Repères historiques du vocabulaire affectif : de saint Augustin à William James

Abstract

Human affectivity points to a very complex cultural reality in European history, as shown by three distinct paradigms: in Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, largely influenced by Plato’s vision of the soul as well as by the Christian Tradition, affects (passions, human appetites and desires) are understated, being considered perturbationes animae to be contained and repressed (St Augustine, St Thomas of Aquinas); the early modern period proposes an anthropology in which passions and emotional states are reevaluated and qualified as a natural outcome of man’s interaction with the world (Descartes, Kant); English and American naturalists and psychologists at the end of the 19th century (Darwin, James) have a scientific perspective on emotions, seen as actions of the body which exert their influence on the human brain. These paradigmatic changes are also visible in multiple semantic variations: thus, if “passion” and its equivalents (“perturbation”, “affection”, “affect”) are rather devalued in the texts of the Christian theologians in the 17th century, they are considered in a neutral perspective, next to “emotion” that ends up imposing itself in the naturalistic paradigm of thought.