Cognition and Emotion: From Dichotomy to Ambiguity

Abstract

In this article, we pose the question of the relation between cognition or reason and emotion or affectivity as it emerges in contemporary debates in psychology, particularly in the debate between Robert Zajonc and Richard Lazarus. Basing themselves on experiments involving priming, Zajonc and Lazarus have offered contrasting accounts of the roles of cognition and emotion respectively in the processing and evaluating of information. On this issue, Zajonc has typically privileged emotion, whereas Lazarus insists on the efficacy of cognition. Despite their disagreement, however, we claim that both scholars make the same basic philosophical assumption of an in-principle dichotomous relation between the two orders. In order to bring out the limits of such a conceptual schema, we turn to Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the patient Schneider in Phenomenology of Perception. We argue that his analysis of the sexual function – or rather its absence – in Schneider makes salient how the subject’s cognitive and affective capacities more generally are inseparably intertwined through their concrete and lived exercise.