Author Reply: Comment on Reisenzein & Stephan

A major theme of my article is the transformation of the study of emotions from a study in moral philosophy to a scientific study. The transformation includes a change in how writers pursuing the study conceived of its object. Hume, as I argued, initiated this change when he distinguished a passion’s violence—how great a state of agitation it was—from its strength as a motive of action and maintained that these two features were independent of each other. Taking them as independent, he then characterized some passions as having the former, that is, violence, but not the latter, that is, motivational force. Such passions, he remarked, were “pure emotions.” James, I further argued, completed the change by defining emotion as the feelings of bodily changes that follow upon the perception of an “exciting object” and by excluding such feelings from being direct causes of action, that is, from having motivational force. For James, then, all emotions were what Hume had called “pure emotions.”

Professors Reisenzein and Stephan (2014), in their brief discussion of my article, refer to “[t]he traditional theory of emotions in philosophy, as articulated by Descartes and Hume,” (p. 39) on which “emotions arise from perceptions or appraisals of events and, in turn, cause . . . actions” (p. 39). James’s theory, they then suggest, contradicts this traditional theory by implying that emotions do not cause . . . actions. Unfortunately, by lumping Descartes and Hume together in this way, they miss Hume’s deviation from the traditional theory and how it anticipated James’s. While Descartes conceived emotions as causes of action since he accepted the traditional notion of a passion as an influence on the will, Hume did not. Hume, rather, took some passions to be causes of volitions and thus actions, but denied that all passions were causes of volitions or actions. Consequently, his theory contained significant disagreement with the traditional theory, for he did not, contrary to the traditional theory, make it part of the concept of a passion that a passion be a cause of action.

Pace Reisenzein and Stephan, then, Hume and James did not differ on the question of whether to conceive of emotions as causes of action. Where they differed was on the question of what the direct cause of an emotion was. Hume took an emotion to have some prior mental state as its direct cause. James rejected this view. He took the direct cause of an emotion to be bodily changes and took prior mental states to be indirect causes. As against Hume, James maintained that bodily changes always came between the perception of an object and the emotion that followed in the chain of causes and effects that produced the latter. Since these bodily changes were commonly seen as the expressions of emotion, and since the expression of something is commonly understood to be among its effects rather than its causes, James regarded his theory as a reversal of common sense.

He reiterated these points in the opening paragraph of the reply to his critics (James, 1894) he published a decade later:

In the year 1884 Prof. Lange of Copenhagen and the present writer published independently of each other, the same theory of emotional consciousness. They affirmed it to be the effect of the organic changes, muscular and visceral, of which the so-called “expression” of the emotion consists. It is thus not a primary feeling, directly aroused by the exciting object or thought, but a secondary feeling indirectly aroused; the primary effect being the organic changes in question, which are immediate reflexes following upon the presence of the object. (p. 205)

Reisenzein and Stephan (2014) think that James, in this reply, modified his theory by restricting the bodily changes that directly cause emotion to “visceral changes.” Nowhere in the reply, however, does James go back on the opening paragraph’s description of the theory, and the description expressly includes muscular as well as visceral changes among the organic changes that are the direct cause of emotions. ¹ James does say, in answering an objection to his having used running from a bear as an example of bodily movements that directly cause emotion, that he meant running, in this example, “to stand for … many other movements in us, of which invisible visceral ones seem by far the most essential” (1894, p. 206). But to say that the visceral movements are the most essential ones that directly cause emotion is not to say they are the only ones, and he plainly did not mean to exclude running from being among those movements. So Reisenzein and Stephan appear to misconstrue James’s remark when they take him to have modified his theory at this point. James, as far as I can see, consistently expounded the same theory in his various writings on emotion from 1884 to 1894.

In particular, I agree with Reisenzein and Stephan’s (2014) point, in response to Professor Ellsworth, about the place of appraisals in James’s theory. James had no reason to deny that sometimes the thought triggering the bodily changes whose feelings an emotion consists in entails an appraisal, and in replying to his critics he acknowledged as much. But to take this acknowledgment as showing that James held that appraisals are necessary to the triggering of these changes is to read too much into his reply. Sometimes, as Reisenzein and Stephan observe, perception without appraisal triggers an instinctual response, and nothing James says in his reply or elsewhere implies that he denied this or excluded the feelings of the bodily changes that such a response consists in from being an emotion.