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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 August 2019
According to what is now the standard account in the history of psychology, in the 1880s William James and the Danish physician Carl Georg Lange independently developed a strikingly new theory, commonly referred to as the ‘James–Lange’ theory of emotion. In this paper it is argued that this standard account is highly misleading. Lange's views on affect in his (1885) Om Sindsbevægelser were more cautious than James allowed, and not open to criticisms that have often been levelled against the theory of emotion that James claimed he shared with Lange. In fact, Lange argued for distinctions that James did not mention in his discussion of Lange's work. Even with regard to the primary emotions, the two thinkers’ explanatory models diverged significantly. The contrast between James and Lange on affect is especially striking in their respective discussions of topics in aesthetics, as is established with reference to Lange's little-known (1899) Bidrag til Nydelsernes fysiologi som grundlag for en rationel æstetik.
1 See, for instance, The Encyclopedia of Psychology (ed.) Alan E. Kazin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 175, 1893.
2 James, William, ‘What is an Emotion?’ Mind 9:34 (April 1884), 89–90Google Scholar. (henceforth cited as W); this passage appears with very minor changes in The Principles of Psychology, vol. II (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1890), 449–450 (this volume is cited henceforth as PP).
3 Lange, Carl Georg, Om Sindsbevægelser. Et psyko-fysiologisk Studie (Copenhagen: Jacob Lunds, 1885)Google Scholar. Henceforth cited as OS with page numbers in this first edition; all translations my own.
4 Lange, , Über Gemüthsbewegungen. Eine psycho-physiologische Studie, trans. Kurella, Hans (Leipzig: Theodor Thomas, 1887)Google Scholar. Referred to in what follows as UG. This German translation was the basis of Les Émotions: étude psychophysiologique, trans. Georges Dumas (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1895); and ‘The Emotions: A Psychophysiological Study’, trans. Istar A. Haupt, in Knight Dunlap (ed.) The Emotions, vol. I (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1922), 33–92 (referred to in what follows as E).
5 James to Ribot, July 1888, in The Correspondence of William James, Volume 6: 1885–1889 (ed.) Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley (Charlottesville and London: The University of Virginia Press, 1998), 420–421; anon, ‘New Books’, Mind 13:50 (April 1888), 304–305. Høffding, Harald, Psychologie in Umrissen auf Grundlagen der Erfahrung (Leipzig: Fues, 1887), 343Google Scholar; ‘Sindsbevægelsers fysiologi’, Tilskueren 3 (1886), 114–123, reprinted in his Mindre Arbejder, vol. I (Copenhagen: Nordisk, 1899), 51–60; and in German in Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie 12 (1888), 356–366.
6 James, , ‘The Physical Basis of Emotion’, Psychological Review 1 (1894), 516–529CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Lange, Carl Georg, Bidrag til Nydelsernes fysiologi som grundlag for en rationel æstetik (Copenhagen: Gydendalske, 1899)Google Scholar. Referred to in what follows as B with page numbers to this edition; all translations are my own.
8 Lange, Sinnesgenüsse und Kunstgenuss. Beiträge zu einer sensualistichen Kunstlehre (ed.) Hans Kurella (Wiesbaden: J. F. Bergmann, 1903). As Kurella announces in his editorial preface, he took it upon himself to revise and ‘complete’ Lange's manuscript. This at times involved skipping sections in Lange's text.
9 Gurney, Edmund, ‘What is an Emotion?’, Mind 9:35 (1884), 421–426Google Scholar.
10 Damasio, Antonio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (London: William Heinemann, 2003), 88Google Scholar.
11 Damasio, Antonio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999), 367Google Scholar.
12 Damasio, Antonio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1994), 130Google Scholar.
13 Damasio, Descartes’ Error, 130.
14 One place to look is the manner in which a token emotion is identified. Above I cited a passage in which James explicitly identifies an emotion with the feeling or sensation of peripheral bodily events; our feeling ‘IS the emotion’, he asserts. Some commentators doubt that this is the most charitable way to read James; see, for example, Ellsworth, Phoebe, ‘William James and Emotion: Is a Century of Fame Worth a Century of Misunderstanding?’, Psychological Review 101 (1994), 222–229CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Robinson, Jenefer, Deeper than Reason: Emotion and its Role in Literature, Music, and Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 29CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the argument that James actually did regularly identify the emotion with the feeling, see Reisenzein, Rainer, Meyer, Wulf-Uwe, and Schützwohl, Achim, ‘James and the Physical Basis of Emotion: A Comment on Ellsworth’, Psychological Review 102:4 (1995), 757–761CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Lange sometimes similarly appears to reduce the emotional episode to the bodily feeling, but not always, since Lange also states that the emotion is not just a feeling, but a causal episode including both stimulus and response. It could be argued, then, that Lange and James differed in this regard. I shall not pursue this argument here because Lange's texts are inconsistent on this topic. Lange writes, for example: ‘the certain and tangible factors in every emotion are, first of all, the cause – a sensory impression that as a rule works through an association of ideas or a memory; next there is the effect, namely, the aforementioned vaso-motor and other attendant changes in bodily and mental function. The question then is what lies in between these two factors, if anything at all does lie between them’ (OS 59; UG 50; E 64).
15 James to Ribot, July 1888, in The Correspondence of William James, Volume 6, 420–421.
16 Preben Bender Petersen regrets that Lange's readers, and this would include James, have not paid sufficient attention to a footnote in which Lange attenuates his usual emphasis on the vascular system. Lange here acknowledged that he has ‘simplied the matter’ by separating the vasomotor function from the rest of the nervous system, whereas it is in fact ‘only part of the involuntary nerve muscle apparatus’ (OS 51, n. 1; UG 87–88, n. 20; E 87, n. 20); see Petersen's ‘La description de réflexes conditionnels par C. Lange comme base de sa théorie d’émotion vaso-motrice’, Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavia 41 (June 1966), 188–192, at 189 (Petersen cites Les émotions, 156).
17 This aspect of Lange's theory is usefully stressed in Petersen's ‘La description de réflexes conditionnels’.
18 Titchener, E.B., ‘An Historical Note on the James–Lange Theory of Emotion’, The American Journal of Psychology 25:3 (1914), 427–447CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 446.
19 For background, see my ‘Dubos’ Paradox’, The British Journal of Aesthetics 53: 4 (2013), 393–406.
20 James, review of Pain, Pleasure, and Aesthetics, by Henry R. Marshall, in his Essays, Comments, and Reviews (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 489.
21 James, review of The Sense of Beauty, by George Santayana, in his Essays, Comments, and Reviews, 177.
22 Lange, ‘Udkast til en psykologi’, in Knud Farber, Erindringer om C. Lange (Copenhagen: Levin & Munksgaards, 1927), 67–113.
23 Lange, cited in Faber, Erindringer, 30, my trans. The context was Lange's 1899 review in Hospitalstidende of Alfred Georg Ludvig Lehmann's De sjælelige tilstandes legemlige ytringer pletsymografiske undersøgelser, 2 vols. (Copenhagen: Frimodt, 1888). Lehmann had criticized both James and Lange in his Die Hauptgesetze des menschlichen Gefühlslebens, trans. F. Bendixen (Leipzig: Reisland, 1892), 65–75.
24 Thanks to Rafael De Clercq and Andrea Sauchelli for helpful comments on a draft of this paper. I am also grateful for questions and comments after my talk at the Royal Institute of Philosophy in London. I also received excellent feedback from participants in a seminar in the philosophy department at the University of Southern Denmark. Thanks in particular to Søren Harnow Klausen and Nikolaj Nottelmann for stridently defending (a weak version of) the hypothesis that there really was an innovative James–Lange theory of emotion.
