 1750, this was mainly due to the accommodation of Episcopalianism and a shared belief in the need for a strong clergy responsible for overseeing civic and moral discipline. (This kind of Calvinism has been identified as ‘liberal’ or ‘humanistic’, where theology is dispensed with but the religious grounds of moral conduct in society are emphasized.)34 This unusual compromise fostered a distinctive set of mental habits among Aberdeen intellectuals, of whom a significant number were academic clergymen. These habits included a traditionalism and respect for learning, coupled with moderation and a desire for self-determination in matters of religious conscience. At the same time, they also included a commitment to social reform and support for the experimental principles that were the basis of the new, ‘forwardlooking’ Newtonian science. Conrad argues that this mix of reflective individualism and social authoritarianism is epitomized in the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, whose agenda was to promote knowledge as a means of self-improvement and right moral action; a programme to reconcile the truths of modern experimental science with traditional Christian values. To this end, the club argued for the hegemony of philosophers in all areas of social life and argued that society, not the individual, was the object of reform—a process to be achieved through proper education. Given these values, it is not surprising to find that the balance between self and society, between the good of the soul and the good of society, is central to Gregory’s lecture, in which music’s potential to effect moral and social integration is closely examined. Gregory’s lecture begins with the complaint that philosophers have cultivated understanding at the expense of other powers of the mind, notably the imagination. As a result, they have ignored the fine arts, which ‘have been left in the hands of ignorant artists unassisted by philosophy’.34 He argues that the consequences of such neglect are particularly clear in the case of music, an art that potentially has profound influence over the mind. Although acknowledging music’s capacity for virtuosity and amusement, he nevertheless regrets that modern music is not more deeply affecting.35

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Today’s professional musicians, he claims, are led by purely commercial demands, and consequently their music is merely pleasurable. To move people profoundly, to raise ‘every passion and emotion of the soul’, both composer and performer have to understand the heart and the passions, which can only be accomplished through ‘the enlarged and liberal prospects of genius and science’.36 Such effects can never be achieved by those who trade in music for a living, since they are ignorant of its principles, and their sole ‘interest’ is to ensure their audiences are gratified. Ideally, therefore, it is men of genius—that is, philosophers—who should be responsible for directing musical style, and indeed all the elegant arts.37 Gregory urges that philosophers and men of taste should not be put off music just because they dislike modern fashions—since musical taste has its foundations in a refined nature, their displeasure is actually an indication of true culture.38 The overall thrust of Gregory’s lecture is that music can play a valuable role in social and personal development. Cultures that express themselves through music, poetry and dance have members who are more sensitive to emotional states and feelings than people in primitive societies, whose nervous systems are comparatively undeveloped. Gregory’s lecture is chiefly devoted to the historical evidence for music’s capacity to refine sensibility (known as the cultivation of a ‘musical ear’), drawing on ancient Greek and Scottish examples.39 The physiological principles underpinning sensibility are dealt with more extensively in the lectures on practical medicine that he delivered at Edinburgh between 1766 and 1773, and so I shall discuss them in more detail after dealing with his historical approach. Gregory legitimates his vision of a more effective, affective form of music-making by appealing to the traditions of ancient Greece, a period when music was taken seriously by its ruling classes. He notes, for example, that the laws and maxims of the early Greek states were written in verse, and ‘melody and poetry was the established vehicle of all the leading principles of religion, morals and polity’.40 The key ancient authorities Gregory refers to are Aristotle’s Politics and the Plutarchian De musica, both of which discuss the regulation of music in the life of a well-adjusted society.41 The principal modern source he cites is the Rev. Dr John Brown’s Dissertation on the Rise, Union, and Power . . . of Poetry and Music, published in London in 1763, the year Gregory delivered his lecture. Brown’s central argument, with which Gregory concurred, was that the development and eventual union of melody, dance and poetry in a society are indicators of its progress towards civilization and are also constitutive of this process.42 The legislators of the early Greek states were often bards—for example Orpheus and Amphion—whose power to influence human action through song and lyre was real, not metaphorical. Gregory stresses that bards were important figures in the early periods of all civilized nations, notably among the Celts in Great Britain. He invokes Fingal and Ossian as examples of bards who combined the roles of general, poet and musician. Through the combination of words and instrumental accompaniment, they moved the hearts and minds of their people towards right action. Although he does not say so, Gregory doubtless assumed his audience would call to mind Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland (1760)

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and Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem (1761), both recently edited by James Macpherson, and perhaps also Hugh Blair’s Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal (1763). At this time, these poems were claimed as authentic Gaelic poetry, and Ossian was Scotland’s literary equivalent to Homer.43 The Gaelic bard’s songs were powerful because they expressed simple emotions that communicated sympathetically with the hearts of his people. Ossian clearly epitomizes Gregory’s ideal of a man (statesman, philosopher, poet) whose nervous system is at the optimum stage of development, and whose songs embody the authentic voice of the society he represents. This affinity between self, song and society leads us to the third theme of Gregory’s discourse, the assertion that ‘every country has a melody peculiar to itself, expressive of the several passions’ that embody a nation’s temperament.44 Already a commonplace by the mid eighteenth century, the principal source for this notion was the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher’s Musurgia universalis (Rome, 1650), which offered the first systematic account of the ‘doctrine of affections’, which underpinned early opera and oratorio and framed the thinking of later baroque composers such as Bach and Handel.45 Gregory may never have encountered Kircher’s work, but his linkage between the passions and their musical expression follows this intellectual tradition. Gregory did believe that certain sounds or tones are connected to certain feelings of the mind by nature, independent of custom: ‘Thus certain tones are naturally adapted to solemn, plaintive, and mournful subjects, and the movement is slow; others are expressive of the joyous and elevating, and the movement is quick.’46 Nevertheless, each country gradually develops its own musical character, which eventually becomes naturalized. Scotland, for example, has chearful music perfectly well fitted to inspire that joyous mirth suited to dancing, and a plaintive music peculiarly expressive of that tenderness and pleasing melody attendant on distress in love, both original of their kind, and different from every other in Europe . . . there is a peculiarity in the stile of the Scotch melody, which foreigners, even some of great knowledge in music, who resided long in Scotland, have often attempted to imitate, but never with success.47

Gregory’s pride in this distinctively Scottish music did not lead him to dismiss the classic Italian composer Corelli. Although unusual in recording his views in writing, Gregory was typical of his generation in perceiving no conflict between these very different musical cultures, which for much of the century served complementary functions for Scotland’s elite. On the one hand, as David Johnson has observed, ‘classical’ art music (a literate tradition of notated composition) served as an expression of progress, of participation in Europe and of community with the educated classes of England, Holland, France, Germany and Italy. On the other, ‘folk’ music (an oral/aural tradition) served as an expression of conservatism, of national identity and of community with fellow Scots.48 As the political climate changed, however, members of the Scottish elite felt increasing pressure to choose between these two cultures, which

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were being drafted to support supposedly opposite camps of ‘progress’ and ‘nationalism’. The programme of ‘improvement’ begun decades earlier had become so successful there was concern that Scottish values were in danger of being lost. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the fear of losing a distinctively Scottish identity, including a native musical tradition, had become widespread.49 Gregory himself was already aware of this danger in 1763: he laments that ‘the Scots will, in all probability, soon lose this native music, the source of so much pleasure to their ancestors, without acquiring any other in their place’. He thought that they would either neglect it or destroy its simplicity ‘by a fantastical and absurd addition of graces foreign to the genius of its melody.’50 Typically, Gregory looks to ancient examples for historical justification of his concerns, in a manner that suggests Rousseau’s influence. Having argued for the correlation between civility and the union of melody, dance and poetry, Gregory (following Brown) notes that as Greek society became increasingly cultivated these arts became specialized and separated from each other. By Aristotle’s time, professionals had taken them over, and while this raised standards, the prostitution of music for mere entertainment made it an unsuitable skill for ‘any man of high rank and character’, and the power, the utility and dignity of music sank ‘into general corruption and contempt’.51 For Gregory, these ancient events have their modern equivalent. He observes that nowadays too ‘the rage for variety is so excessive, and the taste of course so indiscriminating, that composers and performers who depend on the public for their subsistence, must satisfy with any food they can procure, it has only novelty to recommend it’.52 Left to the market, professional musicians cater to public whims, which makes it seem ‘that there are no fixed principles of taste in music . . . and that it has no foundation but caprice in fashion’. In fact, as we shall see below, Gregory did believe there was a ‘just taste’ founded in truth and human nature, whose principles could be established by collecting and arranging the ‘genuine feelings of Nature’. However, he was sceptical of the public’s taste, notably the ‘admiration pretended to be given to foreign music in Britain’, which he dismissed as ‘a general despicable affectation’.53 In short, Gregory believed that unchecked cultivation of music for its own sake undermines the moral health of a society. To avoid this, it is necessary to strike the right balance between the extremes of primitivism and decadence, a process that requires careful regulation. Gregory’s historical theories about music’s role in social development are closely intertwined with his theories of individual development, which are found in his medical lectures.54 The physiology and pathology that Gregory taught followed the most recent trends in Scottish medical thinking, which still took Boerhaave’s model as its point of departure.55 This essentially mechanistic physiology assumed that the body is made up of fluids (humours) and solids (fibres), that all bodily functions can be reduced to hydraulics, and that all diseases can be explained in terms of disturbance to these fluids and solids. In effect, disease was due to imbalance and excess, the physician’s role being to advise how to balance body and mind through careful regulation.

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Within this equilibrium model, disease is caused by a combination of internal and external factors, the latter resulting from abuse of the so-called ‘non-naturals’, which were typically identified as comprising light and air, meat and drink, exercise and rest, waking and sleeping, expelling and retaining of superfluities, and passions of the mind.56 Although cast in secular medical terms, Boerhaave’s emphasis on moderation in all things and avoidance of excess was thoroughly in keeping with a Calvinist worldview in which disease and sickness serve as God’s punishment for sin. But rather than being an inevitable consequence of humanity’s fallen nature, such suffering followed from personal wrongdoing and specific transgressions (see Michael Heyd’s discussion in Chapter 7 above). In other words, the responsibility for avoiding ill-health lies chiefly with the individual, who must learn to exercise self-control. From the 1760s, however, teaching at Edinburgh was moving away from this hydraulic model, a departure Gregory attributed to the influence of Georg Ernest Stahl (1659–1734) of Halle, but which was also found more locally in the work of Robert Whytt (1714–1766).57 Instead of attending to the vascular system and the flow of humours, doctors now focused on the state of people’s nerves, which needed to possess a proper degree of ‘sensibility’ to remain healthy. Essentially, the state of the nerves determined whether a body was healthy or sick.58 Thus, although disease was still thought to be a result of excess or imbalance in general, it was regarded as a result of weakness of the nerves in particular. There was a significiant ambiguity in this theory, namely that although ‘sensiblity’ was a quality possessed by the nerves themselves, it was also understood as a quality of the soul. In fact, it was commonplace among doctors at this time to use the concept of ‘sensibility’ to bridge the gap between the natural and moral realms.59 However, Christopher Lawrence argues that athough French, German and English physicians all subscribed to the notion of ‘sensibility’, the emphasis placed on the centralized nervous system by Gregory and other Edinburgh physiologists was uniquely Scottish, in that it was seen as an integrated structure of interacting sensibilities, which resisted any attempts to devolve the bodies’ powers—a concept that fitted well with their views on social and political organization.60 The physiological model on which Gregory’s theory of disease was based assumed that the central nervous system provides an anatomical basis for the integration of all bodily functions and for the communication of feeling between different bodily organs, known as ‘sympathy’. He believed the nerves to be hollow tubes continuous with the brain and spinal medulla, forming a network through which an extremely fine substance, or ‘nervous energy’, flows throughout the body. This was the vehicle through which a non-material, sentient principle, coextensive with ‘mind’ and the basis of life, communicates its actions to every part of the body. The nerves are excited through external stimuli on the sensory organs, and the ‘sensibility’ or degree of excitation aroused varies with their physical state.61 It seems that music can alter this level of sensibility or refinement through the impressions it makes on the external ear, vibrations that are then communicated to the auditory nerve.

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Gregory’s lectures reflect his particular interest in weak nerves. While every person was thought to have a unique nervous temperament dependent on their constitutional makeup, there was also a recognizable, distinct form of ‘nervous temperament’. Like most of his contemporaries, Gregory believed that this condition of ‘weak nerves’ typically affected women, who were more prone to emotions, and also the rich, because their lifestyle encouraged intemperance of all kinds. Excessive sensibility led not only to nervous disorders like melancholia, hysteria and hypochondria but also to diseases like gout, smallpox and syphilis, which Gregory associated with luxury. His pathology reflected a widespread contemporary anxiety about the moral dangers that arise from the acquired desires of a commercial society.62 Having established the fundamental interrelationship between Gregory’s theories of human nature and his social theories, we are now in a better position to understand his fear about the damaging effects of unregulated musical commerce, and to appreciate his plea for the regulation of musical taste by philosophers, a social ideal whose origins are ultimately located in Plato’s Republic.63 Gregory was optimistic about the power of music to effect personal and social integration. He believed it made pedagogical sense to make music part of primary education—for boys as well as girls—since it improved people’s capacity for feeling as well as developing their purely musical tastes. The examples of Ossian and Fingal indicated that music can contribute to healthy emotional development, producing ‘men of feeling’ capable of influencing moral action. Simple melodies are the most effective means of commanding the passions, which should be music’s chief goal. However, Gregory also wanted to point out that music can also lead to a ‘higher’ kind of pleasure arising from the cultivation of judgement and the intellect, rather than mere sensory gratification. Unfortunately, this inner faculty comes at the expense of simplicity, since a proper standard of taste is only achieved when the ‘ear is accustomed to more complex music’ (music in parts), which is designed to raise or soothe a particular emotion. Gregory tried hard to establish an objective foundation for this ‘just taste’, a standard clearly derived from rules of composition, just as he believed in a common objective standard for morality and happiness. In the end, however, he was forced to admit that such rules may not be universally agreed, and that disagreements in taste may arise from differences to be found in the organs of feeling themselves, in tempers of people, or even in customs and characters of nations.64 Paradoxically, while differences in musical taste could be used to justify musical legislation by an elite cadre of philosophers, they also undermined the basis of that elite’s privileged status, which according to Gregory has its foundations in common sense and experience. The same paradox can be seen in Gregory’s admission of the potentially negative consequences of musical education. He clearly spoke from his own experience when he observed that ‘when one practises music much, the simplicity of melody tires the ear’.65 This leads to the desire for variety and complexity, a condition that, although essential for cultivating high standards of taste and performance, is fatal when left to develop among the uneducated masses. Just

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like other excesses of luxurious living, such as tea-drinking, too much meat, or other dietary indulgences, too much variety in music—or perhaps just too much music— leads not only to enervation, effeminization and sickness of the individual but also to the decadence of society as a whole. In conclusion, we can see how Gregory’s model of emotional development was informed by his immersion in contemporary Scottish musical culture as well as by his reading in history, classics, medicine and the natural sciences. His concept of bodily, mental and spiritual integration as the key to personal and social health— which he understood in wholly Christian terms—was expressed not only through his philosophical and medical writings but also through music itself, an activity that seems to have provided an essential balance to his academic and professional life. But although Gregory was extreme in his love of music, it is clear that most of his colleagues also recognized music as an appropriate leisure pursuit for men of their social standing, even if they did not necessarily practise it themselves. Given the importance of music for theories of sensibility, why has it been so comprehensively overlooked by historians of Scottish medicine and philosophy? Part of the reason is that the most prominent figures in these fields—notably Cullen, Hume and even Reid himself—were not educated in music and had nothing important to say about it. While they allowed its capacity to move the emotions, music was essentially irrelevant to their intellectual agendas and professional identities. This would not seem surprising to most doctors or scientists today; indeed, it is precisely because music has no place in their formal training or methods that it is disregarded by historians of these disciplines. Although understandings of earlier medical culture have been enriched through attention to informal clubs and social networks, particularly in relation to literature and the visual arts, music has yet to be fully integrated into this larger ‘picture’ of cultural exchange. This process can be facilitated through paying closer attention to the religious beliefs that underpinned Gregory’s discourse on music. How Presybterian values were translated into secular medical and philosophical terms has long been recognized; as Christopher Lawrence shows, the linkage between social hygiene and individual moral virtue was central to Edinburgh medical teaching. However, the emergence of a distinctively liberal form of Calvinism, a position that Stephan Conrad argues was adopted by Aberdeen intellectuals, and which Harold Cook and Andrew Cunningham have also shown to underpin Boerhaave’s medical curriculum, seems to have been particularly important for acknowledging music’s potential for developing self-control and achieving emotional balance or peace of mind. This certainly fits in with Michael Heyd’s claim (in Chapter 7 above) for a general shift in the early eighteenth century away from a dogmatic Calvinism that regarded sin as an existential state towards a ‘moral individualism’ that focused on specific transgressions and a person’s ability to control their own passions. This paper suggests that Lawrence’s insights into the mutually-constitutive relationship between medical and moral discourse, between ‘science’ and ‘culture’ in eighteenth-century Edinburgh, can be deepened through a consideration of music’s

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place within the social body and of its perceived importance in both private and public spheres. Of course, further research is needed to ascertain how far Gregory’s views were representative. As Christopher Gärtner shows in Chapter 10 above for the case of Paris, there was an enormous conflict of opinion about music’s overall purpose and value among the intellectual elite, as well as sharp differences in medical explanations for its emotional power. Nevertheless, even at this preliminary stage, it is clear that there were deeply-held, but mostly unarticulated assumptions that underpinned medical discourse on this subject. Thus, for example, although physiologists had no means of observing music’s effects on the nervous system directly (an experimental quest that Otniel Dror’s essay, Chapter 13 below, indicates only emerged in the twentieth century), the correspondence between musical, emotional and social states, and the central role of the nerves in effecting this linkage, was an integral part of Enlightenment medical orthodoxy. In fact, the same correlation formed the basis of nineteenth-century theories of musical evolution in which the gradual transition from primitive to complex forms of music in society was thought to be recapitulated in the individual’s own development, as discussed by Charles Brotman in Chapter 12 below.

Notes I should like to thank Christine Battersby, Christopher Gärtner, Helen Hills and Paul Wood for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. 1 2 3 4

5

John Gregory, A Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man with Those of the Animal World, 3rd edn. (Edinburgh, 1788), 138–9. The text read at the meeting appears in the 1st edn. of A Comparative View (Edinburgh, 1765) in Discourse II, pp. 72–120. Gregory later expanded it for later editions. In the 3rd edn. of 1788 it appears in Section III, pp. 132–203; all references are to this edition. Gregory mostly uses the term ‘passions’, although he occasionally refers to ‘emotion’, e.g. as in the opening quotation. See especially Christopher Lawrence, Medicine as Culture: Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment (PhD thesis, Univ. of London, 1974), 253–311; idem, ‘The Nervous System and Society in the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Barry Barnes and Steven Shapin, eds., The Natural Order (London, 1979), 19–40; Lisbeth Haakonssen, Medicine, Morals and the Enlightenment: John Gregory, Thomas Perceval and Benjamin Rush (Amsterdam, 1997), 46–93; Laurence B. McCullough, John Gregory and the Invention of Professional Medical Ethics and the Profession of Medicine (Dordrecht, Boston and London, 1998). See e.g. Vern Bullough and Bonnie Bullough, ‘The Causes of the Scottish Medical Renaissance in the Eighteenth Century’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 45 (1971), 13–28; J. B. Morrell, ‘The University of Edinburgh in the Late Eighteenth Century: Its Scientific Eminence and Academic Structure’, Isis 62 (1971), 158–71; R. H. Campbell and Andrew S. Skinner, eds., Origins and Nature of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1982).

204 6

7

8

9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Penelope Gouk Lawrence, ‘Nervous System’, 33. For a comparable analysis of French theories, see Anne C. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore and London, 1998), which also ignores the musical dimension of sensibility. The 1707 Act of Union and the Rebellions of 1715 and 1745 marked key turning points in a period that witnessed a general population increase, a marked shift towards urbanization, and growing prosperity in (lowland) Scotland. The assimilation of the highlands was framed within the same ideology of improvement, which contrasted savage highland society with civilized values: Lawrence, ‘Nervous System’, 20–23. See Andrew Cunningham, ‘Medicine to Calm the Mind: Boerhaave’s Medical System, and Why It Was Adopted in Edinburgh’, in idem and Roger French, eds., The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1990), 40–66; Lisa Rosner, Medical Education in the Age of Improvement: Edinburgh Students and Apprentices, 1760–1826 (Edinburgh, 1990). Fourteen members of Gregory’s family had held professorships in mathematics or medicine since the 17th c. See Paul David Lawrence, The Gregory Family: A Biographical and Bibliographical Study (PhD thesis, Univ. of Aberdeen, 1971). Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, Memoirs of the Life of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik (Edinburgh, 1892), 15. Although he gave up composition by the time he was 30 and had a successful career as a lawyer, Clerk composed a number of works, which were unpublished in his own lifetime but have since been recorded (e.g. Hyperion CDA67007). His Leo Scotiae Irritatus (The Scottish Lion Enraged), which tells of the doomed plan to set up a Scottish colony on the isthmus of Panama, is a cantata with words by Herman Boerhaave, whom Clerk befriended during his medical studies in Leiden around 1700. For further details, see Peter Davidson, ‘Leo Scotiae Irritatus: Herman Boerhaave and John Clerk of Penicuik’, in Cedric Charles Barfoot and Richard Todd, eds., The Great Emporium: The Low Countries as a Cultural Crossroads (Amsterdam and Atlanta, 1992), 155–94. David Johnson, Music and Society in Lowland Scotland in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1972). For the importance of medical students in this phenomenon, see Davidson, ‘Leo Scotiae Irritatus’. Johnson, Music and Society, 64, 119. Scotland’s brief musical renaissance ended with the closure of the Edinburgh Music Society in 1798, when it ran into spiralling debt. Although music schools were attached to town churches in 17th-c. Scotland, John Knox had disapproved of music that was too complex for ordinary people to participate in; Johnson, Music and Society, 4–10. Jennifer Mcleod, The Edinburgh Musical Society: Its Membership and Repertoire, 1728–1797 (PhD thesis, Univ. of Edinburgh, 2001). Davidson, ‘Leo Scotiae Irritatus’, 155–6. Boerhaave regularly held concerts at his house, and also gave lectures on sound and hearing. Gerrit Arie Lindeboom, Herman Boerhaave, the Man and His Work (London, 1968), 137, 253. Harold J. Cook, ‘Boerhaave and the Flight from Reason in Medicine’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 74 (2000), 221–40; idem, ‘Body and Passions: Materialism and the Early Modern State’, Osiris 17 (2002), 25–48. Cunningham, ‘Medicine to Calm the Mind’, 57–66. A former pupil of Aberdeen Grammar School and King’s College, Gregory spent three years studying medicine at Edinburgh before going to Leiden in 1745. He came back to Aberdeen a year later, King’s College having awarded him the degree of Doctor of

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21

22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31

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Medicine and electing him Professor of Philosophy on his return. Gregory gave up this post in 1749, and it was taken over by his cousin Thomas Reid. For the next two decades Gregory ran a successful medical practice in Aberdeen, except during 1754–5 when he moved to London. Gregory came back to Aberdeen to take over the Professorship of Medicine from his elder brother James (d. 1755), who had followed their father James Gregory (d. 1731) in this position. Henry G. Farmer, Music Making in the Olden Days: The Story of the Aberdeen Concerts, 1748–1801 (London, 1950). Farmer did not provide references for the material he used in this study, but it is apparently in the Local Studies Department of the Aberdeen Public Library (personal communication from Michelle Gait, Special Libraries and Archives, University of Aberdeen). According to Farmer, Music Making, 13–15, the other founder-members were Mr David Young, a music copyist, and Peter Black and James Black jr, neither of whom are identified. On 17th-c. amateur consort groups, see Penelope Gouk, ‘Performance Practice: Music, Medicine and Natural Philosophy in Interregnum Oxford’, British Journal for the History of Science, 29 (1996), 257–88. Farmer, Music Making, 19–36. H. Diack Johnstone and Roger Fiske, eds., The Blackwell History of Music in Britain: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1990), 20–27; Jennifer Burchell, Polite or Commercial Concerts? Concert Management and Orchestral Repertoire in Edinburgh, Bath, Oxford, Manchester, and Newcastle, 1730–1799 (New York, 1996). Farmer, Music Making, 37. Johnson, Music and Society, 13–14, 36–40; also Mcleod, Edinburgh Musical Society. Edward Topham, Letters from Edinburgh Written in the Years 1774–1775 (London, 1776): Letter CLV, ‘On the Scotch Music’ (Edinburgh, 27 May 1775). Penelope Gouk, ‘The Role of Harmonics in the Scientific Revolution’, in Thomas Christensen, ed., The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory (Cambridge, 2002), 223–45. For further ideas on music, see Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste (London and Edinburgh, 1759); James Beattie, Essays: On Poetry and Music, as They Affect the Mind (Edinburgh and London, 1776). Farmer claimed that all members of the Wise Club except Reid were also Music Society members, and that ‘all of our Scottish musico-philosophers were volitionists, and were extremely scared at the doctrines of Hume and the determinists’; Farmer, Music Making, 37, 91–6 (quotation p. 92). Although flawed, Farmer’s attempt to connect their philosophical (i.e. ‘scientific’) and musical (i.e. ‘aesthetic’) discourse is worth pursuing. A useful starting-point would be Jamie Croy Kassler, The Science of Music in Britain 1714–1830: A Catalogue of Writings, Lectures and Inventions (New York and London, 1979). This includes brief summaries of relevant works by e.g. Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), 562–4; Adam Smith (1723–1790), 942–6; also Gerard, 387–9; Beattie, 63–7; Reid, 873–6; Gregory, 416–21. For Reid’s musical aesthetics, see Peter Kivy, Sound Sentiment: An Essay on the Musical Emotions; Including the Complete Text of ‘The Corded Shell’ (Philadelphia, 1989), 24–6, 99–101. My argument follows Stephan Conrad, Citizenship and Common Sense: The Problem of Authority in the Social Background and Social Philosophy of the Wise Club of Aberdeen (New York, 1987). Conrad does not, however, say anything about music. For a broader overview of Aberdeen’s intellectual life, see Paul B. Wood, ‘Aberdeen and Europe in the Enlightenment’, in Paul Dukes, ed., The Universities of Aberdeen and Europe: The First Three Centuries (Aberdeen, 1995), 19–42.

206 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

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44 45

46 47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54 55

Penelope Gouk Conrad, Citizenship and Common Sense, chaps.1 and 2. Ibid., 107. Gregory, Comparative View, 134. Compare Rousseau’s influential ideas, outlined in Christopher Gärtner, Chap. 10 above. Gregory, Comparative View, 39. For equivalent sentiments in England, see William Weber, The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England: A Study in Canon, Ritual and Ideology (Oxford, 1992). Gregory had already discussed standards of taste at a meeting of the Philosophical Society on 25 April 1758; Aberdeen University Library MS 3107/2/1. An influential medical source for this concept of ‘musical ear’ was Thomas Willis, ‘The Anatomy of the Brain and Nerves’, in idem, The Remaining Medical Works, Englished by Samuel Pordage (London, 1681), chap. 17, ‘Of the Nerves’, 117–19. Gregory, Comparative View, 144. Eng. trans. in Andrew Barker, Greek Musical Writings, I: The Musician and His Art (Cambridge, 1984), 170–82, 205–57. Enrico Fubini, ed., Music and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Europe: A Source Book (Chicago and London, 1994), 154–230; also Matthew Riley, ‘Civilizing the Savage: Johann Georg Sulzer and the “Aesthetic Force” of Music’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 127 (2002), 1–22. Sulzer (1720–1779) was the author of Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771–4), ‘one of the most frequently cited works on aesthetics in the German Enlightenment’ (p. 1). Ossian was a hot topic amongst members of the Wise Club in 1763; see Thomas Reid to Lord Kames, 14 Feb. 1763, in Paul Wood, ed., The Correspondence of Thomas Reid (Edinburgh and University Park, PA, 2002), 26–7, and the references cited in the annotations to the letter. Also see the chapter ‘The Call of the Highland Bard’, in Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1985), 246–61. Gregory, Comparative View, 156. For a translation of Kircher’s discussion of national temperament from Musurgia, 542–5, see Leo Treitler, ed., Strunk’s Source Readings in Music History (New York, 1998), 708–11. See also Claude V. Palisca, ‘Moving the Affections through Music: Pre-Cartesian Psycho-Physiological Theories’, in Paolo Gozza, ed., Number to Sound: The Musical Way to the Scientific Revolution (Dordrecht, 2000), 289–308. Gregory, Comparative View, 156. Ibid. Johnson, Music and Society, 188. Claire Nelson, ‘Tea-Table Miscellanies: The Development of Scotland’s Song Culture, 1720–1800’, Early Music, 28 (2000), 596–618. Gregory, Comparative View, 158. Ibid., 151. For Gregory’s views on the corrupting effects of civilization and the likely influence of Rousseau and Montesquieu on his historical theories, see Paul B. Wood, ‘The Natural History of Man in the Scottish Enlightenment’, History of Science, 27 (1989), 89–123. Gregory, Comparative View, 199. Ibid., 201, 159. Lawrence, ‘Medicine as Culture’ 260–68. Lester S. King, The Philosophy of Medicine: The Early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1978), esp. 121–4, 219–30.

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56 L. J. Rather, ‘The “Six Things Non-Natural”: A Note on the Origin and Fate of a Doctrine and a Phrase’, Clio Medica, 3 (1986), 337–47. 57 On Stahl’s vitalism, see King, Philosophy of Medicine, 143–51. Whytt was Professor of the Institutes (theory) of Medicine at Edinburgh between 1747 and 1766 and published his Treatise of Nervous Diseases in 1765; see Roger French, Robert Whytt, the Soul, and Medicine (London, 1969). 58 This emphasis on the nerves is already found in George Cheyne, The English Malady, or A Treatise of Nervous Diseases of All Kinds in Three Parts (London, 1733); Malcolm Flemyng, The Nature of the Nervous Fluid, or Animal Spirit (London, 1751). For further background, see G. S. Rousseau, ed., The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990), especially Antonie LuyendijkElshout, ‘Of Masks and Mills: The Enlightened Doctor and his Frightened Patient’, 186–230. 59 Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology, 1. See also Christopher Gärtner, Chap. 10 above. 60 Lawrence, ‘Nervous System’, 31–3. 61 Ibid., 25–8. On earlier conceptions of the ‘animal spirits’, see Robert G. Frank, ‘Thomas Willis and His Circle: Brain and Mind in Seventeenth- Century Medicine’, in Rousseau, ed., The Languages of Psyche, 107–46; Penelope Gouk, ‘Music, Melancholy and Medical Spirits in Early Modern Thought’, in Peregrine Horden, ed., Music as Medicine: The History of Music Therapy since Antiquity (Guilford, 2000), 173–94. 62 For equivalent fears of luxury in 18th-c. London. see Marcia Pointon, Chap. 9 above. 63 Eng. trans. in Barker, Greek Musical Writings, I. 127–40. 64 Gregory, ‘Is there a standard of taste in the fine arts?’, Aberdeen University Library MS 3107/2/1, fol. 3r. 65 Gregory, Comparative View, 181.

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CHAPTER 12

The Undulating Self: The Rhythmic Conception of Music and the Emotions Charles Brotman

In 1891, an Austrian music theorist living in London made a sweeping statement about the origin of music in an article published in the journal Mind. It was ‘a wellknown fact’, Richard Wallaschek (1860–1917) wrote, ‘that the one essential feature in primitive music is rhythm, melody being a matter of accident’. Although melodic cadences were occasionally used to co-ordinate activities within the tribe, they were never ‘fixed . . . according to musical principles’ in the primitive world. Undoubtedly, Wallaschek’s contention echoed the ethnocentric observations of contemporary travel writers and ethnologists, many of whom believed that non-Europeans lacked the culture and intellect to create works of beauty. In fact, were one to peruse the works cited by Wallaschek in the bibliography of his subsequent publication, Primitive Music, it would not take long to find other similarly-worded passages, many implying that primitives were noisemakers who lacked a music to speak of at all.1 In his writing, however, Wallaschek indicated that he did not view the rhythmic nature of primitive music merely as evidence of its poverty, or its incommensurability with civilized music. Rhythm constituted ‘the essence of music, in its simplest form as well as in the most skillfully elaborated fugues of modern composers’; it imparted structure to music by tying the movement of sounds to the movement of ideas and emotions in the organism. Carrying his argument further, Wallaschek argued that the evolution of musical forms could be accounted for as the product of man’s effort to make sonant human feelings—or ‘rhythmical impulses’— more distinctive and lasting.2 Wallaschek was hardly the first writer to emphasize the significance of rhythm in music, but the intellectual context in which he situated his work had uniquely English scientific overtones that have figured only peripherally in histories of musical thought.3 According to Wallaschek, the science supporting his observations had been developed by the philosopher of evolutionism, Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), whose essay ‘On the Origin and Function of Music’ was widely known by scientists and music writers in the late nineteenth century. Whereas previous ‘speech-theories’ of music had posited the ‘simple intuition of language ready-made’, Spencer’s work was innovative, in Wallaschek’s view, because it ‘first showed an intimate physiological

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connexion between all our emotions and their expression, leading us to discover vestiges of music in declamation and conversely’.4 Historians of science have acknowledged that Spencer exerted a wide-ranging influence on social and scientific thought in the second half of the nineteenth century, but they have not sufficiently recognized his contributions to aesthetics.5 In the 1850s Spencer wrote widely on beauty and the arts, including poetry, architecture and dance, and he later incorporated this work in his Synthetic Philosophy. His 1857 essay ‘On the Origin and Function of Music’ became widely known later in the century, especially after Charles Darwin (1809–1882) addressed its arguments in The Descent of Man and The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. Whereas Spencer argued that music was a refined language of the emotions that had evolutionary roots in the excited speech of man’s primitive ancestors, Darwin replied that musical expression was more primitive than language and permeated the animal kingdom, where the evolution of vocal apparatus had been driven by a process of sexual selection, or female mating-preferences for males who produced the most beautiful songs in the wild. The power to make ‘musical notes and rhythms’, according to Darwin, ‘developed low down in the animal series’, but it also afforded raw material for the evolution of language, ‘one of the latest, as it certainly is the highest, of the arts acquired by man’.6 Music was not the principal object of their scientific inquiries, but the evolutionists wrote specifically about the art because they wanted to account for its widely-known ability to evoke powerful emotional responses in listeners. Indeed, Darwin and his contemporaries experienced the power of music personally. Although many of them lacked music-making proficiency, the emergence of a nineteenthcentury culture of listening had already rendered actual performance skills less important to conceptions of musicality. As Peter Gay has written, bourgeois Victorians assimilated from the Romantics a reverent approach to music that transformed the experience of the art into an emotional substitute for the sacred. For scientists in the process of establishing their cultural authority independent from the Church, the ‘religion of music’ could be appealing not only for its symbolic value as a respectable art but also for its power to account for elevated emotional feelings and instincts in naturalistic terms. ‘The emotion produced by music’, according to Spencer, had a stronger effect on him in the cathedral than ‘the adoration of a personal being, the utterance of laudations, and the humble professions of obedience’. Like contemporaries such as the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911), Spencer was a life-long music-lover who appreciated the chance to hear music performed in public and private places. Darwin famously described his own ‘curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes’ in his autobiography, but he too had been strongly moved by musical performances throughout his life, prompted even to ‘hire the chorister boys to sing in my rooms’ as a student at Cambridge. These experiences had an impact on his work. In his Transmutation Notebooks, written years before the publication of The Origin of Species, Darwin had begun to speculate about the origin of music, and he returned to this subject in the

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final decade of his life.7 Engaged by the work of Darwin and Spencer, Wallaschek and other turn-of-thecentury theorists developed what Margaret Glyn termed the ‘rhythmic conception of music’ in an effort to reorient musicology in the light of scientific naturalism.8 From an ethnological perspective, the rhythmic conception illuminated the nature of disparate customs and practices; from the standpoint of experimental psychology, it provided an example of the way physiological processes conditioned ideas and feelings. Most significantly, the rhythmic conception appeared to demonstrate the vitality and manliness of an aesthetic culture that otherwise appeared feeble or superfluous. In an age marked by worries about the enervating effects of industrialism, the irrelevance of the traditional curriculum in the schools, and the alleged feminization of art and culture, these writers ultimately sensed that rhythm had more emotional authenticity than other constituents of musical art.9 Spencer, who had conceived of music primarily in terms of its tonal structure, nevertheless spurred the scientific interest in rhythm in his First Principles of a New System of Philosophy (1862). In that work, which became the first instalment of his Synthetic Philosophy, Spencer maintained that ‘The Rhythm of Motion’ was a corollary of evolution and a deduction from general principles of matter and motion. He described rhythm as a law of movement that occurred wherever there was a ‘conflict of forces not in equilibrium’: in the revolution of planets, the variations in climate, the pulsing of blood, the contraction of muscles, the oscillation of mental states, and the cycles of economic commerce. Poetry, dance and music also exemplified the law of motion: ‘these several kinds of rhythms’, he wrote, ‘are not, in the common sense of the word, artificial, but are intenser forms of an undulatory movement habitually generated by feeling in its bodily discharge’. Conceived as more than a conventional element of art, rhythm governed movement itself. In The Principles of Psychology, Spencer even described the emotions behaving in accordance with the rhythm of motion: objectively, nervous discharges were represented as pulsations that followed the course of least resistance in the body; subjectively, those changes were experienced rhythmically: as oscillations in states of feeling.10 Spencer’s chapter on ‘The Rhythm of Motion’ captivated readers and undoubtedly influenced music theory, psychology and popular scientific writing. Early in his career, G. Stanley Hall (1844–1924), who headed the first American PhD program in psychology, studied abnormal rhythmic phenomena in the human body with the scientist Joseph Jastrow (1863–1944), hoping to find correlations between physiological rhythms and changes in the weather and planetary movements. In an experimental study of rhythm submitted later in the century as a dissertation under Hall’s direction, Thaddeus Bolton credited Spencer with having accurately identified the universality of rhythm in physical motion, organic activity, and human responses to music and art. Opening The Rhythmic Conception of Music, Margaret Glyn announced her debt to Spencer and defined rhythm in purposefully cosmic terms as ‘the periodic quality, undulating, circling, or pulsative, of all movement’ that was a formative influence on the origin of all arts. ‘Rhythm seems to be almost as

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intimately associated with everything that a man can see or hear’, the aesthetician George Lansing Raymond (1839–1929) wrote, ‘as is the beating of his own heart with his own life’. Further afield, Charles Brodie Patterson (1854–1917), an adherent of the New Thought movement in the United States, wrote optimistically of the power of rhythm to heal body and spirit; with Spencerian evolutionary concepts in mind, he noted that ‘all vibration is the result of energy in motion. Energy in rhythmic, vibratory motion has produced every form in the universe; and energy in discordant motion is destructive of all form.’11 Initially, the ‘law of rhythm’ had a less significant impact on musical thought than the evolutionists’ theories of music itself. Stimulated by their debate on the ‘origin of music’ and by the work of German scientists Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) and Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), the English psychologists Edmund Gurney (1847–1888) and James Sully (1842–1923) sought to formulate a naturalistic science of music that dispensed with past explanations of ‘the power of music’ rooted in philosophical idealism and theological assumptions. According to Sully, Spencer had singularly accounted for the mysterious effect of music on the emotions because he linked man’s desire to vocalize feelings with the origins of musical forms. Gurney, by contrast, argued that humans possessed a ‘musical faculty’ that had taken shape in the ancestral past under the influence of mating instincts. Sexual selection, he reasoned, plausibly accounted for the ineffability of musical judgments, and the power of music to elicit emotions that were difficult to describe verbally.12 Their naturalistic aesthetics notwithstanding, neither Gurney nor Sully thought that rhythm had an important place in music theory. Like many of their contemporaries, they tended to view it as commensurate with a primitive stage of culture. Such assumptions were evident in the writings of influential composers, scientists and antiquarians, including Hubert Parry (1848–1918), Carl Engel (1818–1882), Mary Elizabeth Brown (1842–1917), John Frederick Rowbotham (1859–1925) and Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), all of whom sensed that the predominance of a rhythmic element in music signified unsophisticated musicmaking, even noisemaking, that lacked melodic structure and emulated the movements of the dance. Such theories of music would continue to be written in the twentieth century. As late as 1939, the musicologist Warren Dwight Allen lamented that too many music historians were writing music histories based on the ‘developmental assumptions’ of Spencer and other ‘Victorian anthropologists’.13 In many respects, Richard Wallaschek’s Primitive Music (1893) was grounded in the same developmental assumptions. Here he offered readers an interpretation of the origins of music based on exhaustive research—but research that was narrowly focused on contemporary travel-narratives and ethnologies that subsequent anthropologists would find to be unreliable. Like his Victorian predecessors, Wallaschek believed that non-European music was less sophisticated than Western music, more closely tied to a primitive stage of existence in the animal kingdom, and functionally similar to the music that had been produced by man’s progenitors. At one point, for example, he wrote that ‘primitive man’ occupied ‘exactly the same

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position as the higher animals’; at another, that he was like the child, overflowing with feeling but intellectually undeveloped.14 Unlike many of his predecessors, however, Wallaschek developed a full-fledged naturalistic theory of music from his studies of the ethnological record. In Primitive Music, he pointed to the significance of the dance and the performance of music during social gatherings and for medicinal purposes, the use of words to emphasize sounds rather than to convey linguistic meanings, and the universal love of drums and other percussive instruments. Having found examples of relatively complex musical systems throughout the world, Wallaschek argued that previous theories had not sufficiently accounted for the instinct to produce music, a ‘time-sense’ physiologically rooted in the human organism and responsible for the basic emotional effects produced by music. Animals too had an inborn sense of interval, but they lacked the intellect to work with rhythms discovered by accident in nature; thus, the ‘simple beating of a drum’ was more genuinely musical than melodious birdsongs because it appealed to the sense of rhythm that made music pleasurable and reproducible. Even the discovery of tones and intervals had to be understood as the product of a rhythmic education. The time-sense impelled man to create musical instruments in order to structure sounds in an increasingly imaginative fashion.15 Wallaschek presented his findings in an engagement with the naturalistic aesthetics of Darwin, Spencer, Wallace and the German biologist August Weissmann (1834–1914). He emphasized the significance of Spencer’s argument that the impulse to produce art had its origins in the ‘play’ instinct of animals, or the instinct to use ‘surplus vigour . . . exceeding what is required for immediate needs’, but he also rejected the notion that musical cadences had evolved from exaggerated forms of speech. Wallaschek was equally qualified in his comments about Darwin’s work; sexual selection imputed ‘too much of human psychological interest’ to birdsong, but the theory of natural selection helped explain how musical innovations had been preserved. Music was produced in human societies under ‘sociological as well as psychological conditions’. Because the rhythmic impulse ‘made common action’ possible by readying the members of larger social groups in co-ordinated time, it promoted effective and unified social action. The war-dance had ‘in all respects the same function which the drummers, trumpeters, and fife-players still have with the army and with public processions’. Combined with dance, which represented the external manifestation of the rhythmic impulse, primitive music was ‘inseparably connected’ with preparatory forms of play. Implicitly assuming, in other words, that natural selection could work on the group or tribal level, Wallaschek claimed that the possession of a rhythmic sense had survival value for man.16 Imputing practical aims to primitive music-making, Wallaschek sought to overturn assumptions that music was merely a peripheral leisure activity in the civilized world. He described his Primitive Music as a ‘contradiction’ of an argument Wallace had made in an essay on the ‘limits of natural selection’. Whereas Wallace had said that music ‘among the lower savages . . . hardly exists’, Wallaschek insisted that its evolution had to be traced back to the earliest moments in man’s history.

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A ‘direct and immediate effect of the feelings of the moment’, the rhythmic sense in man had impelled him to use his intellect to create musical forms—and to harness the power of music for life-sustaining activities and preparations.17 Wallaschek understood the ‘sociological’ dimension of rhythmic play, but he did not investigate how this might have shaped the origin of the musical impulse itself. In the early twentieth century, however, writers familiar with his work focused more explicitly on the ‘social functions’ of rhythmic activity and higher forms of art. James H. Tufts (1862–1942), a philosopher at the University of Chicago, emphasized the social genesis of aesthetics in a 1903 essay. Primitives raised together in tribal units, he argued, developed shared emotional responses to forms of play well before they acquired an appreciation of nature. Thus, rhythm marked ‘one of the most important elements of art-form’ because activities ‘performed in common by a group’ naturally assumed rhythmic forms. ‘In common rhythmic action’, he wrote, ‘the stimulus and reinforcement of sympathy and social accord are felt, and whatever pleasure there may be in the physiological process is immensely strengthened by this action of social forces.’ According to the anthropologist Ernest Crawley (1869–1924), the music of the drum was particularly effective at stimulating ‘the social emotions’ because it was so closely connected with muscular feelings common to all men living in shared spaces. The significance of drums in primitive societies testified, that is, to the close correlation between rhythm and ‘the whole range of human feeling’: not merely military preparations, but all forms of human interaction and communication. ‘The fact is that the music of the drum is more closely connected with the foundations of aurally generated emotion than that of any other instrument’, he wrote. ‘The emotional appeal of music is to a very large extent muscular. Rhythm is practically a neuro-muscular quality, and it is the fundamental form of musical sound.’ Like Wallaschek, Crawley recognized that there was something ‘fundamentally human’ and anthropologically significant in the use of rhythmic beating in primitive societies.18 Wallashek, Tufts and Crawley were reluctant to endorse a form of rhythmic reductionism. If the physiological sense of rhythm had propelled humans to discover the potentiality of music and art, formal compositions could not be accounted for merely by tracing the elaboration of a rhythmic impulse over time. ‘The sense of beauty’, Wallaschek wrote, ‘in the higher meaning of the term, is an abstract sensation which animals do not possess, just as little as primitive man.’ Aesthetic culture, then, seemingly had independence from the forces that moulded the origins of music itself. J. Donovan, a contemporary who also sought to lay the foundations for an evolutionary science of music in two books as well as a series of essays published in the journal Mind, was more consistent and ambitious in his narrative of musical development. Opening his first book of 1889, Music and Action, Donovan similarly contended that rhythm elicited powerful emotions, or what he called feelings of self-expansion, in humans. Specifically, rhythmic stimulations ‘reproduced’ raw sensations received throughout the body in the individual or phylogenetic past. According to Donovan, Darwin and other evolutionists had erred in their assumptions that the emotions stimulated by music were generated by

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pleasurable tonal sequences. Rather, rhythm directly accounted for the emotions stimulated by sound. ‘Simple pulsatory stimulation’, he observed, ‘had its grounds in the nature of the human organism, most obviously the movements of the body, and in the pulsations of blood in the body.’ In other words, rhythmic beats, first discovered by accident in the natural world, were the ‘natural playmates of bodily movements’ because they physically reproduced known feelings in the organism. Drawing elsewhere on Spencer’s play aesthetic, Donovan argued that rhythmic beating had evolved as a human practice during tribal festivals. Imitative ‘bodily play excitements’, common during communal celebrations, had impelled early man to find more creative ways to sustain pleasant rhythmic feelings. Since those individuals who possessed the strongest martial and amorous feelings tended to survive and reproduce, music continued to develop under the inspiration of these feelings.19 The emotional feelings of self-expansion, according to Donovan, were inherently masculine in character and derived from primordial days when men fought battles against tribal enemies and overcame obstacles ‘in the way of the satisfaction of sexual passion’. Woman’s need to handle reproductive duties permanently rendered her emotional nature different from man’s, making her more fragile and less susceptible to the lure of rhythmic beating. The feelings awakened by music, Donovan wrote, were ‘feelings of pure impulse, belonging by direct experience more to the remotely past than to late periods of human existence’. But music was not merely a rhythmical expression that enabled the offspring of victors to experience vicariously the triumphs of their ancestors. If rhythm awakened the most powerful emotional feelings of man, tonal elements captured his attention and turned it away from worldly matters for gradually extended periods of time; the Darwinian principle of ‘serviceable associated habit’20 implied that music had evolved from rhythmic origins into a connected series of tonal intervals that increasingly occupied man’s perceptive faculties and liberated him to experience the most powerful emotional pleasures. Rhythm reproduced raw sensations, but tonal intervals ensured that those sensations would be pleasurable and devoid of conceptual distractions. Thus, music was refined and beautiful but vigorous, masculine and action-oriented. Like religion, it elicited ‘the essence of human deeds purified of all material cloggings, of all material weakness against the real hard world in which the deeds were really performed’, but it dispensed with the fear-inducing foundation of faith. Its evolution could be accounted for in naturalistic terms without appeals to a supervening deity or transcendental idea: ‘it is possible’, Donovan wrote, ‘to work down from the greatest symphony of Beethoven to the rudest rhythmic beating of savages, and show that every step of tonal development between them was made in order to improve the effectiveness of the elements of sensation which could preserve the content of consciousness springing out of play-excitement and communal elation’. Even as music evolved and became more closely associated with tonal relations, it retained links to the strongest bodily sensations. Envisioning the evolution of music in this fashion, Donovan appropriated the energy and masculinity of ‘the primitive’ without eroding contemporary assumptions about the respectability and elevated status of civilization and its arts.21

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The emphasis on the bodily persistence of the rhythmic sense in the work of Donovan and Wallaschek had its roots in the aesthetic problems raised by Darwin and Spencer, but it also was paralleled by developments in the field of psychology. Studies of the ‘organic character of rhythm’ emphasized the sensuous quality of rhythm as well as the tendency of the emotions and bodily gestures to follow rhythmic forms. In his famous 1884 essay, ‘What is an Emotion?’ William James (1842–1910) described the corporal quality of the emotions, seeking essentially, as Sue Campell as written, ‘to effect an ontological reduction of the affective sphere to the physiological’. Although he did not explore in detail the origin of aesthetic feelings, James described the emotions in language suggesting the aural-rhythmic quality of physiological processes: More and more, as physiology advances, we begin to discern how almost infinitely numerous and subtle [the bodily affections] must be. The researches of Mosso with the plethysmograph have shown that not only the heart, but the entire circulatory system, forms a sort of sounding-board, which every change of our consciousness, however slight, may make reverberate. . . . The bladder and bowels, the glands of the mouth, throat, and skin, and the liver, are known to be affected gravely in certain severe emotions, and are unquestionably affected transiently when the emotions are of a lighter sort. That the heartbeats and the rhythm of breathing play a leading part in all emotions whatsoever, is a matter too notorious for proof.22

If mental states did not cause emotional feelings, as previous psychologists had assumed, then even subtle musical pleasures could be understood as physiological facts similar to breathing patterns, heart palpitations and nervous transmissions through the body. According to Carrie Squire Ransom, who studied the nature of rhythmic conceptions in children in a turn-of-the-century dissertation, the greater pleasure which children find in rhythm is due to the efficacy of rhythm to set up vibrations in other organs of the body, and the consequent harmonious activity of the several bodily organs. The affective tone increases in proportion as the summation of excitation increases, till a state bordering on ecstasy may be reached. Ecstasy, when it follows upon rhythmical stimulation, is due to a spreading of the excitations to a greater and greater number of centers, till the body and the whole consciousness are set in covibration. At such times the rhythm has become automatic, and the attention is directed solely upon the sensations accompanying the diffused bodily movements.

Ransom argued that aesthetic response to rhythm depended on the individual’s ability to make perceptual connections between those sensations, but she described the diffusion of rhythm through the body in order to emphasize its coincidence with emotional feeling. Those who emphasized the mental component of musical response, or the importance of the ‘association’ of ideas to the appreciation of music, acknowledged that rhythmic patterns were a powerful source of emotional responses to music. ‘As an element in music giving strength to the mental reaction music produces’, the philosopher Hans Halbert Britan acknowledged in 1908, rhythm

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imputed emotional strength to the war dance as well as the ‘refined and subdued’ sounds of ‘our higher musical forms’. Unlike intellectually apprehended elements of music, rhythm appealed directly to the body, functioning in the nervous centre ‘with all the compelling force of an instinct’. In an essay on ‘The Evolution of Mastery’, Helen Huss Parkhurst (1887–1959) sought to connect the sense of rhythm with the evolution of man’s instinct to subjugate nature and his foes. ‘Present in the living organism of both man and his brute progenitors’, rhythmic phenomena—‘heartbeat and breathing, motions of fins and wings and limbs’—furnished physiological rawmaterial for man seeking to exert his will. By appropriating rhythmic patterns in his own creations, and then by learning to combine the rhythmic with the ‘a-rhythmic’, civilized man exhibited the highest forms of mastery and emotional ‘self-expansion’ as an artist. If earlier ethnologists and travellers had quarantined rhythm from ‘higher’ musical forms by implying that primitive music-making hardly qualified as ‘music’, turn-of-the-century studies of rhythm made it increasingly difficult to ignore the significance of rhythm in all artistic forms.23 According to Margaret Glyn, musicians needed to reconceptualize the entire art of music from a rhythmic perception. In her 1908 work, she argued that it was impossible for humans to conceive of tones outside of a rhythmical structure. Rhythmic movement, she argued, was a formative principle for music because it paralleled the flux of the emotions themselves. ‘The natural conditions of feeling are those of a state of flux, elation and depression, animation and repose, increase or decrease of intensity’, she wrote; ‘the power of music over the emotional nature lies in the fact that the art, by means of its undulating rhythm, is able to adapt itself to the natural succession of the emotions of the mind, and is therefore felt to be the direct appeal of emotional nature.’ Citing the ethnological evidence gathered by Wallaschek, she noted that primitive people exhibited a sense of rhythm simultaneously in dance and music that hardly depended on tone-colour for its emotive power. Folk-music, moreover, which she described as ‘a later stage of primitive music’, was also ‘founded essentially upon rhythmic pulsation’. Although the steady evolution of music, in her view, had been retarded by the dominance of Church-imposed contrapuntal theory in the Middle Ages, the century of Beethoven and Wagner had revitalized the spirit of folk-music by restoring an emphasis on rhythmic development to the art of music.24 The notion that the rhythmic theory of music had a revitalizing effect on music and culture had significant implications in the realm of pedagogy and the child-study movement. G. Stanley Hall and Arthur Somervell (1863–1937) both subscribed to notions that individuals recapitulated the evolution of race in their development and that rhythm underscored the way that music conditioned the emotional life of children. For Hall, music had a therapeutic ability to move individuals up and down the phylogenetic scale, giving them a taste of the highest aesthetic expressions, but also reviving ‘the most ancient elements and experiences’ of the organism. As part of a reformed educational programme, he advocated dancing in the schools in order to foster better motor skills and a more complete sense of self in the child. ‘Music and

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expressive motion’ both embodied the ‘language of the emotions’, as could be discerned in studies of primitive societies, and dancing had the potential to reinvigorate humans in modern society by restoring their organic health in an age of drudgery and passivity. Ideally, Hall also hoped that a progressive pedagogy would encourage children to expand their emotional natures at an early age; kindergartners, he maintained, would benefit most from acquiring a stronger rhythmic and muscular sense of music. Similarly, Somervell, the English composer who served as inspector of music on the Board of Education, embraced the rhythmic component of music, which he saw as unifying the child with the natural world. His wife, Edith Somervell, even carried rhythm a step further: in a book entitled A Rhythmic Approach to Mathematics, she called for teachers to foster an instinctive and intuitive sense of rhythmic patterns in their students before introducing them to intellectual propositions.25 In the 1920s, Satis Coleman (1878–1961), an influential teacher at the Lincoln School, Columbia University Teachers College, championed a ‘Creative Music’ pedagogy that emphasized the significance of rhythmic feeling and practical activity to the genesis of music appreciation. Inspired by G. Stanley Hall and other adherents of the child-study movement, she sought to replace older methods of formal schooling with a pedagogy that focused on guiding children in their experience of the world. Like Hall and others who were inspired by evolutionary scientific ideas, Coleman insisted that children recapitulated the history of the race in their individual development. By introducing them to notation and concert-hall music at an early age, educators had confused symbols of music with the experience of music itself. Coleman argued that children needed first to learn to respond to music emotionally and rhythmically before discovering more advanced music and musical instruments; like the primitive in his environment, who discovered methods of producing music without assistance from others, the child would instinctively make music by inventing the physical means to produce sounds. ‘The natural evolution of music’ dictated that the educator focus on leading the child ‘from the simple to the complex’.26 According to Coleman, the musical sense was stifled by efforts to divorce musical pleasure from the medium of the body itself. Before acquiring a love of music, the child needed to develop rhythmic responses to music through dancing and other forms of physical activity. ‘The body’ formed ‘the medium through which musical thought must be expressed’. In order to appreciate music and ‘feel the fullest intellectual and emotional response’, the individual needed to appreciate it at the motor or ‘reflex level’. Thus, in the view of Coleman and other progressive educators, dance and music were related as different manifestations of rhythmic response and appreciation. ‘Physical movements that followed rhythmic patterns improved the sensitivity of the child to musical rhythms and enhanced the emotional experience.’27 The rhythmic conception of music had its roots in the naturalistic aesthetics of Darwin and Spencer. In an age marked by anxieties about masculinity, ‘overcivilization’, and the passivity of modern life, the focus on the rhythmic component of music refurbished Victorian assumptions about the authenticity of aesthetic emotions

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by pointing to the muscular and action-oriented origins of musical art, and its correspondence with physiological rhythms in the human body, such as the beating of the heart or the circulation of blood through the veins. Associated with cultural practices that spanned the globe, rhythm was defined within a framework of evolutionary science that enabled writers and scientists to tap its ‘primitive’ and corporal qualities without eroding the pillars of civilization. If rhythmic beats stimulated masculine self-awareness and physical awakening, they also structured ideas and more refined aesthetic expression. The proponents of the rhythmic conception thus displayed serious interest in nonEuropean musical practices, but the task of evaluating their musics within nonlinear frameworks would fall upon the shoulders of cultural anthropologists such as Franz Boas and his disciples in the twentieth century. Notes 1 2

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Richard Wallaschek, ‘On the Origin of Music’, Mind 16 (1891), 375–86; idem, Primitive Music: An Inquiry into the Origin and Development of Music, Songs, Instruments, Dances, and Pantomimes of Savage Races (London, 1893). Wallaschek, ‘Origin of Music’, 375–7. [Editors’ note: Wallaschek, Spencer, etc., typically for their time, routinely used ‘man’ for humankind and other forms of sexist language. In this chapter, Brotman has kept to the terms used by his historical actors rather than altering them to gender-neutral categories, but it should go without saying that like every other author in this volume he would avoid such usage himself.] For some exceptions, see Warren Dwight Allen, Philosophies of Music History: A Study of General Histories of Music, 1600–1960 (New York, 1962; 1st edn.1939); Bojan Buji\Ux0107\, ‘Musicology and Intellectual History: A Backward Glance to the Year 1885’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 111 (1984–5), 139–55; Bojan Buji\Ux0107\, ed., Music in European Thought, 1851–1912 (Cambridge, 1988); Edward A. Lippman, A History of Western Musical Aesthetics (Lincoln, NE, and London, 1993); Ruth Solie, ‘Melody and the Historiography of Music’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 43 (1983), 297–308. Wallaschek, ‘Origin of Music’, 382. Although he praised Spencer’s physiological approach to the problem, Wallaschek did not endorse Spencer’s specific theory of the origin of music. Spencer in turn responded to Wallaschek’s arguments in a subsequent contribution: see Herbert Spencer, ‘On the Origin of Music’, Mind 16 (1891), 535–7. For other contributions to the discussion, see James McKeen Cattell, ‘On the Origin of Music’, Mind 16 (1891), 386–8; E. T. Dixon, ‘On the Difference between Time and Rhythm in Music’, Mind, n.s. 4 (1895), 236–9. According to Peter Dale, In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture: Science, Art, and Society in the Victorian Age (Madison, WN, 1989), 31, Spencer was one of the few Victorian positivists who had ‘virtually nothing of significance to say about art’ and was guilty of a ‘radical marginalization’ of it in his philosophy. Nancy Paxton, George Eliot and Herbert Spencer: Feminism, Evolutionism, and the Reconstruction of Gender (Princeton, N.J., 1991), 14, has even suggested that Spencer anticipated ‘the emergence of that great separation between the discourses of literature and modern science’.

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Charles Brotman Herbert Spencer, ‘The Origin and Function of Music’, Fraser’s Magazine [1857], repr. in idem, Essays: Scientific, Political, Speculative, 2 vols. (London, 1863), II. 400–451; Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols. (London, 1871), I. 205; idem, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (London, 1872). Peter Gay, The Naked Heart: The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud (New York, 1995), 11–35; Frank M. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge, 1993); Bernard Lightman, The Origins of Agnosticism: Victorian Unbelief and the Limits of Knowledge (Baltimore, 1987); Herbert Spencer, An Autobiography, 2 vols. (New York, 1904), I. 171; Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–1881, ed. Nora Barlow (New York, 1958), 138, 61. Margaret Glyn, The Rhythmic Conception of Music (London, 1907). T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York, 1981); Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization (Chicago, 1995). Herbert Spencer, First Principles of a New System of Philosophy (New York, 1865), 325, 317, 328; idem, Principles of Psychology, 123. Dorothy Ross, The Psychologist as Prophet (Chicago, 1972), 158; Thaddeus Bolton, Rhythm (Worcester, MA, 1894; repr. from American Journal of Psychology, 6 (1893); thesis, Clark University, 1895), 2–3; Glyn, The Rhythmic Conception of Music, 138; George Lansing Raymond, Rhythm and Harmony in Poetry and Music (London, 1895), 9; Charles Brodie Patterson, The Rhythm of Life (New York, 1915), 25. Edmund Gurney, The Power of Sound (London, 1880); James Sully, Sensation and Intuition: Studies in Psychology and Aesthetics (London, 1874). C. Hubert H. Parry, The Art of Music (London, 1893), 6–8; Carl Engel, Musical Instruments (London, 1875); John Frederick Rowbotham, ‘Art of Music,’ Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 10 (1880), 380–89; idem, A History of Music to the Time of the Troubadours (London, 1893); A. F. MocklerFerryman, Up the Niger: Narrative of Claude MacDonald’s Mission to the Niger and Benue Rivers, West Africa (London, 1892), 265; J. W. Powell, ‘Evolution of Music from Dance to Symphony’, Science 14 (1889), 244–9, esp. 246; Allen, Philosophies of Music History, 297. Wallaschek, Primitive Music, 272, 270. Ibid. Wallaschek, ‘On the Origin of Music,’ 377; idem, Primitive Music, 232, 244, 274–6. Ibid., 278. James H. Tufts, ‘On the Genesis of the Aesthetic Categories,’ The Philosophical Review, 7 (1903), 12; Ernest Crawley, Dress, Drinks, and Drums: Further Studies of Savages and Sex (London, 1931), 248–9, 247. Wallaschek, Primitive Music, 279–280; J. Donovan, Music and Action, or The Elective Affinity between Rhythm and Pitch: A Psychological Essay on a New Principle of Explanation for the Genesis and Development of Music (London, 1889), 11, 15–16; idem, ‘I. The Festal Origins of Human Speech’, Mind 16 (1891), 500–501; idem, ‘II. The Festal Origins of Human Speech,’ Mind, n.s. 1 (1892), 326. By ‘serviceable associated habit’, Donovan meant the theory that habits initially developed by an organism in response to certain conditions could become associated with inheritable emotions. Darwin offered this as one of his three explanations of the emotions in Expression of Emotions. See Robert Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago, 1987), 232.

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Donovan, Music and Action, 11, 21. On the effort to negotiate between ‘primitive manliness’ and ‘civilization’, see Bederman, Manliness and Civilization. William James, ‘What is an Emotion?’ Mind 9 (1884), 188–205; Sue Campbell, ‘Emotion as an Explanatory Principle in Early Evolutionary Theory’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 28 (1997), 466. Many critics of James’s theory argued that it offered an insufficient account of aesthetic emotions because it focused too narrowly on stronger emotions such as anger and fear. See Edmund Gurney, ‘What is an Emotion?’, Mind 9 (1884), 421–6. One could argue that the rhythmic theory of music partly muted this criticism of James by narrowing the gap between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ emotions. Carrie Ransom Squire, A Genetic Study of Rhythm (Worcester, MA, 1901), 98; Halbert Hains Britan, ‘The Power of Music’, Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, 5 (1908), 355–7; idem, The Affective Consciousness (New York, 1931); Helen Huss Parkhurst, ‘The Evolution of Mastery’, International Journal of Ethics, 30 (1920), 412, 413–16. Glyn, Rhythmic Conception of Music. G. Stanley Hall, ‘The Pedagogy of Music,’ in idem, Educational Problems, 2 vols. (New York, 1911), I. 91–135; R. R. Rideout, ‘On Early Applications of Psychology in Music Education,’ Journal of Research in Music Education, 30 (1982), 141–50; Edith Somervell, A Rhythmic Approach to Mathematics (London, 1906). Satis N. Coleman, Creative Music for Children: A Plan of Training Based on the Natural Evolution of Music (New York, 1922). On Coleman’s activity at the Lincoln School, see William Mathis, ‘The Emergence of Simple Instrument Experiences in Early Kindergartens’, Journal of Research in Music Education, 20 (1972), 255–61. Coleman, Creative Music, 20, 29, 171, 83, 90.

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CHAPTER 13

Dangerous Liaisons: Science, Amusement and the Civilizing Process Otniel E. Dror

From the 1860s, the modern laboratory and its gentlemanly scientists became fascinated with disruptive emotions and disorderly feelings and attempted to discipline them. Machines encountered sentiments; experimenters standardized the joke; laboratory organisms, such as rats, rabbits, cats and dogs were fondled and caressed in managing and disciplining their emotions; and scientists engaged in feminized emotion-talk. Emotion was quantified, temporized, purified and preserved, and was gradually incorporated into the general schema of the body-as-machine. In the chapter that follows, I argue that the modern laboratory engaged in the construction of a new type of ‘civilized’ emotion. I draw on Norbert Elias’s and Erik Dunning’s characterization—in the context of the civilizing process—of modern sport as a locus for the production of a ‘controlled de-controlling of emotions’ in order to study the transformation of emotions into objects of knowledge inside the modern laboratory. I argue that on an archeological level the laboratory was not opposed to the culture of leisure and sport—as nineteenth-century scientists and recent historical literature has argued—but participated in a similar and parallel construction of a new form of ‘civilized’ emotion.1 In reading the laboratory of emotions, I follow a suggestion made by Edward Boring in the mid 1920s, when the National Research Council convened a confidential Committee and Conference on the Experimental Study of Human Emotions. ‘The first thing to do’, Boring suggested, ‘is to bring together all the people who are working on emotion and let them tell what they are doing . . . Then you will find out what in the world emotion is that can be investigated.’2 This is, partially, the approach that I adopt here. I study experimenters who attempted to operationalize emotions as objects of laboratory knowledge, by shifting between different loci where science encountered the jest, and where the discipline of the laboratory encountered the disorder of emotions. The chapter begins with an exploration of the oppositional representation of the relationship between modern leisure and the laboratory—as understood by a cohort of

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late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century emotion-focused investigators. I then show that the study of emotions entailed the creation of multiple and unique moments in which inimical cultural motifs—from science and leisure—were juxtaposed inside the laboratory. These disruptive moments and configurations produced momentary states of a ‘controlled de-controlling of the emotions’ and positioned the laboratory not in opposition to leisure—as early-twentieth-century experimenters sought—but as full participants in the same civilizing process. In this sense, both the laboratory and the culture of leisure and sport contributed to and participated in the same social predicaments and created similar types of ‘civilized’ emotions. Embodiments of Science, Embodiments of Emotion When we used to experiment upon the emotions in the psychological laboratory, we had all the equipment for it except the emotions. The shining kymograph stood ready with its smoked drum, the marker was adjusted, and the stage was seductively set for any passion to emerge, appropriately labeled, and be measured. But it usually declined to appear. How often have I stood poised to record the disturbance wrought by hate or deadly fear, only to find that my subject, far from being hateful or afraid, was slipping into a comfortable nap! It was like Alice ready to play croquets, only to see the wickets and balls stretch their legs and saunter away.3

On November 1900 Francis Gano Benedict—future director of the Carnegie Nutrition Laboratory—began his experiment by ‘carefully avoid[ing]. . . all nervous excitement’. For four days he spent most of his time ‘at the chemical laboratory in experimental work’. Then, on 24 November, he attended ‘one of the great intercollegiate football games’.4 At noon on November 25, Benedict concluded his experiment on the effects of ‘nervous excitement’. His ‘careful diary’ and ‘habits of life’ were published in the American Journal of Physiology. Alongside Benedict’s daily estimates of his ‘degree of nervous excitement’ were daily (sometimes tri-daily) analyses of his collected urine; each day brought its tallied excitements and its collected urine. While Benedict’s diary expressed his introspective and intangible inner excitements in words, his voided urine—distilled from his body’s innards—contained a material and tangible trace of his emotions. Such, at least, was Benedict’s hypothesis when he conjoined his collected urine with his tallied excitements. Although Benedict failed to procure from his urine a material trace of his inner excitements, ‘it is by no means certain’, he concluded, ‘that long continued anger, sorrow, or fear would not produce disturbances’.5 Benedict’s meticulous and detailed protocol did not specify the particular nature of the first phase of his experiment inside the chemical laboratory. During this crucial initial phase, Benedict measured and determined the effects of absent emotions on his urine. He assumed, like his readers, that his embodied ‘experimental work’ guaranteed that the ‘subject’—Benedict’s alias for himself—was devoid of emotion. During the second phase of Benedict’s experiment, the ‘subject’ left the laboratory

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and attended an intercollegiate football game. Here, his embodied excitements would, he had hoped, produce a materialized representation in his urine. Benedict’s personal voyage from the world of the laboratory (zero emotion) to the culture of leisure (excitement) was both a physical and emotional journey: from emotionless to emotional, from laboratory to field, from work to leisure, and from science to feelings. His seemingly easy displacement from the laboratory to the football stadium, and from the culture of science to the culture of leisure, masked the conceptual and representational chasm that separated these two cultural enclaves: the laboratory was the privileged site for emotionless knowledge; the football stadium represented its antithesis.6 Other experimenters also travelled from the laboratory to the football stadium. Like Benedict, they regarded their extra-laboratory sojourns as opportunities for embodied excitements.7 Their private journeys from laboratory to football stadium instantiated the emotional difference between laboratory and extra-laboratory, work and leisure, science and emotion in their own bodies. As John F. Fulton, the renowned Yale physiologist, wrote in his diary in November 1930: A rather hectic week with the Yale–Harvard game as a climax. It is rather a relief to have the football season over so that one can again begin to live normally! I enjoy watching football, and it has the virtue of bringing one into the open, but it is almost as strenuous for the onlookers as it is for the players.8

Or as Walter B. Cannon, head of the Department of Physiology at the Harvard Medical School, divulged in his diaries: the excitement of attending an intercollegiate football game induced a secretion of glucose in his urine. Among American researchers on emotions, the football game was a particularly popular and readily accessible extra-laboratory site for mining emotions.9 One of the major reasons for leaving the laboratory and collecting specimens of emotions from football stadiums was the perception that laboratory-produced emotions were not as authentic as emotions in real-life situations. Various laboratorybased experimenters discussed the difficulties involved in procuring genuine emotions inside the laboratory. As Frederick Lund explained in his comprehensive 1939 survey, Emotions: Their Psychological, Physiological and Educative Implications: ‘the production of genuine emotional states under laboratory conditions ha[s] proved much more difficult when dealing with humans than when dealing with animals’.10 Although the modern laboratory had successfully produced a certain number of emotions, particularly in animals (for instance fear or rage), it failed quite dramatically to induce real emotions in human subjects under experimental conditions. How could one produce genuine joy, embarrassment or shame in the setting of the laboratory? Even fear, the most investigated of emotions (together with anger), was often uninducible in the laboratory setting.11 Authentic ‘pleasant’ emotions were even more difficult to generate in the laboratory than unpleasant ones, except in children.12

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Moreover, many ‘subtle’ emotions either could not be evoked at all or, if they were generated, could not be standardized, because their method of production entailed complex experimenter–subject interactions (such as a ‘heart-to-heart talk’).13 Reported observations from outside the laboratory only reinforced these tensions by demonstrating that emotions outside were much more intense than emotions produced inside the laboratory.14 The de-emotional status of the laboratory was detrimental to the production of emotional excitement (and to a science of emotions). These practical difficulties of researchers on emotions implicitly reified the special status of the laboratory, even as experimenters failed in their objectives. The failure of the laboratory was, in a sense, one of its greatest symbolic achievements and successes. It reified the laboratory’s standing as a space uncontaminated by feelings. Exiting the laboratory was a practical solution for the difficulties imposed by the laboratory and, symbolically, a passage from non-emotion to emotion; a voyage that reified the emotional difference between inside and outside. This division along the emotional axis—between intra- and extra-laboratory— resonated with a broader shift in the emotional topography of the late nineteenth century. From the late nineteenth century—and in contrast to the mid-Victorian period—emotional expression and display were increasingly restrained, in all but a few social enclaves. Sports spectatorship, the cinema, the new consumerism and the booming amusement-park industry—to list but a few of the numerous modes of modern leisure—were sanctioned sites for the induction and production of emotions in the midst of a culture that emphasized restraint.15 If in Victorian culture leisure and non-leisure were perceived as relatively continuous, in post-Victorian culture (and by the 1920s) leisure became ‘almost deliberately antagonistic to’ the norms of daily life. Consumerism began to acquire a potential passion of its own, particularly for middle-class women, and sports, ‘the male flip-side of consumerism’, allowed the new corporate man to express a different set of emotions—those excluded from ordinary work-life.16 Modern ‘emotionology’ thus created a social topography of emotional expression and restraint. As one moved between different social sites, one traversed lines of emotional demarcation. These demarcations dictated the rules of emotional behavior and reflected and reinscribed important social distinctions, such as those between private and public or leisure and work. The embodied and experienced opposition between leisure and laboratory, and its reification through scientific protocols and voyages of displacement, created an essential tension when experimenters began to produce emotional states, not by exiting the laboratory but inside its emotionless spaces. Poetry in the Laboratory The induction of affective states inside the laboratory engaged a broad and dispersed collective of physiologists, psychologists and clinicians. These ‘emotionologists’

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followed divergent paths and came to emotions from a variety of perspectives and disciplines. Physicians usually focused on the relationships between affective states and disease. They generated emotions in their clinics or laboratories as challenge tests— for diagnostic purposes—or in the course of experiments on the emotional etiology of various somatic pathologies. Some, for example, induced emotional excitement in their patients during routine clinical encounters, in order to test their patients’ somatic reactions to slight emotional stimulation. The deliberate induction of an emotion during a clinical encounter uncovered various pathological reactions that were hidden from the physician’s view during the standardized non-emotional examination.17 As Edward Stieglitz explained in 1930, during a routine blood pressure measurement one of his patients gave normal (calm) values of 135/80; but ‘on embarrassment’ her blood pressure jumped to a pathological value of 190/120.18 Some clinicians were interested in exploring various physiological mechanisms of psychosomatic disease. They transformed their clinics into a ‘testing ground where . . . anger [might be] aroused or situations of frustration created for the sake of observation’.19 Harold G. Wolff’s group at the New York Hospital–Cornell Medical Center, for example, was famous for its experimental studies on emotions and various organic diseases. Other clinicians strove to model human emotions in laboratory animals, in order to extrapolate from their animals to their patients.The celebrated Cleveland surgeon George W. Crile, for example, modelled the emotional trauma of patients during a routine hospital stay by subjecting his dogs to fear and anger with a whip.20 Laboratory-based experimenters also produced emotions in a range of different contexts. Some induced emotions in the context of the collective effort to standardize routine physiological measurements. Arthur Grollman of the Johns Hopkins University, for example, deliberately evoked emotions in his subjects, in order to determine the momentary effects that emotions might have on standard cardiac output determinations in humans. 21 Others evoked emotions in the context of various theoretical debates concerning the mechanism of emotions, or in order to measure the emotional development of children, the emotional status of psychiatric patients or the emotional stability of army recruits. As E. W. Scripture explained in 1908: ‘for the nervous patients who come to us it is just as necessary to know how emotional they are as it is for the general practitioner to know how high is the temperature in a case of fever’. 22 These and countless other experimenters and clinicians depended on a constant and reliable source of emotions—an emotion-generating technology that would produce emotions on demand—in spite of the artificiality of the laboratory and clinic. One fundamental characteristic of the diverse techniques for generating emotions inside the laboratory was the paradoxical juxtaposition of science and entertainment. Although the laboratory constructed its unique epistemological status by excluding emotions—and in opposition to the culture of amusement and entertainment— paradoxically, it depended on the creation of moments of leisure and entertainment inside its sober and respectable spaces. The production of emotion inside the

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laboratory depended on the confrontation between these antithetical cultures and social milieus, and on a tenuous balance between amusement and science. On a practical level, experimenters produced emotions by introducing elements from leisure culture—moving chairs, fake animals, movies and even live snakes—into the confines of the laboratory. The successful creation and study of emotions inside the laboratory literally depended on this encounter between science and leisure, between the world of amusement and laboratory life, or on the introduction of art into the laboratory. As J. S. Lombard explained in his 1879 treatise Experimental Researches on the Regional Temperature of the Head: ‘[Among] emotional conditions only one class has been found available for strict experimental examination. It is that condition of the mind which is brought about by the reading or recitation [inside the laboratory] . . . of poetical or prose productions of an emotional character.’23 Other experimenters, such as Alfred Binet, Christian Ruckmick, Annette Felekey and Carney Landis, for example, also relied on the confrontation of Art and Science inside the laboratory as a technique for generating emotions. A different set of technologies borrowed elements directly from the culture of entertainment, and even resorted to black humour. Ruse, deception and mimicry mingled with scientific method in tricking the naive subject. ‘Anxiety, grief or anger’, one commentator remarked, are induced through ‘information about imaginary deaths, supposed accidents, unhappy future prospects or the like’.24 Deceptions ranged from simple set-ups to more sophisticated ones. Occasionally, meticulous stage instructions, a supporting cast and special props were necessary in order to ‘make the deception truly convincing’, as one psychologist emphasized. 25 In the simple deception, while a naïve subject participated in a routine experiment, an anonymous collaborator, following a preconceived plan, ‘suddenly enters into the laboratory and announces that there is fire . . . in the staircase . . . . We [the experimenters], r[u]n . . . [while the subject] . . . stay[s] immobile in the apparatus’. Or as one physiologist outlined his strategy: while the subject is seated in the laboratory ‘the professor in charge of the department . . . enter[s] the laboratory and accuse[s] the subject . . . of laxity in his work in the physiology course’.26 Measurements are taken before and after the false accusation. More complex deceptions included ‘sham’ instruments. These were technologies that mimicked real instruments, but whose function had been altered by the experimenters. Elaborate blueprints were provided in some of the protocols. This particular method resonated with a typical mode of modern amusement, manifest in the amusement-park industry. It entailed the deliberate disruption of the world of work. Alienating technologies were turned into fun-machines and their reconfigured failures of production or function created amusement in the modern park. One such deceptive apparatus in the laboratory was the ‘sham electrode’: When the time comes for the ‘shock’ stimulus . . . [the experimenter] announces: ‘I want to try a powerful electric shock’ . . . the subject is given the handles to hold . . . . Now [the experimenter] says slowly, ‘One-two-three,’ and with ‘three’ throws the switch

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forward, lighting the lamps . . . [the experimenter] turns to [the reactor] and asks, still excitedly. ‘Did you feel it?’ Upon the answer, ‘No,’ he says: ‘There must be something wrong,’ and turns to examine the box. He picks up the [prearranged] loose end of wire, saying ‘Loose connection,’ . . . . Then the connection is actually repaired . . . . Again ‘One-two-three,’ but an explosion results . . . [the experimenter] explaining that the fuse was blown.27

There were many fabricated scenes in these laboratories: false accusations, imaginary fires in the building, ‘unpleasant communications’ such as an ‘unfaithful consort [or] unpleasant telegram’, and occasionally, as one psychologist put it, a ‘cock-and-bull story’.28 Failures to generate emotions were due to unsuccessful pranks. As John Whitehorn reported: ‘In general, the subject immediately appreciated the artificiality of’ a sudden gesture with the fist. The search for a universal ‘sure-fire joke’ was also unattainable. The use of these borrowed stimuli and motifs, such as the ‘trick of breaking over the forehead of the [subject] an egg that had previously been “blown” and filled with cold water’ moved the laboratory dangerously close to those social milieus against which it had constructed its unique epistemological status.29 It produced an uneasy balance in the midst of the experimental sciences but created an essential tension, which on the one hand generated rich and authentic emotions, and on the other hand allowed the experimenters to control these emotions and produce knowledge. At times, the experimenters themselves remarked, in passing, on their own selfconsciously comic approach to the experiment or on the comic constituents of the protocol. These vaudevillian moments—instructing subjects to insert hands into buckets filled with cow brains or ‘kicking persons in the shin’—could, on occasion, evoke amusement in the experimenters.30 These and other potentially disruptive moments were contained by strictly adhering to the structural framework of protocols—replication, standardization, tabulation and so forth, and by the austere and poised countenance of the experimenters in their photographic depiction of laboratory situations. These photographic representations convey the concoction of the comic and the austere. Thus, comic aspects were rendered institutionally respectable through protocols, procedures, a formalized language and deadpan portrayals of potentially hilarious situations. Experimenters represented the precariousness of this balance, the containment of potentially disruptive phenomena, by depicting the ever-present danger of sudden loss of control over the protocol. The production of emotions inside the laboratory occasionally led to a disorderly moment. During these disorderly moments, the generative balance or tension between laboratory control and emotional disruption was lost, and the experimenter produced ‘emotions’ that overcame the laboratory. The controlled subject would then spin out of control, either tearing down the apparatus or using profane language. As Carney Landis reported from his protocols, ‘some subjects became angry and tore the electrode from the arm throwing it toward the experimenters’.31 Others described the violent cries, struggles and strong emotional reactions of subjects to some of the stimuli. Christian Ruckmick had ‘enraged students to the point that they said that they could almost kill me’. Several

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experimenters restrained their subjects in order to maintain control over their laboratories and protocols during emotions.32 These tensions between laboratory control and emotion were also visible in the selection of subjects for experiments on emotions. As one physiologist explained in 1920: ‘The study of the influence of emotional strain . . . offers some difficulties due to the fact that the emotions cannot be readily controlled, nor are the subjects of extreme emotion readily amenable to experimentation.’33 Potentially productive subjects, individuals who were easily brought to states of emotion inside the laboratory, were, by definition, inappropriate subjects from the perspective of knowledge and control. The laboratory of emotions deliberately created high-risk situations that always bordered on the dividing line between control and emotion or between order and disorder. ‘Control’ and ‘emotion’ were concepts that articulated opposing facets of the laboratory. Emotion was the nemesis of control. Civilizing Emotions The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a transitional period for emotions. Late Victorians positioned emotions in complicated and contradictory roles. On the one hand they maintained the importance of having strong emotions, and on the other hand they demanded that these emotions be channeled to particular purposes—that they be controlled. This transitional vision for emotion contrasted with more stable views that either promoted intense emotional fervour above all or attempted to eliminate emotions altogether.34 The laboratory of emotion was methodologically situated in a somewhat precarious position. It was the ideal site for disciplining the passions (in the experimenters as well as in the objects of knowledge), yet it demanded and produced states of disorder—even loss of control—defined in terms of ‘emotions’ by the experimenters. The combination of release and control, of a controlled creation of loss of control, was not limited to the laboratory of emotions. The struggles with and attempts to create controlled emotions were also enacted in the emerging world of mass sport spectatorship, in the amusement-park industry and in the literature on the management of emotions. The creation of fabricated realities, the subversion of modern technologies, the construction of closed enclaves in which modern technologies manipulated affective states, and the exercise of non-genteel deportment typified the emerging world of mass amusement. Like experimenters in laboratories of emotions, amusement-park owners were also interested in controlling and determining the affects of their subjects. Coney Island, to take one prominent example, turned all the values of its time upside-down: it challenged Victorian gentility, turned engines of work into joymachines, spectacle and chaos, and presented landscapes of fantasy in enclosed, almost utopian enclaves.35 It participated, together with the laboratory, in a controlled generation of disorderly states.

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In their study of the Quest for Excitement, Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning have argued that industrialized societies demand that people keep fairly firm hold on their affects and emotions in their daily lives. Leisure activities, on the other hand, are designed to arouse feelings. While excitement is curbed in the pursuit of business life, leisure pursuits are meant to elicit excitement. They are designed, as Elias and Dunning put it, to produce a ‘controlled de-controlling of emotions’.36 In leisure one needs to reconcile ‘two contradictory functions’: the ‘de-controlling of human feelings, the full evocation of . . . excitement on the one hand, and . . . the maintenance of a set of checks to keep the de-controlled emotions under control’.37 Leisure is a situation of restraint that is imposed in spite of the fact that emotions are stirred. Thus social relations that seem to be mutually exclusive— control and release of emotions—are revealed in the context of sport, for example, to be ‘complexly interdependent’. The laboratory of emotions, I would suggest, participated in the same cultural and social processes that Elias and Dunning have identified in the world of leisure and sport. Experimenters on emotions also managed and created a tension between emotion as disorder and emotion as an object that must be controlled. They produced controlled moments of loss of control, and, like the culture of leisure and sport, a controlled—civilized—emotion. Epilogue: Order and Disorder In their discussion of ‘Orders and Their Others’, Mark Berg and Stefan Timmermans have argued that ‘orders do not emerge out of (and thereby replace) a preexisting disorder. Rather, with the production of an order, a corresponding disorder comes into being . . . . The order and its disorder . . . are engaged in a spiraling relationship—they need and embody each other.’38 In the course of laboratory protocols on emotions, the opposition between laboratory control and emotional disorder was articulated and enacted at the level of discrete laboratory practices, the interpretation of various events inside the laboratory as ‘emotion’, and the configuration or technical arrangement of experimental protocols. The orders and disorders that materialized during these encounters between laboratory and leisure or science and amusement were not, however, products of the isolated laboratory. They were formulated over a broader historical period, which saw the emergence of the seemingly natural and stable oppositions between laboratory and play, observation and spectacle, science and art, pleasure and knowledge.39 Inside laboratories of emotions, investigators created culturally significant moments that not only explored the boundaries and the relationships between order and disorder but also revealed a more complex stratum in which scientists amused themselves in play, knowledge was founded on deceit, and the laboratory engaged in the carnivalesque.

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Notes This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant no. 0325229). I am grateful for the suggestions and comments of Helen Hills and Penelope Gouk. 1

2 3

4 5 6

7

8

On this opposition and its history, see Peter N. Stearns, American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style (New York, 1994), esp. 264–84. Stearns develops this theme in the context of a naturalized set of emotions that are ‘biologically or psychologically programmed in’. The restraint in official culture led to the ‘demand’ for outlets. Leisure was such a socially constructed emotional outlet (265). See also Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process (New York, 1986); Bill Brown, The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economics of Play (Cambridge, MA, 1996); Judith A. Adams, The American Amusement Park Industry: A History of Technology and Thrills (Boston, 1991). E. Boring to Stratton, 8 March 1926, NAS–NRC Archives Div A&P Rec Grp: DNRC: A&P: ‘Conf on Experimental study of Human Emotions: Second’ 1926 Mar, Washington, DC. Eleanor Rowland Wembridge, ‘Emotion in the Court-Room’, American Mercury, 17 (1929), 48. See also Anon., ‘Students Measure Fear by a Pupilometer: Kick Subject’s shins to Experiment on Anger’, New York Times (24 Nov. 1925), p. 27 col. 4; William Blatz, A Physiological Study of the Emotion of Fear (PhD diss., Univ. of Chicago, 1924); David Brunswick, ‘The Effect of Emotional Stimuli on the Gastro-Intestinal Tone: I. Methods and Technique’, Journal of Comparative Psychology, 4 (1924), 19–79. Francis Gano Benedict, ‘The Excretion of Nitrogen During Nervous Excitement’, American Journal of Physiology , 6 (1902), 402, 399. Ibid., 401. On the non-emotional status of experimenters and subjects inside the laboratory, see Otniel E. Dror, ‘Creating the Emotional Body: Confusion, Possibilities, and Knowledge’, in Peter N. Stearns and Jan Lewis, eds., An Emotional History of the United States (New York, 1998), 173–94; idem, ‘The Affect of Experiment: The Turn to Emotions in Anglo-American Physiology, 1900–1940,’ Isis 90 (1999), 205–37. Some of these voyagers included Christian Ruckmick, George W. Crile, W. B. Cannon, M. G. Marañon, F. G. Benedict and many more. See e.g. Waldemar Kaempffert, ‘Scientist Proffers Remedy for Habits’, New York Times (28 Dec. 1927), p. 16 col. 2; Wendell S. Dysinger and Christian Ruckmick, The Emotional Responses of Children to the Motion Picture Situation (New York, 1933); New York Times (29 Dec. 1922), p. 3 col. 3. World Wars I and II were also occasions for collecting specimens of emotions. However, practically all of the literature on the wars focused on pathology rather than normal emotional excitement and the emotions of everyday life. On war, see e.g. Walter B. Cannon to E. Wittkower, 15 Nov. 1940; Walter B. Cannon to E. Wittkower, 23 April 1941. Both are in folder 791, box 60, Walter Bradford Cannon Papers (H MS c40), Rare Books and Special Collections, Harvard Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Boston, MA (hereafter WBC). All WBC materials are cited with permission of the Harvard Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine. Entry for 17–23 Nov. 1930. John F. Fulton Diary, 8 Aug. 1930 – 19 Aug. 1931, Series I, John Farquhar Fulton Papers, Manuscript Group 1236, Manuscript & Archives, Yale University, New Haven. Quoted with permission.

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10

11 12

13

14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

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Entry for 23 Nov. 1913, Diary 1911–1914, box 167, WBC. See also Edmond J. Farris, ‘Increase in Lymphocytes in Healthy Persons under Certain Emotional States’, American Journal of Anatomy, 63 (1938), 297–323; H. T. Edwards, T. K. Richards and D. B. Dill, ‘Blood Sugar, Urine Sugar and Urine Protein in Exercise’, American Journal of Physiology, 98 (1931), 352–6. Frederick H. Lund, Emotions: Their Psychological, Physiological and Educative Implications (New York, 1939), 97. On these difficulties, see also Christian A. Ruckmick, ‘Emotions in Terms of the Galvanometric Technique’, British Journal of Psychology, 21 (1930), 151; and references cited in n. 3 above. See Otniel E. Dror, ‘Is the Mind a Scientific Object of Study? Lessons from History’, in Christina E. Erneling and David M. Johnson, eds., The Mind as a Scientific Object: Between Brain and Culture (Oxford, forthcoming). A. Binet and J. Courtier, ‘Influence de la vie émotionnelle sur le cœur, la respiration et la circulation capillaire’, L’Année psychologique, 3 (1896), 67, 87. See J. C. Whitehorn, M. R. Kaufman and J. M. Thomas, ‘Heart Rate in Relation to Emotional Disturbances’, Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, 33 (1935), 716. Binet and Courtier, ‘Influence de la vie’, 67, 87; Whitehorn, Kaufman and Thomas, ‘Heart Rate’, 716, 717. H. I. Schou, Some Investigations into the Physiology of Emotions, Acta psychiatrica et neurologica: Supplementum, 14 (Copenhagen and London, 1937), 28, also argued that a conversation always entailed ‘mixed emotions’. See e.g. Don P. Morris, ‘The Effects of Emotional Excitement on Pulse, Blood Pressure, and Blood Sugar of Normal Human Beings’, Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, 7 (1935), 415; Frank Bolles Wakeman, Some Biochemical Aspects of Emotional States (PhD diss., Catholic Univ. of America, 1935). Stearns, American Cool, esp. 264–84. Ibid., 272. Stearns also mentions more open sexuality and looser language (curses) as domains in which emotional intensity was allowed expression. See Dror, ‘Creating the Emotional Body’. Edward J. Stieglitz, ‘Emotional Hypertension’, American Journal of the Medical Sciences, 179 (1930), 777. For additional cases, see 777–8. Helen Goodell and Isabel Bishop Wolff, ‘The Influence on Medicine and Neurology of Harold G. Wolff, M.D.’, Cornell University Medical College Alumni Quarterly (Spring 1970), 8. George Crile, ‘Surgical Aspects of Graves’ Disease with Reference to the Psychic Factor’, Annals of Surgery, 47 (1908), 866. Arthur Grollman, ‘Physiological Variations in the Cardiac Output of Man: IV. The Effect of Psychic Disturbances on the Cardiac Output, Pulse, Blood Pressure, and Oxygen Consumption of Man’, American Journal of Physiology, 89 (1929), 584–8. E. W. Scripture, ‘Detection of the Emotions by the Galvanometer’, Journal of the American Medical Association, 50 (1908), 1164. J. S. Lombard, Experimental Researches on the Regional Temperature of the Head under Conditions of Rest, Intellectual Activity, and Emotion (London, 1879), 175. Schou, Some Investigations, 8. Brunswick, ‘The Effect of Emotional Stimuli’, 44. Binet and Courtier, ‘Influence de la vie’, 73; Grollman, ‘Physiological Variations’, 585. See also Angelo Mosso, Fear [1884], trans. from the 5th edn. by E. Lough and F. Kiesow (London, New York and Bombay, 1896), 79.

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Index Aberdeen Music Society 193, 194 Aberdeen Philosophical Society 194, 196, 202 acedia 43 aesthetic delight 56 affect 17, 19, 21, 23, 54 architecture and 89–104 art and 69–83 Giotto’s Lamentation 28, 70–77, 83 Piero’s Pala Montefeltro 28, 77–83 music and 26–7, 31 affections 17, 26–7, 53, 54, 145, 174, 176, 178, 216 affetti see affect Alberti, Leon Battista 21, 22, 28–9, 89, 160 On the Art of Building (De re aedificatoria) 28, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93–104 Escapes from Trouble (Profugiorum ab aerumna) 89, 90–93 On Painting (De pictura and Della Pittura) 72, 77, 90 d’Alembert, Jean Le Rond 173 Allen, Warren Dwight 212 altruism 52 ambition, historiography of 36 anachronism 37–8 anger 37, 39, 41, 50, 51, 71, 90, 225, 228, 229 historiography of 36, 37 animals 55 laboratory 227 music and 176, 210, 213 Annesley, Dr 130 Antal, Friedrich 161 anthropology, emotions and see emotions, anthropology and anxiety 50, 52–3, 55, 56, 228 historiography of 40, 42 Archer, Isaac 127 architecture 21, 89–104 beauty in 94, 96, 97, 100–101 concinnitas and 94, 101, 102–3 development of civilization and 89–90 Florence Cathedral 91–3 modernity and 89 number and 94, 101

pleasure and 93–4, 98–9, 103 relationships in 98 Roman 99 social purposes of 90, 94–5 spirituality and 91–2 Arianism 130, 131 Aristotelianism 24, 34, 60 Aristotle 15, 91, 94, 96, 197, 199 Arminianism 129 Armon-Jones, Claire 131 Arnaud, François 178–80, 183, 184 Arnold, Magda B. 53, 54, 60 art 18, 21, 39, 56, 69–83, 178 see also individual artists atheism 131 atomism 70 attention 179 attitudes to emotions see emotions, history of attitudes to Auden, W. H. 42 Austin, John Langshaw 40, 50 Averill, James 42 aversion, 144 awe 59, 93–4 Baier, Annette 141 Bakhtin, Mikhail 37 Bartky, Sandra 150 Basire, James 161 Battersby, Christine 19, 22, 29–30 Baxandall, Michael 78 Baxter, Richard 128 Beattie, James 194 beauty 93–4, 97, 181 in architecture 94, 96, 97, 100–101 Beck, Ulrich 42 Beethoven, Ludwig van 56, 215, 217 behaviour, instinct 51–2 Bellanges, Jacques, Magdalene in Ecstasy 112 Belting, Hans 74 Benedict, Francis Gano 224–5 Berg, Mark 231 Beszard, Lucien 37 Binet, Alfred 228 Blair, Hugh 198 Blake, William 60

248

Index

blood 157, 165 Boas, Franz 219 Boccaccio, Giovanni 155 body 17, 19, 21–2, 27, 29, 70, 90, 144, 159–60, 175, 178 see also senses Boerhaave, Hermaan 193, 199, 200, 202 Bolton, Thaddeus 211 Bonnart, Robert 161 Livie Impératrice 162 Bonnot de Condillac, Étienne 176 Bordeu, Théophile de 177 boredom 37, 50, 51, 52, 58 Boring, Edward 223 Bouwsma, William 42 Braidotti, Rosi 140 Britan, Hans Halbert 216 Brotman, Charles 19, 22, 31, 32, 203 Brown, John 197 Brown, Mary Elizabeth 212 Browning, Robert 36 Brunelleschi, Filippo 102 Buddhism 50 Bunyan, John 55 Burckhardt, Jacob 36, 38, 39, 42 Burke, Peter 16, 27, 33 Calvinism 20, 29 illness and 200, 202 liberal 196, 202 music and 193 original sin doctrine and 123, 124–31 Campbell, Sue 216 Cannon, Walter B. 225 capitalism 19 Cartesianism 30, 60, 70 Catholicism 19, 29, 30, 142 Catholic Reformation 110, 113 original sin doctrine and 124 the soul 175 Charlemont, Lord 161 Charleton, Walter 41 Chastellux, François-Jean, Marquis de 182–3 Chaucer, Geoffrey 17 children, original sin doctrine and 123, 125–6, 128, 130 Christ 28, 54, 78, 80–83, 110, 115–17, 127, 130–31 Passion of see Passion of Christ Christianity 19, 25, 127 Chubb, Thomas 131

Churchill, Charles 164 Cicero 96, 97 Cimabue, Lamentation 75 civilization 223, 230–31 architecture and 89–90, 95 music and 191, 197, 199–203 class see social class Clegg, James 128–9 Clerk, John 192 climate 58 codes, emotions and see emotions and codes Coe, William 129 cognitivist theories 52 Coleman, Satis 218 collocation 101 comparison 91, 96 concinnitas, architecture and 94, 100, 101, 102–3 Conrad, Stephan 196, 202 consciousness, music and 176–7 consolation, emotions and 61 constructionism 43, 57, 61 contemplative prayer 81 contrasts, discernment of 96 control see discipline Cook, Harold 202 Corelli, Arcangelo 198 Correggio, Antonio 158, 161, 164, 167 Cowper, John 55 Coypel, Charles Antoine, Adrienne Lecouvreur as Cornelia 161, 163 Crawley, Ernest 214 Crile, George W. 227 Cullen, William 191, 202 culture 59, 126 see also emotions and culture Cunningham, Andrew 193, 202 curiosity 51 Damasio, Antonio 50 dance 213, 217 Dante Alighieri 17, 76 Darwin, Charles 31, 32, 210, 211, 213, 214, 216, 218 de Certeau, Michel 113 Deism 130, 131 Delumeau, Jean 37, 38, 41, 42 depression 24, 55, 62 Derrida, Jacques 76, 116 Descartes, René 15, 18, 41, 59, 60, 109, 110, 144, 145, 150 desire 30, 53, 90, 144, 156–7, 164

Index despair 55 devotion contemplative prayer and 81 private 77, 78, 113 Diderot, Denis 173 dignity 55 discipline (control) of emotions 23–6, 31, 36, 41–2, 60, 92, 191 disgust 55 Dodds, E. H. 42 Dolchi, Carlo 158 Domenichino 158 Donovan, J. 214–15, 216 Dror, Otniel 19, 21, 23, 24, 32, 203 Dryden, John 155–7 dualism 60, 70 duelling 41 Dunning, Erik 223, 231 Dunton, John 130, 131 ear 94, 174, 176, 178, 181–2 Eckhart, Meister 82 Edinburgh 31, 191, 192, 193 Edinburgh Musical Society 194 education 31, 147, 193, 196, 201, 202 music in 201, 217–18 Ekman, Paul 38, 42, 56 Elias, Norbert 23–4, 27, 36, 41, 42, 223, 231 Eliot, George 150 embarrassment 38, 227 emotion meanings of 16–17, 38, 54 see also individual topics emotions architecture and see architecture anthropology and 16, 40, 219 beauty and 93–4, 97, 100–101 codes and 42 consolation and 61 discipline and 23–6, 36, 41–2, 60, 92, 191 experience of 54–5 experiments and 18, 24, 224–31 expression of 21, 26, 49–50, 166–7 extremes of 51, 52, 60 gender and 22, 139–51, 224–31 history of 15–28, 35–44, 59, 53–5 historiography of 16, 36–7, 39–44 intensity of 42–3 language and 40, 43, 49–62 music and see music politics and 36, 60

249

psychology and 38, 40, 50–52, 55, 61, 62 reason and 22, 60, 139–51 repression of see emotions and discipline social class and 36, 55 subjectivity and 49–50, 57, 69, 70 emotional literacy 35 empathy 145 Encyclopédie, writings on music 30, 173, 174–8, 181, 183–4 Engel, Carl 212 Enlightenment 29, 60, 123, 173, 175, 192 ennui see boredom enthusiasm 28, 142, 158, 178–80 envy, historiography of 36 Episcopius, Simon 129 essentialism 41 etymology 16–17, 53 eunuchs 183 evolutionary theories 31, 52, 55, 210 sexual selection 212, 213 experiments on emotions 18, 24, 224–31 expression of emotion 21, 26, 49–50 facial expressions 21, 70, 157–8, 167–8 fear 50, 51, 59, 90, 144, 225 historiography of 37, 41 Febvre, Lucien 35, 36, 37, 38 Federigo da Montefeltro, Duke 78 Felekey, Annette 228 femininity 22 reason–passion and 139–51 see also emotions and gender Fingal 197, 198, 201 Flavel, John 54, 55, 59 Florence 23 Florence Cathedral 91–3 Foucault, Michel 25, 38, 150 Foulis, David 193 fraternity 38 Freud, Sigmund 26, 36, 38, 60 Friesen, W. 42 Fromm, Erich 38 frustration 52 Fulton, John F. 225 Furetière, Antoine 109 Furini, Francesco Magdalene 167 Sigismunda 161, 164 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 83 Gärtner, Christopher 19, 20, 22, 24, 30, 203 Garrick, Mrs 158

250

Index

Gatens, Moira 150 Gay, Peter 36, 38, 210 gender 15, 18, 19, 22 music and 215 reason–passion and 139–51 Gerard, Alexander 194 Gilligan, Carol 149 Giotto di Bondone, Lamentation 28, 56, 70–77, 83 Gluck, Christoph Willibald 30, 173, 178–83, 184 Alceste 178, 180 Armide 181 Glyn, Margaret 31, 211, 217 God 17, 19, 20, 23, 28, 37, 55, 81, 92, 93, 94, 104, 113, 144 Goffman, Erving 43 Gouk, Penelope 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 31 Gracián, Baltasar 41 Gregory, John 20, 21, 23, 31, 191–203 grief 50, 55, 90, 144, 166, 228 Giotto’s Lamentation 70–77, 83 Hogarth’s Sigismunda Mourning 155–68 Grollman, Arthur 227 Grosvenor, Richard 161, 164 guilt 55, 59 original sin doctrine and 29, 124, 125, 126, 127, 130 Gurney, Edmund 212 Hall, G. Stanley 211, 217, 218 harmony 28, 31, 92, 94, 97, 100 Harré, Rom 43 Hartley, L. P. 38 hate 59, 145 health 31, 200 hearing, pleasure of 94, 96 Heidegger, Martin 70, 82 Heinse, Wilhelm 36 Held, Virginia 139 Helmholtz, Hermann von 212 Heyd, Michael 16, 19, 20, 23, 24, 29 Heywood, Oliver 125–6, 130 Hill, Aaron 160 Hills, Helen 19, 21, 22, 23 Hogarth, Jane 157 Hogarth, William 20, 155 The Analysis of Beauty 167 Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism 195 Garrick and his Wife 158 Garrick as Richard III 160

Piquet, or Virtue in Danger 161 A Scene from The Tempest 160 Sigismunda Mourning 30, 155–68 The Three Marys at the Tomb 160 Time Smoking a Picture 161 Home, Henry 53–4, 57, 59 honour 55 Hooker, Joseph Dalton 210 Housman, Mrs H. 123 Hugo, Victor 36 Hui Neng 57 Huizinga, Johan 36, 37, 38, 39, 42 human sacrifice 59 Hume, David 22, 29, 32, 60, 141–7, 202 humility 59, 145 hypochondria 147 hysteria 176 illness 148, 227 hypochondria 147 theories of 199–201 incest 157 individualism 129, 196 instincts, emotions and 51–2 intelligence, emotional 35 irritability 49, 51 James, Susan 145, 150 James, William 51, 216 James-Lange theory of emotion 52 Jastrow, Joseph 211 jealousy, historiography of 37, 39 Johnson, David 193, 198 joy 90, 95, 144, 225 Judovitz, Dalia 17, 19, 29 Jung, Carl 60 Kant, Immanuel 30, 141, 147–8 Kircher, Athanasius 198 Knolles, Richard 16 Krautheimer, Richard 99 La Harpe, Jean François de 180, 181, 183, 184 La Rochefoucauld, Duc de 41 La Tour, Georges de 18, 28, 110–20 The Cheat with the Ace of Clubs 118 The Cheat with the Ace of Diamonds 118 The Denial of St Peter 117–20 The Dice Players 118 The Penitent Magdalene 111 St Peter Repentant 110, 113–16, 119

Index

251

laboratory experiments on emotions 18, 24, 224–31 Lacan, Jacques 38 Lafayette, Madame de 41 Laing, R. D. 38 Landis, Carney 228, 229 language, emotions see emotions and language laughter, historiography of 37 Lawrence, Christopher 192, 200, 202 Le Brun, Charles 15, 21, 41, 83, 157 Expressions of the Passions of the Soul 70, 71 Lecouvreur, Adrienne 161 leisure activities 24–5, 223, 226, 230–31 sport 223, 225, 226 Leites, Edmund 129 Lewis, C. S. 36, 37 literary texts 39, 40–41 Encyclopédie 173, 174–8, 183–4 Lloyd, Genevieve 139–42, 149, 150 Locke, John 57, 131, 145, 176 Lombard, J. S. 228 London 20, 158, 209 love 27, 46, 50, 51, 81, 82, 143, 145, 156–7 historiography of 36–7 rules/codes of 42 Luhmann, Niklas 42 Lund, Frederick 225

see also emotions and gender; masculinity Menuret de Chambaud, Jean-Joseph 174, 175–7, 183 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 69 metaphors 43, 57, 58, 59, 143, 144 Midgley, Mary 60 modernity 69, 70, 82 Monro, Alexander 193 Monteverdi, Claudio 41 Montpellier University 177 morality 20, 129 moral philosophy 141 Müller, Max 57 music 20, 21, 26–7, 28, 56, 58, 92, 101 civilizing process and 191, 197, 199–203 controversies in 173–4, 178–83, 184 Encyclopédie writings on 173, 174–8, 183–4 medicine and 31, 201 national identity and 191, 192–3, 198–9 origins of 32, 209, 210–19 passions and 16, 26, 30, 143 philosophy and 191, 196 primitive 209, 210, 212–14 rhythmic conception of 209–19 in Scotland 191–203 truthfulness and 184 Musset, Alfred de 36

McDougall, William 51 Macpherson, James 198 Magdalene, Mary 110–12, 115, 120, 166 manipulation of emotions 18, 23, 224–31 Marmontel, Jean François 180, 181, 183, 184 masculinity 22, 29 music and 183, 215 reason–passion contrast and 139–51 Master of St Francis, Crucifix 73 materialism 60 mathematics 93 Medici, Nicola de’ 91–2, 93 medicine 15, 16, 23, 31, 173, 175, 177, 191, 202 melancholy 24, 26, 43, 49, 50, 62, 142, 146, 147, 148, 158 historiography of 37 hypochondria and 147 men emotions and 22

Napoleon III, Emperor 36 national identity, music and 191, 192–3, 198–9 nerves 30–32, 176, 177, 192, 197–201, 203 Newton, Isaac 144 Nicholas of Cusa 109 Nietzsche, Friedrich 30, 35, 36, 141, 148 Nilsson, Martin 36, 42 number, architecture and 94, 101 opera 26, 29, 30, 173–4, 178–80, 184 original sin doctrine 23, 29, 123–31 Ossian 197, 198, 201 Padua 72 pain 53, 145, 182 Pandolfini, Agnolo 91–2, 93 ‘paradigm persons’ 58 Paris 20, 171, 203 Parkhurst, Helen Huss 217 Parkhurst, Thomas 130

252 Parry, Hubert 212 Parsons, James 160 passion, passions 17–18, 39, 53, 109–20 and music 26–7, 174–7 reason–passion opposition 139–51 see also emotion; emotions Passion of Christ 17, 18, 53, 72, 109 historiography of 36, 37 in painting of Georges de la Tour 109–20 patriotism 56 Patterson, Charles Brodie 212 Peacock, Francis 193 philosophy 22, 176 history of 139–51, 196 music and 191, 196 Piccini, Nicolò 30 physiology 176, 177, 192 Piero della Francesca, Pala Montefeltro 77–83 Plato 15, 21, 92, 96, 139, 201 Platonism 23, 94 pleasure 53, 96 architecture and 93–5, 98–9, 103 music and 181, 182 philosophy and 146, 201 Plutchik, Robert 56 Pointon, Marcia 19, 20, 24, 30 politics, emotions and 36, 60 Pollock, Dr 193 Porter, Noah 57 power 25–6, 142 pre/trans fallacy 69 pride 145, 157 primitive music 209, 210, 212–14 Pringle, Walter 126 Protestantism 19, 23 illness in 200 music and 193 original sin doctrine and 23, 29, 123, 124–31 Reformation 20, 124, 166, 196 psychology 20, 41 emotions and 38, 40, 50–52, 55, 61, 62 psychosomatic illness 227 Pythagoras 139 Quakerism 30, 142 Rabelais, François 37 Rachman, Stanley 56 Ransom, Carrie Squire 216

Index Raymond, George Lansing 212 reason 22 emotions and 22, 60 Enlightenment and 60 modernity and 70 privileging of 139 Reddy, William 40 reductionism 60, 61 Reformation movements Catholic 110, 113 Protestant 20, 124, 166, 196 Reich, Wilhelm 38 Reid, Thomas 196, 202 religion 19–21, 55, 61, 193 architecture and 92 contemplative prayer 81 imagery 113 see also individual artists original sin doctrine 23, 123–31 Passion of Christ 17, 18, 53, 72, 109 private devotion 77, 78, 113 reason–passion and 142–4, 147 see also Catholicism; Protestantism Reni, Guido 161 representation of emotions 16, 26–7 see also individual topics repression 25 see also discipline (control) of emotions respect 55 revenge 142 Reynolds, Edward 41, 60 Reynolds, Joshua 160 Mrs Abington as Miss Prue 158, 159 rhythmic conception of music 31–2, 209–19 Richards, Graham 16, 17, 26, 27–8, 131 Richardson, Samuel 158 Rokeby, Thomas 126 Roman architecture 99 Romanticism 35, 60 Rose, Nikolas 54–5 Rougemont, Denis de 37 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 15, 30, 147, 174–5, 179, 183, 184, 199 Rowbotham, John Frederick 212 Ruckmick, Christian 228, 229 St Augustine of Hippo 15, 43, 113, 124, 128 St Francis 78 St John the Evangelist 76, 78 St Paul of Tarsus 124 St Peter 110, 113, 115–20 Sartre, Jean-Paul 51

Index Savage, Sarah 128 Saxl, Fritz 39 Schopenhauer, Arthur 149 science 19–20, 223 evolutionary theories 52, 55, 210 sexual selection 212, 213 experiments on emotions 18, 24, 224–31 Scripture, E. W. 227 Schwartz, Michael 18, 19, 28 selfhood 17 self-interest 142 transcendence of see transcendence Senault, Jean François 60 senses music and 174, 175–7, 179–80, 181, 182–3 pleasure of 96 see also individual senses sensibility 192, 200 music and 176, 177, 179, 180, 192, 197, 202 sentimentalism 41, 42 sexual selection 212, 213 sexuality 25, 30, 31, 156, 157, 158, 166 appreciation of arts and 183 see also emotions and gender Sharp, John 126 Sheridan, Thomas 160 sickness see illness sight 91 concinnitas and 102 pleasure of 96 Sinclair, May 150 smell 91 Smith, Christine 92, 94 social class 24 emotions and 36 honour and 55 sociology, emotions and 35, 38 Somervell, Arthur 217, 218 Somervell, Edith 218 sorrow see grief soul 17, 19, 21, 24, 28, 90, 92–3, 94, 103, 118, 164, 177, 178, 181 music and 174–6 sounds 101, 103 sources for history of emotions 39 Sousa, Ronald de 43 specificity of emotions 43 Spencer, Herbert 31, 32, 209–10, 211, 213, 215, 216, 218 Spinoza, Baruch 15, 30, 149–50

253

sport 223, 225, 226 Stahl, Georg Ernst 200 state, growth of 19 Stearns, Carol and Peter 37, 39, 40, 42 Steinberg, Leo 83 Stendhal 36 Stevens, Wallace 15 Stieglitz, Edward 227 Storr, Anthony 38 stress 55 subjectivity 109–10 emotional experience and 49–50, 57, 69, 70 transcendence of see transcendence suffering 93 Sully, James 212 superstition 142, 147 Szasz, Thomas 38 Tait, Andrew 193 tears (weeping) 75, 113, 116, 155, 158, 161, 164, 167–8 theatrical metaphors 43 Thomism 60 Thoresby, Ralph 126 Thornhill, James 161 Timmermans, Stefan 231 transcendence, Giotto’s Lamentation 70–77, 83 translation 38 Trosse, George 128 truthfulness, music and 184 Tufts, James H. 214 universality of emotions 43 Veitch, Marion and William 127 Vester, Heinz-Günter 35 violence 36, 142 ritualization of 41 Virgin Mary 76, 80–82 Vitruvius 90 Voltaire 15 Voss, Hermann 110 Wagner, Richard 217 Wallace, Alfred Russel 212, 213 Wallaschek, Richard 31, 209, 211–14, 216, 217 Walpole, Horace 158, 164, 165–6

254 Warburg, Aby 39 weather 58 Weber, Alfred 36 Weber, Max 36 weeping see tears Weissmann, August 213 Whitehorn, John 229 Whitney, Dwight 57 Whytt, Robert 200 Wierzbicka, Anna 38, 43 Wilber, Ken 69 Wilkes, John 164 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 166 Wise Club 196

Index Wolff, Harold G. 227 women education 147 emotions and 22, 93, 161 music and 215 see also femininity wonder 59, 144 words, emotions and 49–62 worry 36, 52–3, 55, 93 Wright, Thomas 17, 60 Wundt, Wilhelm 212 Zeldin, Theodore 35, 36, 42