Abstract
Can we feel emotions about abstract objects, assuming that abstract objects exist? I argue that at least some emotions can have abstract objects as their intentional objects and discuss why this conclusion is not just trivially true. Through critical engagement with the work of Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, I devote special attention to awe, an emotion that is particularly well suited to show that some emotions can be about either concrete or abstract objects. In responding to a possible objection, according to which we can only feel emotions about things that we take to matter to our flourishing, and thus cannot feel emotions about causally inefficacious abstract objects, I explore how abstract objects can be relevant to human flourishing and discuss some emotions other than awe that can be about abstract objects. I finish by explaining some reasons why my conclusion matters, including the fact that it presents a challenge to perceptual theories of emotion and causal theories of intentionality.
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Notes
For a survey of theories about the nature of abstract objects, see Rosen (2014).
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to this substantial new philosophical contribution to the awe literature. In allowing for emotions with transpersonal objects, Kristjánsson diverges somewhat from Aristotle, but otherwise wants to remain as true to Aristotle as possible. Kristjánsson’s commitment to Aristotelianism, mid-article shift in focus from awe (the episodic emotion) to awe (the trait), and goal of morally justifying awe (the trait) constitute substantial differences from my project. Unlike Kristjánsson, my main goal is to illustrate a larger point about a whole class of emotions that take abstract intentional objects.
Kristjánsson might say that awe can be about such things if they are idealizations. However, it is opaque what he means by ‘idealization,’ since that term only appears once in his article, without a definition. I think an idealization is a representation of something as ideal, and I do not think that things like repeatable artworks, natural languages, and games are necessarily representations of things as ideal or even representations of ideals themselves. Nevertheless, even if all the abstract objects that I want to discuss are appropriately classified as ideals or idealizations, and thus transpersonal objects in Kristjánsson’s sense, he does not engage with examples of emotions about a wide range of such things, as I aim to do here. Whether we classify emotions about repeatable artworks, languages, and games as emotions about ideals, idealizations, or neither, I think they are about abstract objects, and merit attention as such.
On formal objects, and other things that lay some claim to being “the” object of an emotion, see de Sousa (1987: chapter 5).
A syndrome analysis involves a similar strategy; for a nice example of a syndrome analysis of hope, see Martin (2014).
See Sherry (2013), who argues that wonder is a response to what seems extraordinary, and is often linked to other responses ranging from delight to dread, including awe.
Although Kant’s Critique of Judgment and its famous discussion of the sublime might seem like a good starting place, Kant’s work is less useful for my purposes than one might suspect. For in the third Critique, Kant’s main tasks are to determine the constraints that bind the faculty of judgment and to show how aesthetic judgments can have universal validity despite being subjective. Kant describes these judgments as disinterested (albeit based on feelings of pleasure or displeasure). However, emotions are more than mere judgments and are not disinterested. Furthermore, while we might feel awe about the sublime, it is just one of many possible objects of awe. Moreover, Kant says that our experiences of the sublime are about our ideas of reason, and thus about objects internal to us, but I am concerned with the possibility of awe (and other emotions) about objects that are not necessarily internal to us, since many apparently abstract objects are also apparently mind-independent.
Sometimes they call these “appraisals” and sometimes “themes” or even “appraisal themes.” These terms originate in Lazarus’s work on “core relational themes” (1991), but are not synonymous. I stick with ‘appraisal,’ meaning an evaluative representation. Unfortunately, as other scientists have increasingly built on Keltner and Haidt (2003), they have understood the second “appraisal” rather differently. For example, Rudd, Vohs, and Aaker present it as a desire to make new knowledge structures (2012: 1131), but tell their research subjects that it is neither an appraisal of nor a desire for said structures, but the alteration of them caused by the appraisal of vastness (Ibid.: 1133). Valdesolo calls it a process (2014: 170). I strive to avoid that imprecision, partly by distinguishing five prototypical components of awe, not just two.
For different reasons to favor this revision, see Kristjánsson (7).
In a related discussion of wonder, Philip Fisher says, “Wonder is the middle condition between an unawakened intellect and a systematic knowledge so complete that there no longer exists anything unexpected” (1998: 58). See Sherry (2013: 344) on a difference of opinion between Richard Dawkins and Keats about whether feeling wonder about something is compatible with a scientific understanding of it. See Shelley (2014) on Alexander Gerard’s view of the sublime, and the point that “Sublime objects give pleasure because their sheer scale renders their conception just difficult enough.” See Rachel Zuckert (2003) on (a) Kant’s claims that we fail to comprehend the sublime via imagination, but can conceive of it through reason, hence the dual pleasure and displeasure involved in experiencing it (218) and (b) Johann Gottfried von Herder’s phenomenology of the feeling of the sublime as taking a narrative form, which begins with uncomprehending awe and ends in knowledgeable awe (220).
As Keltner and Haidt say, awe is at the “upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundary of fear” (297), which fits with Kant’s claims about experiences of the sublime.
See Keltner and Haidt (2003: 304).
Keltner and Haidt (2003: 299-300, 302, and 307-308) find evidence of this view in the work of Weber and Durkheim.
Kristjánsson emphasizes awe’s self-reflexivity explicitly in another context (8). However, his claim that awe is essentially self-reflexive (8) needs to be reconciled with his claim that awe directs attention away from the individual self (14).
Kant’s famous quote about feeling awe for the starry heavens above and the moral law within also implicitly recognizes the possibility of feeling awe for an abstract object, under the plausible assumption that the moral law is an abstract object (1956: 166).
Thanks to Jen Rowland for inquiring whether deities might be abstract objects, James Lewis for inquiring whether persons might be, and an anonymous referee for inquiring whether football clubs, countries, and political parties might be. I do not take a stand on those questions here, but if so, then feeling emotions about abstract objects would be more common (and widespread) than I had thought.
For another example, Shiota, Keltner, and Mossman (2007: 945) recognize that we can think of mathematical equations, which are (arguably) abstract objects, as vast or great.
See also Goldie (2012).
My position is thus unlike Kristjánsson’s, since he seems to think that all instances of a given emotion type will take one and only one type of target: all pride is about the self, all compassion about other people, all fear about external events, and all awe about transpersonal ideals (11). In contrast, I think that some instances of awe have concrete intentional objects and others have abstract intentional objects (and the same goes for some other emotion types).
Keltner and Haidt, drawing on Durkheim, seem to agree that objects elicit awe at least in part because they can impact people’s well-being (2003: 300). Non-cognitivists, like Jesse Prinz, can also be eudaimonists and thus make a similar objection. For to distinguish between perceptions of bodily changes that are emotions and those that are not (like cold-induced shivers), Prinz (2004) says that emotions are the subset of perceptions that are characteristically caused by an organism entering a relation with the environment that bears on the organism’s well-being (which he calls a core relational theme).
Thanks to an audience member at EPSSE for this suggestion.
In this formulation of the paradox, I follow Schneider (n.d.).
We might be justified in believing this even if we do not yet understand exactly how we engage with abstract objects.
The object of pride could be Hamilton itself, even if the cause were the fame and fortune it brought him, or the object of pride could be Miranda’s relation to Hamilton, which is also plausibly seen as an abstract object.
For an argument that arguments are abstract objects, see Simard Smith and Moldovan (2011).
See Behrendt (2010: 673) for the idea that fear of non-existence (which, if not an abstract object, is at least like one in lacking certain properties that concrete objects have) is a particularly contemplative emotion. Returning to awe and its cousins, Sherry (2013) repeatedly suggests that wonder is a contemplative or intellectual emotion. Shiota, Keltner, and Mossman (2007: 960) describe an empirical study that suggests “that awe-prone people are particularly comfortable revising their mental representations of the world.” It would be interesting to investigate whether the same is true of people prone to other emotions about abstract objects.
I say “might” because people like Viktor Frankl, the Holocaust survivor, sometimes suggest that finding meaning in one’s life is at least as important as meeting one’s more concrete needs.
Plus, by considering emotions with abstract objects, we may thereby deepen our understanding of abstract objects themselves.
Thanks to Demian Whiting for helpful discussion of this issue.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to audiences at the 2016 conference of the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions (EPSSE) and at Ball State University for helpful feedback and fun discussion.
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Fredericks, R. Can Emotions Have Abstract Objects? The Example of Awe. Philosophia 46, 733–746 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9814-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9814-3