Emotion, Imagination, and the Limits of Reason

Talia Morag

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138656949
• eBook ISBN: 9781317220473
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The emotions pose many philosophical questions. We don't choose them; they come over us spontaneously. Sometimes emotions seem to get it wrong: we experience wrongdoing but do not feel anger, feel fear but recognise there is no danger. Yet often we expect emotions to be reasonable, intelligible and appropriate responses to certain situations. How do we explain these apparent contradictions?

Emotion, Imagination, and the Limits of Reason presents a bold new picture of the emotions that challenges prevailing philosophical orthodoxy. Talia Morag argues that too much emphasis has been placed on the "reasonableness" of emotions and far too little on two neglected areas: the imagination and the unconscious. She uses these to propose a new philosophical and psychoanalytic conception of the emotions that challenges the perceived rationality of emotions; views the emotions as fundamental to determining one's self-image; and bases therapy on the ability to "listen" to one's emotional episode as it occurs.

Emotion, Imagination, and the Limits of Reason is one of the first books to connect philosophical research on the emotions to psychoanalysis. It will be essential reading for those studying ethics, the emotions, moral psychology and philosophy of psychology as well as those interested in psychoanalysis.

Part I

1
Emotions as judgments or as modes of “seeing-as”

The explanatory challenges toward a causal account for emotional episodes

When a man is said to express emotion, what is being said about him comes to this. At first, he is conscious of having an emotion, but not conscious of what this emotion is. All he is conscious of is a perturbation or excitement, which he feels going on within him, but of whose nature he is ignorant. While in this state, all he can say about his emotion is: “I feel … I don’t know what I feel.” From this helpless and oppressed condition he extricates himself by doing something which we call expressing himself. This is an activity which has something to do with the thing we call language: he expresses himself by speaking.¹

It is often the case that we are able to describe what we are feeling and to express our emotion in words more easily than Collingwood seems to suggest. Nevertheless, the claim that we feel “perturbation or excitement” before we describe it or are able to describe it seems correct. An emotional episode of the sort we feel and proceed to describe is an affective state that differs from mere sensation precisely since it feels that there is something to say and understand about it, that we can become aware of what explains it.

An emotional episode typically directs our attention to certain features of the here-and-now situation, certain people and things that become emotionally salient to us. And whether or not these emotionally salient features are also what triggered our emotional episode, we see those people and things as the cause of our emotion.² In addition, we can usually describe the physiological and behavioral particularities of the perturbation and excitement we feel in terms of emotion-types.

It is perhaps a question whether or not a subject can identify or describe correctly what she feels. It stands to reason that if one can report at all about an emotional episode one can provide a rough-and-ready characterization of the emotion-type one is experiencing. Perhaps one cannot decide in the first instance whether one feels contentment or gratification or whether one feels glee or pride or joy. But one would be in the ballpark, as it were, since these emotions’ affective or expressive aspects are typically similar.

What about emotions whose action tendencies overlap? Perhaps one could confuse attacking in fear with attacking in anger? There is no need to assume that one must be feeling only one emotion-type at each moment. There are cases of mixed feelings where two emotion-types of different typical affect are experienced more or less together, such as disgust and compassion, contempt and admiration, gratitude and resentment and so forth. Such cases are discussed in the second part of this book. For now, it seems reasonable to accept that even in such cases, if one can report at all about the ambivalent episode, one is likely to be able to provide at least one out of the two relevant emotion-type terms that may be suitable to describe the experience.

Altogether, we experience the emotional episode as a reaction to someone else’s behavior or to something that is happening in the here-and-now situation, as an attitude that we have toward the people and things that we see as having caused our emotional episode. We are thus usually able to describe ourselves as emotionally relating to someone or something: “I am angry with John,” or “I am afraid of Carol.” An emotional episode can also be described in terms of a relation to imagined or remembered people and things, but for the sake of simplicity I focus on present people and things, a discussion that can easily be generalized to include emotionally salient features of remembered or imagined situations.

The emotionally salient features of the situation are often other people that become affected by the emotional reaction. Being marked as the cause of someone else’s emotion raises questions about their responsibility for the emoter’s perturbation and excitation: What have they done to cause someone else’s anger or fear? Have they done something wrong? Are they posing a risk? Should their self-image be affected by it? Furthermore, people who have become emotionally salient for someone who is undergoing an emotional episode are often subjected to action tendencies such as aggression in anger, fear or jealousy, imitation in the case of admiration and envy, and so forth. Being seen as emotion-provoking affects one’s social position, and emotional relations often further implicate other people in the emoter’s social niche. The emoting subject is also affected by her own emotional episode, even if nobody else knows about it. Her fear makes her feel small and vulnerable, her pride makes her feel that she is above other people or at least above her own previous self, her guilt may come with a tendency to punish herself, her shame or embarrassment might cause her to hide at home and not want to see anyone, and so forth. Even joy can make one want to get clear on its cause for the sake of repeating it in the future.

This ethical dimension of emotions, their impact on the well-being and on the social position of the people involved, puts the emoting subject under normative pressure to describe the kind of emotional relation she is in. Sometimes people will find it acceptable that someone just “gives me the creeps” in the case of fear,³ or that “I’m just so into him” in the case of admiration, or that “Sorry, I just can’t stand her,” in the case of contempt. But usually the emoting subject, as well as others around her, want to have a more clear understanding of the emotional relation that is affecting the social position of those involved. What did the person who has been marked as emotion-provoking do? Did something happen to that person? What behavior or occurrence is the emotional relation calling attention to?

This normative demand for a verbal description comes hand in hand with a demand for justification. If people are going to be affected in this manner, then the emotionally salient person or thing should merit this emotional salience. Is the emotionally salient person merely a causal trigger for an emotional relation she has nothing to do with, or can she be regarded as responsible for this emotionally expressive behavior? In other words, seeing a person or a thing as emotion-provoking is normatively taken to be an evaluative attitude. The emoting subject faces the demand to rationally justify her emotionally expressive behavior. The emotionally salient people and things must be more than mere causal triggers for shame or fear to be socially acceptable – they should be evaluable as shameful or fearful.

This demand for emotional salience to correspond to a rationally justifiable evaluation is usually spoken in terms of judging the emotional episode to be “appropriate” or “inappropriate.” I shall articulate a few notions of appropriateness or inappropriateness in this chapter as well as in Chapter 3, but for now I want to note the two most widely acknowledged conceptions of emotion appropriateness: fittingness of the emotion type and intensity to the situation at hand.

Judgments of emotion-type fittingness are made in reference to what Justin D’Arms and Daniel Jacobson call “norms of fittingness,”⁴ norms that match emotion-type words with roughly described circumstances: fear fits danger or people and things that can be evaluated as dangerous, anger fits wrongs or people that can be evaluated as having wronged the emoting subject, guilt fits circumstances where the subject has committed a wrong, disgust fits contamination or the unpalatable, shame a failing, pride an achievement, joy – benefit, and so forth. What exactly counts as a wrong, an achievement, a benefit, and even danger further depends on various other social, moral and prudential norms, which may vary from culture to culture and from one social niche to another within the same culture. This is why norms of fit “cannot be settled by conceptual analysis or linguistic fiat,” their specific articulation is “provisional, open to revision,”⁵ and cannot be read in a strict or literal sense. And the same can be said for norms of fit for emotion intensity. Intensity could only be described vaguely as “very angry” or “just a little angry,” and here too people should be allowed difference of opinion as to the appropriate degree of an emotional response to a certain situation.

I think it is fair to say that many philosophers, especially those that do not define themselves as philosophers of emotion but that work in ethics, moral psychology, and aesthetics, belong to what we may call the conceptualist camp. Those who belong to this camp do not only speak of emotionally salient people and things in the here-and-now situation but further claim these people and things are the “intentional objects” of the emotion. When it comes to the specific features of these people and things – those that the emoting subject describes as the relevant emotionally salient aspects – the philosophers of this camp do not only speak of them as the description of what one takes to be the causal trigger of the emotion or as a response to the normative pressure to justify one’s emotion, but they further describe those aspects as the “intentional content” of the emotional attitude. According to the conceptualist, then, when one describes one’s emotion, one specifies the intentional object of the emotion and the aspect under which that object is the object of the emotion. For example, I am angry with John under the aspect that he stole my car.⁶ And this general schema can also be formulated as a propositional attitude “I am angry that John stole my car,” or generally as:

I E that P

This does not mean that conceptualists must claim that the proposition P is the object of the emotion or that the emotional attitude is toward an abstract object such as a proposition.⁷ The proposition “John stole my car” is the intentional content of the attitude. The intentional object of the emotion is still John, and I am angry with him under the aspect that he stole my car. It is true that we often describe our emotions in the form “I E that P.” In fact, this could be seen as a general schema for the verbal description of an emotional episode, what I call in the introduction the describable aspect of an emotion. But according to most conceptualists, this is not just a way to verbally describe or express one’s emotion but the conceptual bedding of the emotion itself.

In other words, according to the conceptualist, emotions are rationally assessable states of mind. Either E fits P in reference to the relevant norms or it does not. That is, according to the conceptualist, rational assessment of emotions as fitting or unfitting is not just an ethical dimension that is placed above, as it were, the causal dimension of emotions. Rational assessibility, according to the conceptualist, is part and parcel of emotional states. This also means that philosophers of the conceptualist camp speak of emotions as inherently evaluative states of mind, and not merely as states that are regarded as evaluations in our social interactions, in the manner described above.

When it comes to philosophers who define themselves as philosophers of emotion, conceptualist accounts go into further detail. That is, they specify in what way emotions embed conceptuality. The first section of this chapter presents the account known as “judgmentalism,” according to which emotions are normative judgments of fit, namely judgments that the here-and-now situation calls for a certain emotional response. The first section makes explicit the kind of causal account for the formation of emotional episodes that is implicit in judgmentalism. The critical examination of judgmentalism, presented in the second section, leads to abandoning it in favor of an alternative approach, which basically corresponds to the preliminary definition of emotions presented in the introduction, that is, that emotions are ways of seeing or rather of experiencing certain features of the situation as emotionally salient. The third section of this chapter is largely dedicated to presenting a minimalist conception of the “seeing as” alternative, which could be agreed upon by all the contemporary accounts discussed throughout this book that do not subscribe to judgmentalism. The third section also describes and criticizes the conceptualist version of the seeing-as accounts.⁸

I think it is fair to say that this conceptualist seeing-as view is the one held by most conceptualists, within the philosophy of emotion as well as in other fields of philosophy that adhere to the view that emotions are rationally assessable attitudes with intentional content. I nevertheless begin with and dedicate a large part of this chapter to judgmentalism since it serves to delineate the general way to understand the describable aspect of an emotional episode, as well as to identify the explanatory questions about the formation and subsidence of emotional episodes. These questions or challenges are inherited, as it were, from the widely accepted criticisms of judgmentalism, and that against which any causal account of emotional reactions should be assessed.

1. The judgmentalist view

Many nuanced versions of “judgmentalism” can be found in the literature, and I will not provide a survey of them here. In what follows, I describe a synthesized version of “judgmentalism” which I find the most plausible and that incorporates various critical insights that can be found in the literature.⁹ According to the judgmentalist, as Robert Solomon says, an emotional reaction is a normative judgment.¹⁰ In other words, the emotional attitude is an evaluative judgment that the situation fits a certain emotional response. For the sake of discussion, I shall talk about emotions as having intentional content, as presupposed by judgmentalists.

As evaluative judgments, emotions can be correct or incorrect, as strange as it may sound to talk about “correctness” of emotions. An emotional attitude gets it right if the content of the attitude, namely P, fits the emotion-type E, in reference to the relevant norms. This means that for the judgmentalist, norms of fit are not just norms of justification in reference to which we ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Bibliography
• Index