Expressing Mind

Expressing Mind

In The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals Darwin goes into great (indeed excruciating) detail about the ways emotions are expressed in the body—the face, the voice, the hands, the posture. He leaves no doubt that animals and man express their emotions in characteristic bodily configurations, particularly facial expressions. But he never discusses whether thought likewise has a bodily expression; in fact, he doesn’t even bring up the question. Why not? Evidently because it has none: thought itself does not contort the face in a specific way (the facial muscles remain relaxed) and particular kinds of thought don’t correspond to different types of facial expression. Only when thought proves difficult does it shape the human face, but not when it is proceeding unimpeded. A book called The Expression of Thought in Man and Animals would be very short, indeed non-existent. This is why we cannot read a man’s thoughts from his face, but we can detect his emotions this way. Thought is unexpressive. But that fact cries out for explanation: why is the emotional part of the mind so physically expressive but not the cognitive part? What makes emotion so prone to externalization but not thought? Why the link to muscles in the emotion case but not in the thinking case? (And why did Darwin never make this point?).

It might be said that Darwin’s text provides the answer: we inherited our emotions from animals that made use of the bodily expressions they produced, but we didn’t inherit our capacity for thought from them—so we didn’t get anything like the whole feeling-behaving package. If animal emotions didn’t come with natural expressions, then we would not have such expressions either—for they have no real utility in our lives. But thoughts originate with us, it may be said, and hence don’t carry any such animal baggage. There are two problems with this explanation: it is implausible that we did not inherit the capacity for thought from our ape-like ancestors; and the same question arises for perceptual capacities, and we surely inherited them. Apes think and believe and know, but they too show no sign of these mental acts in instinctive facial expressions or gestures: and we inherited this trait from them. And perception is generally not accompanied by distinctive facial expressions or other bodily signs: your face doesn’t automatically change when you stop perceiving, or perceive something else. You don’t have one face for seeing red, say, and another for seeing blue. Nor does your face change its expression when you close your eyes or unplug your ears. Yet we surely inherited these senses from our animal ancestors, going back a long way. The fact is that perception and cognition are intrinsically disconnected from musculature, but emotion is so connected, intimately. Emotions naturally and forcibly express themselves in the body, often in puzzling ways, but not so for thoughts and perceptions. This seems intuitively correct, but it is theoretically puzzling: what is the reason for this asymmetry? Your face goes a certain way when you are angry or fearful or disgusted without the intervention of will, but nothing like this happens when you are thinking about, say, the meaning of life (or what to have for lunch), or seeing a tree in the distance. Your emotion makes your body do such-and-such, but your thought or perception doesn’t make your body do anything. Cognition leaves your body alone, but emotion messes with it (often pointlessly). It can be hard to hide your emotions, but your thoughts are naturally hidden (and can be difficult to reveal). In this sense thoughts are private and emotions are public—but why?

Can we imagine inverting the two—could there be beings whose faces contort with thought but not with emotion? Logically, that seems conceivable; humanly, it seems strange. Isn’t it in the nature of emotion to seek expression, but not so thought? Here is a possible explanation: emotions are episodic and transitory but thoughts and perceptions are always with us. Emotions motivate animals to act and they come and go with the events surrounding the animal, but animals are always perceiving and thinking (except when asleep). If there were a facial signature of perceiving and thinking, it would always be there—you would always be making a thinking and perceiving face (knitted brow, puckered mouth, perhaps). That seems like a complete waste of biological resources; better to let the face relax while you think and perceive. But emotions are responsive to the passing show and hence demand action—say, flight or aggression or consumption. Emotions are mental states we act on in the struggle to survive, but we don’t need to act on our every thought or perception. Hence, emotions are motoric, but cognition isn’t; cognition informs and guides action rather than peremptorily prompting it. Fear of a looming lion makes you run, but thinking about a lion doesn’t make you do anything. There is something to this explanation, though it needs some spelling out; but it doesn’t touch the hard question—namely, what is it about the nature of emotion, but not about the nature of thought, that suits it to have its behavioral role? Why is emotion built to be expressed, but thought isn’t? And how does emotion succeed in shaping behavior whereas thought does not? How come emotion is active in this way but cognition is passive? As we know from Darwin, emotion is elaborately expressive, dedicated to bodily manifestation, but other aspects of the mind are unconcerned about expression, expressively indifferent. The Cartesian mind is cut off from the muscles as a matter of its intrinsic character, but the affective mind (the Darwinian mind) is closely bound up with the muscles—indelibly movement-oriented. Darwin lovingly details the manner of this expressive dimension, but no such project attends the consideration of other aspects of the mind. True, animals can communicate their thoughts and perceptions in bodily action, especially if they have a real language, but this is not the same as the expression of emotion, which is not generally communicative. Having a behavioral effect is not the same as having a behavioral expression. Nor would be it be correct to describe general behaviorism as an expressive theory of the mind in the sense of “expression” intended by Darwin. In that sense we are dealing with an instinctive habitual bodily correlate not with an intentional action that may be withheld at will. This is why we can be surprised at the way our body is behaving under the influence of emotion; it takes close study to see how your eyebrows are behaving when experiencing certain emotions. Emotions reflexively produce bodily expressions of specific types, but the same is not true of thoughts and their behavioral effects (saying, for example, “I was thinking about going shopping”). So, the puzzle remains: why the difference? There is a kind of dualism at work here, but its rationale remains obscure.[1]

[1] What is called belief-desire psychology is completely oblivious to the distinction I am drawing, and has nothing to say about the kind of expressiveness in action that Darwin is interested in. Habitual facial expressions are hardly intentional actions, yet they are clearly things done. The agent does not have a reason to perform these actions (the body performs them). Emotional expressions and intentional actions may both be caused by states of mind, but it would be wrong to assimilate the two. The philosophy of action should really fall into two parts: the philosophy of intentional reason-based action, and the philosophy of instinctive expressive action.