“This essay considers what it means to think of the emotions in terms of physical force and chemical affinity and the role that romantic science played in making the emotions manageable. Emotion of course is etymologically connected to motion, and is derived from the Latin to move and to move out. I turn to physics and chemistry, the two disciplines that had the most to say about movement, to challenge the popular view that emotions embody subjectivity, and consequently to resist the narrow framing of emotions as a site of psychological intensity.

I also highlight the sustained use of “force” within current and romantic period affect and emotion theory; if we are still invoking a term from physics and chemistry to think about the emotions, then these disciplines must be doing more than freezing being. Indeed, because Kant thought of particles as being constituted by forces (Ault 7), force carries with it a curious materiality that makes the emotions seemingly graspable yet dynamic and hardly simply mechanistic. Even within physics, force begins as an analogy to human willpower (Jammer 7) [see: will to power]. Force furthermore grants emotion a material impact upon the world. Far from severing emotions from a social world as critics ranging from Merleau-Ponty to Daniel Gross contend, chemistry and physics provide ways of thinking about sociality itself insofar as these disciplines attempt to understand in human terms why entities seek association to begin with, and develop concepts that underwrite the language of emotion. The fact that scientists like Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday could reconcile their physics with spirituality underscores the nuanced but neglected possibilities within these sciences.

Force endowed emotion with a vital mechanicity and even spirituality that belies both the traditional romantic declared disdain of mechanism, and the cordoning off of physics and chemistry from the thinking about the emotions. Such mechanicity proffered the idea of an integration of person and environment because force permeates all matter. Percy Shelley in Prometheus Unbound thought of love, for instance, as a physical force in the universe (that “powerful attraction towards all…beyond ourselves” (“On Love,” 503)), and in his Lyrical Drama he compares it to gravity, planetary attraction (Venus), rain, light, electricity, and magnetism. In his “Speculations on Metaphysics,” he essentializes the differences between “thoughts, or ideas, or notions” in terms of ‘Force’ (5:59), and thus the term bridges mind and body, thought and emotion. Shelley’s claim is that since we are surrounded by these forces, the absence of love within any particular society (Jupiter’s, and even initially Prometheus’s own, for example) is a perversion of nature.

The key is to wholeheartedly embrace and direct them. Mechanics also offered intelligibility, a way of understanding the body as machine and the universe in terms of laws, and mechanics even within the romantic period was crucial to understanding the physiology of the heart, circulation, and nervous and glandular systems. When linked to emotion such mechanical motion skirted the problem of intentionality. Was emotion a physiological movement (understood in part through mechanics as a reaction) or an act of will, as Coleridge insisted love was, or something in between? He comments that “love, however sudden, as when we fall in love at first sight…, is yet an act of will” (Omniana 339)."

“Funny you should object to the spirit. I am no spiritualist. But I want to think about how spirit captures the surplus left over from materialist reductionism. So I aim to think about the relation between matter and spirit, especially in romantic science where final causes and God were hardly off the table.”

“It seems that we are still harnessing the elasticity of force either to grant ourselves agency at the expense of a mechanistic materiality, or to emphasize the vitality of matter in hopes that the mechanical automaticity of our emotions will not disallow the possibility of choice or will.”

— Richard Sha (2011). “The Chemistry and Physics of Romantic Emotion” [1]

“Emotions can be thought of in terms of physical force and chemical affinity. Romantic science played a role in making emotions manageable. Emotion of course is etymologically connected to motion, and is derived from the Latin ‘to move’ and ‘to move out’.”

— Richard Sha (2014). “The Motion Behind Romantic Emotion: Toward a Chemistry and Physics of Feeling” [4]