The Routledge Handbook of Language and Emotion

Sonya Pritzker, Janina Fenigsen, James Wilce, Sonya Pritzker, Janina Fenigsen, James Wilce, Sonya E Pritzker, James M Wilce, Sonya E Pritzker, Janina Fenigsen, James M Wilce

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000740837
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Emotion offers a variety of critical theoretical and methodological perspectives that interrogate the ways in which ideas about and experiences of emotion are shaped by linguistic encounters, and vice versa. Taking an interdisciplinary approach which incorporates disciplines such as linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, psychology, communication studies, education, sociology, folklore, religious studies, and literature, this book:

• explores and illustrates the relationship between language and emotion in the five key areas of language socialisation; culture, translation and transformation; poetry, pragmatics and power; the affective body-self; and emotion communities;
• situates our present-day thinking about language and emotion by providing a historical and cultural overview of distinctions and moral values that have traditionally dominated Western thought relating to emotions and their management;
• provides a unique insight into the multiple ways in which language incites emotion, and vice versa, especially in the context of culture.

With contributions from an international range of leading and emerging scholars in their fields, The Routledge Handbook of Language and Emotion is an indispensable resource for students and researchers who are interested in incorporating interdisciplinary perspectives on language and emotion into their work.

1

Perspectives on emotion, emotionality, and language

Past and present

Janina Fenigsen, James M. Wilce, and Rebekah Wilce

What is “emotion”¹? How can we understand the paradigms, tensions, and priorities that have driven the emergence of this category of experience as a subject of systematic inquiry? What kinds of moral ideologies have historically surrounded emotion in Western thought? What are the historical roots of present-day concerns about emotion, including issues such as sources of emotional experience, its valorization, or its role in the constitution of contemporary selves, and intersections between language and emotion? And, further, what kinds of intersections between emotion and language have historically been envisioned in Western thought?

Historians—and to some extent anthropologists—have treated the English word “emotion” as a label for a form of subjectivity that transcends both diachronic-historical and synchronic-cultural diversity (e.g., Rosenwein 2001; but see Wilce 2009). This means that many accounts of subjectivity seem to take for granted the idea that different “cultures” (or people at different points in history) have simply used different words or labels for “emotions.” The word “emotion” has not been around for an especially long time, having entered English usage in the seventeenth century. It was only in the nineteenth century that it became a keyword in psychology newly emergent as a secular discipline, naming its subject of inquiry (Dixon 2012). Historians point out the fallacy of presentism in the historiography of what we now call “emotion” by noting major shifts in labels and models of this field—even within the so-called Western philosophical (and, importantly, theological) tradition. Such findings undermine the widespread tendency, even among scholars, to treat their own cultural history as teleological, the tendency to project a “scientific” view that unites all subjective states under the single label of “emotion.” The lack of consensus as to the meaning of “emotion,” even within present-day scholarship in psychology (Dixon 2012), drives home the precarity and fragmentation of this concept in spite of its centrality to the discipline.

While limitations of space preclude addressing these questions in detail, in this chapter we hope to provide some framework for situating this volume and some of its central concerns. Our chapter begins with several sections offering overviews of the history of various distinctions that have dominated Western thinking about emotion, including the ways in which mind (or, earlier, soul) and body have been interpreted as alternative loci of emotion and the ways in which “emotion” has been juxtaposed with “reason.” We then turn to a discussion of the central moral values that have dominated Western thinking about emotions and their management. Finally, we provide a brief overview of historical conceptualizations of the relationship between “emotion” and “language” that influence the ways in which language and emotion are often understood to intersect in contemporary literature. It is our hope to offer some cultural-historical context for many of the theoretical discussions contained in the following chapters, each of which grapples with the notions of “language” and “emotion” from various disciplinary perspectives.

Emotion in mind, soul, and body

What is the locus of emotion? Where do emotions come from? Since classical times, these questions have been addressed in Western thought in ways influenced by body-mind dualisms. The eighteenth-century Christian theologies of the soul distinguished between passions and affections (Dixon 1999, 297), two categories that would eventually be folded into one concept of “emotion.” Considering passions as “symptoms of man’s fallenness” and affections as “signs of relatedness to God” (Dixon 1999, 301), eighteenth-century scholars working in the classical Christian tradition of Augustine and Aquinas attributed relative importance to the soul while treating body as inconsequential, even unnecessary, for the formation and experience of affections (Dixon 1999, 303). It was in this vein that Jonathan Edwards viewed passions as “movements of the soul,” which were often, but not always, accompanied by bodily agitations (Dixon 1999, 303). In his dismissiveness of the body, and in sharp contrast to the future approach of physiological psychologists (including William James), Edwards proposed that “an unbodied spirit may be as capable of love and hatred, joy or sorrow, hope or fear, or other affections” (cited in Dixon 1999, 303). Even passions, viewed by eighteenth-century thinkers such as Edwards and Watts who were influenced by the Cartesian dualism as impressions made on the soul by the movement of animal spirits of the body, were considered categorically to be states of the soul rather than states of the body. Edwards, for one, was very clear that body states and fluids were epiphenomenal to the soul/spirit. In contrast to passions, “affections”—the main object of Edwards’ considerations—were viewed as entirely voluntary and independent of the body (Dixon 1999, 303).

As “emotion” replaced passions and affections and the “soul-body” dualism gave way to “mind-body” in mid-nineteenth century psychological thought, an evolutionary paradigm of emotion was developed and espoused by Alexander Bain, Charles Darwin, and William James, among others. In the late nineteenth century, psychological thought took a distinct physiological turn, treating mental experience as epiphenomenal. As Dixon reminds us, for William James, “emotion dissociated from all bodily feelings [was] inconceivable,” and the cognitive dimension to emotion was merely that of the felt awareness of an involuntary instinctive bodily reaction (1999, 308).

In the twentieth century, the physiological reductionism that relegated emotion to the body and its involuntary responses was replaced by cognitive views represented, among others, by Carol Stearn and Peter Stearn, who claimed that emotions were not simply biological reactions (Stearn and Stearn 1985). Mind and cognition returned to the center of psychological theorizing of emotion. Eventually, the mind-body tug of war was replaced by a “component theory of emotion,” attentive to instinctive bodily responses, expressions and behaviors, cognitive factors including appraisals and beliefs, and subjective phenomenological tone of emotions (Dixon 1999, 310–11).

Emotion, reason, and other binaries

What is the relationship between emotion and reason? In the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, which combined elements of Stoicism, Cartesianism, Hobbes, and medieval Jewish rationalism, affects—that is, love, anger, hate, envy, pride, etc.—were inclusive of both actions and passions. Spinoza attributed actions to the mind (notably to “knowledge” or “adequate ideas”) and passions to causes external to the person’s nature. While Spinoza posited the power of the mind over all affects, he also proposed that affects provoke a change in a person’s power to act or “power to persevere in being” (Nadler 2019, 2.4). In considering this “power” as constitutive of the “essence” of any being, Spinoza foreshadowed positions of eighteenth-century Christian thinkers such as Isaac Watts, and the present-day unconditional valorizations of emotional self (e.g., Lindholm 2008), situating affect in its totality at the center of existence (Nadler 2019).

While the reason/passion dichotomy was certainly part of Christian tradition, with Augustine denouncing passions as ungodly affairs of flesh and senses in contrast with reason and truth, Christian psychologies of the eighteenth century did not simplistically contrast reason and passion, nor did they unequivocally assign value to these categories (Dixon 1999, 301). For example, for Isaac Watts, cold and dry reasoning was as undesirable as passions uncontrolled by reason (1746).

The ensuing secularization of the concept of emotion and its establishment as the central concept of the discipline of psychology have not put the dichotomy between reason and emotion to rest. Because of their categorical commitment to empiricism, evolutionary thinkers such as Bain and Darwin have not addressed the binary. Much later, Claude Lévi-Strauss espoused a similar skepticism about the knowability of emotion by describing “affectivity [as] the most obscure side of man” (1969, 140). A late-nineteenth-century non-reductionist approach to emotion is found in William James’ theory of emotion (1884), which presented a departure from physiological reductionism, whether ontological or merely epistemological. Echoing George Berkeley’s categorical juxtaposition of emotion and cognition (1708), William James treated reason as a “cerebral” and emotion as a “visceral” function. At another level, however, James’s perspective on emotion restores the cerebral to his theory of emotion by situating emotion as both physiological and cognitive. In spite of considering bodily feelings as the primary locus of emotion, James did not trivialize cognition, with this approach being especially notable in his later writings (Ratcliffe 2005).

Max Weber envisioned a complex relationship between emotion and reason. While following the historical binaries, Max Weber’s perspective on the relationship between rationality and emotion as defining his concept of “Beruf” (“calling” or “vocation”)—that is, the practice of systematic self-control central to rational action—underwent a significant shift. In his early statements on beruf as central to his argument on the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism (1905), beruf involves the suppression of emotion. In Weber’s later thought (e.g., 1919), beruf both expresses passion and emotion and is achieved through them, a perspective that foreshadowed corporate perspectives on emotion under late capitalism (Gershon 2017).

Echoes of these nuanced and complex perspectives on reason and emotion and the uneasy relationship with emotionality in Western thought continue to reverberate in today’s public discourse, characterized by social acoustics that demand (of some social actors more than others) a skillful navigation of the Goldilocks guidelines for display of emotion: just enough to come across as authentic without losing credibility as rational (e.g., Mendoza-Denton 1995).

Emotion: Norms and values

Whether approached from perspectives informed by soteriology, secular ethics, concerns with selfhood and the self, or emotional labor under late capitalism (Hochschild 1983; Illouz 2018), emotions have elicited scrutiny and valorization. The valorization of emotion falls into two categories. One type involves values attached to emotion and emotionality in their totality such as when contrasted with reason and its derivative concepts of rationality. The other concerns values related to particular kinds of emotions and their display, for example, “It’s good to be compassionate” or “Don’t show the bully that your feelings have been hurt.”

The Stoics viewed passions as diseases of the soul, a view that held its own into the nineteenth century, when passions and affections were terms used for medical diagnoses. For the Stoics, being free of all passions was the ultimate goal, and the remedy was in the application of calm reason at the first stirrings of these movements of the soul. Taking a different approach, Augustine and Aquinas insisted on the distinction between troubling passions and the virtuous affections of love and compassion. Notably, for Augustine, experiences of fear or sorrow were indispensable to being human (Dixon 2012). In a similar vein, the eighteenth-century Christian philosopher Isaac Watts warned against ungoverned passions that would “break all bonds of human society and peace, and would change the tribes of mankind into brutal herds, or would make the world a mere wilderness of savages” (cited in Dixon 1999, 301). Watts was equally concerned with dry and cold reasoning, considering it incapable of stimulating the “pious affections” required of a virtuous life. Instead, Watts suggested a middle soteriological road, that of a “warm and affectionate religion.” In a similar vein, other eighteenth-century thinkers and writers in the classical Christian tradition, including Christian Psychology (“pneumatology”), treated passions as “symptoms of man’s fallenness” and affections as “signs of relatedness to God.” Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley thus viewed passions in “negative light, [as] impressed on the soul from without, against the will,” arguing that when a subject is overcome by passions, “his mind is less in its own command” (Dixon 1999, 301–3).

The distinction between passions and affections based on their subjection to human will was also salient for Edwards who, following Augustine, considered affections to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Editors’ Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Perspectives on emotion, emotionality, and language: Past and present
• PART I Emotion and language socialization
• PART II Language and emotion: Culture, translation, and transformation
• PART III Language and emotion: Poetry, pragmatics and power
• PART IV Language, emotion, and the affective body-self
• PART V Emotion communities
• Index