Sentimentalism, Moral Values, and Emotional Expression in Darwin and the Anatomists*

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 47(4), 335–358 Fall 2011 View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI 10.1002/jhbs.20515 © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. THE NATURALIST AND THE NUANCES: SENTIMENTALISM, MORAL VALUES, AND EMOTIONAL EXPRESSION IN DARWIN AND THE ANATOMISTS* STÉPHANIE DUPOUY Comparing Charles Darwin’s account of emotional expression to previous nineteenth- century scientific studies on the same subject, this article intends to locate the exact nature of Darwin’s break in his 1872 book (as well as in his earlier notebooks). In contrast to a standard view that approaches this question in the framework of the creationism/ evolutionism dichotomy, I argue that Darwin’s account distinguishes itself primarily by its distance toward the sentimentalist values and moral hierarchies that were traditionally linked with the study of expression—an attitude that is not an inevitable ingredient of the theory of evolution. However, Darwin’s approach also reintroduces another kind of hierar- chy in human expression, but one based on attenuation and self-restraint in the exhibition of expressive signs. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. INTRODUCTION . if . a man grinning is to exposes [sic] his canine teeth, no doubt a habit gained by formerly being a baboon with great canine teeth.—(This may be made capital argument if man does move muscles for uncovering canines).—Blend this argument with his having canine teeth at all. This way of viewing the subject important.—Laughing modified barking, smiling modified laughing. Barking to tell other animals in associated kinds of good news, discovery of prey. Under this point of view, expression of all animals becomes very curious. (Darwin, 1987, p. 315) This note from the “C Notebook,” written by Darwin in 1838 (while conceiving the out- line of his evolutionary theory), captured for the first time the core insight of his theory of expression, which he would extend and publish more than thirty years later in his Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Darwin considered emotional expressions such as smiling (or laughing) as an evolutionary legacy, both hereditary vestige and proof of our animal origins. Because baboons uncovered their large canine teeth when they saw some food (either in preparation for eating, or to call their fellows to share the meal), men still uncover their teeth even now when they are in a joyful mood—although this gesture, in the latter case, has become useless and purely automatic: “[W]ith respect to sneering, the very essence of an habitual move- ment is continuing it when useless—& therefore it is here continued when the uncovering the canine useless” (Darwin, 1987, p. 542). Expressions are therefore the behavioral equivalent of atrophied organs that indicate some species’ former ways of life (such as webbed feet in animals that no longer swim). Consequently, expression has not been favored by natural selection for its adaptive value as a communication tool, but as a by-product of other biological mechanisms. Darwin’s explanation of expression, and more generally his 1872 book, have been widely and excellently commented on, mostly by historians of evolutionary theory, by historians of * This article won the 2009 John C. Burnham Early Career Award from the Forum of the History of Human Science. STÉPHANIE DUPOUY was trained in philosophy. Her PhD dissertation was on the subject of scientific approaches to emotional expression in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She teaches philosophy and history of science at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris. 335 336 STÉPHANIE DUPOUY art, and by a long line of scientific researchers on emotions and facial expressions (Ekman, 1973, 1998; Gilman, 1979, 1982; Gruber, 1981; Burkhardt, 1985; Browne, 1985a, 1985b; Montgomery, 1985; Richards, 1987, 2003; Fridlund, 1992; Duvernay-Bolens, 1998; Armstrong, 1998; Prodger, 1998). Within this body of scholarship, a standard account has emerged concerning the nature of Darwin’s break in the study of emotional expression. Darwin is usually credited with having substituted evolution for Providence as the origin of expression: Formerly conceived on the model of an immutable language, given to human beings by God on the day of Creation, human expressions would become, in Darwin’s sce- nario, the result of other biological functions, the blind and indirect product of evolution. A related view argues that Darwin introduced the “why” question, as opposed to the “how” question, in the investigation of expression: Whereas his forerunners had contented them- selves with describing the signs of the various passions, Darwin opened up the question of their origin (e.g., Ekman, 1998; Delaporte, 1999). It is also common to oppose the pre- Darwinian “spiritual” treatment of expression, conceived as a human privilege—the mirror of the soul—to Darwin’s approach, which reduced expression to a purely physiological and organic phenomenon, common to the entire animal kingdom. Another widespread analysis, influenced by contemporary issues in the cognitive sciences, suggests that Darwin was the first to see human expression as universal, in opposition to previous physiognomy that emphasized the individual element in the human face (Ekman, 1973, 1998; Browne, 1985b). None of these statements, of course, is devoid of truth. However, I intend to show that they are all too simple, given the sophistication of Darwin’s forerunners’ accounts, and are rarely grounded in a sensitive reading of these authors. Among the scientists of expression quoted by Darwin in the Expression, only Charles Bell has been studied by most historians, and even Bell has rarely been read on his own terms and context. I believe that this restricted scope, as well as this teleological perspective, have contributed to slightly distorting the perception not only of Darwin’s forerunners, but even of Darwin’s own contribution. Darwin’s book on expression has generally been approached within the framework of the history of the theory of evolution—a perspective that has had to confront the vexing question of the absence of the natural selection principle in Darwin’s explanation of expression.1 Nevertheless, as other studies have convincingly demonstrated, Darwin’s book can also be understood within other contexts, such as the history of scientific illustration, argumentative strategies, and popular science (Prodger, 1998, 2009; Smith, 2006; Voss, 2007); the history of philosophical, literary, and scientific ideas on emotion (Stedman, 2002; Dixon, 2003; White, 2009, 2011); or the history of physiognomy and the scientific approach to the face (Drouin- Hans, 1995; Hartley, 2003; White, 2008). Dixon (2003), in particular, has recently given an illuminating account of the theories of affectivity in nineteenth-century British philosophy and psychology, showing how the diverse and nuanced affective categories of the early nineteenth century have been progressively eroded by the single and simplified notion of “emotion,” conceived of as an amoral, disintellectualized mental state—a shift in which Darwin’s book on emotion played a decisive part. In a series of stimulating articles, White has investi- gated the place of sentimentalism and sympathy in Victorian science, especially in the scientific discourse on the emotions and the face (particularly in Darwin); he describes with finesse the various manners in which Darwin uses, objectifies, and reconfigurates his own 1. The usual picture of Darwin’s account as an evolutionary response to Bell’s natural theology, although initially propagated by Darwin himself, was indeed supported by this focus of the Darwinian scholarship, since Darwin’s opposition to Bell’s creationism provided a convenient explanation for this puzzling lack of discussion of natural selection in the Expression (Burkhardt, 1985; Fridlund, 1992; Ekman, 1998; Dixon, 2003). JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES DOI: 10.1002/jhbs SENTIMENTALISM, MORAL VALUES, AND FACIAL EXPRESSION IN DARWIN AND THE ANATOMISTS 337 sentimental experience to produce knowledge on emotions. The following analysis is greatly indebted to the (somewhat complementary) perspectives of Dixon and White. White and Dixon (and the researchers associated with Queen Mary, University of London’s Centre for the History of Emotions) are both concerned to read Darwin’s writings in their own context (and in the light of previous research traditions), in order to avoid the hindsight bias resulting from the perception of Darwin as a forerunner of contemporary science. Following these broader accounts, I would like to compare Darwin’s work on expression to the long prior tradition of scientific investigation on facial expression by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anatomists.2 Against this background, I argue that the originality of Darwin’s treatment of this subject relies more on the moral judgments that pervade his devel- opments on expression than on the explanatory mechanisms he invokes. Compared to those of his forerunners, Darwin’s analysis (particularly in the Notebooks), stands out for the casu- alness, indeed the irony with which he approaches the sentimentalist values and the moral hierarchies that had been traditionally linked to the theme of emotional expression. His approach is salient in its juxtaposition of the supposedly refined or sublime human expressions to their prosaic or sensual, potentially ridiculous or improper, animal origins. This moral and cultural dimension of

Load more