The long eighteenth century saw two opposed tendencies in Christian expression in the English-speaking world. On the one hand was the religion of the Enlightenment, which emphasised reason and tolerance, while on the other hand were those sometimes called ‘enthusiasts’, who valued emotion in their relation to the deity. In this chapter texts by major religious writers of the period – Joseph Butler, John Wesley, and George Whitefield – are examined, with a view to determining how their distinctive lexical choices aligned with their theology. All three were at one time members of the Church of England, but their thinking diverged markedly as the century progressed; Wesley and Whitefield are now recognised as leaders in the emergence of Methodism, although they too came to differ about basic matters of belief. The chapter ends with an examination of the ‘language of feeling’ in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, showing how ‘exemplary fiction’ was impacted by the contemporary religious lexicon.

This chapter explains how the Romantic gnoseology goes together with the concept of a dependent subjectivity. Indeed, the Romantics imagine their ontology as based on relationships (rather than on identity) and, consequently, the self as entangled in a mesh of reciprocal dependencies. This perspective on the Romantic gnoseology begins with the notion of ‘experiment’, which for the Romantics is a genetic method through which the subject–object dualism is undermined. Thinking of philosophy as an experiment implied, for them, accepting that the human being does not dominate nature but is instead constantly influenced by it. The deep relationship between the knower and the known is manifested in feeling, which reveals the primordial connection between subject and object and is at the core of the relational idea of the self. The relational ontology underlying the Romantic conception of feeling is even more evident in their analysis of love as a universal force that unites beings to and in the Absolute. Love designates the network of relationships constitutive of Being, of which the self is not the apex.

The human body is tied to a distinctive form of natural beauty, for Hegel proposes that there is something about the human body in its given, natural form that makes it uniquely capable of manifesting self-conscious spirit or mind. Since, ontologically speaking, the being of spirit is of a higher order than anything in nonhuman nature, the capacity to give off the distinctive look and sound of a spiritual way of being amounts to the human body’s capacity for a higher, fuller beauty as well. This chapter focuses primarily on the naturally given, predominantly involuntary ways in which the human body allows spirituality to appear. Because Hegel characterizes artworks generally as involving a “spiritualizing” of otherwise natural forms, we are encouraged to think of the human body’s distinctive, spirit-manifesting demeanor as a kind of root aesthetic vocabulary with which all of the more developed “languages” of art are familiar and from which they grow. But it also seems that for Hegel it ultimately takes art, and in particular classical sculpture, to reveal the purportedly natural beauty of the body, and this complicates the sense in which bodily beauty is natural after all.

William James has a complex and intriguing relationship to aesthetics. Although he is the classical pragmatist who had the deepest relationship to the arts, James never devoted a book or an academic article to aesthetic theory. He intentionally refrained from this not only because of his disappointments in reading the texts of philosophical aesthetics but also because of what he perceived as the inherent limits of aesthetic theory. Notwithstanding these severe reservations, James gave aesthetic principles a pervasive and important place in his philosophy. This paper examines both James’s reservations about aesthetic theory and the various significant roles he grants to aesthetic principles in his theories of knowledge, action, ethics, and affective life. One of the key problems James saw in aesthetic theory results from the way it inevitably comes up against the generality and limits of language. This is particularly true with respect to the language of theory. This chapter provides a detailed examination of this issue and its consequences.

The chapter examines how anthropologists can produce ethically engaged and scientifically rigorous results in their work with people living at society’s social, political, and economic margins. It builds on long-term participatory research with street-involved youth in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and elucidates affect-focused methodologies to build empathetic relationships with collaborators and to develop critical theoretical insights. The chapter argues against compartmentalizing the researcher’s affect, feelings, and emotions, which is thought to characterize a rigorous scientific approach. The affect, feelings, and emotions experienced in this challenging work are an invaluable source of ethnographic data, allowing greater theoretical insight into emotional economies, where street-involved youths’ careful arrangements of emotives in social interactions create attention, trust, concern, care, or cooperation. Affect, as forms of discourse and governmentality, can construct orders of feeling, found as emotives present in laws, billboards, and news headlines. These matter for discursive changes implemented by governments to sanitize cities of unwanted communities.

This chapter takes the anthropology of emotion and affect as its central problem, with a particular focus on socialization processes. It starts with an overview of how psychological anthropologists have approached the topic of emotion since the 1980s and outlines the social–anthropological understanding of emotion before it considers the “affective turn” in the social sciences and humanities and its impact on anthropology. In the second part of the chapter special attention is paid to the socialization of emotions, first from a cross-cultural and second from a transcultural perspective. Using the example of the socialization of emotions in transcultural settings, it discusses the extent to which the notion of “affect” enhances our understanding of how the transformation of socially learned emotion repertoires might work.

Kant’s account of the function of orientation vis-à-vis human agency has been the subject of a recent debate in the literature. On the reading this chapter puts forward, orientation consists in giving me a sense of myself and my activity in relation to the world so that I can reach the destination I have chosen. By contrast, Melissa Merritt has argued that orientating myself consists in having a sense of the direction I should follow in order to realize my rational vocation. This chapter revisits this debate by examining Kant’s notion of orientation through the prism of the Stoic notion of oikeiōsis. While Kant and the Stoics share the view that agency requires orientation and orientation requires a certain form of self-awareness, they disagree on the function of orientation, and locating the source of their disagreement will shed light on Kant’s account.

This chapter traces Qiu Jun’s use of Classical ritual texts, legal debates, and historical cases to discuss the political, emotional, and ritual dilemma of filial revenge, the ancient obligation of a child to avenge a parent’s murder. Legal and ritual precedents are given in order to find a balance between the Confucian tenets embodied in the central virtue of filial piety and ensuing ritual obligations, personal feeling, and popular sympathy, with legal sanctions and imperial power, while also elevating filial revenge to a cosmic principle. His chosen texts and commentaries urge leniency and sympathy and for individual filial revenge cases to be considered at the highest level. I argue that there is a palpable unease at the heart of Qiu’s discourses, in that his lifelong attachment to ritual studies and his filial piety complicate his responses as a loyal minister in handling the perennial problem of filial revenge.

The standard philosophical model of intentional action-explanation appeals to states of belief and desire to do the explaining. This chapter evaluates what philosophers have had to say about the nature of desire. Chapter 5 showed that the ordinary notion of desire encompasses two very different kinds of mental state: goals and intentions, on the one hand, and affective or emotion-like forms of desire, on the other. The focus here is on the latter. The chapter shows that desires of this sort always incorporate anticipatory pleasure, and that pleasure itself is an analog-magnitude representation of value. The chapter begins with what the science can tell us about the respective natures of pleasure and desire, before comparing the results with claims made by armchair-philosophers. Many of the latter are false, albeit sometimes containing partial insights.

This essay traces the study of the vexed topic of sentimentalism in long nineteenth-century American critical discourse. Over the past decades, scholars have drawn upon different disciplines and critical theories to reframe the expansive and subtle complexities of sentimentalism’s influence as mode and ideology; these investigations, under the capacious term “feeling,” sometimes dovetail with, and other times are disaggregated from, inquiries into sympathy, affect studies, the sensorium, and the history of emotions. Although the turn to affect has been seen as a way out of political overdetermination, concerns about liberatory potential and structural collusions were prefigured and informed by debates about sentimentality’s ethical bind. This essay turns to negative terms, glossing the use of “unfeeling” in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and then appearances of “unfeeling” and “unsympathetic” in illustrative scholarship over the last three decades for their operations and implications. The chapter then teases out the cultural politics of unfeeling from a queer, feminist of color perspective: What if one reconsiders unfeeling from the vantage point of those marginalized and not simply as hegemonic imposition? The discussion closes with Yankton Dakota writer Zitkala-Ša, reassessing the Indigenous activist’s wish, in her own words, to become “unfeeling stone.”

This chapter offers an exposition of Collingwood’s theory of imagination as presented in the commonly overlooked Book Two of The Principles of Art. I show how the standard objections to Collingwood’s view are relatively superficial, and also how the account in Book Two should be understood in the light of Collingwood’s remarks concerning the imagination in his earlier writings (especially Speculum Mentis and Outlines of a Philosophy of Art). For Collingwood, sense perception inseparably involves the imagination of possible objects of perception in any perceptual experience. Moreover, the imagination makes the sensory object thinkable – a position that blends Kantian and Humean motifs. Additionally, the crucial mark of the imaginary object is self-containment (“monadism”), a notion serving to clarify both Collingwood’s claim that the imagination is indifferent to reality or unreality and the conceptual connection, on his view, between imagination and art.

By 1660 the number of common criminals hanged in England had fallen dramatically: but England still executed far more people than other European states. That practice was sustained in part, in the minds of England’s urbane peoples, by a time-honoured perception of crime as a moral failing akin to others, albeit of far greater social consequence. By the third quarter of the eighteenth century, however, that vision was being eroded by two cultural transformations. First, a more worldly (secular) vision bred impatience with the idea that the most lasting and certain punishment of serious crime must be left to God’s Last Judgment rather than achieved in the here and now. Such views were reinforced, secondly, by a new culture of feeling, which inspired not only distaste for the physical and emotional sufferings inflicted upon serious criminals, but also (contrarily) greater anxiety about the threat of their crimes.

The transition from one culture of governance to another explains the character and timing of changes in the nature, location and scale of English executions from 1660 to 1900. Traditional landed elites adhered both to a “Bloody Code,” whose enforcement against common criminals could be regularly adjusted through consultations between trial judges and themselves, and to the occasional use of prolongedly agonizing execution rituals against traitors. The men who dominated England’s uniquely extensive and steadily expanding urban realms, and embraced new cultures of desacralization, feeling and reason, increasingly viewed the purposes, numerical extent and staging of executions differently. As the numbers and power of urbane people grew, first the extent and finally the practices of execution were adjusted accordingly. The many paradoxes of “feeling”, however, ensured their continued commitment to execution for murder, and some measure of hypocrisy in their views of executions and the people who attended them.

The Murder Act of 1752 imposed post-mortem dissection as the primary punishment for all people convicted of that crime. Recent historians have viewed this statute as strikingly regressive. In fact, its purposes and effects were notably humane. It dramatically reduced the number of dissections imposed on criminal bodies in London. By almost entirely confining dissection to murder alone, it substantially ended riots at executions. And, in ensuring a legal supply of “subjects” to anatomists, it helped make surgery as swift as possible in an age before reliable anaesthesia. On the other hand, public anatomization of dead killers was so uncommon that it seems likely to have inspired fascination rather than deterrent horror. And, in failing to supply enough “subjects,” the Act inspired epidemical levels of grave robbery, finally coming undone when enterprising monsters resorted to murder itself in meeting the needs of anatomists, who now seemed complicit in such crimes.

This chapter addresses Jacobi’s literary contributions, Edward Allwill’s Collection of Letters and Woldemar, in the context of his critique of both Enlightenment reason and feeling. Both, Jacobi argues, undermined human individuality and freedom.