Emotions

What is an emotion? And are emotions rational? Those two questions have dominated the philosophical history of the subject, and, of course, the answer to one suggests a set of plausible answers to the other. If emotions are such as to contribute to our well-being and the good life, and if emotions motivate moral behavior, then it makes good sense to say that emotions are rational or at least contribute to rationality. On the other hand, if emotions are merely an unintelligent residue of our "animal nature," they are more likely to be distractions or obstacles to civilized living and thereby irrational. Nevertheless, the picture is more complicated than this would suggest. One train of thought since ancient times suggests that the emotions are indeed an aspect of our animal life, unsuitable to civilized life. But since Charles Darwin (1809–1882), the emotions have been argued to be continuous in the evolution from animal to man and, so considered, probably functional and adaptive at least at some point in their history. In either case, this biological view of emotions has been supported in the past few centuries—since René Descartes in the seventeenth century—by increasingly sophisticated physiological and neurological models of emotion.

The history of ideas about emotion is thus divided into two sometimes complex and interweaving tracks in which emotions tend to be "dumb" and "sophisticated," respectively. The first kind of theory takes an emotion to be a feeling or physiological process. In medieval medicine, the emotions were the result of organic "humors" in the body. In early modern philosophy, they were the product of "animal spirits" in the blood, which caused simple sensations of pleasure and discomfort. William James (1842–1910), at the end of the nineteenth century, insisted that emotions are sensations caused by physiological disruptions. In the twenty-first century, many psychologists and philosophers hypothesize that emotions, or at least the "basic" emotions, are "affect programs," essentially hard-wired and evolutionarily derived complexes of neurological, hormonal, and muscular responses, with accompanying feelings, of course. But such feelings are of minimal significance, mere "icing on the cake" according to one prominent researcher (Joseph le Doux). An emotion is for the most part an unconscious or at least not necessarily conscious physiological process, which may or may not still serve an evolutionary function but does not involve sufficient "cognition" to be rational in any meaningful sense.

By contrast, Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) insisted that emotions, while fully natural, are also an essential part of rational, civilized life and themselves social and cultural, consisting of ideas, learned and cultivated and even "intelligent." In the twentieth century, many psychologists and philosophers defended various "cognitive" and "appraisal" theories of emotion, in which an emotion is constituted, at least in part, by ideas, beliefs, or judgments and by an active engagement with the world. Aristotle insisted, accordingly, that quite the contrary of a dumb reaction, an emotion such as anger was a learned and cultivated response to what was recognized as an offense or a "slight," and as such it required not only the recognition of the nature of the offense but a measured and appropriate response. As such, emotions represented sophisticated, sometimes uniquely human, behavior. A cat might be aggressive or defensive, but only a human being with a moral upbringing can be morally indignant. A dog might demonstrate dependency and affection, but only a human being can fall in love. Thus some contemporary theorists who defend an "affect program" conception of emotions distinguish between "basic" and "higher cognitive" emotions, perhaps insisting that only the former are "really" emotions but acknowledging that many of the most important emotions—guilt, shame, pride, and jealousy, for instance—require cultivation and culture.

Many theorists would argue that whether or not anything like an affect program is involved in emotions (and no one would argue against the idea that emotions are somehow the product of our brains), that is not what an emotion really is. An emotion is a kind of experience of the world, and, as such, it necessarily involves intentionality, an orientation toward objects in the world (for example, situations, other people, or oneself). Thus anger is not just feeling flushed and tense; it is a feeling about something, involving, for instance, a judgment that someone has insulted or wronged you. And love is not just a feeling but an attitude (or a huge complex of attitudes) about someone. Emotions are "cognitive" in that they seem to involve and presuppose beliefs about the world; for example, fear is premised on the judgment that one is in danger, and shame is based on the recognition that one has done something shameful. They are also evaluative (and involve "appraisals") in that they involve the recognition that some things are important. Grief, for instance, is an emotion that recognizes a serious (perhaps devastating) loss. Emotions are therefore not "dumb" but, one might say, potentially as smart and sophisticated as the person who has them and the culture that embeds and teaches them. Anger may sometimes be nothing more than blind rage, but it can also be an exquisite response to injustice. Love may be as naïve and foolish as a teenage "crush," or it may be profoundly insightful and involve deep mutual intimate knowledge. Feelings and physiology play their roles, of course, but the emotion is much more than that.