Action, Emotion and Will

Dr Anthony Kenny, Anthony Kenny

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415305822
• eBook ISBN: 9781134410934
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Action, Emotion and Will was first published in 1963, when it was one of the first books to provoke serious interest in the emotions and philosophy of human action. Almost forty years on, Anthony Kenny's account of action and emotion is still essential reading for anyone interested in these topics.
The first part of the book takes an historical look at the emotions in the work of Descartes, Locke and particularly Hume. In the second part, Kenny moves on to discuss some of the experimental work on the emotions by 20th Century psychologists like William James. Separate chapters cover feelings, motives, desire and pleasure. This edition features a brand new preface by the author.

CHAPTER ONE

THE PASSIONS OF THE SOUL

THE concepts employed in the description, explanation, and appraisal of human conduct have been regarded since antiquity as subjects of philosophical interest. From the Renaissance, however, until quite recent times, the major interest of philosophers has been epistemology. Research has been centred on the contemplative rather than the active, on the intellectual rather than the emotional and voluntary aspects of human life. Knowledge rather than action, belief rather than emotion, the intellect rather than the will have been the central topics of philosophical concern. Moral philosophy has indeed been written in abundance: but it has not, for the most part, been based on any systematic examination of the concepts involved in the description and explanation of those human actions which it is the function of morals to enjoin or forbid, to criticise and to appraise.

The major philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not indeed altogether neglect the study of the emotions and the will. Descartes wrote his pamphlet Les Passions de l’Ame, while Hume interposed in his Treatise, between the book on the understanding and that entitled “Of Morals” a third book treating expressly “Of the Passions”. But these books have remained among the least discussed, as they are among the least successful, of their output.

I shall begin the first part of this book with a consideration of the account which these philosophers gave of the emotions. Having attempted to show how their theories were vitiated by a mistaken epistemological approach, I shall discuss the influence which they had on the experimental examination of the emotions. I shall then treat separately some of the problems which are raised by a consideration of the emotions and pass finally to the allied topics of desire and pleasure.

Descartes, in his treatise on The Passions of the Soul, deals with fear, anger, joy, love, admiration, respect, scorn, pride, humility, bravery, pity, sadness, “and other similar sentiments”. The passions of the soul are a sub-class of “the things which we experience in ourselves”. There are some things, such as heat and movement, which we experience in ourselves, but which can also exist in inanimate bodies: these are to be attributed not to the soul, but to the body. To our soul we must attribute only those of the objects of our experience which are “pensées”. Not all pensées, however, are passions of the soul: some are “volontés” which originate in the soul alone, and therefore deserve rather to be called actions. Those pensées in which the soul is passive are perceptions, and these again are of two kinds: those which are caused by the soul, and those which are caused by the body, that is to say, by the action of the animal spirits on the soul. An example of the former class is the perception of our volontés: “for it is certain that we cannot will anything without perceiving ipso facto that we will it”. The latter class is divided finally into three sub-classes: there are some perceptions which we refer to outside objects, others to our bodies, and others to our soul. It is this last class which alone rightly deserves the name “passions of the soul”. “The perceptions which are referred only to the soul are those whose effects are felt as if in the soul itself, and of which normally no proximate cause is known to which they can be attributed. Such are the sentiments of joy, anger, and others like them”.

The peculiar characteristic of these perceptions which are called “the passions of the soul” is the infallibility which we enjoy in their regard. We may be deceived by perceptions referred to external bodies, and by perceptions referred to our own, such as feelings of hunger and pain. But we cannot be deceived in the same way by our passions. “They are so close and so interior to our soul that it is impossible that they should be felt without their being in reality just as they are felt.” “Even if a man is asleep and dreaming, it is impossible that he should feel sad, or feel moved by any other passion, without it being strictly true that such a passion is in the soul” (Les Passions de l’Ame, 17–26).

Having thus delimited the class of passions, Descartes defines them as follows. The passions of the soul are “perceptions, sentiments or emotions of the soul, which are referred particularly to the soul itself, and which are caused, continued, and strengthened by some movement of the animal spirits”. His reason for calling them “sentiments” or “feelings” is interesting: “they are received into the soul in the same fashion as the objects of the exterior senses, and are known by it in exactly the same manner” (Op. cit., 28).

In Descartes’ exposition of his theory so far there appears a certain obscurity. How can he say both that the passions of the soul are among the perceptions which are caused by the body, while defining them as those “desquelles on ne connoist communément aucune cause prochaine, à laquelle on les puisse rapporter”? And what does he mean by saying that they are “les perceptions…dont on sent les effets comme en l’âme mesme” (Op. cit., 25)? And how can he say that indubitability is a peculiar characteristic of the passions, since he elsewhere attributes it to all our sensations strictly so called (Philosophical Writings, 71)?

His remarks become intelligible only in the light of his own theory of perception. “When we say we perceive colours in objects,” he wrote in Principles of Philosophy, “it is really just the same as though we said that we perceived in objects something as to whose nature we are ignorant, but which produces in us a very manifest and obvious sensation, called the sensation of colour” (Op. cit., 195). When, therefore, we say that we see a red apple, we are, on Descartes’ view, attributing our sensation of redness to the apple as a cause. Again, when we say that we feel pain in the foot, we are, according to Descartes, recording a sensation in the mind and attributing it to a disturbance in the foot as a cause. So that when Descartes says that for the passions, unlike sensations which we refer to our own or other bodies, no proximate cause is commonly known to which they can be attributed, he is referring to the fact that when we feel a passion such as fear, we do not attribute the fear to any external object as we attribute the redness to the apple, nor do we locate it in any part of our body as we locate pain in our foot. It is well known that, for Descartes, the causal hypotheses embodied in ordinary-language reports of perception or sensation could be mistaken, though reports of the pure mental events of perception and sensation, pure cogitationes, were immune from error. It is because reports of the passions report purely a mental event, and embody no hypotheses about the cause of this event, that they enjoy the peculiar infallibility which Descartes ascribes to them. The perceptions which are referred to our own or other bodies may deceive us, since they may tempt us to frame incorrect hypotheses; the perceptions which are the passions cannot so deceive us, since they tempt us to frame no hypotheses at all (Op. cit., 71, 122–123).

Though reports of the passions do not ascribe them to any physical cause, yet, Descartes insists, the passions have physical causes. The immediate cause of a passion, as of any perception or sensation, is a motion of the pineal gland brought about by animal spirits. But the passions are not felt in the pineal gland any more than colour is seen, or pain is felt, in the pineal gland. They are felt, says Descartes, in the soul itself: “les perceptions qu’on rapporte settlement a l’âme sont celles dont on sent les effets comme en l’âme mesme”.

Again, though the passions have no proximate physical cause in the way in which sensations of colour have a proximate physical cause, they do most commonly have remote physical causes. That is to say, the motion of the pineal gland which is the immediate cause of the passion, itself has a cause. This cause may be a fortuitous disturbance in the brain, or some other part of the body, “as happens when one feels sad or joyful without being able to assign any object of one’s sadness or joy”. But commonly the cause of the motion of the animal spirits is some object which acts upon our senses.

Why does Descartes list the passions among the perceptions which are caused by the body? Since they are not “referred to the body”, it might have seemed more appropriate to class them among the perceptions which are caused by the soul alone. This is the one step in his classification which he does not here justify: but the reason is in fact obvious to anyone familiar with his general position. It is that the passions—as he remarks later—are not subject to voluntary control. In the sixth Meditation Descartes gives the fact that sensations are not subject to voluntary control as the best reason for believing that they proceed from bodies distinct from consciousness. “I certainly had some reason,” he writes, “to think that I was aware in sensation of objects quite different from my own consciousness: viz. bodies from which the ideas proceeded. For it was my experience that the ideas came to me without any consent of mine; so that I could neither have a sensation of any object, however I wished, if it was not present to the senseorgan, nor help having the sensation when that object was present” (Op. cit., 112).

It would take us too far round to follow Descartes’ inquiry into the nature of the several passions. But there are several points of general interest which emerge. It is clear that he conceives his main task to be to frame hypotheses concerning the mechanisms by which external objects give rise to passions in the soul: the passions are differentiated from each other partly by the different external objects which cause them, and partly by the differing mechanisms by which they are brought into being. Fear, for example, is explained in the following manner. An approaching animal prints an image of itself on each of our eyes; in the pineal gland these two images are fused into a single image which acts immediately on the soul, thus making it see the animal. If the animal is of a frightening kind, the sight of it arouses various passions in the soul: that is to say, the animal spirits which make up the image scatter, some of them travel to the heart and some of them travel to the nerves which serve to turn the back and to move the legs in flight. The movement of the spirits to the heart gives an impulse to the pineal gland, which causes fear in the soul; the movement to the flight nerves gives the gland a different impulse, which causes the perception of the flight. Thus flight may be caused by a purely corporeal process, without any intervention of the soul; and similarly, joy may make one swoon by opening the orifices of the heart so widely that the blood floods in and puts out the fire in the heart before it can be rarefied and expelled into the veins. But the commonest effect of the passions is to incite the soul to will a course of action for which they merely prepare the body (Les Passions de l’Ame, 35–40, 112).

The quaint physiology should not distract us: Descartes’ theory deserves to be treated no less seriously as an essay in philosophy than the James-Lange theory which in some ways it resembles. In its essentials the theory is that the physiological processes involved in the perception of a fearful object set in motion, by purely mechanical causation, a further physiological process which issues in the behaviour characteristic of fear. As, for Descartes, both the perception of the fearful object and the perception of the behaviour manifesting the fear are mental events caused by the physiological processes in question, so the fear itself is a mental event caused by a third physiological process in mechanical causal connection with the first two; or, perhaps more accurately, by another part of one uninterrupted process which constitutes the bodily counterpart of seeing, fearing, and fleeing from a fearful object.

Not only fear, Descartes maintains, but almost all the passions are accompanied by turbulences in the heart and blood and animal spirits. As long as this turbulence lasts, the appropriate passion remains present to our thought, in the same fashion as sensible objects are present to it as long as they are acting upon our sense-organs. For this reason, the passions are only indirectly subject to the control of the will. The volonté which is the will not to be angry, say, is not sufficient by itself to prevent one from being angry. The most it can do is to refuse consent to the effects of anger. Anger may make the hand rise in order to strike; the will can ordinarily hold it back from striking (Op. cit., 46).

Voluntary action is, for Descartes, the exact reverse of perception. As perception is an event in the soul caused proximately by a movement in the pineal gland, so voluntary action is an effect caused by a movement in the pineal gland which is itself caused by an event in the soul. Each volonté in the soul is linked by nature with a particular motion of the pineal gland; but it is not always the volonté to do X which is connected with the movement of the pineal gland which causes X. For instance, the movement of the pineal gland which causes the pupil to contract is not linked with the volonté to contract the pupil, but with the volonté to see a distant object.

Since the pineal gland may be moved from two different directions, that is to say by a volonté from the soul, and by a physiological process of the body, there arises the possibility of tension. It is by means of this that Descartes explains the phenomenon of conflict between the will and the passions. In temptation, for instance, the will to avoid the tempting object pushes the pineal gland one way; while the animal spirits are pushing the gland the other way so as to cause in the soul the desire of the tempting object (Op. cit., 46–47).

Descartes is interested in the teleology of the passions, and is anxious to show how they serve human well-being. He says that they are instituted by nature to incite the soul to consent to and assist such actions as serve to preserve and perfect the body. Nature teaches the soul what objects are beneficial or injurious to the body by means of the sensations of pleasure or pain which accompany the perception of the objects: these sensations produce a train of passions which lead to the action appropriate to conserve the body. Thus the sensation of pain produces the passion of sadness, which is followed by the passion of hatred for the painful object, and finally the passion of desire to get rid of it. Or when something is “represented as good for us”—i.e. when accompanied with a sensation of pleasure—it causes love in us which leads to various forms of appropriate voluntary behaviour (Op. cit., 56, 137, 120, 144; Philosophical Writings, 117).

Though many passions are thus linked by nature with particular courses of action, not all such links are built in to the human being. Soul and body are so linked, that once a bodily action and an experience have been joined, they always recur together. This explains why not all men have the same passions in the same circumstances; as does the fact that not all men’s brains are made alike. Thus if we have a horrible experience while eating a pleasant dish, we may ever after feel repugnance for that dish; a man may have a horror of the smell of roses because early in life he was injured by a rose (Les Passions de l’Ame, 39, 50, 136).

Descartes lists five primary passions: gladness and sadness, love and hatred, and desire. The other passions are built up out of these: thus pride is compounded out of gladness and love. This compounding of passions is envisaged as a mechanical combination of the physiological processes which give rise to each of the compounded passions: thus pity, which is a mixture of sadness and love, causes weeping, because love sends blood to the heart, which makes vapours rise to the eyes, while sadness, being a chilling passion, condenses these vapours and expels them in liquid for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION
• PREFACE
• 1. THE PASSIONS OF THE SOUL
• 2. THE EXPERIMENTAL EXAMINATION OF THE EMOTIONS
• 3. FEELINGS
• 4. MOTIVES
• 5. DESIRE
• 6. PLEASURE
• 7. ACTIONS AND RELATIONS
• 8. STATES, PERFORMANCES, ACTIVITIES
• 9. OBJECTS
• 10. JUDGING AND WILLING
• 11. SKETCH OF A THEORY OF VOLITION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX