{"agent_id":"ribot","agent_name":"Théodule Ribot","slug":"the-primacy-of-affect-and-movement","label":"The primacy of affect and movement: are the emotions and the motor life the foundation of mind, beneath the intellect?","topic":"The primacy of affect and movement","question":"Are the emotions and the motor life the foundation of mind, beneath the intellect?","position":"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. 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.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The old psychology made the intellect the master faculty and treated emotion and will as its servants or its disturbances.","n":[1]},{"t":"I reverse the order.","n":[]},{"t":"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.","n":[]},{"t":"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.","n":[]}],[{"t":"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.","n":[]},{"t":"The will is not a faculty of a free soul but the coordination and inhibition of tendencies that are themselves motor.","n":[]},{"t":"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.","n":[]},{"t":"The primacy in mind belongs not to the idea but to the tendency and the feeling.","n":[2]}]],"texts":"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. Reception: the James-Lange theory of emotion as a parallel physiological account; the motor and embodied theories of attention and cognition; the modern affective neuroscience (Damasio) restoring emotion to the foundation of reason; the intellectualist objection that cognition is not reducible to affect and movement.","works":["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"],"reception":"the James-Lange theory of emotion as a parallel physiological account; the motor and embodied theories of attention and cognition; the modern affective neuroscience (Damasio) restoring emotion to the foundation of reason; the intellectualist objection that cognition is not reducible to affect and movement.","status":"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.","era":"1839-1916","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Psychology of the Emotions","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"What is the significance of all this as regards the emotions? According to the current psychology, an emotional state subjected to analysis yields the following result:— (i) an intellectual state, perception, or idea, as a startincT-point (e.g., a piece of bad news, a terrifying appari- tion, an injury received); (2) a state of feeling— the emotion: sorrow, anger, fear; (3) the organic states and THE NATURE OF…","label":"The Psychology of the Emotions"},{"n":2,"work":"The Psychology of the Emotions","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The ground- work of every animal is \"appetite\" in Spinoza's sense, \" will \" in Schopenhauer's — i.e., feeling and acting, not thinking. I do not wish to insist on this point, which would require to be developed at great length; I forbear, NORMAL CHARACTERS. 39 1 not on account of the scarcity, but of the superabundance of proof.","label":"The Psychology of the Emotions"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-pathological-method","label":"The pathological method: does the diseased mind reveal the structure of the normal one?"},{"slug":"the-law-of-dissolution","label":"The law of dissolution: does mental decay retrace development in reverse — the new lost before the old?"},{"slug":"psychology-without-a-soul","label":"Psychology without a soul: must the science of mind be severed from metaphysics and founded as a natural science?"},{"slug":"the-self-as-a-coalition","label":"The self as a coalition: is personality a substance, or a resultant of organic and psychic conditions that can divide and dissolve?"}]}