The primacy of affect and movement: are the emotions and the motor life the foundation of mind, beneath the intellect?

Théodule Ribot, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The old psychology made the intellect the master faculty and treated emotion and will as its servants or its disturbances. I reverse the order. Beneath the clear ideas of the intellect lies the deep, obscure, and older life of the affections and the movements, and it is there that the foundations of mind are laid.1 Emotion is not a pale accompaniment of thought; it is rooted in the organic states of the body — the visceral, the motor, the coenesthetic — and there is an affective memory as real as the memory of images.

Attention is not a pure act of intellect but at bottom a motor fact: an adaptation of the body, a fixation and inhibition of movement. The will is not a faculty of a free soul but the coordination and inhibition of tendencies that are themselves motor. The intelligence floats upon this affective and motor sea; sever a man from it, and his reason, however intact, no longer knows what to want or to do. The primacy in mind belongs not to the idea but to the tendency and the feeling.23

Sources

  1. On the common ground of the specific activity, the desires outline vaguely the individual character; they reflect the mode of reaction of a particular organism, As soon as a sufficient accumulation of experiences has permitted intellect to arise, there is produced a new form of activity, for which the epithet of ideomotor is most convenient, ideas being causes of movements.
    Diseases of the Will, pp. 5–6
  2. Are these two groups of equal importance?—are they both primary? or is one subordinated to the other? As far as the actual state of our knowledge permits us to answer the question, says Lange, the vascular changes must be assumed as primary, since the slightest circulatory variations profoundly modify the functions of the brain and spinal marrow. What is the significance of all this as regards the emotions?
    The Psychology of the Emotions
  3. Desire, love, fear render the most obtuse understanding lucid. And besides, if will and intelligence were identical in nature, their development would proceed side by side, whereas nothing is more frequent than a great intellect united to an inferior character, and "we sometimes find violent desires, impassioned and impetuous impulses, joined to a feeble intellect, that is to say a small brain badly enclosed in a…
    The Psychology of the Emotions

Where the argument is made

  • The Psychology of the Emotions (1897 — emotion founded on organic states, affective memory)
  • The Psychology of Attention (1890 — attention as fundamentally motor, adaptation and inhibition)
  • the account of will as coordination/inhibition of tendencies

How the argument was received

Ribot's insistence on the primacy of the affective and motor life over the intellect is one of his most prescient positions. His physiological theory of emotion parallels the James-Lange theory (emotion grounded in bodily states); his motor theory of attention prefigures embodied and motor accounts of cognition; and his claim that reason cannot function severed from the affective base is strikingly confirmed by modern affective neuroscience (Damasio's demonstration that damage to emotion-processing regions cripples practical reasoning and decision — the somatic-marker hypothesis). The debated points are the extent of the reduction (whether emotion and movement are the whole foundation, or one foundation among others) and the details of the affective-memory and motor-attention claims, which are refined rather than refuted.