by Robert Musil
“In whatever relationship the emotion may therefore stand to ‘internal and external behavior’ this demonstrates how any change in this behavior could correspond to a change in the emotion, and vice versa, as if they were the two sides of a page.”
“(There are many model and experimental examples that confirm the broad extent of this theoretical idea, and other examples outside science that this idea fitfully illuminates, whether apparently or actually. I would like to retain one of these. The fervor of many portraits—and there are portraits, not just pictures, even of things— consists not least in that in them the individual existence opens up toward itself inwardly and closes itself off from the rest of the world. For the independent forms of life, even if they represent themselves as relatively hermetic, always have common links with the dispersive circle of a constantly changing environment. So when I took Agathe on my arm and we both took ourselves out of the frame of our lives and felt united in another frame, perhaps something similar was happening with our emotions. I didn’t know what hers were, nor she mine, but they were only there for each other, hanging open and clinging to each other while all other dependency disappeared; and that is why we said we were outside the world and in ourselves, and used the odd comparison with a picture for this animated holding back and stopping short, this true homecoming and this becoming a unity of alien parts.)”
“So the peculiar thought I am talking about teaches that the alterations and modulations of the emotion, and those of the internal and external behavior, can correspond to each other point for point without the emotion having to be equated with the behavior or with part of it, or without anything else having to be maintained about the emotion beyond its possessing qualities that also have their civic rights elsewhere in nature. This result has the advantage of not interfering with the natural distinction between an emotion and an event, and yet bridges them in such a way that the distinction loses its significance. It demonstrates in the most general fashion how the spheres of two actions, which can remain totally unlike one another, may yet be delineated in each other.
“This obviously gives the question of how, then, an emotion is supposed to ‘consist’ of other mental, indeed even of physical processes, an entirely new and remarkable turn; but this only explains how every change in the behavior corresponds to a change in the emotion, and vice versa, and not what really leads to such changes as take place during the entire duration of the emotion. In that case, the emotion would appear to be merely the echo of its accompanying action, and this action would be the mirror image of the emotion, so it would be hard to understand their reciprocally changing each other.
“Here, consequently, the second major idea that can be derived from the newly opened up science of the emotions begins. I would like to call it the idea of shaping and consolidating.”
“This idea is based on several notions and considerations. Since I would like to clarify it for myself, let me first go back to our saying that an emotion brings about a behavior, and the behavior reacts on the emotion; for this crude observation easily allows a better one to counter it, that between both there is, rather, a relationship of mutual reinforcement and resonance, a rampant swelling into each other, which also, to be sure, brings about mutual change in both components. The emotion is translated into the language of the action, and the action into the language of the emotion. As with every translation, something new is added and some things are lost in the process.
“Among the simplest relationships, the familiar expression that one’s limbs are paralyzed with fear already speaks of this; for it could just as well be maintained that the fear is paralyzed by the limbs: a distinction such as the one between ‘rigid with terror and ‘trembling with fear’ rests entirely on this second case. And what is claimed by the simplest movement of expression is also true of the comprehensive emotional action: in other words, an emotion changes not just as a consequence of the action it evokes, but already within the action by which it is assimilated in a particular way, repeated, and changed, in the course of which both the emotion and the action mutually shape and consolidate themselves. Ideas, desires, and impulses of all sorts also enter into an emotion in this way, and the emotion enters them.”
“But such a relationship of course presupposes a differentiation in the interaction in which the lead should alternate sequentially, so that now feeling, now acting, dominates, now a resolve, scruple, or idea becomes dominant and makes a contribution that carries all the components forward in a common direction. So this relationship is contained in the idea of a mutual shaping and consolidation, and it is this idea that really makes it complete.
“On the other side, the unity described previously must at the same time be able to assimilate changes and yet still have the ability to maintain its identity as a more or less defined emotional action; but it must also be able to exclude, for it assimilates influences from within and without or fends them off. Up to now, all I know of this unity is the law of its completed state. Therefore the origins of these influences must also be able to be adduced and ultimately explained, thanks to which providence or arrangement it happens that they enter into what is going on in the sense of a common development.”
“Now, in all probability a particular ability to endure and be resuscitated, a solidity and degree of solidity, and thus finally also a particular ‘energy’ cannot be ascribed to the unity alone, to the structure as such, the mere shape of the event; nor is it very likely that there exist other internal participatory energies that focus specifically on this. On the other hand, it is probable that these energies play nothing more than a secondary role; for our emotions and ideas probably also control the same numerous, instantaneous internal relationships and the same enduring dispositions, inclinations, principles, intentions, and needs that produce our actions as well as our emotions and ideas. Our emotions and ideas are the storage batteries of these elements, and it is to be assumed that the energies to which they give rise somehow bring about the shaping and consolidation of the emotions.”
“How that happens I will try to make clear by means of a widely held prejudice. The opinion is often voiced that there is some kind of ‘inner relation’ among an emotion, the object to which it is directed, and the action that connects them. The idea is that it would then be more comprehensible that these form a unified whole, that they succeed one another, and so on. The heart of the matter is that a particular drive or a particular emotion—for example, hunger and the instinct for food—are directed not at random objects and actions but primarily, of course, at those that promise satisfaction. A sonata is of no help to a starving person, but food is: that is to say, something belonging to a more or less specific category of objects and events; and this gives rise to the appearance of this category and this state of stimulation always being connected. There is some truth in this, but no more mysterious a truth than that to eat soup we use a spoon and not a fork.
“We do so because it seems to us appropriate; and it is nothing but this commonplace appearing-to-be-appropriate that fulfills the task of mediating among an emotion, its object, the concomitant actions, ideas, decisions, and those deeper impulses that for the most part elude observation. If we act with an intention, or from a desire, or for a purpose—for instance, to help or hurt someone—it seems natural to us that our action is determined by the demand that it be appropriate; but beyond that it can turn out in many different ways. The same is true for every emotion. An emotion, too, longs for everything that seems suited to satisfying it, in which process this characteristic will be sometimes more tightly, sometimes more loosely, related; and precisely this looser connection is the natural path to shaping and consolidation.
“For it occasionally happens even to the drives that they go astray, and wherever an emotion is at its peak, it then happens that an action is merely attempted, that an intention or an idea is thrown in that later turns out to be inappropriate and is dropped, and that the emotion enters the sphere of a source of energy, or
this sphere enters that of the emotion, from which it frees itself again. So in the course of the event not everything is shaped and consolidated; a great deal is also abandoned. In other words, there is also a shaping without consolidation, and this constitutes an indispensable part of the consolidating arrangement. For since everything that seems appropriate to serve the directing energies can be absorbed by the unity of the emotional behavior, but only so much of this is retained as is really appropriate, there enter of themselves into the feeling, acting, and thinking the common trait, succession, and duration which make it comprehensible that the feeling, acting, and thinking mutually and increasingly consolidate and shape themselves.’
“The weak point of this explanation lies where the precisely described unity that arises at the end is supposed to be connected to the unknown and vaguely bounded sphere of the impulses that lies at the beginning. This sphere is hardly anything other than what is embraced by the essences ‘person’ and ‘I’ according to the proportion of their involvement, about which we know little. But if one considers that in the moment of an emotion even what is most inward can be recast, then it will not seem unthinkable that in such a moment the shaped unity of the action, too, can reach that point. If one considers, on the other hand, how much has to happen beforehand in order to prepare such a success as a person giving up principles and habits, one will have to desist from every idea that concentrates on the momentary effect. And if one were, finally, to be satisfied by saying that other laws and connections are valid for the area of the source than for the outlet, where the emotion becomes perceivable as internal and external action, then one would again come up against the insufficiency that we have no idea at all according to what law the transition from the causative forces to the resulting product could come about. Perhaps the postulation of a loose, general unity that embraces the entire process can be combined with this, in that it would ultimately enable a specific and solid unity to emerge: but this question extends beyond psychology, and for the time being extends beyond our abilities too.”
“This knowledge, that in the process of an emotion from its source to its appearance a unity is indicated, but that it cannot be said when and how this unity assumes the closed form that is supposed to characterize the emotion’s completely developed behavior (and in analyzing which I used the articulation of a melody as example)—this quite negative knowledge permits, remarkably, an idea to be brought in by means of which the deferred answer to the question of how the concept of the emotion appears in more recent research comes to a singular conclusion. This is the admission that the actual event corresponds neither in its entirety nor in its final form to the mental image that has been made of it. This is usefully demonstrated by a kind of double negative: One says to oneself: perhaps the pure unity that theoretically represents the law of the completed emotion never exists; indeed, it may not even be at all possible for it to exist, because it would be so completely cut off inside its own compass that it would not be able to assimilate any more influences of any other kind. But, one now says to oneself, there never is such a completely circumscribed emotion! In other words: emotions never occur purely, but always only in an approximating actualization. And in still other words: the process of shaping and consolidating never ends.”
“But this is nothing other than what presently characterizes psychological thinking everywhere. Moreover, one sees in the basic mental concepts only ideational patterns according to which the internal action can be ordered, but one no longer expects that it is really constructed out of such elements, like a picture printed by the four-color process. In truth, according to this view, the pure nature of the emotion, of the idea, of sensation, and of the will are as little to be met with in the internal world as are the thread of a current or a difficult point in the outer world: There is merely an interwoven whole, which sometimes seems to will and sometimes to think because this or that quality predominates.
“The names of the individual emotions therefore characterize only types, which approximate real experiences without corresponding to them entirely; and with this, a guiding principle with the following content—even if this is rather crudely put—takes the place of the axiom of the older psychology by which the emotion, as one of the elemental experiences, was supposed to have an unalterable nature, or to be experienced in a way that distinguished it once and for all from other experiences: There are no experiences that are from the beginning distinct emotions, or even emotions at all; there are merely experiences that are destined to become emotion and to become a distinct emotion.
“This also gives the idea of arrangement and consolidation the significance that in this process emotion and behavior not only form, consolidate, and, as far as it is given them, determine; it is in this process that the emotion originates in the first place: so that it is never this or that specific emotion that is present at the beginning— say, in a weak state—together with its mode of action, but only something that is appropriate and has been destined to become such an emotion and action, which, however, it never becomes in a pure state.”
“But of course this ‘something* is not completely random, since it is understood to be something that from the start and by disposition is intended or appropriate to becoming an emotion, and, moreover, a specific emotion. For in the final analysis anger is not fatigue, and apparently not in the first analysis either; and just as little are satiety and hunger to be confused, even in their early stages. Therefore at the beginning something unfinished, a start, a nucleus, something like an emotion and things associated with that emotion, will already be present. I would like to call it a feeling that is not yet an emotion; but it is better to present an example, and for that I will take the relatively simple one of physical pain inflicted externally.
“This pain can be a locally restricted sensation that penetrates or burns in one spot and is unpleasant but alien. But this sensation can also flare up and overwhelm the entire person with affliction. Often, too, at the beginning there is merely an empty spot at the place, from which it is only in the following moments that sensation or emotion wells up: it is not only children who at the beginning often do not know whether something hurts. Earlier, one assumed that in these cases an emotion is superimposed on the sensation, but today one prefers to suppose that a nucleus of experience, originally as little a sensation as it is an emotion, can develop equally well into the one as the other.
“Also already part of this original stability of experience is the beginning of an instinctive or reflex action, a shrinking back, collapsing, fending off, or a spontaneous counterattack; and because this more or less involves the entire person, it will also involve an internal ‘flight or fight’ condition, in other words a coloration of the emotion by the kind of fear or attack. This proceeds of course even more strongly from the drives triggered, for not only are these dispositions for a purposive action but, once aroused, they also produce nonspecific mental states, which we characterize as moods of fearfulness or irritability, or in other cases of being in love, of sensitivity, and so forth. Even not acting and not being able to do anything has such an emotional coloration; but the drives are for the most part connected with a more or less definite will formation, and this leads to an inquiry into the situation that is in itself a confrontation and therefore has an aggressive coloration. But this inquiry can also have the effect of coolness and calm; or if the pain is quite severe, it does not take place, and one suddenly avoids its source. So even this example goes back and forth from the very beginning between sensation, emotion, automatic response, will, flight, defense, attack, pain, anger, curiosity, and being coolly collected, and thereby demonstrates that what is present is not so much the original state of a single emotion as rather varying beginnings of several, succeeding or complementing one another.
“This gives to the assertion that a feeling is present, but not yet an emotion, the sense that the disposition to an emotion is always present but that it does not need to be realized, and that a beginn
ing is always present but it can turn out later to have served as the beginning of a different emotion.”
“The peculiar manner in which the emotion is from the beginning both present and not present can be expressed in the comparison that one must imagine its development as the image of a forest, and not as the image of a tree. A birch, for example, remains itself from its germination to its death; but on the other hand, a birch forest can begin as a mixed forest; it becomes a birch forest as soon as birch trees—as the result of causes that can be quite varied—predominate in it and the departures from the pure stamp of the birch type are no longer significant.
“It is the same with the emotion and (this is always open to misunderstanding) with the action connected to the emotion. They always have their particular characteristics, but these change with everything that adheres to them until, with growing certitude, they take on the marks of a familiar emotion and ‘deserve’ its name, which always retains a trace of free judgment. But emotion and the action of emotion can also depart from this type and approximate another; this is not unusual, because an emotion can waver and, in any event, goes through various stages. What distinguishes this from the ordinary view is that in the ordinary view the emotion has validity as a specific experience, which we do not always recognize with certainty. On the other hand, the more recently established view ascribes the lack of certainty to the emotion and tries to understand it from its nature and to limit it concisely.”