The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle's Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science

by Daniel M. Gross

Princess Diana’s death was a tragedy that provoked mourning across the globe; the death of a homeless person, more often than not, is met with apathy. How can we account for this uneven distribution of emotion? Can it simply be explained by the prevailing scientific understanding? Uncovering a rich tradition beginning with Aristotle, The Secret History of Emotion offers a counterpoint to the way we generally understand emotions today.
 
Through a radical rereading of Aristotle, Seneca, Thomas Hobbes, Sarah Fielding, and Judith Butler, among others, Daniel M. Gross reveals a persistent intellectual current that considers emotions as psychosocial phenomena. In Gross’s historical analysis of emotion, Aristotle and Hobbes’s rhetoric show that our passions do not stem from some inherent, universal nature of men and women, but rather are conditioned by power relations and social hierarchies. He follows up with consideration of how political passions are distributed to some people but not to others using the Roman Stoics as a guide. Hume and contemporary theorists like Judith Butler, meanwhile, explain to us how psyches are shaped by power. To supplement his argument, Gross also provides a history and critique of the dominant modern view of emotions, expressed in Darwinism and neurobiology, in which they are considered organic, personal feelings independent of social circumstances.
 
The result is a convincing work that rescues the study of the passions from science and returns it to the humanities and the art of rhetoric.

Genres: Psychology, Philosophy, Nonfiction, History

204 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Declan · Rating 3 out of 5]

(read for class) very very COMPLICATED! doing a lot of heavy lifting and backfilling for me, which was good, but ultimately a little overwhelming. felt like large sections could’ve been condensed and simplified. glad for the read though

[Jacob · Rating 3 out of 5]

While this book at times feels like a bunch of scholarly journal articles sewn together, it gives some important incite into and history behind the shift from the pre-modern understanding that emotion is a deeply social and, therefore, inherently rhetorical phenomenon to the modern understanding that emotion is the biological property of the individual. Gross is attempting to take the discussion of emotion away from the modern scientific community--and their presuppositions--and bring it back within the realm of the humanities where it belongs. I applaud this move and think that Gross makes a cogent case, and will probably make use of his arguments in future school work. That being said, some parts of the book get a bit specialized and Gross gives an interesting interpretation of David Hume which, while serving his case, is quite different than any interpretation I have heard or agree with thus far, but I give the author the benefit of the doubt. Overall, the book is a decent academic resource for anyone who sees the failure of modern science in describing and evaluating human action.

[Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

We live in a society that constructs norms of emotion and then enforces those rules of appropriateness, meaning that those norms are so embedded in society that often neurologists and empirical psychologists may mistake them as products of “human wiring.” Rather, as we are wont to say in the humanities, society is everything and its influence on emotions is no different.

[Nan]

This book has been very helpful to my dissertation.

[Heather]

Recommended by the inimitable Lena Lencek (of Reed College fame)