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The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions

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My purpose in writing this review is a little different than usual. Normally I want to give some summary of what the author has written and offer a wee bit of criticism. With William Reddy's The Navigation of Feeling, I plan to take a different tack. I want to try to summarize this book cogently enough so that others want to read it and write their own reviews. This is a book that should be thoroughly discussed on the pages of [Amazon.com] and by more competent reviewers than myself.
Reddy's complex argument is presented in two parts. The first half of the book is a summation of research drawn from cognitive psychology, cultural anthropology, and contemporary philosophy in such a way as to present a new theory of emotions. Reddy's theory is designed to work our way out of the impasse presented by the Cartesian dualism common to cognitive psychology and the postmodernism common to cultural anthropology.
In the section on cognitive psychology, Reddy is trying to establish several points. The first is that the separation of emotions from reasoning simply doesn't hold up in the research. The second point is that emotions are not just simply experienced. They can be monitored, controlled and possibly changed by individuals. Our ability to do this is in itself regulated and somewhat determined by the culture we live in.
These results are supported by what Reddy derives from recent work on emotions in the field of cultural anthropology. Here the predominant theoretical approach is social constructivist. Reddy again wants to emphasize several points. One is that the research indicates that there is tremendous difference in emotional expression from culture to culture although they all seem to draw from the same large pool of possible human emotional expression. The second point, which was original to this reader, is the point that "the ethnographic data routinely contain traces of collective shaping of emotional effort and collective elaboration of emotional ideals"(p.56). When an individual succeeds in living up to these ideals, they are encouraged and admired. Indeed, such successful emotional control may become a source of power for that individual.
So far, what Reddy is presenting is a picture of the emotions as being culturally constructed and circumscribed but also as an area of individual endeavor. In effect cultures create "emotional regimes" that monitor and encourage certain types of emotional expression. Individuals can master their emotions to fit into these regimes through their own efforts and can even over time act in such ways as to change the regimes. How Reddy feels that can occur he explains in the philosophical section of Part 1.
Reddy wants to avoid a postmodernist approach that is based on the signifier/signified relationship. He feels that this leads us to a dead end where all cultures are equally "valid".
Reddy wants to move from Saussure to Quine. Instead of arbitrary signifiers, Reddy wants to use the concept of "translation". Reddy sees the main advantage of this move as being that translation allows us to deal with two qualities of utterances that the signifier idea does not. "...the poststructuralist concept of the sign, because it entails operating with only one code at a time, is by far inferior to ...translation...An utterance occurs not just in the context of a single background code, but also in the presence of material available in many other codes: not just sensory codes...but also procedural codes (p. 321)
Another benefit of the concept of translation is that it restores to the individual that agency, that ability to critique one code because of its lack of fit with the other codes that make up the individual's experience.
Where Reddy feels that this leaves us is with the idea that 1. we can outline a history of the emotional regimes of a culture. This allows us to move beyond the static explanations of emotions offered by anthropology and psychology. It also allows us to deepen our historical understanding by broadening the context of history. It allows us to see one more facet of what was expected of and done by the people that populate our histories.
The second major result of all this is that Reddy feels that his theory allow us to critique and evaluate emotional regimes for how much freedom they allow the members of that culture.
I mentioned above that Reddy's argument was presented in two parts. The second half of the book is Reddy's attempt to offer a case study by applying his theory to the French Revolution. I am totally incompetent to evaluate this portion of the book and so will leave that to other reviewers. However, I did find his theoretical constructs to have explanatory power given what little I know about that period.
Give this book a try. It deserves a far wider popular audience than only one review on [Amazon.com] would indicate. I would compare in ambition and scholarship to Charles Taylor's Sources Of The Self. If you learned from that book (and how could you not?) you will enjoy Reddy's. And even if you do not feel up to writing a review write me and let me know what you think.

This was on the bibliography of one of my Master's courses and I've never been happier to re-read for an exam in my life.

Reddy is a very learned writer, managing a wonderful synthesis between various theories on the nature of emotions which, while a bit hard to follow, are definitely worth understanding. Biologically determined? Culturally determined?... Ideas existed in both directions.

Aside from being able to wonderfully summarize any and every number of complicated theories, however, Reddy also suggests his own theories and reinterpretations, proposing a very fluid theory of emotions which would allow for the other theories to be integrated and for men's control over their own emotions. Men, seen with this book's eyes, are complex beings, always changing, reacting differently to facts of life.

If this in itself was not pure genius enough, Reddy applies his theory on the French Revolution in the second part of the book, noticing that history is not quite as we remember it and pointing out that perhaps it has been interpreted badly.

Cognitive psychology, anthropological studies, a bit of structuralism, history, translation - this book binds them all in one for an interesting view, which, if somewhat difficult to read at times due to a scholarly language and the sheer volume of information, is more than absolutely worth it.