Emotions

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EMOTIONS.

Ideas about emotions and their function in human and animal life have been a major theme in philosophy—and more recently in psychology and the social sciences—since the time of the ancient Greeks. The history of ideas about emotion is an essential part of the history of ideas about human nature and about human continuity—and discontinuity—with other animals. Whether emotions are essentially part of our "animal nature" or products of culture and cultivation, for example, is an issue that determines a great deal about our attitudes toward and evaluations of them. The history of ideas about emotion plays a particularly controversial role in the history of ideas about gender and culture. Whether women are "more emotional" (and thus less rational) than men, whether Greeks are more emotional and less rational than "Barbarians" or Englishmen are more emotional and less rational than their colonized subjects have been central themes in the often ugly histories of sexism and racism. Thus it is noteworthy that recent feminist studies have deeply probed the political role of the emotions and gender politics. And the history of ideas about emotion provides several important threads in the history of ethics, whether in the guise of "passion as a threat to reason" or in the more benign role of sympathy and the moral sentiments. Whether emotions contribute to or undermine rationality has been a central issue in ethics (at least) since Socrates.

Definitions

What is an emotion? And are emotions rational? Those two questions have dominated the philosophical history of the subject, and, of course, the answer to one suggests a set of plausible answers to the other. If emotions are such as to contribute to our well-being and the good life, and if emotions motivate moral behavior, then it makes good sense to say that emotions are rational or at least contribute to rationality. On the other hand, if emotions are merely an unintelligent residue of our "animal nature," they are more likely to be distractions or obstacles to civilized living and thereby irrational. Nevertheless, the picture is more complicated than this would suggest. One train of thought since ancient times suggests that the emotions are indeed an aspect of our animal life, unsuitable to civilized life. But since Charles Darwin (1809–1882), the emotions have been argued to be continuous in the evolution from animal to man and, so considered, probably functional and adaptive at least at some point in their history. In either case, this biological view of emotions has been supported in the past few centuries—since René Descartes in the seventeenth century—by increasingly sophisticated physiological and neurological models of emotion.

The history of ideas about emotion is thus divided into two sometimes complex and interweaving tracks in which emotions tend to be "dumb" and "sophisticated," respectively. The first kind of theory takes an emotion to be a feeling or physiological process. In medieval medicine, the emotions were the result of organic "humors" in the body. In early modern philosophy, they were the product of "animal spirits" in the blood, which caused simple sensations of pleasure and discomfort. William James (1842–1910), at the end of the nineteenth century, insisted that emotions are sensations caused by physiological disruptions. In the twenty-first century, many psychologists and philosophers hypothesize that emotions, or at least the "basic" emotions, are "affect programs," essentially hard-wired and evolutionarily derived complexes of neurological, hormonal, and muscular responses, with accompanying feelings, of course. But such feelings are of minimal significance, mere "icing on the cake" according to one prominent researcher (Joseph le Doux). An emotion is for the most part an unconscious or at least not necessarily conscious physiological process, which may or may not still serve an evolutionary function but does not involve sufficient "cognition" to be rational in any meaningful sense.

By contrast, Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.) insisted that emotions, while fully natural, are also an essential part of rational, civilized life and themselves social and cultural, consisting of ideas, learned and cultivated and even "intelligent." In the twentieth century, many psychologists and philosophers defended various "cognitive" and "appraisal" theories of emotion, in which an emotion is constituted, at least in part, by ideas, beliefs, or judgments and by an active engagement with the world. Aristotle insisted, accordingly, that quite the contrary of a dumb reaction, an emotion such as anger was a learned and cultivated response to what was recognized as an offense or a "slight," and as such it required not only the recognition of the nature of the offense but a measured and appropriate response. As such, emotions represented sophisticated, sometimes uniquely human, behavior. A cat might be aggressive or defensive, but only a human being with a moral upbringing can be morally indignant. A dog might demonstrate dependency and affection, but only a human being can fall in love. Thus some contemporary theorists who defend an "affect program" conception of emotions distinguish between "basic" and "higher cognitive" emotions, perhaps insisting that only the former are "really" emotions but acknowledging that many of the most important emotions—guilt, shame, pride, and jealousy, for instance—require cultivation and culture.

Many theorists would argue that whether or not anything like an affect program is involved in emotions (and no one would argue against the idea that emotions are somehow the product of our brains), that is not what an emotion really is. An emotion is a kind of experience of the world, and, as such, it necessarily involves intentionality, an orientation toward objects in the world (for example, situations, other people, or oneself). Thus anger is not just feeling flushed and tense; it is a feeling about something, involving, for instance, a judgment that someone has insulted or wronged you. And love is not just a feeling but an attitude (or a huge complex of attitudes) about someone. Emotions are "cognitive" in that they seem to involve and presuppose beliefs about the world; for example, fear is premised on the judgment that one is in danger, and shame is based on the recognition that one has done something shameful. They are also evaluative (and involve "appraisals") in that they involve the recognition that some things are important. Grief, for instance, is an emotion that recognizes a serious (perhaps devastating) loss. Emotions are therefore not "dumb" but, one might say, potentially as smart and sophisticated as the person who has them and the culture that embeds and teaches them. Anger may sometimes be nothing more than blind rage, but it can also be an exquisite response to injustice. Love may be as naïve and foolish as a teenage "crush," or it may be profoundly insightful and involve deep mutual intimate knowledge. Feelings and physiology play their roles, of course, but the emotion is much more than that.

How Rational Are Emotions?

Plato (c. 428–348 or 347 b.c.e.) famously divided the soul into three parts: reason, spirit, and appetite. He also used a dramatic metaphor to explain the harmonious interrelation between them, reason as the charioteer driving two spirited horses. But Plato also recognized that what we call emotions seem to encompass not only spirit and appetite but reason as well. When, in his Rhetoric, Aristotle defines anger as "a distressed desire for conspicuous vengeance in return for a conspicuous and unjustifiable contempt of one's person or friends," he makes it quite clear that emotion and reason are not to be divided but combined. Aristotle, who was so precocious in so many disciplines, seems to have anticipated many contemporary theories. His analysis of anger includes a distinctive cognitive component, a specified social context, a behavioral tendency, and physical arousal. Whereas Aristotle took emotion to be essential to the good life, the Stoics analyzed emotions as conceptual errors, conducive only to misery. In modern terms, the Stoics Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4b.c.e.?–65 c.e.) and Chryssipus (c. 280–c. 206 b.c.e.) developed a full-blooded cognitive theory of the emotions two millennia ago. Emotions, in a word, are judgments, judgments about the world and one's place in it. The disagreement between Aristotle and the Stoics was whether these judgments were rational and thus conducive to happiness, or not.

Even before the ancients in the Mediterranean, fascination with the emotions occupied the best minds in early India and China. In India, the emotions (rasas ) were considered central to the arts, artistic expression, and, most important, aesthetic appreciation. Thus the cataloging and analysis of the emotions, their causes, and their effects on the mind and body formed the heart of Indian aesthetics. In Buddhism, the control of one's emotions, the elimination of the agitating emotions (klesas ), and the cultivation of compassion were all viewed as essential to enlightenment and to putting an end to the suffering that was so characteristic of life. In China, both Confucians and Daoists recognized that the cultivation and management of one's emotions (qing ) was essential to living well. The Confucians emphasized the importance of cultivating social emotions such as respect and reverence. The Daoists focused their attention on the more "natural" and spontaneous emotions. The concept of rationality as such did not play the central role it did in the Western tradition, but nevertheless, insofar as that concept embodied a general sense of wisdom and well-being, the cultivation of the right emotions played an essential role in their various philosophies. Meanwhile, in the Middle East, the ancient Hebrews endowed their God with a whole range of (super)human emotions, from wrath and jealousy to love. In the New Testament, the emphasis shifted to love and faith, which the medieval scholars argued to be the epitome of rationality. The great importance of such emotions guaranteed that the subject would remain of great interest to the theologians of the Christian tradition.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), like Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), who admired him, described instead the darker, more instinctual and less rational motives of the human mind. This was not to say that all passions are wise; some, he declares, "drag us down with their stupidity," and others, notably the "slave morality" emotion of ressentiment, are devious and clever but nevertheless disastrous for both the subject and society. Nietzsche, like the ancient Greeks, insisted on the cultivation of the right emotions—those having to do with strength and self-sufficiency, but he insisted even more on the self-destructiveness of emotions such as ressentiment and envy. There is wisdom in emotion, he says in The Will to Power, "as if every passion didn't contain its own quantum of reason." So, too, in The Emotions: Outline of a Theory, the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) gave a "phenomenological" analysis of emotions as "magical transformations of the world"—willful strategies for coping with a difficult world. Again, emotions were conceived as inherently purposeful, with an added twist: We choose our emotions, according to Sartre, and so we are responsible for them.

Thus, emotions have been conceived, in many cultures since ancient times, as conducive to wisdom and well-being, and in this sense at least some of the emotions can be said to be rational. And emotions, if conceived of as "cognitive" and involving beliefs and appraisals, are rational in a further sense. They involve concepts and judgments. But our emotions are rational or irrational within a culture depending on whether they are appropriate or inappropriate to the circumstances, more or less accurate in their perception and understanding and more or less warranted in their evaluation of the situation. Thus it is mistaken to say either that emotions (in general) are rational or irrational. It depends on the emotion and the circumstances as well as on the culture. But what is most important in this conception of emotions as much more than mere "gut reactions" and thus as rational or irrational is that what we think about our emotions, the ideas we have about them, in part determine what they are. It is not as if thought and reflection are irrelevant to the emotions, which have their own animal life. Our emotions are to some extent products of our thoughts and reflections, and, of course, our thoughts and reflections are often the product of our emotions. Thus the ideas we have about emotions become part and parcel of our emotional lives.

See also Friendship ; Intentionality ; Love, Western Notions of ; Moral Sense ; Philosophy, Moral .