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Why does the death of Princess Diana provoke global grief, while the demise of a homeless person barely registers on our emotional radar? For Daniel M. Gross, this unevenness is a symptom of something important missing in the standard scientific explanations of emotion

THE study of emotions has long been a vital tool for understanding what makes us human. Philosophers, psychologists of all flavours and biologists have all pitched in with theories. Many of these have been excellent, others less so. But since neurologists joined the fray a while back, we have run the risk of reducing social phenomena to purely biological phenomena 鈥� without due process.

Here鈥檚 where I come in. I am associate professor of rhetoric at the University of Iowa. Rhetoric? Isn鈥檛 that just the art of fancy language and demagoguery we call 鈥渕ere rhetoric鈥�? No. Rhetoric, as I mean it in my work is a sophisticated disciplinary lens that helps us understand what shapes people in terms of their social position and self-perception, as well as what moves them to action. For example, rhetoric helps us pay close attention to the emotionally charged language of 鈥渦s鈥� versus 鈥渢hem鈥� in a speech that mobilises for war, or alternatively, helps us to critique that same speech.

Aristotle formalised rhetoric as a discipline and contributed crucial new elements that were influential in classical times yet remain relevant today. In fact Aristotle鈥檚 rhetorical approach to emotion can, I believe, help us to establish the limits of brain science and revisit our own emotional world. I believe rhetoric may help us decide when the biological understanding of emotion will work, and when it won鈥檛. (It鈥檚 no accident that I鈥檓 at Iowa, home to world-class neurologists, including until recently Antonio Damasio, and a centre for a reinvigorated rhetoric.)

To Aristotle, emotion was a rhetorical construct first. In the Rhetoric, for instance, he writes that those who take pride in their appearance are susceptible to a kind of anger that is heightened 鈥渋f they suspect they do not really have [what they take pride in], either not at all or not strongly, or do not seem to have it鈥�. In other words, this type of anger comes not from some actual 鈥渄efect鈥� in our physical appearance, but from an anxiety about how we are perceived. Anger is a rhetorical construct because it is firmly embedded in cultural norms, not in our brain or biology: the anxious brooding over appearance is inextricably linked to reputation, and always subject to the deflating threat of gossip or insult, whether real or imagined.

So, as a rhetorical construct, emotion operates beyond the individual level, in the realm of cultural institutions and their histories. The contours of our emotional world have been shaped by factors such as slavery and poverty, which ensure some people a greater emotional range than others. Compare reactions to the death of Princess Diana and a homeless person: clearly public recognition provides certain people with greater 鈥渆motional pull鈥�. For me, the nature and power of emotions depends crucially on this uneven distribution.

Consider also the 鈥渁ngry white male鈥� who first appeared in the wake of feminism and minority rights. It would be trivially true and therefore uninteresting to assert that everything human, including this type of anger, has some localisable and theoretically measurable manifestation in the body or brain. To really get at this phenomenon we need a theory of emotion that can account for the specific history and politics of the angry white male. And here rhetorical analysis can help by explaining how language and emotion colluded to create this phenomenon.

鈥淭he contours of our emotional world have been shaped by factors such as slavery and poverty鈥�

No doubt the ongoing flurry of activity among psychologists and neurologists of emotion has produced some interesting results by any measure. In The Emotional Brain, Joseph LeDoux of New York University did a good job of explaining how the range of phenomena we categorise as 鈥渆motions鈥� appear at different moments in the evolutionary saga (fear early, ennui late) and therefore vary in terms of brain physiology. And Damasio鈥檚 work on the emotional life of brain-damaged patients has produced valuable therapies and helped us overcome western medicine鈥檚 crude legacy of mind-body dualism by showing concretely how judgement and emotion are connected.

But success has emboldened them and others to expand their theories of emotion at the expense of a more socially nuanced perspective of the sort initiated by Aristotle and widely absorbed into premodern literature, which we can still mine for its wisdom.

Moreover, I believe the problem runs to the very heart of the experimental programmes of Damasio and others. Damasio (now at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles) likes to cite literary giants such as Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot, which shows sensitivity to the subtlety and range of human thought and emotion. But when it comes to seriously analysing a 鈥渟econdary鈥� or social emotion such as embarrassment, jealousy, guilt, pride, or the feeling of trust, evolutionary biology comes to the fore: they are reduced to the supposedly 鈥減rimary鈥� emotions of fear, anger, happiness, sadness, surprise, contempt and disgust.

Drawing upon the work of Paul Ekman, a psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco, into emotions and facial expressions, for instance, Damasio can ignore the social construction that goes into making a 鈥渦ntrustworthy鈥� face. Damasio can do this because, for his limited purposes, an untrustworthy human face can be treated like a more complicated version of a fearsome snake. The ability to read a face 鈥渃orrectly鈥� 鈥� to judge whether the face is attached to a person who means well or ill 鈥� is, according to Damasio and others, an adaptive human trait shared by everyone with a normal brain.

However, when an experiment designed to characterise normal brain function in a social setting strips away the measurable marker of its social context (the subject鈥檚 judgement of trustworthiness), it begs an important question: what is normal brain function? You could design an experiment that compares across categories of race, gender and age, but common usage and common sense tell us that the judgement of trustworthiness and approachability is irreducibly about who I am, who you are, and prevailing circumstances. Control for these factors, and the phenomenon you want to study disappears. In other words, the emotion of confidence (Aristotle鈥檚 tharsos) manifest in the feeling of trust and in the judgement of trustworthiness is rhetorical because it depends upon a world of changing social relationships.

Here is the challenge for a brain scientist working within evolutionary theory: when a damaged brain isn鈥檛 the cause, what produces disastrous judgements like that shown by the vast majority of Germans in 1933, who believed Adolf Hitler was a trustworthy leader and Jews were untrustworthy? Adaptive prejudices are relatively easy to explain in terms of the platitudes of evolutionary biology (鈥減romoting survival鈥� and so on), but maladaptive prejudices are less so.

And what of the 鈥渟ick cultures鈥� Damasio invokes in Descartes鈥� Error, such as the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s, or China during the Cultural Revolution? Or even our own sick cultures, rife with sexism, racism and other, shall we say, maladaptive biases? How do we define a sick culture scientifically? What barriers to objectivity face the neurologist studying emotion who works in a sick culture?

鈥淲hat barriers to objectivity face the neurologist studying emotion who works in a sick culture?鈥�

Enter the paradox of the observer: how can we adequately characterise an abnormal emotional brain when our study might be designed within a sick culture, or at least in a culture affected by maladaptive biases inherently unidentifiable and therefore uncontrollable from within that study?

Surprisingly, while Damasio argues in Descartes鈥� Error that the build-up of adaptive somatic markers, such as the feeling of attraction and repulsion, requires both brain and culture to be normal, he concedes that sizable sectors of western society are becoming 鈥渁bnormal鈥�. Nine years later, in Looking for Spinoza, Damasio obscured this challenge to his own experimental programme behind sociobiology mixed with the superficial optimism of the Scottish Enlightenment and a dash of Stoic moralism.

Like Seneca and Descartes before him, Damasio suggests that we can simply learn how 鈥渟ome emotions are terrible advisors and consider how we can either suppress them or reduce the consequences of their advice鈥�. Even as a rhetorician, I don鈥檛 have nearly the same faith as Damasio in the power of persuasion.