Fellow at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at
Queen Mary, University of London
What Use is the History of Emotions?
The history of the emotions can often seem a rather niche field. I sometimes receive incredulous looks when I say I work at a centre dedicated to this research: “The history of emotions? What the hell is that?” But the field is actually not just academically interesting, but practically useful, for psychologists, policy makers, and ordinary people.
The foundational idea is that our emotions are biological responses filtered through beliefs, judgements and values. This is the cognitive theory of the emotions, first put forward by Stoics and Buddhists over two thousand years ago, and more recently championed by constructivists like Robert Solomon, Martha Nussbaum (Nussbaum, 2001), and Lisa Feldman Barrett (Barrett, 2017).
Because our emotions are constructed by beliefs, values and language, different cultures at different times have different emotional vocabularies and different inner landscapes. Certain emotions might be recognized as normal and healthy in some cultures, while in other cultures may be considered unhealthy or even non-existent. In medieval Britain, for example, it was considered positive to have an ecstatic vision of Christ or the New Jerusalem, while in contemporary Britain such an experience might more often be deemed pathological. Aspects of a society’s emotional culture which are considered somehow natural and ahistorical might turn out to be recent developments – the British are known for their ‘stiff upper lip’ yet, as Thomas Dixon has shown, before the Victorian era, we were famously weepy (Dixon, 2015).
The practical value of studying the history of the emotions, then, is threefold. Firstly, it can increase a person’s ‘emodiversity’, extending their vocabulary for their feelings and helping them realize how rich and varied humanity’s emotional palette has been over time (Watt-Smith, 2018). Secondly, it can teach us ideas and practices for emotional healing and development from different eras and traditions – such as practices from ancient Greece or 12th century Tibet (Evans, 2012). Thirdly, it can help us analyse and challenge emotional attitudes in culture and politics, and to object if one overly-narrow model of emotional health is imposed onto the messy variety of human experience and claimed to be universal (Davies, 2015).
This is a valuable contribution in an era when ideas from psychology, neuroscience and behavioural economics are infusing public policy, particularly in health and education policy. This is particularly important given the increasing risk of scientism – one particular scientific model of emotional health being imposed onto a population. Such initiatives can be helpful and useful, but they can also be overly-confident in recent scientific findings, and sometimes illiberal, intrusive and harmful.
This is where the humanities can help – by bringing a more nuanced, critical, pluralist and open-ended approach to emotional education. Rather than smuggling in a particular emotional norm under the guise of objective science, the humanities can help uncover the values and history beneath that norm, and help people decide if they want to accept it or not. In this sense, the history of the emotions can support people’s freedom to consider and develop their own ethical and emotional life, rather than being crow-barred into one universalist model. Let me give an example from recent public policy.
The Politics of Well-being
Around a decade ago, a movement arose called the ‘politics of well-being’. It is based around the idea that governments, schools, universities and organisations can and should try to make their citizens (or students, or employees) happier. This movement has led to policy interventions in the UK and elsewhere.
For example, since 2009, the British government has put hundreds of millions of pounds into making talking therapies– particularly Cognitive Behavioural Therapy – more available to reduce the incidence of depression and anxiety in the public. There have also been attempts to teach Positive Psychology (which uses some of the same cognitive behavioural techniques as CBT) in schools, universities and the workplace. Likewise, the American military spent $180 million in 2010 launching a programme called ‘Comprehensive Soldier Fitness’, which was designed by Positive Psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania to make soldiers and their families more resilient and less prone to depression and post-traumatic stress. Many companies have also introduced programmes to try and make their employees healthier, happier, more mindful, more resilient and so on (Evans, 2012; Evans, 2018b)
At the national scale, the UK and several other countries and organisations (e.g., France, New Zealand, Dubai, Bhutan, the EU, the OECD) have introduced ‘national well-being measurements’, which aim to measure and aggregate data on populations’ subjective happiness, life-satisfaction, anxiety, sense of belonging, and other emotional states. The idea is that policy makers can use this subjective data to inform policy decisions, in the same way they use objective data like GDP or unemployment. The subjective and emotional states of citizens have become a direct focus of policy – indeed, the British government recently appointed a minister for loneliness.
What could the history of the emotions bring to this field of policy? First, most obviously, it can highlight the historical roots of some of these interventions and discussions. Psychologists and policy-makers tend to think everything was invented yesterday. They are enchanted by the new. In fact, CBT was directly inspired by the 2,300-year-old philosophy of Stoicism, although this fact is not widely known, even among cognitive therapists. Likewise, while it is more commonly known that mindfulness traces its origins to Buddhism, the precise history of contemporary secular mindfulness – what was kept and what was left out – is little known. CBT and mindfulness took certain techniques from these ancient philosophies and ditched the ethical, historical and metaphysical context in which they were embedded. They were originally part of total life philosophies, rather than instrumentalized techniques to overcome mood disorders.
It is useful for psychotherapists and ordinary people alike to learn about the original philosophical contexts for the therapeutic techniques that they use. It enables individuals to go back to the beautiful original sources – to discover the richness of Epictetus, or Socrates, or Marcus Aurelius – and learn to be ‘the doctor to themselves’ as Cicero put it. Stoicism, unlike CBT, is not shy of using moral terms like courage, wisdom, virtue and brotherly love. People may find it reassuring that the ideas they are using to get better have been around for over two millennia and have stood the test of time. And the original sources are more beautiful than any CBT manual – there’s something persuasive and therapeutic about beauty. This is one contribution the history of the emotions can make – and in fact, our centre has played a role in the contemporary revival of Stoicism, hosting the annual public conference ‘Stoicon’ for two years and helping fund an online Stoic course and evaluation, which several thousand people have enrolled in (LeBon, 2017).
Secondly, historians of emotion – and scholars of the humanities in general – can warn of the limits of scientific measurement and the risk of scientism. Psychologists and policy makers will often over-hype their interventions and over-claim for the universal validity of their models and measurements.
For example, Positive Psychologists such as Martin Seligman (the father of the movement) claim that Positive Psychology is an objective science of flourishing. Seligman claims that he and his colleagues have come up with a universally-valid model of flourishing, called PERMA, which can accurately measure a person’s feelings of Positive mood, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Achievement. Positive Psychology, it is claimed, has discovered the precise interventions which will increase a person’s PERMA. All that’s left is for governments, companies, universities and schools to roll out the Positive Psychology programmes and their populations will automatically flourish more. This is not moral paternalism, it is claimed – it’s objective science. The confidence of the Positive Psychologists has encouraged governments and organisations to put a huge amount of money into such programmes, which are sometimes imposed onto people without room for argument or debate.
The political and ethical risk of claiming you have an objective science of flourishing, if that science is rolled out by companies, organisations or even nations, is that you then impose one inevitably narrow and biased model of the good life onto people, leaving them no room to disagree or think for themselves. It can be illiberal and intrusive. You crowbar the messy complexity, ambiguity and variety of our moral and emotional lives into one box and then measure it with reductionist questionnaires, giving people a score for their flourishing or even their ‘spiritual fitness’ (as done by the US Army’s Comprehensive Soldier Fitness programme – see Evans, 2018b).
This grand project wildly over-claims what can be objectively and reliably measured. A high score on questionnaire measurements of happiness, engagement, relationships, meaning and achievement may not correspond with morally flourishing, in the ancient Greek sense of eudaimonia. As Seligman has admitted, Osama bin Laden would have scored high on PERMA – he felt very happy, very engaged, had a strong network of colleagues, a high sense of meaning and achievement. But he was still, arguably, a bad man. President Donald Trump claims he is very humble: “I think I’m more humble than you would understand,” he has said. He would score high on self-reported measurements of humility. But does that mean he is actually humble?
Positive Psychologists may have data that happier people live longer, earn more, have better marriages, and so on. But that does not necessarily mean that being happier all the time is always the appropriate moral and emotional response for all people. Is there no room for other colours in humanity’s emotional palette? Likewise, Stoic resilience might be helpful for certain people at certain times. But is it a universal panacea, appropriate for all people at all times? Even within the military, as Nancy Sherman has noted, there must surely be a time to grieve, to put down your mental armour, to depend on others, to not be a Stoic warrior (Sherman, 2010).
The Politics of Ecstasy
Let me give another example of the risk of scientism from within the science of flourishing: ecstatic experiences. Most cultures have had rituals for people to find ecstasy, by which I mean moments in which one feels one’s consciousness is radically altered and one has gone beyond one’s ordinary ego-identity (ekstasis in Greek literally means ‘standing outside’ – other terms used by psychologists for this field of research include religious experiences, spiritual experiences, ego-transcendence, peak experiences, trance and altered states of consciousness). Often, people in ecstasy feel a deep connection to something greater than themselves – a spirit, or god, a group of people, or place in nature.
Western culture has marginalized and pathologized ecstasy over the last four centuries, shifting from an enchanted to a materialist worldview. Materialist thinkers, from philosophers like Thomas Hobbes to early psychiatrists like Jean-Martin Charcot, pathologized ecstasy as delusion, ‘enthusiasm’, hysteria, or psychosis. This has led to a taboo around ecstatic experiences – they still spontaneously occur, but we tend not to discuss them because we’re worried we will be considered ignorant or crazy (Evans, 2017).
I think this is an unfortunate narrowing of what is considered normal and healthy. As William James said: “our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different… definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite discarded.”
There have, of course, been attempts to re-find a place for ecstasy in western culture, most notably in the Sixties counter-culture, and also attempts to find a more positive and sympathetic science of ecstatic experiences (particularly within the field of transpersonal psychology, in which William James remains the pre-eminent voice).
In the last decade or so, several universities have re-started research into psychedelic drugs and psychedelic therapy with very positive early results – trials suggest that one or two psychedelic trips can help people recover from depression, addiction, trauma, and even the fear of death.
I support psychedelic research because it is helping our culture – and particularly the rationalist sceptics among us – to think about the usefulness and healthiness of ecstasy and ego-transcendence. We are rediscovering the importance of ecstasy in healing us, connecting us, and giving us inspiration and meaning. Yet here again is the risk of scientism – overclaiming for what science has proven, and imposing one’s particular interpretation of the appropriate form and meaning of ecstasy onto all of the messy and ambiguous varieties of human experience.
One of the leading psychedelic labs, at Johns Hopkins University, has suggested that psychedelics help people by causing mystical experiences of non-dual consciousness, an experience that may be at the root of all mystical traditions. This idea – as Nicolas Langlitz explored in Neuropsychedelia – goes back to the early days of psychedelic research in the 1950s, when Aldous Huxley claimed psychedelics provided a short-cut to the mystical experiences at the heart of a ‘perennial philosophy’ (Langlitz, 2012). It has also been claimed (by Ralph Hood and others) that one can quantify and measure the extent to which a person reaches this unitive non-dual state, giving them a score for the ‘completeness’ of their mystical experience.
However, such claims ignore how different cultures shape psychedelic experiences in different ways. Indigenous Amazon communities, psychedelic experiences more often involve an encounter with spirits, rather than a non-dual experience of cosmic oneness. There is no singular ‘psychedelic experience’ which all people, at all times, experience. Humans have made sense of such experiences in many different ways, and there will always be some uncertainty about what such experiences mean; individuals must make up their own minds. (Evans, 2018a).
Scientists can measure to what extent a person’s account of their experience maps onto their model, but there’s always a risk that the person’s report is shaped by the scientists’ own cultural expectations and experimental setting, and no questionnaire or brain-scan can tell us if a person’s mystical experience is actually true.
Balancing the Sciences with the Humanities
In a time of moral and political uncertainty, when more and more people in western culture are abandoning traditional religions, many people hope that science can provide clear and certain answers to fundamental moral questions, like how to flourish, how to transcend the ego, how to make sense of our place in the cosmos.
There is no doubt science has important contributions to make to these questions, but an overly-scientistic approach ignores the important role of culture, moral values, ambiguity, variety, and ethical discussion in the quest for the good life. Aristotle said that the wise person looks for precision in each class of things only so far as the subject matter permits. You can’t quantify and measure flourishing for all people at all times because what it means to flourish is still up for discussion – Jesus on the cross would represent the opposite of flourishing to any social scientists standing nearby with a questionnaire.
We need the practice of ethical deliberation to develop what Aristotle called phronesis, practical wisdom, to decide for ourselves if the happiness we feel is genuine and valid happiness, if the meaning we are following is a good meaning, if our ecstatic insights are useful and real or not. This is where the humanities can contribute – they train people to consider questions of meaning and value in all their messy ambiguity, and to make up their own minds.
Personally, I support the idea that schools, universities, organisations and even governments should help people to be happier and less miserable, to know their minds and emotions better, and to move towards their own conception of the good life. I went through school and university with very little understanding of my own mind and emotions, and had to work out how to cope with anxiety and depression by myself, initially through Stoicism, and later through other wisdom traditions. As for most people, my experience has been an ongoing search for fulfilment.
In hindsight, having been taught practices from Stoicism, Buddhism, shamanism and other wisdom traditions at school and university would have greatly benefited me. But such techniques can easily be prescribed badly, simplistically, and illiberally – particularly if the teachers or coaches claim their approach is the only way, and there can be no argument or deviation.
Instead, why not teach people both practical evidence-based techniques for changing their minds (techniques like mindfulness or CBT), as well as introducing them to some of the philosophies or religions of the good life from which these techniques emerged (such as Stoicism, Buddhism, Utilitarianism, Daoism, indigenous shamanism, and so on). Leave people room to consider, discuss and debate the strengths and weaknesses of these ethical philosophies, and to bring in their own wisdom – what has worked in their life?
This, practically speaking, is far more engaging for people than simply presenting them with one’s own particular science of flourishing and stating ‘this is the answer for all people and all times’.
Teaching wisdom can easily become rigid scholastic indoctrination – consider how western universities ossified for centuries around Thomist Aristotelianism. There are certainly practices or approaches which people have found useful throughout history, but our notions of the good are also dynamic, according to changing historical circumstances. One ought leave space for each person and each generation to disagree with their elders and come up with their own answer to life.
The search for the good life is a continuous lifelong journey. Who among us has discovered one approach, one set of values, which they have found to be applicable for all situations their whole life? Even if one follows one particular philosophy or religion all their life, they will likely emphasize different aspects of it, different attitudes, at different times in their life. What is needed is phronesis, then, and this is where the humanities – history, philosophy, the arts – have something useful to contribute.
References
Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Davies, W. (2015). The Happiness Industry. London: Verso Books.
Dixon, T. (2015). Weeping Britannia. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Evans, J. (2012). Philosophy for Life and Other Dangerous Situations. London, UK: Rider Books.
Evans, J. (2017). The Art of Losing Control. London, UK: Canongate Books.
Evans, J. (2018a, July 17). Is psychedelic research closer to theology than science? Aeon. Retrieved from https://aeon.co/essays/is-psychedelics-research-closer-to-theology-than-to-science
Evans, J. (2018b). The End of History and the Invention of Happiness. In I. Bache & S. Karen (Eds.), The Politics of Well-Being (pp. 25-47). London, UK: Palgrave MacMillan.
Langlitz, N. (2012). Neuropsychedelia. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
Nussbaum, M. (2001). Upheavals of Thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Sherman, N. (2010, May 30). A Crack in the Stoic’s Armor. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/a-crack-in-the-stoic-armor/
Further Resources
For an approach to well-being education that balances the sciences and the humanities, see recent work by James Pawelksi at the University of Pennsylvania, for example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPgrl7UYdfY
For an analysis of the online course in modern Stoicism, see Tim LeBon:
https://modernstoicism.com/stoic-week-2017-demographics-report-by-tim-lebon/
https://modernstoicism.com/stoic-week-2017-report-part-2-by-tim-lebon/
For an excellent brief introduction to the history of the emotions and the idea of “emodiversity,” see Tiffany Watt-Smith’s TED talk, “The history of the emotions”:
https://www.ted.com/talks/tiffany_watt_smith_the_history_of_human_emotions?language=en
