The eighteenth-century philosopher, David Hume, claimed that emotions are original existences, mental states with no representational properties of their own. While beliefs, perceptual experiences, and other like states represent the way the world is taken to be, emotions make no reference to the world at all. As Hume puts the point in the passage quoted above: āWhen I am angryā¦I have no more reference to any other object, than when I am thirsty, or sick, or more than five foot highā (1896, 415).
Today few philosophers agree with Hume. The standard view nowadays is that emotions are very like beliefs or perceptual states in representing the world in certain ways. On some views, emotions just are types of thoughts or perceptual-like states. On other views, emotions are compound or hybrid mental states containing mental representations as constituents. But common to all such views is the idea that emotions have intentional or representational properties. For instance, when we are afraid we might represent an object (a fierce looking dog, for example) to be dangerous or threatening, and when we are angry we might represent something (how we have been treated by another person, for example) as being unjust or offensive.
One principal reason for writing this book is to try to revive the Humean view and show why thinking of emotions as representational mental states is badly mistaken. Rather, in the tradition of writers such as Hume and William James, I defend the idea that emotions are nothing but types of bodily feelings that have no representational properties of their own.
Part I of this book, then, is taken up with advancing and defending a feeling theory of emotion. In Chap. 2 I am concerned to argue that emotions are phenomenally conscious mental states, by which I mean that emotions comprise how they phenomenally appear or present themselves to us in our experience of them. Establishing that emotions are how they phenomenally appear to us doesnāt in itself show that emotions are feelings that lack representational properties. This is because it is an open question as to how emotions phenomenally present themselves to us, as to whether, for instance, emotions present themselves to us as possessing representational properties or not. However, showing that emotions are their phenomenal appearances does set up the justificatory basis for how I proceed in Chap. 3, where drawing on the phenomenology of emotion, I argue that emotions are non-representational feeling states, closely akin to though not identical with other kinds of bodily sensations, such as aches, pains, and itches.
But defending a feeling theory of emotion is not all I want to do in this book. To be sure, a successful defence of a feeling theory of emotion would be a worthwhile task in itself, and one that holds interest independent of the implications the theory has for other areas in philosophy. One main reason for doing philosophy has always been to get clear on the nature of certain phenomena, including mental states such as emotions, regardless of the wider consequences such a project might have for other areas of enquiry. Nevertheless, I want to spell out what I take to be some of the broader implications of the theory of emotion I defend, because they also hold a great deal of significance and interest. Indeed, it seems to me that to conceive of emotions as types of feelings opens up a whole new way of thinking about the role and centrality of emotion in our lives, and especially the role emotion serves with respect to behavior, moral thought, virtue and vice.
So here is the outline of another idea that I am going to advance and try to make good. In fact, making the idea good will occupy much of the second part of the book. A standard view in metaphysics has it that objects are disposed to behave in the ways they do in virtue of their intrinsic properties. A vase, for instance, is disposed to shatter in the event of being struck by a blunt instrument in virtue of the vaseās atomic or molecular structure. This intrinsic property of an object is commonly known as the categorical basis for the way an object is disposed to behave. Now, human beings too are disposed to behave in certain ways when certain circumstances obtain, sometimes in beneficial and wonderful ways, other times in harmful and terrible ways. But if objects in general are disposed to behave in the ways they do in virtue of certain intrinsic properties of theirs, then the same must be true of human beings specifically. So the question arises: what in the case of ourselves might serve as a categorical basis for the different ways we are disposed to behave?
Answering this question will be the task of Chap. 4. I will claim that unlike the case of ordinary physical objects, such as vases and rocks, the search for those properties that underlie the ways we are disposed to behave seems to be a search for some kind of psychological property. However, I will argue that neither desires nor beliefs can serve as categorical bases for our behavioral dispositions, desires because they are behavioral dispositions and therefore in need of categorical bases themselves, and beliefs because they serve as the stimulus or triggering conditions for the manifestations of our behavioral dispositions.
Instead, my answer to the question posed above will be that dispositions to behavior are grounded in or realized by emotions. Moreover, I will argue that emotions discharge this role precisely because they are the sorts of mental states that I claim they are, namely non-representational feeling states. I will also give reason for thinking that the view I advance is true not only with regard to dispositions to overt physical behaviors or doings, but also dispositions to mental acts or doings, such as a disposition to attend to something in thought or a disposition to infer certain beliefs when presented with supporting evidence.
Furthermore, suppose the idea that emotions serve as categorical bases for our behavioral dispositions is correct. In which case, that idea promises to provide us with a novel way of thinking about emotionās role in the generation of moral thought , virtue and vice. For plausibly moral thought, virtue, and vice, each involve or comprise behavioral dispositions. Thus, in Chap. 5 I argue that if the view that is known as āmotivational internalismā provides us with a correct account of the nature of moral thought and moral judgments are intrinsically motivating mental states, then to form a moral judgment is to be disposed to behave in a certain way. But then it must follow that moral judgments are realized by or grounded in emotions if moral judgments are intrinsically motivating states.
Similarly, virtues and vices are commonly taken to comprise behavioral dispositions. Honesty, for instance, involves the disposition to act in a truthful way, and dishonesty is the disposition to behave in ways that are false. But in which case, and as I argue in Chap. 6, emotions must again serve as those things that underlie or realize the behavioral dispositions associated with different virtues and vices.
Part II of this book, then, is largely concerned to show that emotions as types of bodily feelings discharge an explanatory role by virtue of being those things that underlie or realize how we are disposed to behave. However, I will argue this is not the only role that emotions discharge. For I will also advance the view that emotions play a critical normative role, not in the sense of justifying our behavioral dispositions, but rather in the sense of regulating our behavioral dispositions, by ensuring that our behavioral dispositions are by and large the right ones for us to form in the circumstances in which we are placed.
In the case of moral thought, this means that if motivational internalism is a correct account of the nature of moral thought, then emotions are those things that ensure we form the right moral judgments, that is to say, moral judgments that are sensitive to the right and wrong making features of our situations. I submit there is a clear parallel to be made here with another of Humeās very well-known claims, namely that āreason is and ought only to be the slave of the passionsā (Hume 1896, 415). So we might say that reason is the slave of the passions because reason, comprising our moral judgments or internalized norms of action, has emotion underlying or realizing it, and reason ought to be the slave of the passions because emotions by and large ensure that our moral judgments are the right ones for us to form in the circumstances in which we are placed.
And a similar claim can be made for emotionās role with regard to the virtues. The point will be argued as way of responding to an objection that has been made to virtue theory in recent years, namely, the objection that virtue theory fails to recognize that how people behave is largely situation dependent. Thus, according to the critique of virtue theory in question there is no such thing as the person who is disposed to behave honestly in all situations (as virtue theory is often taken to hold) but only the person who tends to behave honestly in some situations and not in others. But if emotions serve a regulatory role by way of ensuring our behavioral dispositions are sensitive to the particularities of our situations, then virtue theory has a retort to the āsituationist challengeā. The virtue theorist can hold that it is a good thing we are disposed to behave differently in different circumstances, as those are the behavioral dispositions that our emotions prescribe us to have. Regarding emotions as serving an important regulatory role with regard to our behavioral dispositions allows the virtue-theorist a way of replying to the situationist challenge, then, as it motivates the idea that virtues and vices are what are often known as local, not global, traits of character.
Part III of this book addresses a number of issues relating to the self. In Chap. 7 I advance the idea that emotion lies at the core of self, by which I mean that emotions are those properties of ours that characterizes 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. This is an implication of the idea that emotions serve as categorical bases for our behavioral dispositions, taking as true the idea that intrinsic properties act as categorical bases. But it is also suggested by a number of other features that intrinsic properties are commonly thought to bear.
For instance, that emotions identify our intrinsic properties is suggested by the idea that intrinsic properties are non-relational properties of ours, properties the nature of which do not relate us to anything separate from ourselves. Thus, it is my claim that emotions are feeling states that place us in no kind of relation to the world. Moreover, it is difficult to see what else can serve as a property of ours that would qualify as an intrinsic property. Desires and beliefs, for instance, are clearly relational in that they relate us to the things believed or desired. Relevant also, I argue, is what I call āthe test of deep changeā. If emotion is that thing that characterizes what we are like in and of ourselves, then we would expect any kind of emotional change we endure to be accompanied by a deep change in ourselves, a change to the core of our beings, so to speak. In Chap. 7 I give a number of examples from fiction and real-life that makes that idea a very credible one.
In Part III of the book I am interested also in exploring various issues relating to what I call the fractured self, the self that suffers from symptoms of poor mental health, symptoms that plausibly often have their source in emotion. Here, then, I am particularly conc...