The history of emotions, apparently, is a relatively new area of research that has crept up upon academia, where, after an inculcation of 20 years or so, it has sprung itself on to me, a general reader. Your educational pedigree may be as tattered as mine, if so, read on as I introduce you briefly to my difficulties with Boddice, what I had hoped for, and what the book actually contains, both high and low points.
Boddice has a grand plan. “We empathize, primarily, with what we ourselves know how to feel.” He “rejects a universal theory of emotions and adopts a biocultural (sic) approach to argue that how we feel is the dynamic product of the existence of our minds and bodies in moments of time and space.” To be precise “…it is impossible to conceive of a human being outside of culture.” Boddice believes that “Meaning… is always made in context, in culture, and in society… without this we are left only with the veneer of experiential change sitting atop an otherwise stable biology.” And “…it is absolutely beyond doubt that the way emotions have been done has changed over time – the doing includes the words we use for affective experiences, the gestures (facial and bodily) that we use to express them, and the cultural scripts that determine the when and the how of expression – so too must experience itself have changed.”
Now doesn’t that sound wonderful? Who wouldn’t one want to know how our ancestors felt, why, and how they expressed these feelings in the world in which they lived. And indeed, the introduction sets forth a program that, had Boddice followed with dispatch, I would have granted him five stars and read everything other of his books. Sadly, I found many of his examples maddening. Not all; his work on the Iliad was revealing, I enjoyed his reworking of Aristotle’s eudaimonia, his work on Descartes, of great interest. But far too often he writes indirectly. Much seems left unsaid. What are we to make of the Carte de Tendre in Scudery’s novel Clelie? Or that Jenner, the inventor of vaccination, was “depressed” at the death of his loved ones, except that it was an expressive use of word (for which, see Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By)? Why Thomas Paine and not Abigail Adams? What of Hildegard of Bingen and why not Tristan and Isolde? These examples aside, why could not the author have come out to clearly, at the onset of his chapters, ro inform us of the feeling(s) that he wished to examine, what brought them about, how their expression differed from that of the present day, and what conclusions could thus be reached? Far too often he sacrifices clarity for an allusive turn of phrase, leaving me wondering, rereading, and wondering again.
Perhaps this is modern scholarship. Boddice is learned. I am not. I enjoyed, and recommend not only the introduction, but his final chapter, on emotional capitalism – our times are those of happiness industries, and Boddice underlines the concern that any individual should have at the incorporation of what should be a private concern into a goal of the nation state. Yet I recommend A History of Feelings, still. It is a brief volume, which must be wrung like a lemon, to derive its juice.
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- Reviewed in the United States on April 23, 2020
