Abstract
In this chapter I advance the idea that emotion lies at the core of self, by which I mean that emotions are those properties of ours that characterize our intrinsic properties or what we are like in and of ourselves, that is, when considered apart from the different ways we are disposed to behave. I begin by saying something about why the search for an object’s intrinsic nature is an important one. I then outline and motivate five criteria for something to count as an intrinsic property, as well as make some general observations regarding these five criteria. Next I consider a number of psychological states or properties, including beliefs, desires, and emotions, with a view to seeing which might be most suited to serve as intrinsic properties of ours. I will argue that only emotions, conceived of as non-intentional feeling states, meet the five criteria in question.
Ah, Dorian, how happy you are! What an exquisite life you have had! You have drunk deeply of everything. You have crushed the grapes against your palate. Nothing has been hidden from you. And it has all been to you no more than the sound of music. It has not marred you. You are still the same.
I am not the same, Henry.
—Oscar Wilde (1986, 245)
We are not necessarily thinking machines. We are feeling machines that think.
—Antonio Damasio (1994, 16)
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Notes
- 1.
Of course modern physics doesn’t characterize such things in terms of how they tend to appear to us, as such entities are too small to be perceptible to normal senses.
- 2.
It is also of the nature of a disposition to relate its bearer to the triggering conditions (see Chap. 4). Thus, a vase is not merely disposed to shatter, but is disposed to shatter in the event of being struck with force.
- 3.
Bertrand Russell writes: “The physical world is only as regards certain abstract features of its space-time structure—features which, because of their abstractness, do not suffice to show whether the physical world is, or is not, different in intrinsic character from the world of mind” (1948, 240).
- 4.
William Seager writes: “One of the core intuitions about intrinsic properties is that they are the properties that things have ‘in themselves’, the properties that something would retain even if it was the only thing in the universe. If we add the premise that things can exist as the sole denizen of a world (in some appropriately weak modal form—that fact that I need oxygen to survive will not prevent me from having intrinsic properties) we have an argument against relationalism. Individuals can, on this view, be ‘pulled out’ of the relations they may find themselves in and exist entirely apart from them.” (2006, 11)
- 5.
For similar reasons I disagree with Langton and Lewis’s definition of intrinsic property, according to which an intrinsic property is one that an object can possess independent of whether it is lonely or accompanied (Langton and Lewis 1998). An object bearing dispositional properties is independent of the object being lonely or accompanied (thus, an object can possess dispositional properties regardless of whether it is accompanied or lonely), but again such properties are not intrinsic properties.
- 6.
One might query whether dispositions (or causal powers more generally) are relational only as they are represented by us (see e.g. Langton 2006). I think the way dispositions are to be defined rules that idea out. That it is of the nature of a disposition to relate an object to something external to the object is a fact about what dispositions are, and not merely a fact about how we think about dispositions.
- 7.
See, for instance, the views expressed by some dementia carers who were interviewed by Julian Baggini (2011). Of one carer named Jill, Baggini writes: “Dementia took the lid of darker aspects of her mother’s personality. The balance was shifted within her existing personality; she did not acquire a completely new one. The evil looks and snide remarks were simply no longer repressed. Although her memory went along with her ability to recognise her daughter, in Jill’s view she was very much ‘still there’. Jill had no sense of a reduction or diminution of the self” (2011, 53–54). The view that dementia need not change people is one often held by people with dementia also (see e.g. MacRae 2010; Caddell and Clare 2012).
- 8.
As Simon Blackburn writes of Gage and similar cases: “The reason for the inability to function normally…seems to be that these patients have lost any normal association between representing aspects of the situation, and the stable onset of the affect or emotion. Scenes which would excite positive or negative emotions in normal people may leave such patients entirely cold. They do not become excited at the prospect of gain, or fearful at the prospect of loss. In these emotional lives, everything has either disappeared, or at least become unstable.” (1998, 126)
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Whiting, D. (2020). Our Emotional Cores. In: Emotions as Original Existences. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54682-3_7
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