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In Praise of the Cognitive Emotions
The mention of cognitive emotions may well evoke emotions of perplexity or incredulity. For cognition and emotion, as everyone knows, are hostile worlds apart. Cognition is sober inspection; it is the scientistâs calm apprehension of fact after fact in his relentless pursuit of Truth. Emotion, on the other hand, is commotionâan unruly inner turbulence fatal to such pursuit but finding its own constructive outlets in aesthetic experience and moral or religious commitment.
Strongly entrenched, this opposition of cognition and emotion must nevertheless be challenged, for it distorts everything it touches: mechanizing science, it sentimentalizes art, while portraying ethics and religion as twin swamps of feeling and unreasoned commitment. Education, meanwhileâ that is to say, the development of mind and attitudes in the youngâis split into two grotesque parts: unfeeling knowledge and mindless arousal. My purpose here is to help overcome the breach by outlining basic aspects of emotion in the cognitive process.
Some misgivings about this purpose will, I hope, be allayed by a preliminary word. My aim, to begin with, is not reductive; I am concerned neither to reduce emotion to cognition nor cognition to emotion, only to show how cognitive functioning employs and incorporates diverse emotional elementsâthese elements themselves acquiring cognitive significance thereby. I am emphatically not suggesting that cognitions are essentially emotions, or that emotions are, in reality, only cognitions. Nevertheless, I hold that cognition cannot be cleanly sundered from emotion and assigned to science, while emotion is ceded to the arts, ethics, and religion. All these spheres of life involve both fact and feeling; they relate to sense as well as sensibility.
Second, though applauding the cognitive import of emotions, I do not propose to surrender intellectual controls to wishful thinking, nor shall I portray the heart as giving special access to a higher truth.1 Control of
Presented as a special lecture in May 1976 at the 129th annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. Published in Teachers College Record, 79, no. 2 (1977): 171â86.
wishful thinking is utterly essential in cognition; it operates, however, not through an unfeeling faculty of Reason but through the organization of countervailing critical interests in the process of inquiry. These interests of a critical intellect are, in principle, no less emotive in their bearing than those of wayward wish. The heart, in sum, provides no substitute for critical inquiry; it beats in the service of science as well as of private desire.
Finally, I concede it to be undeniable that certain emotional states may be at odds with sound processes of judgment and decision making. Overpowering agitations may derail the course of reasoning; greed, jealousy, or lust may misdirect it; depression or terror may bring it to a total halt. Conversely, the effect of rational judgment may well be to moderate, even wholly to dissipate, certain emotions by falsifying their factual presuppositions: anger fades, for example, when it turns out the injury was accidental or caused by someone other than first supposed; fear evaporates when the menacing figure becomes the treeâs dancing shadow. It does not follow from these cases, however, that emotion as such is uniformly hostile to cognitive endeavors, nor may we properly conclude that cognition is, in general, free of emotional engagement. Indeed, emotion without cognition is blind, and, as I shall hope particularly to show in the sequel, cognition without emotion is vacuous.
Emotions in the Service of Cognition
Considering now the various roles of emotion in cognition, I divide the field, for convenience, into two main parts, the first having to do with the organization of emotions generally in the service of critical inquiry, and the second having to do with specifically cognitive emotions. Under the first rubric I shall treat: (a) rational passions,2 (b) perceptive feelings, and (c) theoretical imagination. I turn first to the rational passions, that is to say, to the emotions undergirding the life of reason.
Rational Passions
The life of reason is one in which cognitive processes are organized in accord with controlling rational ideals and norms. Such organization involves characteristic patterns of thought, action, and evaluation comprising what may be called rational character. Thus it also requires suitable emotional dispositions. It demands, for example, a love of truth and a contempt for lying, a concern for accuracy in observation and inference, and a corresponding repugnance at error in logic or fact. It demands revulsion at distortion, disgust at evasion, admiration of theoretical achievement, respect for the considered arguments of others. Failing such demands, we incur rational shame; fulfilling them makes for rational self-respect.
Like moral character, rational character requires that the right acts and judgments be habitual; it also requires that the right emotions be attached to the right acts and judgments.3 âA rational man,â says R.S.Peters, âcannot, without some special explanation, slap his sides and roar with laughter or shrug his shoulders with indifference if he is told that what he says is irrelevant, that his thinking is confused and inconsistent or that it flies in the face of the evidence.â4 The suitable deployment in conduct of emotional dispositions such as love and hate, contempt and disgust, shame and selfesteem, respect and admiration indeed defines what is meant, quite generally, by the internalization of ideals and principles in character. The wonder is not that rational character is thus related to the emotions but that anyone should ever have supposed it to be an exception to the general rule.
Rational character constitutes an intellectual conscience; it monitors and curbs evasions and distortions; it combats inconsistency, unfairness to the facts, and wishful thinking. In thus exercising control over undesirable impulses, it works for a balance in thought, an epistemic justice, which requires its own special renunciations and develops a characteristic cognitive discipline. There is, however, no question here of the control of impulses through aâbloodless reason,â5 as control is exercised through the structuring of emotions themselves. Rationality, as John Dewey put it,
This coincidence, I emphasize, requires appropriate organization of feelings and sentiments in the interests of intelligent control.
Perceptive Feelings
Having seen the role of emotions in the internalization of rational norms, let us consider now their employment in perception. For they are not only interwoven with our cognitive ideals and evaluative principles; they are also intimately tied to our vision of the external world. Indeed, they help to construct that vision and to define the critical features of that world.
These critical featuresâhowever specifiedâare the objects of our evaluative attitudes, the foci of our appraisals of the environment. Our habits and judgments are keyed in to these appraisals; we define ourselves and orient our actions in the light of our situation as appraised. Characteristic orientations are associated with distinctive emotional dispositions, and both involve seeing the environment in a certain light: is it, for example, beneficial or harmful, promising or threatening, fulfilling or thwarting?7 The subtle and intricate web relating adult feeling and orientation to adult perception of the environment is a product of evolutionary development, to be sure, but also of the special circumstances of individual biography. Acquiring human significance through biographical linkage with critical features of the environment, our feelings come indeed to signifyâto serve as available cues for interpreting the situation.
Fear of a particular person, for example, presupposes that that person is regarded as dangerousâdanger being a critical feature of the environment calling for a special orientation in response. There need, however, be no independent evidence, in every case, of the threat we sense: the characteristic feeling that has become associated for us with past dangers itself serves us as a cue. Interpreting that feeling as fear, we at once characterize our own state and ascribe danger to the environment. Indeed, we may thence proceed to an explicit attribution of danger, prompted by cues of feeling. Pursuing a more abstract direction in forming our cognitive concepts, we may, further, come to describe a certain situation as terrifying, ascribing to it, independently of our own state, the capacity to arouse fear. Thus employing the emotions as parameters, we gain enormous new powers of fundamental description, while abstracting from actual conditions of feeling.
The notion that aesthetic experience, for example, is peculiarly and purely a matter of emotion ignores such manifold connections of feeling and factâ both fact as embodied in the art work and fact as represented therein. Relative to the latter, H.D.Aiken writes:
That emotion is thus tied to a representational understanding of the work of art does not imply, however, that this understanding must be antecedently fashioned, in complete isolation from the feelings. This point must be especially emphasized because the familiar notion of the work of art as âan object for contemplationâ may carry contrary, and therefore misleading, connotations. In fact, I believe, the very feelings through which we respond to the content of a work serve us also in interpreting this content. Reading our feelings and reading the work are, in general, virtually inseparable processes.
The cognitive role of the emotions in aesthetic contexts has been emphasized by Nelson Goodman in a recent discussion. He writes:
The general point is, of course, not limited to the aesthetic realm for, as I have emphasized earlier, the emotions intimately mesh with all critical appraisals of the environment: the flow of feeling thus provides us with a continuous stream of cues significant for orientation to our changing contexts. Indeed, as Goodman remarks:
Theoretical Imagination
Mention of the context of theory brings us to the third role of emotions in the service of cognition, that of stimulus to the scientific imagination. This role is virtually ...