Comment: Historians in the Emotion Laboratory

This special historical section is a call for a new emotion, indeed, for a new paradigm for the emotions. It envisions a future in which the social sciences, the human sciences, and the exact sciences collaboratively reconceive “emotion.” As the contributors clearly exemplify, emotion is political, contextual, ethical, lived; it is phenomenological, intentional, historical, culturally scripted, socially mediated. And it is physiological: embodied and cerebrated. How can any “one” discipline even imagine knowing emotion? To know emotion, we must engage in cross-disciplinary collaborations, critiques, and interchange.

In this short postscript, I can do no more than indicate several challenges and opportunities—out of the many—from the perspective of a historian of the modern sciences of emotions. First, I emphasize that the historian’s primary contribution to the “new” emotion is not to “correct” the scientific “mistakes” of scientists inside their laboratories. The history of the modern scientific study of emotions clearly demonstrates that modern science made perfect scientific sense, and good scientists worked within the strictures and methodologies of good science. The historian’s contribution is thus of a different nature altogether. It is to make immanent in scientific emotion that which is missing from contemporary science: the cosmology, the vocation, the perspective of the humanities writ large. It is to exemplify how cultural assumptions are implicitly integrated into laboratory experiments. It is to explicate how (seemingly) natural kinds are, in fact, social kinds. It is to reconceive private acts (e.g., of “irrationality”) in terms of their social rationality. It is to demonstrate how our basic and intimate experiences are constituted in part by our moral-social valuations. It is to make ostensive the cultural scripting of seemingly reflex and preprogrammed physiological reactions. It is to challenge basic scientific tenets by studying the emotion-history of the science of emotions (rather than only the science-history of emotions). It is, in short, to infuse the historian’s know-how into emotion. ¹

The infusion and integration of the know-how of the humanities into and with the know-how of the sciences of emotion is part of a broader call for such integrations in a variety of different fields. In recent literatures beyond emotion, these endeavors are addressed both in terms of how we come to know and in terms of how things are, in and of themselves. These latter endeavors present possible models for the new emotion and for our collaborations. One recently and rapidly expanding paradigm is the “new materialism.” The “new materialism” is an umbrella term for a new paradigm in the humanities. This new paradigm draws on the sciences—modern physics, Darwinian evolution—in retheorizing from the perspective of the humanities the nature of how we come to know qua the nature of things. The “new materialism” has inspired a spate of novel bio-cultural interpretations and case studies (e.g., Coole & Frost, 2010). A second approach to the bio-cultural is presented in more concrete and discrete projects that adopt a systems theory perspective. These studies exemplify how the biological and the cultural are inextricably enmeshed and fused. There is no “bio” and “cultural.” There is no “bio-cultural.” There is only “biocultural.” These studies (e.g., Fausto-Sterling, 2005) demonstrate how the very materiality, the tissues of our bodies, are immanently and inherently biocultural (I note in passing that this latter biocultural approach can possibly be conjoined with developments in epigenetics). A third bio-cultural (or biocultural) possibility relates to recent collaborations between scientists and historians. These latter collaborations have already produced innovative science–humanities, bio-cultural, interventions. They exemplify how one could begin to think about integrating the cultural with the biological into one framework, with real-life implications and applications (e.g., Gendered Innovations Project: https://genderedinnovations.stanford.edu/). The fourth and last possibility is the broad and wide-ranging field of the “medical humanities,” where the humanities are systematically integrated into the very core of medical teaching and praxis (e.g., Dror, 2011). These few examples, out of the many, present the promises and the challenges of a true integrative science–humanities bio-cultural approach.

One foundational challenge for a science–humanities/bio-cultural emotion is particularly pertinent for readers of Emotion Review, and for potential collaborating historians: how do we infuse the know-how of the humanities into the laboratory and into scientific protocol? ² If we are to collaborate, both the historian and the scientist must grapple with this major issue. The study of medieval emotions, of “happiness” in the 18th century or of 20th-century cancerous disgust, in this special historical section might seem abstruse, irrelevant, anecdotal, and marginal for the contemporary laboratory-based investigator, who will struggle with a language, an approach, a strangeness, and a perspective that are alien to scientific ears. A crucially important function of the collaborating historian is to distill, to interpret for the scientist the methodology, the approach, the model, the perspective, and the cosmology that these studies exemplify, beyond the particularities of the specific historical case study per se. Last, the historian and the scientist inside the laboratory must also consider the implications of bio-cultural emotions for nonhuman animals. How can we, if we can at all, model the new bio-cultural emotion in nonhuman animals? ³ Will the new bio-cultural emotion, or the emphasis on phenomenology and experience, no longer be studied in or attributed to animals? Such a turn of events would take us back to the 19th century, to Darwin and his contemporaries, who insisted that certain expressions, such as blushing and sobbing, were exclusively human. From the mid-1870s, it was no other than laboratory-based physiologists who begged to differ and studied the physiology of emotions, including of the “blush,” in animals, despite Darwin (Mosso, 1886). In contemporary Western society, moreover, the assumption that animals have “human” emotions is practically a truism. Western veterinary medicine, for example, has humanized animal psychology in unprecedented ways. An experimental (laboratory) science of bio-cultural emotions will have to position itself clearly vis-à-vis the nonhuman. Perhaps a warning sign for the contributing historian is the absence of animal emotions in this special historical section.

The collaborations between science and the humanities, and the inauguration of a truly bio-cultural emotion will make science qua science better: more objective, more robust, and more empirically sound. In making science scientifically better, some argue (including in this special section) that it will also make science more equitable and responsible. Will our collaborations discover new emotions—emotions that “weren’t there” before—as 19th-century investigators asserted with respect to the new 19th-century science of emotions (Binet & Courtier, 1896)? Will we develop together a new language for speaking the emotions since, as William James observed, the “lack of a word” can lead us to “suppose that no entity can be there; and so we come to overlook phenomena whose existence would be patent to us all, had we only grown up to hear it familiarly recognized in speech” (James, 1890, p. 195)? Our collaborations will be challenging and demanding. Indeed, if they are seemingly effortless, then we will surely be missing a core ingredient. The promises of collaboration are worthy of our mutual efforts. ⁴