What Is an Emotion? Musil’s Adverbial Theory

Abstract

1. IntroductionAt the beginning of the so-called Emotion Psychology in Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities we find the claim everything that happens among people has its origin ... in emotions.1 Musil's protagonist, Ulrich, then tries to give a theoretical answer to the question of what an emotion, which plays such a central role in human life, is. It does not come as a surprise that his answer differs significantly from the classical one developed by William James. After all, Musil was a pupil of Carl Stumpf who rejected James's view that an emotion is the feeling of bodily changes.2 As Ulrich puts it, emotions are, on this view, nothing more than sensations in the bowels or wrists . . . fear consists of accelerated heartbeat and shallow breathing (1245). Opposing the so-called James-Lange Theory of Emotion, Ulrich, just like Stumpf, distinguishes between 'emotion' (Gefuhl) and mere 'feeling' (Gefuhlsempfindung).3 This distinction brings him more into line with currently predominant 'cognitive' theories of emotion, by which I generally mean theories that attribute representational content to emotion. However, it will tum out in the following that Ulrich's-and Musil's-analysis of emotion is unique. Although there are parallels, especially to Peter Goldie's account,4 Musil is the only one to conceive emotions as Gestalt qualities of a specific kind, i.e., as higherorder phenomena that are extended in time and dynamically structured according to certain Gestalt principles.My first aim in this paper is to show that the specific concept of a Gestalt quality which underlies Musil's emotion analysis is provided by Kurt Lewin, a member of the Berlin School and also a pupil of Stumpf. Ever since research on Musil started, it has been pointed out that his work is strongly influenced by the Gestalt psychology of his time, but Lewin's impact on Musil has been greatly underestimated.51 will argue that Musil could find the two major ideas of the Emotion Psychology in Lewin's Comments Concerning Psychological Forces and Energies, and the Structure of the Psyche and On the Structure of the Mind, which are two parts of one article.6My second aim is to give Musil's views their due position in contemporary cognitive emotion theory. In the course of my argument it will emerge that Musil's Gestalt-theoretical account of emotion differs significantly from the currently predominant 'judgemental', 'perceptual', or 'neojudgemental' theories of emotion.7 He instead holds what I shall call an 'adverbial' theory of emotion, according to which the evaluative qualities that cognitivists associate with the different emotion types are instantiated as the Gestalt-organization of the emotion's first-order components, and not as qualities of the emotion's object. The analogy is with the adverbial theory of perception;8 evaluative qualities in emotion theory, like sensory qualities in perception theory, function as adverbs which in this case characterize the shape and distinct phenomenology of the subject's worldview.Musil was concerned that his theory of emotion might be caught up and thus outdated within ten years.9 I hope to demonstrate that, today, it is still an option, even though I have to leave its ultimate assessment to future research.10 I will instead conclude this paper by sketching how Musil, on the basis of his theory of emotion, may justifiably come to the conclusion everything that happens among people has its origin . . . in emotions. Musil's emotion theory is in fact the heart of his overall theoretical approach-or so I will argue.2. The Emotion PsychologyThe Emotion Psychology is developed in chapters 50, 52, 54, 55, 57, and 58 of the 1938 galley proofs, either in the form of extracts from Ulrich's diary or as reflected upon by Ulrich in gathering his thoughts prior to writing his diary. Clearly, we must not simply take Ulrich's views as expressions of Musil's own. But as I have argued elsewhere, the Emotion Psychology allows two readings: one as part of The Man Without Qualities, and a second one as the nucleus of Musil's overall theoretical approach. …