Abstract
From Plato to Rawls, philosophers have emphasized the need for reason to constrain or channel emotions if political orders are to be created and preserved. From the ancient Greeks to the present a minority of thinkers have been alert to the personal and social benefits of emotions. In the last decade, research in neuroscience has begun to explore the relationship between cognition and affect and numerous studies indicate that they interact in complex, often positive ways that are still poorly understood.
I follow Aristotle, Smith and Tocqueville in believing that affect and reason are essential to good performance of complex cognitive tasks. Together, they determine the kind of sensory inputs we seek or respond to and how we evaluate this information and act upon it. I am particularly interested in explaining cooperation at every level of social aggregation. Toward this end I develop a typology of conflict and cooperation that attributes these different outcomes to the nature of the affect involved and how it interacts with reason.
I develop my argument in four sequential stages. I open with a short overview of thinking about the reason and emotions. Until quite recently emotions have either been ignored or considered detrimental Political scientists and psychologists long assumed that emotional arousal reduces the ability of people to carry out complex cognitive tasks or make good decisions. I then review recent work in neuroscience on emotions and their role in decision-making. The MRI is a remarkable tool that can identify “hot spots” in the brain associated with different activities, emotions and cognitive processes. This gives neuroscientists the ability to image neural networks associated with emotions. These are, of course, correlative, not causal associations. In neuroscience, emotions are increasingly conceived as superordinate psychological mechanisms that coordinate, regulate and prioritize other physiological processes. They are assumed to play a motivational not a passive role. Neuroscientists are finding that emotions are involved in decision-making, generally in a positive way, and from the earliest stage of deciding what information deserves our attention. This research offers strong evidence for philosophers like Aristotle, Smith and Tocqueville who argue for the beneficial role that emotions can play in personal development and social relations.
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Notes
- 1.
A revised version of this text will appear in Daniel Jacobi and Annette Freyberg-Inan, eds.,“in Man, Agency and Beyond” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), pp. 132–55.
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David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, in David Fate Norton and Mary Norton, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 2.3.3.4 and An Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. T. L. Beauchamp (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), Appendix I, p. 163.
- 3.
Max Weber, “Die ‘Objectivität’ sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozial politischer Erkenntnis” [The ‘Objectivity’ of Knowledge in the Social Sciences and Social Policy], in Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, ed. Johannes Winckelmann, 3rd ed. (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1968), pp. 175–78.
- 4.
An important exception is George Marcus, W. Russell Neuman and Michael Mackuen, Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
- 5.
Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Norton, 1958) and Gandhi's Truth: On the Origins of Nonviolence (New York: Norton, 1969); Arnold A. Rogow, James Forrestal:, A Study of Personality, Politics, and Policy (New York: Macmillan, 1963); Alexander L. George and Juliette George, Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House : A Personality Study (New York: Dover Publications, 1964).
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- 7.
Richard Ned Lebow, Between Peace and War: The Nature of International Crisis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981); Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow and Janice G. Stein, Psychology and Deterrence. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).
- 8.
Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, “The End of the Cold War as a Non-Linear Confluence,” in Richard K. Herrmann and Richard Ned Lebow, eds., Ending the Cold War: Interpretations, Causation, and the Study of International Relations (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), pp. 189–218.
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Richard Ned Lebow, Identity and International Relations, forthcoming, ch. 2.
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Annette Freyberg-Inan and Daniel Jacobi, eds., Human Nature and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
- 12.
Important exceptions include the work of Gerald Clore and Andrew Ortony, “Appraisal Theories: How Cognition Shapes Affect into Emotion,” in Lewis, Haviland-Jones and Barrett, Handbook of Emotions, pp. 628–42; Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes' Error (New York: Putnam, 1994) and The Feeling of What Happens (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1999).; Jeffrey Alan Gray, The Psychology of Fear and Stress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). For a good review of the literature, see Rose McDermott, “The Feeling of Rationality: The Meaning of Neuroscientific Advances for Political Science” Perspectives in Politics, 2 (December 2004), pp. 691–706.
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Richard A. Schweder, Jonathan Haidt, Randall Horton and Craig Joseph, “The Cultural Psychology of the Emotions: Ancient and New,” in M. Lewis and J. M. Haviland-Jones, eds., Handbook of Emotions, 2nd ed. (New York: Guildford Press, 2000).
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Magda Arnold, Emotion and Personality, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960); Clore and Ortony, “Appraisal Theories.”.
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Nico H. Frijda, “The Psychologists' Point of View,” in Lewis, Haviland-Jones and Barrett, Handbook of Emotions, pp. 68–87.
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Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (New York: Philosophical Library, 1955).
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Private communication from Rose McDermott, 20 November 2009, describing debates at recent conferences.
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E. R. Smith and Diane M. Mackie, “Intergroup Emotions,” in Lewis, Haviland-Jones and Barrett, Handbook of Emotions, pp. 428–39.
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Frijda, “Psychologists' Point of View”; Hoffman, Martin L., “Empathy and Prosocial Behavior,” in Lewis, Haviland-Jones and Barrett, Handbook of Emotions, pp. 441–455.
- 38.
A. M Isen, “Some Ways in Which Positive Affect Influences Decision Making and Problem Solving,” in Lewis, Haviland-Jones and Barrett, Handbook of Emotions, pp. 549–73; A. M. Isen, T. Shalker, M. S. Clark and L Karp, “Affect, Accessibility of Material and Behavior: A Cognitive Loop?,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36 (1978), pp. 1–12: J. D. Teasdale and S. Fogarty, “Differential Effects of Induced Mood on retrieval of Pleasant and Unpleasant Events from Episodic Memory,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 88 (1979), pp. 248–57.
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P. J. D. Carnevale and A. M. Isen, “The Influence of Positive Affect and Visual Access on the Discovery of Integrative Solutions in Bilateral Negotiation,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 37 (1986), pp. 1–13.
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D. Derryberry, “Attentional Consequences of Outcome-Related Motivational States: Congruent, Incongruent, and Focusing Effects,” Motivation and Emotion 17 (1993), pp. 65–89.
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Demasio, Descartes’ Error; R. de Sousa, R., The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987): Robert H. Frank, Passions Without Reasons: The Strategic Role of Emotions (New York: Norton, 1988); R. C. Solomon, Not Passion's Slave (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
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L. G. Aspinwall and A. McNamara, “Taking Positive change Seriously: Toward a Positive Psychology of Cancer Survivorship and Resilience,” Cancer 104 (11, Supplement) (2005), pp. 2549–2556; L. G. Aspinwall and S. E. Taylor, “A Stitch in Time: Self-Regulation and Proactive Coping,” Psychological Bulletin 121 (1997), pp. 417–36; B. L. Frederickson, “The Role of Positive Emotions in Positive Psychology: The Broaden-and-build Theory of Positive Emotions,” American Psychologist 56 (2001), pp. 218–26.
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Robert M. Sapolsky, “Stress and Cognition,” in Michael S. Gazzaniga, ed., The Cognitive Neurosciences (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), pp. 1031–42.
- 44.
Homer, The Iliad, trans. David Fagles (New York: Viking, 1990); Lebow, Richard Ned, A Cultural Theory of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), ch. 4.
- 45.
Aristotle, De Anima, 1.1403a16-b2, Rhetoric, Book II. The latter describes various emotions and how they are a function of our understanding of other’s motives, worthiness and comparative status. All Aristotle cites in Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
- 46.
Lebow, Richard Ned, “Power, Persuasion and Justice,” Millennium 33, no. 3 (2005), pp. 551–82.
- 47.
Konstan, Emotions of the Ancient Greeks, pp. xii–xiii, 28, 37.
- 48.
David Konstan “Philia in Euripides’ Electra,” Philologos 129 (1985), pp. 176–85.
- 49.
Friendship in the Classical World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
- 50.
Pity Transformed (London: Duckworth, 2004), and Konstan and N. Keith Rutter, Envy, Spite and Jealousy: The Rivalrous Emotions in Ancient Greece (Edinburg: Edinburgh University Press, 2003).
- 51.
Cicero, On Duties, trans. Margaret Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), I, § 15, 7 and 153, 9. Southern honor has been extensively studied. See John Hope Franklin, The Militant South, 1800–1861 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956); Kenneth S. Greenberg, Honor and Slavery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956); Edward L Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19 th Century American South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
- 52.
Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1383b12–15; Konstan, Emotions of the Ancient Greeks, pp. 91–110.
- 53.
Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, II, ii–iii, on hatred, indignation and contempt.
- 54.
Richard E. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought; How Asians and Westerners Think Differently (New York: Free Press, 2003), p. 54; Schweder, Haidt, Horton and Joseph, “Cultural Psychology of the Emotions.”
- 55.
Schweder, Haidt, Horton and Joseph, “Cultural Psychology of the Emotions.”
- 56.
Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1387a31–33, Nicomachean Ethics, 1117a5–15; Konstan, Emotions of the Ancient Greeks, pp. 41–76.
- 57.
Aristotle Rhetoric, 1370b11–12; Homer, Iliad, 18.109.
- 58.
Aristotle Rhetoric, 1370b30–32.
- 59.
Ibid., 1379b17–19.
- 60.
Konstan, Emotions of the Ancient Greeks, p.45.
- 61.
Aristotle, Rhetoric, 387a31–33, 138024–29, 1382a2–14.
- 62.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1103b19, Rhetoric, 1370b13–14; Konstan, Emotions of the Ancient Greeks, pp. 46, 58.
- 63.
Thucydides, 3.36.2.
- 64.
Ibid., 3.42.1.
- 65.
Richard Ned Lebow, Why Nations Fight (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), ch. 4.
- 66.
Plato, Protagoras. All Plato dialogues in Plato, The Collected Dialogues, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961).
- 67.
Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, I.32–36, has the Corinthians express the same sentiments in a speech to the Athenian assembly. Their use is unintentionally ironic, as they have just subverted this very traditional notion of justice in their off-hand dealings with Corcyra.
- 68.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1155a14, 1159b25, 1161a23, 1161b12, and Politics, 1280b39, observes that for Greeks, political community is a common project that requires affection and a common commitment among citizens, and that friendship is often considered more important than justice.
- 69.
On philia, Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Books 8–9, and Eudaemonian Ethics, Book 7.
- 70.
Aristotle, Politics, 1320B7–11, 1329b39–1330a2.
- 71.
Sophocles, “Antigone,” trans. David Grene, in David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, eds., The Complete Greek Tragedies, vol. 2: Sophocles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 161–213, uses philia in a double sense: as kinship and as affection toward the polis.
- 72.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Books 2, 8 and 9.
- 73.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1139a29–30, 1139a29–1142a. Thucydides, 3.82.4 refers to something similar in describing the stasis at Corcyra. People were no longer able to practice moderation or act with “practical intelligence” (to pros hapan xuneton).
- 74.
Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, I.1.5, VI.1.
- 75.
Karl W. Deutsch, The Nerves of Government (New York: Free Press, 1963) also offers a three-step approach learning. The first two levels involve “steering,” based on feedback. They allow people or organizations to calibrate behavior more effectively—to zero in on a target—or the change strategies they use to reach that target. A third feedback loop at a third level of consciousness allows them to refine or alter their goals.
- 76.
Plato, Symposium, 209a–b, who distinguishes eros from epithumia, unreasoning or animal desires that at best can be brought under control.
- 77.
Martha Finnemore and Stephen Toope, “Alternatives to ‘Legalization’: Richer Views of Law and Politics,” International Organization 55, no. 3 (2001), pp. 743–58.
- 78.
Plato, Symposium, 209a-b.
- 79.
These arguments are developed by Plato, in the Republic, and by Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, the Eudaimonian Ethics and Politics.
- 80.
Plato, Republic, 430e6–431a2, 441d12–e2, 444e7–445a4.
- 81.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1106b35–1107a4.
- 82.
Their conceptions of justice differ. For Plato, it was balance and harmony among the components of the psyche or city, with each performing its proper function. For Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1106a15–24, 1129b17–19, 1129b25–26, justice is not an attribute a person can possess in isolation, but a quality that can only develop and find expression in social relations. Justice is an active virtue that requires people to make, implement and adjudicate laws, not just follow them. It is the “complete” or “perfect” virtue because it requires possession and exercise of all other virtues. Aristotle accordingly distinguishes virtue, which applies to individuals, from justice, which operates at the communal level.
- 83.
Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. II, Part 2, Ch. 8, pp. 501–03 for the doctrine of self-interest well-understood.
- 84.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1101b14-1103b-26.
- 85.
Plato, Republic, Book II, 377b to III, 399e, spends a lot of time talking about the poets as inappropriate role models. The Guardians and the literature they approve are intended as their replacement. Aristotle (see below) had a more favorable view of literature, and especially of tragedy, which he believed could have powerful beneficial consequences.
- 86.
Aristotle makes the most explicit case for the beneficial interaction of reason and emotion in his discussions of mimesis and tragedy in Poetics. In Poetics, 1448b7, he contends that we have impulse toward mimesis (kata phusin), and in 1448b5–6, that the pleasure we derive from looking at representations of reality made by artists is connected to our ability to learn from them, and also functions as an incentive to learn from them. We learn from tragedy (1450) because of the pity and fear it inspires in us because of our ability to imagine ourselves in the role of the tragic hero. This association in turn produces catharsis, a purging of our soul.
- 87.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1155a14, 26–28, 1159b25, 1161a23, 1161b12. In 1155a32, he writes “when men are friends they have no need of justice, but when they are just, they need friendship as well; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1154b25. Plato’s vision of an ideal community was not dissimilar. In the Republic, 419a–421a, Socrates describes such a community as one as one in which benefits are distributed fairly, according to some general principle of justice.
- 88.
Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, I.32–36, has the Corinthians express the same sentiments in a speech to the Athenian assembly. Their use is unintentionally ironic, as they have just subverted this very traditional notion of justice in their off-hand dealings with Corcyra.
- 89.
James Madison, “Federalist Number 10,” in Hamilton, Alexander, James Madison and John Jay, The Federalist Papers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981); Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, We All Lost the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 317–19; Lebow, A Cultural Theory of International Relations.
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Lebow, R.N. (2016). Greeks, Neuroscience, and International Relations. In: Lebow, R. (eds) Richard Ned Lebow: Key Texts in Political Psychology and International Relations Theory. Pioneers in Arts, Humanities, Science, Engineering, Practice, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39964-5_6
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