Download PDF | Emotions through Time From Antiquity to Byzantium, Edited by Douglas Cairns, Martin Hinterberger, Aglae Pizzone, and Matteo Zaccarini, Mohr Siebeck, 2022.
529 Pages
Acknowledgements
This volume derives from a project funded by a Leverhulme Trust International Research Network grant that ran from April 2016 to March 2018 and involved partners at the University of Cyprus, the University of Edinburgh, King’s College London, the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, and the University of Vienna. The editors are very grateful indeed to the Trust for the funding that made the project possible and to the network partners and their colleagues in each of the five centres who supported the project and its events.
As well as meetings in Edinburgh, London, and Vienna, the network was fortunate in being able to hold one workshop in the ideal location and facilities of the Fondation Hardt, Geneva (in March 2017), and its final conference at the beautiful A. G. Leventis Gallery in Nicosia, Cyprus, from 27-9 September 2017. We are very grateful to Gary Vachicouras and his colleagues at the Fondation Hardt, to George David and Myrto Hatzaki of the Leventis Foundation, and to Loukia Loizou Hadjigavriel, Director of the A. G. Leventis Gallery, for their hospitality and assistance in making these wonderful events happen.
Three of the network partners (Cairns, Hinterberger, and Pizzone) have been involved in seeing this volume through to publication, with the indispensable assistance of Matteo Zaccarini, now of the University of Bologna. We were very sorry indeed that two partners, Lioba Theis (Vienna) and Ioannis Papadogiannakis (KCL), were, in the end, unable to submit chapters to the volume, but we should like to express our thanks here for the enormous contributions they made to making the network project both successful and convivial, as well as to the work of reviewing the chapters at an earlier stage. We are also sorry to have missed the opportunity to publish the papers of several workshop and conference participants (Toni Bierl, Inna Kupreeva, Filippomaria Pontani, Sophia Xenophontos, and Sarah Teetor): though absent from the product, they nonetheless played an important part in the process.
One of the most positive features of the Leverhulme International Network format was that it allowed us to employ a Network Facilitator, a role filled until October 2016 by Divna Manolova and thereafter by Matteo Zaccarini. Just as it was a delight to work with such efficient, committed, and companionable colleagues, so it is a huge source of satisfaction to be able to celebrate the steady progress of their academic careers on leaving the project.
Finally, we should like to express our thanks to the Editorial Board of the series, Emotions in Antiquity, for accommodating our volume, to Jane Burkowski for her exemplary copy-editing, to Klaus Hermannstadter and Tobias Stabler at Mohr Siebeck for advice and support, and to Stephanie Winder for all her hard work on the Indexes.
Introduction
Emotions through time?
Douglas Cairns
This volume (one of the outcomes of a two-year International Research Network project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust) constitutes a first step in the project of exploring the complex interactions between the emotional worlds of ancient Greece and Byzantium. The Byzantine world shaped the reception of ancient Greece for the modern; and the appropriation and reconfiguration of ancient Greek sources helped, at each historical stage and in each cultural context, to define the Byzantine world.’ This volume’s goal is thus, on the one hand, to shed new light on the Byzantine emotional universe and its impact on Medieval and early modern culture and, on the other, to illuminate ancient Greek concepts, theories, and representations of emotion by investigating their reception in Byzantium. With all due allowance for the availability of scholars and their expertise, and for the vicissitudes of the sometimes tortuous process that has led us from preliminary workshops to summative conference and thence to final publication, we have tried not to limit ourselves only to textual evidence, but to explore additional areas such as visual and material culture, performance, ritual, and the creation of affective environments.
We build on the progress that has been made to date in the investigation of the emotions in our two main disciplines, Classics and Ancient History and Byzantine studies (see Introduction B and C below). More generally, we see our work as a contribution to the growing field of emotion history, now a mature sub-discipline in which the original landmark studies have, over the past forty years, inspired a steady stream of monographs, edited collections, and articles. This is a field that has in recent years been consolidated further by the now standard proliferation of companions and handbooks and achieved a new level of institutional respectability through the establishment of dedicated research centres.” In venturing a contribution to this field we (clearly) believe that the history of emotions is not just a possible but also a valuable enterprise. This is not a wholly uncontroversial position, and even among those who would accept the general possibility and utility of emotion history the subject still requires a degree of definition and justification.
Scepticism regarding the possibility of emotion history is at its most forthright and extensive in Rtidiger Schnell’s highly polemical (and very enjoyable) 1,052-page monograph, Haben Gefiihle eine Geschichte? Aporien einer History of Emotions, published in 2015. Schnell has two main problems with the ‘history of emotions’ as an enterprise: first, it does not deliver what it promises, given that its true focus is not the inner life of subjective psychological experience, but merely the representation of such experience in the form of evaluations, classifications, concepts, standards of behaviour, or expressions — what Schnell calls ‘signs’ (Zeichen) of emotions.> It is these that are subject to historical change, Schnell argues, not ‘the emotions themselves’. Interest in the latter, Schnell argues, reflects a movement that has its roots in a contemporary and mediadriven fascination (since the 1980s) with the inner life of others, with how people ‘really feel’.> Yet subjective psychological experience, he alleges, is properly the stuff of psychology and neuroscience. Those disciplines study emotion, and need to know what it is that they are studying. We who study only representations of emotion need no such knowledge.® Which is fortunate, because Schnell believes that historians of emotion have set themselves the impossible task of studying not only something that cannot be accessed through the methods of historical research, but also a subject that has not been satisfactorily defined, one whose defining features are in fact constituted differently by the various disciplines that purport to study it.” This in effect means that historians cannot in fact decide what precisely it is that they profess to study.’ ‘Emotion history’ means different things to different people.’
As a research project, therefore, “Geschichte der Gefthle’ or ‘history of emotions’ is to be abandoned, since feelings as such, i.e. subjective psychological experiences, remain inaccessible to the text-based approaches that historical disciplines must adopt. As he states in the book’s conclusion (p. 967):
Das geschichtswissenschaftliche Projekt “Geschichte der Gefihle’ ist aufzugeben, ebenso das Projekt einer “History of emotions’, sofern darunter die Geschichte von Gefihlen als subjektiven Erfahrungen bzw. als eine Geschichte des inneren Erlebens verstanden wird. Fur diese Entscheidung sprechen zwei Einsichten dieses Buches. Wir kommen, erstens, an die ‘tatsachlichen’ Gefiihle nicht heran, auch wenn dies immer wieder versucht worden ist. Noch viel weniger sind wir, zweitens, imstande, eine Geschichte dieser nicht fassbaren Gefithle zu schreiben. In einigen Studien der historischen Emotionsforschung wird offen eingeraumt, dass wir, genauso wenig wie wir wussten, was unsere Mitmenschen - oder gar was wir selbst — fiihlten, keine Auskunft geben konnten tiber die Gefiihle unserer Vorfahren ...
Historical research, on Schnell’s view, would be liberated were it to dispense with the focus on inner feelings and concentrate instead on externally observable phenomena." According to him, this would still leave a great deal in the domain of emotion that we can study historically:
Geschichte der emotionsrelevanten Handlungen, Gesten, Praktiken, sozialen Interaktionen (II), die Geschichte der verbalen Emotionsauferungen (III), die Geschichte der Diskurse tiber Emotionen (IV), die Geschichte der Darstellungen von Emotionen und deren Funktionen (V u. VI), schlieflich die Beschreibung der Veranderungen in diesen Bereichen und die Frage nach den Griinden fiir diese Veranderungen (VII)."
Schnell’s vigorous polemic misses the mark in many ways. But his critique is nonetheless useful for that, as criticism almost always is. Even if it rested on no more than misapprehension it would require a more thorough justification for the enterprise of emotion history than is normally offered, and so may help clarify the aims and character of that enterprise. Schnell does, moreover, as his argument proceeds, make a number of valid points against some of the sweeping generalizations, the unsubstantiated theories of change and development, the monolithic models by which whole periods and societies are assigned a particular emotional character, and the tendency to reinvent the wheel by giving an affective inflection to quite familiar (grand) narratives of social, cultural, and intellectual history. A great deal of emotion history is broad-brush, overschematic, and reductive, especially in the often undefended application of social constructionist premises that Schnell so doggedly assails. Yet his argument is at its most interesting, and the attempt to refute it most productive, where it in fact agrees with the suppositions of those who do believe in the history of emotions. In both these ways, answering Schnell also entails a critical examination of some of the working assumptions of the ‘history of emotions’ movement.
Schnell and his targets do not in fact differ greatly on the question of which aspects of affectivity or emotion lend themselves to historical study. The externally observable signs, representations, constructions, and conceptions of emotion that Schnell proposes as legitimate objects of historical enquiry are precisely what those who profess to write the history of emotions do focus on.” There is a superficial issue here, about what we mean by ‘history’ (and to some extent even about what we mean by ‘of’), but also a crucially important one, about what we mean by ‘emotion’. To take the superficial issue first: the history of phenomenon x is by no means confined to changes in the phenomenon itself. A history of influenza (or of Covid-19) would not focus only on the biology of viruses and their genetic mutations,'* but would encompass also the social, political, cultural, and scientific contexts in which viruses spread and are treated, as well as the social, political, cultural, and scientific consequences of their spread and treatment. A history of Ben Nevis would not be limited to geological and other physical changes. A history of beer would not just be about hops, malted barley, and water, how beer matures or goes sour, or how it is physically processed by those who drink it. A history of the River Clyde would be more than a monotonous tale of flowing H,O, with growing admixtures of other substances over the years. A history of these things would include all kinds of contextual material, from the uses of beer in a wide range of societies and social contexts to the role of the Clyde in Glasgow’s development as a centre for the importation of tobacco from Virginia and as the ‘workshop’ of the British Empire."
The clue is in the word history - the history of x is a narrative of human interactions with x. A ‘history of’ a phenomenon will never depend simply on access to phenomena as such, because, in the relevant sense, there are no phenomena as such ~ all phenomena must appear (paiveo@at), under some aspect, to someone. History is about the record of human interaction with phenomena in so far as they are cognized by human beings, and so also about the social, political, and cultural implications and consequences of these cognized phenomena. It is precisely a matter of representations and traces. It involves a narrative of events and phenomena that is largely based on earlier narratives about those events and phenomena, as well as on the traces that those events and phenomena have left in a variety of sources and media. It is not just the emotions of the past that are gone; past events are gone too — we generally have only representations, accounts, reconstructions, and external signs. But we do not conclude on that basis that history as such is impossible. History deals not with events ‘as such’, but with the evidence for events. We also have evidence for emotions. Schnell clearly thinks that we can study such evidence; and to do so is largely what the targets of his criticism mean by doing emotion history. If emotion were indeed the subjective, internal, private thing that Schnell claims, historians would be acting wholly within the remit of their profession in seeking to study how people in different societies and at different times have tried to come to terms with it.
This takes us to the more substantive issue. Emotions are also events — they have an action- or event-structure of their own (one that is often described in terms of ‘scripts’);!° and both emotion events themselves and the place of those events in larger event-structures lend themselves to representation in narrative terms.!° This is true because emotions are not private, internal, subjective experiences, but physically embodied, manifested in behaviour, socially and contextually situated, and embedded in the conceptual categories of particular linguistic communities. The evidence of emotion events that survives in the historical record is evidence of emotion as such, in the true sense of the term, not of phenomena that are in some way derivative of or secondary to emotion.
An oddity of Schnell’s polemic is that, though few have pursued the point with quite his tenacity, a great many of those whom he attacks do in fact agree with him that a history of emotions as such is an impossibility. A leading figure in Classical emotions research, Angelos Chaniotis, writes that ‘the ancient historian cannot study what people really felt’, but only ‘the external stimuli that generated emotions as well as the cultural and social parameters that determined when and how emotions were represented in texts and images’.'? A number of our contributors in the present volume are, not unreasonably, attracted by similar formulations. Schnell acknowledges that such views are widespread in the ‘history of emotions’ community, but still tasks those who make these concessions with the mistaken conviction that they are able, nonetheless, to get to ‘the emotions themselves’.!* Though such people are, on the whole (according to Schnell), social constructionists who do not generally accept that emotions are private, internal, historically invariant subjective experiences, nevertheless they are driven to accept that there are indeed inner feelings independent of language and culture and persistently fail to distinguish signs (concepts, expressions, etc.) of emotion from emotions themselves.!? These scholars, according to Schnell, promise to do emotion history, but in fact do only the history of emotional discourse. Literary scholars who deal with emotions in the literary artefacts of the past similarly deal only with representations, not with the emotions themselves,” and their task is further complicated (Schnell alleges) by the possibility that emotions represented in literary texts may bear little relation to those of everyday life.”!
A further oddity, therefore, is that Schnell regards his opponents’ research as fatally compromised by the fact that emotions do not represent a single and easily definable category, yet his own critique is underpinned by a narrow and rigid sense of what emotions ‘really’ are — private, internal, historically invariant subjective experiences, present only in the moment, only in real-time interaction, and irrecoverable once that moment is gone. A partial explanation for this approach perhaps lies in a particular aspect of emotion history that many readers will have lived through, namely the gradual replacement of Gefiihl by Emotion as the default German term for ‘emotion’.”” ‘Feelings’ may sound more private, more internal, than ‘emotions’.* But though many do distinguish between feelings and emotions (or between affect and emotion),™ and though talking about ‘feelings’ rather than ‘emotions’ perhaps raises more immediate issues regarding conceptualization, labelling, and communicability, not even the distinction between feeling and emotion makes for a private, internal world of purely subjective experience.
We should probably concede that first-person experience rests, at least to some extent, on processes that are not accessible to others. In some cases, indeed, there are aspects of these processes that are not phenomenally present to us in experience. Equally, however, many aspects of first-person experience and the processes that underpin it are intersubjectively constituted by conceptual knowledge, language, and culture. Visual perception, for example, is not just a matter of passive sensory input, but to a substantial extent also involves topdown processes such as active prediction and the application of conceptual and experiential knowledge. It may appear to us that we receive, passively, a complete and objective picture of a given visual scene, but any number of wellknown experiments, common illusions, and phenomena such as change blindness and inattentional blindness indicate that, to a very large extent, what we see is what we expect to see in the light of predictions made on the basis of experience and in the light of our own subjective aims and concerns.” Similarly, what one sees is influenced by the conceptual structure of one’s native language.”® The performance of Russian speakers vis-a-vis English speakers, for example, in simple colour discrimination tasks is influenced by the fact that Russian has two linguistic categories for the range that English speakers call blue.?” These hues appear together in Russian representations of the rainbow.”® Users of English can translate the Russian terms easily, and both Russian and English speakers can see and distinguish the same hues, but the experimental evidence shows that English speakers do not process those hues precisely as Russian speakers do - reaction times differ in a way that suggests that linguistic categories influence attention, and thus that the hues in question mean something slightly different for members of the two linguistic communities. Language, on this evidence, influences the top-down aspect of vision as a rich perceptual process. As language influences perception, so it influences thought: in languages which have the relevant feature, for example, grammatical gender conditions the way that speakers think and talk about inanimate objects.””? Though they distance themselves from earlier, more sweeping and deterministic versions of the ‘Sapir— Whorf hypothesis’, many linguists now contend that language permeates and influences thought in multiple ways.°° Just as the mechanisms by which we perceive the external world are thoroughly permeated by the concepts and categories given by our experience as social and cultural beings and as users of language, so too are those by which we make sense of our own subjective experiences. A substantial body of work suggests that affect and emotion can be experienced dif-ferently when speakers of more than one language (or late versus early bilinguals) do not use their mother tongue,*! indicating that use of the native language involves forms of affective processing that second and further languages do not. These indications of the influence of language on first-person experience suggest that differences in the conceptualization of emotion - e.g. where a single concept in language A maps on to more than one in language B - represent, at least to some extent, different ways both of seeing the world and of understanding oneself as an experiencer of the world.*?
As thinkers from “Longinus’ in the first century to William James in the nineteenth have recognized,** emotions do not come in distinct, pre-labelled packages — all human beings are at all times in some affective state or another.** Every action we undertake, every state we are in feels a certain way, even if that feeling seems to us to involve a relative absence of affect. The episodes that we, in contemporary English, describe as ‘emotions’ are merely the peaks and troughs in this affective continuum.* This is what the constructionist psychologists James A. Russell and Lisa Feldman Barrett call ‘core affect’.*° As Lindquist and Barrett put it, ‘Core affect is an ongoing, ever-changing, psychologically primitive state that has both hedonic and arousal-based properties’,*’ that is states of core affect exist on a continuum of valence (pleasant/good or unpleasant/bad for the subject) and arousal (how calm or agitated the subject feels). Core affect underpins a variety of states, including emotion, and differs from emotion in that it need not be labelled or interpreted. For psychological constructionists, such as Barrett and Russell,** it is precisely interpretation, or conceptualization, that makes the difference: core affective states are experienced as emotions when interpreted in the light of the conceptual categories of emotion that the individual has acquired through experience and socialization.*? According to them, this is a process in which language plays a crucial role.*” On this view, emotions are like perception (e.g. colour perception) in that they have both bottom-up and top-down aspects; in the case of emotions, the bottom-up aspect is supplied by core affect, a matter of perceiving both the world and one’s own bodily states, while the top-down aspect depends on concepts and categories.*! In making sense of the world, emotions also make sense of our experience of and responses to the world.” As Lisa Feldman Barrett puts it in her book-length synthesis of this approach:*
In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. When the concepts involved are emotion concepts, your brain constructs instances of emotion ...
Emotions are not reactions to the world. You are not a passive receiver of sensory input but an active constructor of your emotions. From sensory input and past experience, your brain constructs meaning and prescribes action. If you didn’t have concepts that represent your past experience, all your sensory inputs would just be noise. You wouldn’t know what the sensations are, what caused them, nor how to behave to deal with them. With concepts, your brain makes meaning of sensation, and sometimes that meaning is an emotion.
The crucial point about this is that, while there may be more or less ‘private’, i.e. internal and subjective, aspects of core affect, emotions are not wholly private, internal, subjective experiences. They depend on concepts and categories that may be individually inflected (and in whose deployment individuals may be more or less sophisticated) but are not unique to any one individual. While there are unmediated aspects of subjective affective experience — perhaps ineffable or not immediately transparent even to their patients — as soon as we think and talk about such experience, it is mediated. In so far as ‘the feelings themselves’ are interpreted, conceptualized, and labelled as objects of our thought, they are more than purely personal. As Wittgenstein insisted, no one has a private language for subjective experience:** as soon as we name, categorize, talk, or think about such things, difficult though that sometimes is, we inevitably draw on the shared, intersubjective resources of the languages we speak. One’s own subjective understanding of one’s own emotions is inflected by what emotions are taken to be in one’s language and culture. Emotions are not perceiver-independent entities to which we merely apply the labels that name them,** but perceiver-dependent notions which depend on intersubjective categories and on interactions between the perceiver and the world. The concepts and categories, moreover, by which we make sense of our core affective experience are, on this view, not ‘classical’ ones, in which membership depends on fulfilment of a limited set of necessary and sufficient conditions, but ‘fuzzy’ ones with indeterminate boundaries, exhibiting overlap with other categories, ambiguities regarding membership, and an internal structure that encompasses peripheral as well as prototypical cases.*° Just as affective experience does not come in discrete chunks, ready to be labelled, so the labels that we do apply cover a range of cases with a variety of characteristics.
Subjective experience is, accordingly, thoroughly permeated by intersubjectivity. Even to reflect on how one feels at any given moment involves a process of sense-making that draws on the resources of language and culture. As William Reddy sees it, getting from feeling to expression is an act of translation, one that both reduces complexity and simultaneously influences how we feel.*” Thinking about, categorizing, naming, expressing, and acting on one’s feelings involve aprocess of transformation,*® but one that is also part of the whole experience of having the emotion in question. And it need not be only a matter of language or conscious reflection: even where there is no explicit act of categorization or labelling - i.e. nothing that is actually or potentially formulated in linguistic terms - aspects of non-verbal behaviour, of expression and performance, may play the same role of transforming the inner affective experience, whatever it is, into something that is now a member of a culturally recognized emotion category.” The ‘mess inside’ does exist, but human beings are pattern-making creatures, driven to impose sense on the mess both inside and outside,*° and our perceptions not only of the world, but also of our own internal states are thoroughly permeated by patterns drawn from the conceptual, linguistic, and social resources that shape our experience. This process of thinking and talking about emotion (and all such processes), whether we do it privately, in everyday interaction with others, or in our scholarly and scientific endeavours, does reduce complexity,”! but this is a loss which is the price of all communication and all the ways in which we endeavour to understand ourselves and the world we live in.* In the case of emotion, too, the reduction in complexity is not a matter of the relation between the phenomenon and our attempts to communicate it, but a fundamental aspect of the phenomenon as we experience it. Though one must concede (to Schnell and others) that the role, in views of this sort, of unconceptualized feelings or core affect - the mess inside - does entail an acceptance that there are some aspects of affective experience that are inaccessible to historical methods,* there is absolutely no reason to concede that raw, unmediated affect (what Russell calls ‘the simplest raw (nonreflective) feelings evident in moods and emotions’) is what emotion ‘really’ is.** Such feelings may be perceptible by their patient in ways that are unavailable to others, and so largely unavailable for historical analysis, but still it is not these that are the proposed subject matter of emotion history, precisely because, in so far as they are unconceptualized, they are not ‘the emotions themselves’ or the emotions ‘as such’. Even at the level of individual subjective experience emotion is thoroughly permeated by intersubjectivity; and the fundamental relation between language and emotional experience already offers considerable scope for historical investigation of emotion in the texts and documents that are our sources.
One need not go all the way with the psychological constructionism of Barrett and Russell, and indeed most psychologists do not. There is discussion to be had about whether and if so precisely how the twin variables of valence and arousal account for the complexity of core affective states (including the possibility of mixed or ambivalent states in which positive and negative valence coexist).>° And it remains possible to question the hard and fast distinction that Russell and Barrett draw between ‘core affect’ and ‘emotion’, which seems to sit rather uneasily with the view that both subjective experience and the perceptible world form a continuum that our concepts and categories differentiate — ‘core affect’ and ‘emotion’ themselves would seem to be labels that effect a reduction of this complexity. This might itself suggest that core affect and emotion are themselves ranges within a continuum - for example, that cases of core affect might exhibit varying degrees of cognitive and conceptual penetration of the kind that Barrett and Russell attribute to emotions, while what most people would regard as fullblown emotions, in terms of the definiteness of their eliciting conditions and the specificity of their intentionality, might still resist easy conceptualization or labelling as one of the set of phenomena that our culture typically regards as emotions.*° We might, that is, know perfectly well how our current affective state arose and what its objects are, feel ourselves to be affected in a way that stands out against the background of affective experience, and yet still be unable to put a conventional name to the feeling. There may be aspects ofa full-blown emotion scenario as well as of states of core affect that are difficult to express in words. One suspects that patterns of core affect may amount to what most people would call emotions, and it remains possible to believe that, though emotions have no single ‘fingerprint’ in the brain, in the body, or in behaviour, nonetheless there are more substantive patterns of correlation between affect, bodily changes, expression, and behaviour than psychological constructionism allows,*” and thus that cross-cultural similarity in prototypical patterns of emotion expression and emotional response depends on more than just cross-cultural similarity in the conditions that give rise to emotion. One consequence of the hard and fast distinction between ‘emotion’ and ‘core affect’ is to separate the former from features of the latter that those of us who are not psychological constructionists might see as characteristic of emotion - features such as what seems to some an impressive degree of cross-cultural similarity in the patterns of bodily changes, symptoms, expressions, behaviour, and action that different cultures associate with what appear to be reflexes of similar types of phenomenon.
None of these doubts, however, would warrant the assumptions either that emotions or feelings are nothing more than essentially private, subjectively experienced internal causes of external expression and behaviour or that the experience of emotion - like our experience of ourselves and the world in all other respects — is not thoroughly permeated by the linguistic and cultural concepts and categories by which we make sense of the world. If that is so, then the resources — linguistic or non-linguistic — that one uses to conceptualize emotion are also available to communicate it. All forms of communication share the intersubjectivity that is the hallmark of language. Emotion is enmeshed in language in a variety of different ways, but its relation to language makes it, in all these contexts, tractable and discussable rather than something that is accessible only to the individual in question or to science.** As such, emotion is also accessible to the historian.
If even the first-person experience of emotion is thoroughly permeated by intersubjectivity, then there is no absolute gulf between the access that we have to our own experience and that which we have to others’. Though our experience of ourselves is in important ways unlike our experience of others, neither is 100 per cent focused on private internal states. Emotions involve perceptions of the world and perceptions of our own internal states. In both respects, perception will be as richly informed by knowledge and experience as it is in all other contexts. Thus, we can expect our perception of others’ emotions as well as the perceptions of the world and of ourselves that inform our own emotions to be shaped by the linguistic and conceptual categories of the cultures we inhabit. If that is the case, then, by the same token, the gulf that Schnell and others posit between the emotions of those we encounter directly in the here and now and the emotions represented in historical and literary sources also breaks down. Schnell in fact accepts that, on his own view of emotion, there is no hard and fast distinction between past and present — if emotions are the private, subjective experiences that he takes them to be, we have no access to the ‘actual’ emotions of anyone else at any time, even if that person is emoting, right now, before our very eyes.°! The emotions of the long dead are not, on this view, qualitatively different. This, as Schnell recognizes, is a concession that his opponents also often make.
But we should not make that concession, for it is not true that we have no access to the emotions of other people. The privacy of the mental is an extreme Cartesian standpoint that is no longer widely shared, whether at the scientific or at the popular level. Most of us believe that we can - perhaps normally, perhaps just sometimes — perceive others’ emotions. We do not and cannot conduct ourselves in the world as though other people’s feelings and motivations were wholly inscrutable; in operating, in fact, with quite the opposite view, our practice rests not on access to private inner states, but on context. We do not think and behave as if our responses to others’ emotions depended on hidden, internal causes, nor do they. Emotions are intersubjective, interpersonal, and interactive phenomena.
Often enough, we perceive others’ emotions directly, a point stressed repeatedly in the Continental phenomenological tradition.* As Wittgenstein puts it: ‘Just try - ina real case - to doubt someone else’s fear or pain!’ This is a point on which the psychological constructionism of Barrett and Russell agrees, at least in essentials, with the phenomenologically inspired enactivism of Shaun Gallagher.® According to both approaches, one perceives the emotions of others directly, but this perception is a rich process, informed by experientially formed and socially shared concepts.®° We perceive others’ facial expressions, posture, bodily movements, and actions as typical markers of the emotion concepts that our socially developed brains construct; and we do so to different degrees depending on whether we are interacting with a member of the group to which we ourselves belong or with an out-group member.*” Neither approach holds that we merely recognize pre-given, perceiver-independent patterns strictly associated with specific emotions. Barrett, however, on occasion refers to this process using the terminology of more traditional forms of “Theory of Mind’, both “Theory Theory’ (in which we infer, more or less theoretically, others’ mental states on the basis of external evidence) and ‘Simulation Theory’ (according to which we understand others’ mental states by - somehow - simulating them ourselves). Thus, Barrett is prepared to describe the perception of others’ emotions as inference or even as guesswork. One reason for this, it seems, is precisely that the properties that we perceive when we perceive others’ emotions are not perceiver-independent. Thus, while we think we can see (e.g.) another person’s anger, the only way to be sure that such a perception is accurate would be to ask them (and be lucky enough to receive an honest and informative answer).° But the fact that perception might be mistaken does not mean that more than perception is involved.” References to inference and guesswork sit uneasily with the constructionist premise that categorization informs and takes place at the point of perception.”! As Barrett’s constructionist colleague, James A. Russell, writes, ‘most of us do not hypothesise fear - we see it. We see discrete emotions in others and experience them in ourselves.’”* Phenomenologically, the experience does not present itself as one of guessing or inferring. There is no further stage at which inference enters the picture: if perceiving another’s emotions is like perceiving colours, there is - even if both forms of perception are inflected by the conceptual categories that the perceiver brings to bear — no guesswork involved. Thus any ‘inference’ or ‘guesswork’ must, on this view, be intrinsic to the rich process of perception itself rather than a matter of phenomenologically distinct, conscious processes.”* And that is not really ‘inference’ or ‘guesswork’ at all. True, direct social perception is not infallible;”4 but that is because the properties so perceived are not perceiver-independent. Both the constructionist and the enactivist approach therefore emphasize that, when we think we detect others’ emotions, we are not speculating about undetectable internal experiences, but construing the patterns we perceive as meaningful, both as bodily movements and as contextually and socially situated events understood substantially through our own experience of the concepts and categories of the cultures in which we have grown up.”
But though emotions at least typically prepare us for action of some sort, there is no necessary connection between subjective emotional experience and any one single pattern, or even any very limited set of patterns, of expression or behaviour.”° There are, indeed, prototypical associations, embedded in the emotion categories of a given culture, but these span a wide range of often heterogeneous cases.’” One can express or act upon emotion in a large number of different ways. Or not at all.”8 And thus not all emotional experiences, perceived and categorized as such by their patient, are by any means directly perceptible by others. In some cases, whatever external indications there are may be ambiguous or misleading. Often, too, people set out to mislead. Yet emotions typically have intentional content that relates to some pattern of eliciting conditions appraised as affectively salient by the patient. They are thus situated, contextualized experiences, experiences that respond to events and situations construed in a certain way. They have, as we noted above, an event-like structure that lends itself to representation in narrative. Thus, Gallagher argues, where direct perception fails, narrative takes over, based on whatever knowledge one can bring to bear of the contexts in which emotion unfolds.” This belongs in general with a narrative approach to social cognition and other-understanding that is now gaining ground against traditional ‘Theory of Mind’ approaches.°°
Whether or not there is any strong correlation between emotion concepts, families of emotion concepts, cross-culturally paralleled emotion concepts and specific patterns of affect, expression, and behaviour is an issue that we can leave to one side. The main point for our purposes is that emotions, i.e. the kinds of things we talk about when we use superordinate-level categories such as emotion (or any of its analogues in other languages) or basic-level categories such as fear (or its analogues), are not uniquely subjective, private experiences. Our first-person awareness of our own emotional experience is intersubjectively and culturally inflected, and so are our responses - our affective, interactive responses — to the emotions of others.*! In both cases, context plays a crucially important role.* Categorization of emotional experience, whether one’s own or someone else’s, depends on a sense of contextual situatedness that is at least potentially structured in terms of narratives of antecedent cause, intentionality, and response. Emotions are not just events in the brain or body; they are also events in the world - events of which we make sense using shared linguistic and cultural categories. These are the aspects that come especially into play when it comes to attributing to others emotions that are not immediately apparent in their expressions or behaviour. Though the context and our knowledge and understanding of it are relevant in all cases, including those in which we directly perceive others’ emotions, they take on greater significance when others are dissimulating or inscrutable.
Our understanding of our own emotions and our understanding of the emotions of others are both forged, from the beginning, in interactive situations which come to inform the emotion scripts we internalize and the narratives in which those scripts are embedded. Though there is a genuine sense in which the prototypical case of emotion is one that is being performed, by oneself or another, in the here and now, the fact that such cases are understood interactively and intersubjectively in terms of shared concepts, with their associated scripts and narratives, means that we can talk, in narrative terms, about the present and past emotions of ourselves and others in ways that reflect the narrative structure of emotion events themselves. Emotions, as experienced online, have such a structure, but they can also be recalled and narrated offline. Historical and literary sources are rich in such narratives: if the emotions that we deal with in realtime social interaction have a narrative structure, then the narrative structures of the past can preserve the evidence of past emotions, evidence that is the stuff of emotion history.
The basic position that Schnell upholds (that ‘the emotion’ is to be located in only one definitive aspect of a total emotion scenario) has been widely prom-ulgated in modern emotion research, going back at least to William James.* Jesse Prinz reprises the Jamesian perspective when he writes:
Typical emotion episodes ... contain a number of components. There are thoughts, bodily changes, action tendencies, modulations of mental processes such as attention, and conscious feelings. But which of these things is the emotion? Suppose we decide that winning a coveted prize induces ‘elation’. What part of the episode does that label designate?
Against those who ‘pack in too much’ to the concept of emotion “by assuming that bodily changes, propositional attitudes, action dispositions are essential parts or preconditions for emotions’,®° Prinz in 2004 followed James in arguing for a simpler theory of emotions as ‘embodied appraisals’, perceptions of bodily change that register and prepare the organism to respond to features of the world.®° Against views of that sort, however, J. L. Austin long ago objected:*”
It seems fair to say that ‘being angry’ is in many respects like ‘having mumps’. It is a description of a whole pattern of events, including occasion, symptoms, feeling and manifestation, and possibly other factors besides. It is as silly to ask “What, really, is the anger itself?’ as to attempt to fine down ‘the disease’ to some one chosen item ... That the man himself feels something which we don’t (in the sense that he feels angry and we don’t) is... evident enough ...: but there is no call to say that ‘that’ (‘the feeling’) is the anger.
James’s argument for the opposite conclusion does not withstand scrutiny:**
Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth. We might then see the bear, and judge it best to run, receive the insult and deem it right to strike, but we could not actually feel afraid or angry.
At best, this would support the claim that the bodily states arising from perception of an emotion’s eliciting conditions are necessary for emotion. It does not prove that they are sufficient - that they and nothing else are the emotion. Without the perception of the bear or the insult, what we feel might qualify as fear or anger, but it would not be a typical case, because such cases, even as presented by James, involve perceptions of states of affairs in the world (perceptions that James takes to be cognitively rich), a sense of the valence of such states, forms of bodily arousal, symptoms and expressions, tendencies to action, and behaviour. Without the perception of the bear or the insult, we should have instances of fear or anger atypically unrelated to perception and appraisal; thus, those things too would appear to be as necessary for a prototypical episode of emotion as are bodily states such as trembling. When an emotion episode occurs in the absence of any perception or evaluation of particular eliciting conditions — i.e. when we feel angry or afraid but do not know why - the most likely step is that both the patient of the emotion and any observer of the episode will search for possible objects and causes. This is enough to indicate that there is at least a regular correlation between the subjective experiences that we categorize as emotion and the contexts and conditions that we similarly see as aspects of emotion categories. This is one reason why appraisal theories of emotion now take account of all the dimensions that appraisals can encompass.”” But even among those who do not follow that precise approach it is widely assumed that emotions are prototypically multidimensional: emotion concepts are categories that, as we saw, encompass families of scripts in which no single element is necessary.”! It is noticeable, however, that one element of a prototypical emotion script generally presupposes others - appraisal is appraisal of a certain emotioneliciting scenario; such scenarios are evaluated with a view to action in the light of evaluation; there is a typical relation between the affective states of arousal and the action that typically results; and so on. Even ‘thin’ views of emotion as internal subjective states in fact presuppose context.
James sets out to consider only ‘emotions that have a distinct bodily expression’ ((1884) 189) and writes that ‘A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity’ ((1884) 194). No doubt that is in some sense true. Even on the prototype approach of the psychological constructionists Russell and Barrett, according to which no single element of a script is necessary for emotion, the occurrent emotional state, involving both valence and arousal, is the typical form. But though emotion research focuses overwhelmingly on occurrent emotion, i.e. episodes that involve some form of phenomenally salient, embodied affective state, even that typical aspect of emotion is not an absolutely necessary condition for membership of the category. Just as it is common enough to feel (e. g.) sad or angry without construing any specific state of affairs as the intentional object of one’s feelings, so it is perfectly possible legitimately to use emotion concepts with no reference to any occurrent affective state.
The inclusivity of the conceptual categories to which emotion terms relate is clearly and straightforwardly demonstrated by the fact that legitimate uses of emotion terms need not refer to affective states (states of physical arousal) at all. Not only are there non-occurrent, dispositional senses of the terms in question (e.g. the fear of high places which in fact means that one never goes anywhere near a place in which one is likely to experience an occurrent episode of fear), but there are non-occurrent, non-dispositional senses that depend solely upon the distinctions inherent in the concept itself. To say ‘I’m afraid I’m too busy to chat right now’ simply categorizes the scenario in a certain way, as one in which I am compelled to represent my situation in a way that I represent as negative and normally to be avoided. If we consider ‘fear’ to be above all an occurrent affective state, then we have to take my fear (for example) that you are mistaken as derivative of, even parasitic upon, the core member of the category. But if we take ‘fear’ to be a category that has a range of more and less prototypical examples, then all these senses are legitimate members. Instead of saying ‘I’m afraid I’m too busy to chat’, I might have said ‘I’m sorry; I’m too busy to chat right now. These statements are identical in illocutionary and perlocutionary force: they both apologize, at least formally, for a refusal to engage in interaction, represent that refusal as socially undesirable and normally to be avoided, and seek, at least formally, to mitigate the interlocutor’s disappointment. Neither has any necessary reference to an occurrent episode of emotion, whether fear or sorrow. They differ in that each makes use of a different emotion concept to construct and evaluate a scenario in a different way, as a future state of affairs that one represents as something one would avoid if one could or as a current state of affairs that one represents as regrettable and for which one should apologize. Without involving any bodily changes whatever each relates to elicitors, appraisals, and action tendencies that are typical elements of the relevant script.”
These may seem to be trivial cases; they are certainly not typical examples of the categories to which they belong. But they demonstrate that considering occurrence to be essential for emotion is to drive a wedge between legitimate members of the category in a way that makes the exclusion of non-occurrent cases inexplicable. If we see the resemblance between occurrent and nonoccurrent cases we see that the distinction between them is functional only for certain purposes, that occurrence is typical, but — like all other elements of the script - not essential. Very often, in fact, legitimate uses of emotion terms (uses which thereby identify legitimate members of the relevant category) focus primarily on external aspects of the relevant script rather than on subjective internal states or feelings. A colleague who regularly diminishes other colleagues’ achievements, opposes their applications for promotion or tenure, and so on, is quite legitimately regarded as envious, jealous, or spiteful. We should like to believe that such a colleague is in fact tortured by inner feelings of malice and insecurity; but it is not necessary that this be the case in order for his or her behaviour to be qualified in those terms — the behaviour itself is enough.’ This has implications for the historian that are certainly not trivial. When Thucydides (1.23.6) identifies the Spartans’ fear (phobos) of the Athenians’ growing power as the ‘truest cause’ of the Peloponnesian War it does not matter whether he thinks or means us to think that any individual Spartan or group of Spartans experienced an occurrent episode of emotion on any particular historical occasion. The Spartans’ fear represents their construal of, attitude towards, and behaviour in the light of a certain set of historical developments. That construal may have been one to which historical Spartans gave voice; but Thucydides’ imputation of that emotion as a cause of war is adequately justified by his understanding of the policies and actions of the Spartan state. It is a perfectly regular feature of emotion scenarios that the behavioural and evaluative aspects of the script may be much more salient than the affective, phenomenological elements.** James Russell is right to conclude that ‘emotional episodes can be studied without reference to conscious feelings specifically of fear, anger, jealousy, and the like’.”°
This is the case because, as typically conceived in the categories of the languages we as scholars speak and those we, as Classicists and Byzantinists, study, emotions have intentional as well as phenomenal aspects. They are typically about something. And, thus, context is important. Though any given case may involve the identification of no particular set of eliciting conditions, when such conditions are identified, they are integral aspects of that instantiation of the script. The same is true of action: though one need not act on emotion at all, when one does, the actions one takes may in themselves be indication enough that an emotion script is being enacted. The occurrence of a specific set of phenomenologically salient physical changes is not an essential feature of every case of emotion; but occurrence, with specific patterns of valence and arousal, is prototypical of emotion, and correlates with typical patterns of eliciting conditions and resulting behaviour. Equally, though one can be in an emotional state without showing any particular expression of emotion, still expression, when it occurs, is not a detachable aspect of that particular episode: where there is expression, it is one aspect of a single process.*° (Evidence suggests, in fact, that inhibiting, even minimally, the body’s expressive capacities can interfere with the processing of emotion concepts.)*” Emotions have dimensions that extend far beyond whatever it is that happens in the head or under the skin: they involve the outward as well as the inward aspects of the body, interaction between the individual and the physical and social environments, embodied practice in roles, relationships, and institutions, as well as shared norms and concepts.” This means that — despite the hard and fast distinction drawn by Schnell between emotion (on the one hand) as a private, subjective, inner experience and (on the other) its expression, its performance, its causes and contexts, the external factors that constrain it, and the concepts we use to think and talk about it - there are important respects in which the ontology of emotions as phenomena depends on much more than the subjective psychophysical states with which they are prototypically correlated. We cannot separate emotion as subjective experience from the contexts, expression, behaviour, and discourse of emotion.
The fact that both concept and context are fundamental to the ontology of emotions, as experienced, practised, recognized, and understood, positively requires that emotion research should encompass historical and cross-cultural investigations and comparisons. The primacy of conceptualization has in the past been illustrated with reference to emotions such as xn 5{a/acedia/accidie,” but a more striking contemporary example might be ‘empathy’. The concept of empathy in English is just over 100 years old, the term having been coined in the early 1900s to calque the German term Einfiihlung,™™ itself a comparatively recent coinage deriving from the earlier use of sich einfiihlen in German Romanticism as way of projecting oneself or one’s emotions imaginatively chiefly on to objects, works of art, and the natural world. Though its sense was still primarily aesthetic, the term Einftihlung was extended by Theodor Lipps, in the later years of the nineteenth century and early years of the next, to include the process by which we allegedly understand others’ mental states by perceiving and simulating the movements that express them and then projecting our own feelings back on to the other.'*! In English and especially since the 1950s, empathy has since taken on a life of its own, acquiring a variety of senses, not always closely related, and making itself at home not only in a range of academic disciplines but also in everyday language. Contemporary empathy is very different from what it was when the term was first coined. That developmental history in turn means that the German equivalent is now Empathie, not Einftihlung.
The naturalization of the term in English and German coexists with a proliferation of uses, senses, and theorizations on which no consensus is likely to emerge. Complaints about the imprecision and multivalence of both Einfiihlung and empathy begin to proliferate almost as soon as the terms are coined. Susan Lanzoni reports that ‘At the 1910 Fourth Congress for Experimental Psychology in Innsbruck, the phenomenologist Moritz Geiger warned that if researchers did not spell out what they meant by Einfiihlung, it was not at all clear what they were talking about!”!* Lanzoni similarly cites Theodor Reik for the view that, by 1936, empathy (in English) had “become so rich in meanings that it [was] beginning to mean nothing at all’.'°> Though meanings have changed, their range has not narrowed: C. Daniel Batson was probably erring on the side of caution when in 2009 he identified eight ‘related but distinct phenomena called empathy.!* A recent review starts from the premise that “The inconsistent definition of empathy has had a negative impact on both research and practice! There are explanations which locate at least some forms of empathy in basic mechanisms of perception, motor resonance, and mirroring,!°° and others which demand higher levels of conscious reflection and processing.” Some accounts maintain at least something of the term’s original reference to the projection of one’s own emotions on to others,!°* while many think that the phenomenon in question can in some sense encompass feeling what other people feel.!” On yet other accounts there are forms of empathy that involve very little in the way of ‘feeling’ at all.!!° Though it has become conventional in psychology to distinguish empathy as ‘feeling with’ from sympathy as ‘feeling for’,!!! this reflects a historical devel-opment by which empathy has now come to usurp functions that from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries were regularly attributed to sympathy,!!” while sympathy’s long association with pro-social, caring attitudes and actions is now, at least in popular parlance, typical of empathy (even if we still do not quite send people our empathies).''° Though several mainstream definitions of empathy should, on the face of it, allow us to share whatever emotion the other person may be feeling, it would sound very odd to say that one empathized with another person’s happiness.'!* Having taken over sympathy’s reference to feeling what others feel, empathy, in everyday speech, is beginning to usurp its later role as a form of compassion; and yet there are formulations that would predicate some kind of empathy not only of those whose distress makes them less likely to support others in their sufferings,''’ but also of those whose understanding of others’ pain is a source of pleasure.1!°
In all this, there is variation between language-users, between theoretical positions, between disciplines, and between technical and non-technical applications. This is not just a matter of a single label being applied over time to a variety of discrete and generally accepted phenomena. Though people clearly do have some understanding of others’ feelings, feel bad when they feel bad, and try to support them when they do, the application of the term empathy, even its popular senses, to such scenarios typically brings with it a wider set of associations. What one takes the phenomena to be will often depend on how one explains human beings’ ability to understand others’ feelings and mental states and the mechanisms that one supposes to underpin that ability (or those abilities). In some cases, the alleged phenomena postulated by proponents of particular conceptualizations of empathy (such as the ability in some sense to share other people’s first-person experience and subjective mental states) are, at least in the opinion of their opponents, chimerical. Empathy has from the beginning been a creature of discourse, at first technical and then popular, and the phenomena to which the label is applied are substantially constructed by the explicit or implicit assumptions that the relevant discourse entails. Attempts to pin it down as a phenomenon in scholarly and scientific contexts are regularly constrained not or not only by the alleged nature of the mechanisms involved but by intuitions derived from the term’s usage in many of the contexts in which it is now at home.'”” This is not to claim that none of the scenarios to which the term empathy may be applied is possible. Nor is it to claim that empathy ‘does not exist’. But it does involve the claim that empathy is not an essence. It is not a label for a distinct psychological event or a single interpersonal scenario, but a complex, non-classical category with a wide range of more and less prototypical members and a particular history in which its senses have developed and mutated. If empathy is listening to others, being attuned to their feelings, trying to understand their perspective rather than imposing one’s own, caring about them, and being as supportive as one can be, then hurray for empathy. But if this or something like it is empathy’s current prototype, we need to be aware that this has not always been the case, that it will most probably not continue to be the case, and that the current vogue for the term and the various scenarios with which it is associated is to a substantial extent a matter of fashion, both in ordinary speech and in scientific discourse.
The power of popular and scientific discourse to combine in influencing the history of emotion concepts can be observed in action in the current interest in establishing and exploring the parameters (conceptual, evaluative, phenomenological, physiological, expressive, situational, etc.) of the experiences and scenarios that speakers of English include in the vague concept of being ‘moved’ or ‘touched’. A number of recent studies suggest that this is indeed a distinct affective category with its own conceptual structure, one that has linguistic analogues in a wide range of cultures.'!* This process of identification and analysis, however, is not like discovering an unknown planet or a hitherto unclassified species of lichen. It is a matter of academic discourse probing the emotion concepts recognized, to varying extents, in the popular discourse of different human cultures.
Labels, as aspects of conceptualization, do matter, and they matter especially, though not only, for historians. The historical perspective here is also a comparative one: historical research on a concept such as empathy requires us to be mindful of differences in the usage and meaning of the term at different periods. This comparative perspective is central when it comes to studying emotion in cultures which use or used languages other than our own. We saw above how language conditions one’s experience of the world and how one makes sense of that experience. Findings with regard to the influence of language on processes such as colour perception suggest analogues in the ways that members of different cultures perform, experience, and understand emotion.
What dif-ference might it make, for example, that speakers of ancient Greek had one concept, aidos, that covers scripts that in English are associated with shame on the one hand (focusing primarily on one’s own honour, though also encompassing one’s sense of oneself as a social being) and with respect on the other (focusing primarily on the honour of other people, as recognized through one’s own attitudes and behaviour)? According to a recent book by the philosopher Richard Gaskin, not very much difference at all.1!° For Gaskin, our ability to translate a term in another language that has no direct equivalent in our own allows us also to experience the world as users of that term in that language experience it. In my 1993 book on the subject I upheld the view that “To recognize that we feel respect where a Greek might feel aidds provides no warrant for the claim that we experience aidos’, concluding that “Neither as a whole nor in part is the experience of aidds as such available to those who do not conceptualize emotional experience in the same way as did native speakers of ancient Greek.’!”°
Gaskin, by contrast, argues that, because we translate aidds using different English terms in different contexts, aidds is ‘not one’ and ‘not uniform, [but] embodies a multiplicity of sub-concepts’, so that ‘it will be possible for modern English speakers to feel aidos’.'! No serious philologist would deny that we can translate virtually all words in other languages into contextually adequate terms in English. But it is a big claim to argue that English has succeeded where ancient Greek has failed in picking out a genuine multiplicity of concepts, and an even bigger one to argue that someone who labels her experience as respect in English feels what a speaker of ancient Greek felt in calling her experience aidds. The argument is not that a speaker of ancient Greek cannot distinguish more than one sense of aidos — that is clearly not the case.'” Rather it is that, just as we can never share exactly the perspective of another human being, so we do not precisely share the perspective of those whose languages make different distinctions from our own. To do so one would have to be able not only to translate the source language into the target, but also to use that language as a native speaker does.!”3
The opportunity to do that, by inhabiting ancient Greek culture and interacting, at a native level of linguistic competence, with native speakers of ancient Greek, is now beyond our grasp. Not even the greatest of modern philologists have come anywhere close to using ancient Greek as native speakers once did. We remember that even near-native competence in another language still makes for differences in the experience and performance of emotion.!** Aidés is not uniform, if that means that it has only one sense; but neither is it simply ‘a multiplicity of sub-concepts’. The encapsulation of both shame and respect in a single concept recognizes a genuine fact about the world (the mutual entanglement of self-esteem, the esteem we receive from others, and the respect we owe others) that English speakers must laboriously reconstruct.!”° This is an altogether more complex phenomenon than that of English speakers’ ability to experience an emotion (such as Schadenfreude) that is unnamed in their language but named in another, because in that case the mapping is straightforwardly between single scripts in each of the two cultures.
Yet this is not to deny the possibility of translation. Translation succeeds when it is contextually appropriate. To translate emotion terms in a contextually appropriate manner we need a developed understanding of the various scripts with which the emotion terms of both source and target languages are associated.!”° These scripts are themselves aspects of the relevant emotion concepts. Thus, though aidds, shame, and respect are different concepts, comparison between aidos, on the one hand, and shame and respect on the other is eminently possible and constitutes a fruitful way of establishing substantial common ground between ancient Greek and modern English concepts: aidds is not wholly coextensive with any English term that we may use to translate it, but the category does encompass scripts that are aspects of familiar English-language categories. The common ground that comparative conceptual analysis establishes does not warrant either the false exoticism that sees partial congruence as radical difference or the unwarranted assumption that we are all just the same, really.
Where the emotion concepts of different cultures are not wholly congruent in the scripts that they cover, still the scripts, as aspects of those concepts, may be directly comparable. Thus, though English has one term, pride, that covers innocent and positively evaluated forms of pleasure in the achievements and excellences of oneself and one’s own, especially when recognized by others (cf. French fierté), as well as various negatively evaluated ways of thinking too highly of oneself (cf. French orgeuil), while ancient Greek has several terms for the pride that goes before a fall, but none that unequivocally labels the positive sense of pride, this does not allow us to conclude that the scripts associated with positive pride in English go unrecognized - or even, in fact, that they go unlabelled in ancient Greek society, much less that the forms of behaviour that the scripts encompass did not exist in that society.!*” Though there is no Greek noun that answers directly to English pride, positive and negative, or to the positive kind of pride designated by the French fierté, Greek recognizes the scripts associated with positive pride by means of verbs such as agallomai,'** kallopizomai,'”’ and kallunomai,*° as well as by various locutions denoting the pleasure one takes in one’s (or one’s family’s) achievement, especially as recognized by others.!*!
Similarly, the noun zélotupia (jealousy) is of comparatively late coinage and is not found in fifth-century sources. Thus, it is not available as a label for the motivation of Medea in Euripides’ tragedy, first produced in 431 Bc. And in fact the terms most prominently predicated of Medea’s feelings towards the husband who jilted her for another all designate forms of anger.'*? But this does not mean that we cannot also see her motivation in terms of what we call jealousy: both Medea herself and Jason emphasize her resentment of the fact that Jason has rejected her as a sexual partner in favour of another’s bed;
Medea’s possessiveness with regard to Jason is clear;!** and it is equally clear that there is no love lost between her and Jason’s new wife, whose death she brings about in a grotesquely macabre fashion (much to her own satisfaction).!°° The view that anger is an aspect of jealousy as the latter is understood in English is a common one; though often expressed in terms of the essentialist view that “basic emotions’ are used as building blocks to construct more complex examples,!*° it is compatible with the position that there is an overlap between anger and jealousy in terms of the scripts and scenarios to which the terms relate. Thus, while it undoubtedly matters that Medea’s motivation is labelled using ‘anger’ terminology rather than specifically designated by a close equivalent to the English-language notion of jealousy,’ there can, given the right context, be considerable overlap, in both pragmatic and conceptual terms, between the emic account of Medea’s actions in terms of orgé, cholos, and thumos, and the etic interpretation of her behaviour as motivated by jealousy.
Labels do matter, but they do not by any means constitute the totality of a concept, especially when we are dealing with concepts that have the event-like structure that emotions do. When our searches reveal an absence of labels, we still need to search further before we can establish that such absences point to radical differences between societies and their mentalities; and if we are going to compare cultures at all we need a certain level of abstraction from details and specificities if meaningful points of comparison are ever going to emerge. The absence of a label is not necessarily the total absence of the concept or of the forms of experience that the concept structures: there is no oneto-one relation between either labels and concepts or labels and experience. What makes Medea’s anger, in this case, a form of what we call jealousy is not primarily a matter of how the experiences are labelled. Nor is it a matter of specific bodily changes or symptoms.
It may, partly, be a matter of the way the agent appraises the situation; but a difference in appraisal between anger that counts as jealousy and anger that does not is above all a consequence of the difference in the eliciting conditions, in the scenario that the appraisal construes, i.e. in the context. This shows, once again, that emotions are not just subjective, internal feelings or states of mind. They are also implicated in the relations between people, in the external conditions in which they arise and which give rise to them, and in the actions that we take in a given emotional scenario.'*? They have many dimensions, all of which are aspects of the concepts that human beings use when they enact them and when they interpret them. Their specificity can depend on features of the context beyond the skull and the skin, on aspects of pragmatics, performance, and situation, not just on labels. Just as there is no sharp antithesis between inner and outer, emotion and expression, emotion and representation, there is no question of Schnell’s distinction between Gefiihle an sich and every other aspect of an emotion scenario.
The Gefiihle, as we have seen, are never really an sich - they are implicated in context, in social interaction, in narrative, in language, in shared forms of thought (such as metaphor), and in culture. This means that we, as Byzantinists, Classicists, or historians of ideas and culture, are in a fortunate position. Many of the skills we use on an everyday basis - the understanding that translation is about ideas, not words; the knowledge that the ideas one translates must be understood in contextually situated terms; the sense that terms and concepts change over time; the sensitivity to narrative cues about the motives of characters in the diegetic, mimetic, and mixed genres of ancient and Byzantine literature - turn out to be essential if we are to use our textual sources as material for the history of emotions. Because emotions are by no means only features of some private inner world, we have plenty of scope for investigating them by means of texts that afford us no direct access to such worlds, either because their authors and the individual figures that populate them are long dead or because, qua dramatic or narrative fictions, they never possessed private inner lives in the first place.
The narrative fictions of the past mirror the narrative structure of emotions; in so far as emotions are event-like in form and script-like in concept, we have access to the emotions of individuals represented in any text that has even a minimal narrative form - from the epic narratives of Homer to the sketches of the conditions, appraisals, and behaviour patterns associated with individual emotions in Aristotle’s Rhetoric. We have, in our ancient and Byzantine sources, a wide array of texts of various kinds that represent, elicit, and theorize emotions, and these theorizations, in particular, are of inestimable benefit in guiding our approaches to the representations we study. Rich as our texts are in representations, they provide, in their turn, contextual information by which we can reconstruct the affective qualities to which their ancient audiences responded. With the help of those texts, we can also begin to explore the affective qualities of other contexts for emotion and other emotion elicitors, such as the objects and artefacts that survive from the cultures we study or the remains of the physical spaces in which emotions were experienced and enacted. There is thus plenty of scope for histories not just of the signs of emotion, but of emotions themselves, because emotions are primarily concepts, concepts by which individuals and cultures make sense of their worlds and themselves.
It is, pace Schnell,"° not a fault that emotion history follows so closely in the footsteps of conceptual and intellectual history (or of social history, gender history, etc.). It is a culture’s concepts and categories of emotion that tie the elements of emotion scripts together, that form the link between certain patterns of eliciting conditions, appraisals, subjectively experienced bodily states, externally perceptible facial and bodily movements, and kinds of action. As Matt and Stearns observe, “By studying feelings, historians are uncovering the worldviews and the most fundamental assumptions about life, culture, and personality that people in the past carried in their heads.’!! Historians of many traditions and approaches have always studied these things. What the history of emotions adds to traditional approaches is an additional level of attention to and emphasis on affective concepts and phenomena as such.
Emotion history is an evolving field, not just in the sense that one project builds incrementally on or takes a critical stance towards another, but also in that all its practitioners are feeling their way through obscure and difficult terrain, attempting to use the results of one difficult enterprise - an understanding of human emotion in all its complex ramifications - as a means of progress in another - the process of trying to understand the lives, experiences, motives, and perspectives of historical individuals and communities. It turns out that we do, after all, have to have as full an understanding as we can achieve of what emotions might be before we can begin to study their history. For all of us, no matter how long we have engaged in these tasks, this involves many false steps and false starts. If we fail, we hope that at least we fail better.
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