Abstract
We seek an understanding of emotion and a better grasp of the role that emotions should play in our lives.1 We aim to move past the wholesale evaluation of emotion as, for example, “useful” or “dangerous.” In this chapter we will canvass two prevalent theories of emotion, affective and cognitive approaches, and see that they each privilege different types of emotionality as well as different types of emotions (as their main exemplars). Nevertheless, there are many different types of emotions and emotional experiences. Some emotions are simple, and yet some are very complicated. If we can say anything about the nature of emotions in general, it is perhaps that they involve some intersection between the mind and body. Kant’s theory of emotion—as bodily feelings that are caused by various mental states (including perception)—helps to address a number of perplexities left by the current breach between theories. Not only does it show us the way that emotions are both mental and physical, it also helps us to make sense of the variety of emotional experiences. Moving beyond Kant, we will consider the ubiquitous nature of emotion and meditate on the question of whether or not we are always having an emotion. Similarly, we will note that, far from being “in the moment,” emotions are often characterized by our connection to the past or future.
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Notes
Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998).
William James, “What Is an Emotion,” in What Is an Emotion? ed. Cheshire Calhoun and Robert Solomon (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). Originally published in Mind (1884).
Richard Lazarus offers an appraisal theory of emotion, much like the cognitive theories we will discuss shortly although with a biological focus. See Richard Lazarus, Emotion and Adaptation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
Paul Ekman’s research on facial expressions supports the conclusion that there are universal emotional responses, or core relational themes, but, for him, the triggers of those responses are culturally conditioned. Sadness may be universally experienced after a personal loss, for example, but the event that counts as a personal loss, will be, to some degree, subjective and culturally relative. See Paul Ekman, Emotion in the Human Face: Guidelines for Research and an Integration of Findings (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1972).
Prinz also makes use of Damasio’s idea of the as-if loop to explain instances where emotions “bypass the body.” See Jesse Prinz, Gut Reaction: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 72. It is not clear whether this phrase is meant to refer to emotions that occur without affects or to all emotions that are triggered by judgments.
Cannon was the first to express this argument that “the same visceral changes appear in a number of different emotions” (18). W. B. Cannon, “The James-Lange Theory of Emotion: A Critical Examination and an Alternative Theory,” in The Nature of Emotion, ed. M. B. Arnold (New York: Penguin, 1968).
S. Schachter and J. E. Singer, “Cognitive, Social, and Physiological Determinants of Emotional State,” Psychological Review, 69 (5) (1962): 379–399. For my purposes here, the Singer-Schachter “two factor theory” still counts as an affective theory of emotion because it tends to assume that emotions first and foremost are a response to external stimuli. They begin to cross the divide into cognitive theories when they acknowledge that interpretations of the arousal can themselves cause arousal, but in so far as they would see those interpretations as secondary, they are still in the affective camp.
For an argument that Aristotle’s theory does represent purely cognitive theory and that it is comprehensively constructed, see Chapter 1 of W. W. Fortenbaugh, Aristotle on Emotion (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1975).
The context in which we find the lion’s share of Aristotle discussion of emotion (pathos) is particularly significant and is mostly responsible for the fact that Aristotle is thought to have a cognitive theory of emotion. The goal of the Rhetoric is to teach lawyers how to sway jurors. It is no surprise that an “Aristotelian” theory of emotion holds that emotions are beliefs that are based on some kind of evidence: the giving of evidence is the only means a lawyer has of stirring emotions. Furthermore, jurors are in a position to judge about a defendant, although not to actually interact with the defendant. Similarly, Aristotle’s discussion of emotion portrays emotions as dispositions to actions, such as the disposition to help another with no benefit to oneself (charts), that are disconnected from the actions themselves: one can feel charis (or gratitude) toward a person without doing anything about it. (See David Konstan, “The Emotion Is Aristotle Rhetoric 2.7,” in Influences on Peripatetic Rhetoric, ed. David Mirhady [Amsterdam: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2007], for an argument that charis should be translated as gratitude.) It is possible that the problem in translating this term comes from exactly the point about context to which I refer, namely the fact that charis is an emotion that is normally connected to some action (as is grace, or gratis) but is disconnected from its action in this context. The juror is in a position to act regarding the defendant but in a way that is removed from a direct relationship.
John M. Cooper, Reason and Emotion: Essays on Ancient Moral Psychology and Ethical Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 422. Note that this three-part description is similar to Dewey’s but Dewey focuses on the consciousness of the feeling, not the consciousness of the situation that leads to the feeling. See John Dewey, “The Theory of Emotion. (Part II) The Significance of Emotions,” Psychological Review, 2 (1895).
Sokolon’s argument that Aristotle believes that they can also sometimes be rational is obviated by a clarification between the irrational and non-rational. Something that does not originate from reason (the nonrational) need not be opposed to reason (irrational). See Marlene Sokolon, Political Emotion: Aristotle and the Symphony of Reason and Emotion (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006), 19.
Pathos is better translated as “passion” than as “emotion,” but this does not stop contemporary philosophers of emotion from borrowing from either Aristotle or the Stoics. See F. H. Sandbach, The Stoics, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 59–68.
Sherman argues that Buddhism also holds that reason can itself be a dangerous object of attachment. See Nancy Sherman, Making a Necessity of Virtue: Aristotle and Kant on Virtue (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 115. Therefore, Buddhism is more like Pyrrhonism, which also aims at ataraxia, than Stoicism. Still, the Pyrrhonist slogan ou mallon (more or less) is similar to the Stoic ideal of apathy.
Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 64.
Robert Solomon, “Emotions and Choice,” in Explaining Emotions, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Oakland: University of California Press, 1980), 257.
Robert Solomon, “Emotions, Thoughts, and Feelings,” in Thinking About Feeling, ed. Robert Solomon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 77.
Alison Jagger, “Love and Knowledge:Emotion in Feminist Epistemology,” in Gender, Body, Knowledge, ed. Alison Jagger and Susan R. Bordo (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1989); Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 26; Prinz, Gut Reactions, 76; and LeDoux, The Emotional Brain, 19, 69.
We should start a discussion of Kant’s theory of emotion with his theory of feeling. Many commentators start with his comments about “affects” and “passions,” but they fail to notice that affects and passions are two different sorts of mental entities. Affects are feelings, and passions are desires. I discuss passions in chapter 6, and in chapter 4 I give more reason to think that emotions are only secondarily related to desires. For a good argument that we should uncouple our analysis of Kant’s theory of emotion from his notion of inclination, see Ido Geiger, “Rational Feelings and Moral Agency,” Kantian Review, 16 (2011): 283–308. In addition, when we understand the nature of Kantian (intellectual) feelings, namely, that they are always the feeling of some cognitive event, we can better understand their relationship to motivation—as Geiger describes the feeling of respect: “It follows the dictates of reason, but it cannot itself formulate rational directives” (291). After we realize that affects, in Kant’s sense, are feelings, we can characterize feelings in many different ways in relationship to their varying cognitive causes: moral and immoral feelings, strong and weak feelings, rational and irrational feelings, and so on.
Here I am not referring to Kant’s theory of passion (Leidenshaft), which will be addressed in chapter 6. Maria Borges is right to hold that Kant’s theory of emotion, as it takes emotions to be both cognitive and physiological, contributes a considerable amount to contemporary debates, but her characterization of the nature of this conjunction is not entirely accurate. Affects are feelings, for Kant, and feelings are caused by cognitive events; they are not themselves cognitive. While it is possible to put Kant’s notion of passion “under the label of emotions,” as Borges seems to, Kant distinguishes between passions and feelings (153). I argue in chapter 6 that since passions for Kant are mostly vices, the important question is how not to let affects turn in to passions. See Maria Borges, “What Can Kant Teach Us About Emotions?” Journal of Philosophy, 101 (3) (March 2004): 140–158.
Kant provides an important insight on the difference between his and Descartes’s approach to the study of human nature. Descartes, on one hand, is largely concerned with a physiological, neurological study of humans; Kant, on the other hand, considers humans from the point of view of their free, mental lives: “[Descartes’s] physiological knowledge of man investigates what nature makes of him: pragmatic [knowledge investigates] what man makes of himself” (A 119). For more on this distinction, see Robert Louden, “Anthropology from a Kantian Point of View: Toward a Cosmopolitan Conception of Human Nature,” in Rethinking Kant, ed. Pablo Muchnik (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2009).
Edmund T. Rolls, Emotion Explained (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 21. I find this textbook incredibly strange, even more so because it does not even attempt to argue that one can “explain” emotion without referring to any emotion, but instead referring to affective states that even the author does not call “emotions.” It is one thing to attempt to replace ordinary language with more precise theoretical definitions or make the case that people are often confused in their experience; it is quite another thing to simply swap one concept for another, under the guise of rejecting “folk” theories of emotion. (See also LeDoux, The Emotional Brain, 16.) Rolls makes a distinction between emotions, which are initiated by stimuli in the external environment, and affective states, which are caused by a change in the “internal milieu,” where hunger is an example of the latter and sadness is an example of the former. Furthermore, he believes that this difference is not sufficiently alienating, making it reasonable to study one and draw conclusions about the other. Clearly, Rolls’s strategy for explaining emotions “scientifically” is to cut out their cognitive content in order to explain them biologically. This begs the question for the justification of an affective approach.
Jenefer Robinson, “Startle,” Journal of Philosophy, 92 (1995): 53–57.
Paul Ekman, “Expression and the Nature of Emotion,” in Approaches to Emotion, ed. Klaus R. Sherer and Paul Ekman (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1984), 329.
My point is that this argument about the way we should define emotion, if it boils down to privileging some instances of emotion and excluding others, does not constitute an interesting debate. The first and simplest step we can take in overcoming the cognitive-affective debate involves refusing to squabble over which emotions should or should not count as an “emotion.” There can be no rational debate about how to cut the psychological cake. The only type of reason that can be offered in this debate comes from observations about the way we use the word “emotion,” but contradictory reasons about the way that we should use the word “emotion” count too. It is common to point out that the current use of the word “emotion” is a relatively late linguistic development and that the term “passion,” with its connection to passivity, is historically more prevalent. “Emotion,” on the contrary, is formed from an active verb. These etymological musings are ultimately inconclusive: perhaps the recent linguistic development represents progress in the latent theory of emotion. See James Averill, “Emotion and Anxiety: Sociocultural, Biological, and Psychological Determinants,” and Amélie Rorty, “Explaining Emotions,” in Explaining Emotions, ed. Amélie Rorty (Oakland: University of California Press), 1980.
Just as Hume uses skepticism to advance empiricism, James can sometimes appear to be a biological reductionist, but this polemic is in the service of advancing a psychological monism and moral naturalism. Calling himself a radical empiricist, James is suspicious of those thought processes that take themselves to be “pure.” Instead, the most important intellectual truths are intuitive, and a product of our natural, psychological engagement with the world. It is not hard to see that James’s pragmatism represents a dissatisfaction with the primacy given to reason in the history of philosophy, and so one defense proffered for the “lower” faculties comes in the form of a Romantic inversion of value. James seems to want to defend emotion from reason, and his strategy for doing this is to assert that emotions are more rational than reasons. This move is certainly not novel, and it is enjoying popularity currently. In fact, if we phrase the debate in these terms, it seems that alliances are redrawn and many more cognitive approaches, like Nussbaum’s, end up agreeing with James and Prinz. Prinz’s assertion that emotions are embodied must be understood as the idea that moral theory must be embodied, or that the body must play a foundational role in moral theory, as we can see with his renewed moral sense theory; Jesse Prinz, The Emotional Construction of Morals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Rock believes that James is open to the criticism that he fails to make a distinction between perception and recognition, but this fact merely illuminates James’s theory of perception. Irwin Rock, “A Look Back at William James’s Theory of Perception,” in Reflections on the Principles of Psychology: William James After a Century, ed. Michael G. Johnson and Tracy B Henley (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1990).
W. V. O. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” Philosophical Review (60) (1951): 20–43; reprinted in his From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953).
Prinz, “Embodied Emotions,” in What Is an Emotion? ed. Robert Solomon and Cheshire Calhoun (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 57.
In an attempt to bring together cognitive and affective approaches, Singer and Schachter have developed a “two components” theory, arguing that emotions involve both physiological responses and their cognitive evaluations. S. Schachter and J. Singer, “Cognitive, Social, and Physiological Determinants of Emotional State,” Psychological Review, 69 (1962): 379–399. As we have seen, neither side denies that emotions involve both cognitive and affective aspects. Nevertheless, the disagreement is likely about the relative importance of each aspect and the connotations of each.
“[A]n incentive can determine the will to an action only insofar as the individual has incorporated it into his maxim” (R 6:24, emphasis mine); this is referred to as Kant’s “Incorporation Thesis.” See Henry Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
My point here is not unlike Peter Goldie’s insistence that we must consider the narrative structure of an emotion. See Peter Goldie, The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
The goal of therapeutic self-understanding necessarily sees emotions as fluid and indistinct since it is familiar with the relationship between emotions and the ways that one emotion can turn into or reveal itself to contain another. Neu, a representative of a more cognitive approach, argues that the emotions do not qualify as natural kinds. He argues that emotions are determined by thoughts and so are too numerous to classify in only the most general groupings. See Jerome Neu, A Tear Is an Intellectual Thing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Rorty concurs and adds that emotions cannot be “sharply distinguished from moods, motives, attitudes, [and] character traits.” See Amélie Rorty, “Introduction,” in Explaining Emotion (Oakland: University of California Press, 1980).
Again, in this difference between the two approaches, we do not see a disagreement about the facts about emotion—Frijda’s “laws” of emotion are not wrong, they are simply very general and open to the criticism of tautology—but a difference in focus and goal. See Nico Frijda, The Laws of Emotion (London: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2007);
M. D. Lewis, “Self Organizing Cognitive Appraisals,” Cognition and Emotion, 10, 1996: 1–26; and “Bridging Emotion Theory and Neurobiology through Dynamic System Modeling,” Behavioral and Brain Science, 28, 2005: 105–131.
See Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (New York: Mariner Books, 2003).
See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper Perennial, 1962), 172.
The first two sentences of Book One of his Treatise of Human Nature runs thus: “All the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds: impressions and ideas. The difference betwixt these consists in the degrees of force and liveliness with which they strike upon the mind.” See David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford Clarendon Press, 1888).
Paul Ekman, “Basic Emotions,” in Handbook of Cognition and Emotion, ed. T. Dalgleish and M. Power (Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 1999).
Paul Ekman, “A Methodological Discussion of Nonverbal Behavior,” Journal of Psychology, 43 (1957): 141–149.
Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
This characterization of consciousness is similar to Damasio’s; Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Mariner Books, 2000).
Cheshire Calhoun, “Cognitive Emotions?” in What Is an Emotion? ed. Robert Solomon and Cheshire Calhoun (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 328.
Much of Calhoun’s argument seems to be preceded by Amélie Rorty, “Explaining Emotions,” Journal of Philosophy, 75 (3) (1978): 139–161.
Calhoun details the difference between what she calls “intellectual” or “evidential” beliefs and “experiential” beliefs to help explain emotion-belief conflicts. Experiential beliefs, which come from some kind of biased history, can intrude on one’s intellectual beliefs like a kind of illusion. In this way, we can deny the intellectual validity of our emotions. Emotions, thereby, involve epistemic normativity: our emotions should match our intellectual beliefs. Calhoun concludes that emotions must be analyzed in terms of one’s elaborate system of beliefs, which include “interpretive ‘seeings as…’ and their background cognitive sets” (342). She concludes that emotions are not beliefs, but interpretations, but this does not address her original criticism that emotions and beliefs, and now interpretations, are logically and ontologically distinct sets. Sherman argues that Aristotle’s notion of phantasia offers this same insight about emotion. See Nancy Sherman, Making a Necessity of Virtue: Aristotle and Kant on Virtue (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 61.
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© 2015 Diane Williamson
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Williamson, D. (2015). Understanding the Nature of Emotion. In: Kant’s Theory of Emotion. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137498106_3
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