Emotions

Plato (c. 428–348 or 347 B.C.E.) famously divided the soul into three parts: reason, spirit, and appetite. He also used a dramatic metaphor to explain the harmonious interrelation between them, reason as the charioteer driving two spirited horses. But Plato also recognized that what we call emotions seem to encompass not only spirit and appetite but reason as well. When, in his Rhetoric, Aristotle defines anger as "a distressed desire for conspicuous vengeance in return for a conspicuous and unjustifiable contempt of one's person or friends," he makes it quite clear that emotion and reason are not to be divided but combined. Aristotle, who was so precocious in so many disciplines, seems to have anticipated many contemporary theories. His analysis of anger includes a distinctive cognitive component, a specified social context, a behavioral tendency, and physical arousal. Whereas Aristotle took emotion to be essential to the good life, the Stoics analyzed emotions as conceptual errors, conducive only to misery. In modern terms, the Stoics Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4B.C.E.?–65 C.E.) and Chryssipus (c. 280–c. 206 B.C.E.) developed a full-blooded cognitive theory of the emotions two millennia ago. Emotions, in a word, are judgments, judgments about the world and one's place in it. The disagreement between Aristotle and the Stoics was whether these judgments were rational and thus conducive to happiness, or not.

Even before the ancients in the Mediterranean, fascination with the emotions occupied the best minds in early India and China. In India, the emotions (rasas) were considered central to the arts, artistic expression, and, most important, aesthetic appreciation. Thus the cataloging and analysis of the emotions, their causes, and their effects on the mind and body formed the heart of Indian aesthetics. In Buddhism, the control of one's emotions, the elimination of the agitating emotions (klesas), and the cultivation of compassion were all viewed as essential to enlightenment and to putting an end to the suffering that was so characteristic of life. In China, both Confucians and Daoists recognized that the cultivation and management of one's emotions (qing) was essential to living well. The Confucians emphasized the importance of cultivating social emotions such as respect and reverence. The Daoists focused their attention on the more "natural" and spontaneous emotions. The concept of rationality as such did not play the central role it did in the Western tradition, but nevertheless, insofar as that concept embodied a general sense of wisdom and well-being, the cultivation of the right emotions played an essential role in their various philosophies. Meanwhile, in the Middle East, the ancient Hebrews endowed their God with a whole range of (super)human emotions, from wrath and jealousy to love. In the New Testament, the emphasis shifted to love and faith, which the medieval scholars argued to be the epitome of rationality. The great importance of such emotions guaranteed that the subject would remain of great interest to the theologians of the Christian tradition.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), like Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), who admired him, described instead the darker, more instinctual and less rational motives of the human mind. This was not to say that all passions are wise; some, he declares, "drag us down with their stupidity," and others, notably the "slave morality" emotion of ressentiment, are devious and clever but nevertheless disastrous for both the subject and society. Nietzsche, like the ancient Greeks, insisted on the cultivation of the right emotions—those having to do with strength and self-sufficiency, but he insisted even more on the self-destructiveness of emotions such as ressentiment and envy. There is wisdom in emotion, he says in The Will to Power, "as if every passion didn't contain its own quantum of reason." So, too, in The Emotions: Outline of a Theory, the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) gave a "phenomenological" analysis of emotions as "magical transformations of the world"—willful strategies for coping with a difficult world. Again, emotions were conceived as inherently purposeful, with an added twist: We choose our emotions, according to Sartre, and so we are responsible for them.

Thus, emotions have been conceived, in many cultures since ancient times, as conducive to wisdom and well-being, and in this sense at least some of the emotions can be said to be rational. And emotions, if conceived of as "cognitive" and involving beliefs and appraisals, are rational in a further sense. They involve concepts and judgments. But our emotions are rational or irrational within a culture depending on whether they are appropriate or inappropriate to the circumstances, more or less accurate in their perception and understanding and more or less warranted in their evaluation of the situation. Thus it is mistaken to say either that emotions (in general) are rational or irrational. It depends on the emotion and the circumstances as well as on the culture. But what is most important in this conception of emotions as much more than mere "gut reactions" and thus as rational or irrational is that what we think about our emotions, the ideas we have about them, in part determine what they are. It is not as if thought and reflection are irrelevant to the emotions, which have their own animal life. Our emotions are to some extent products of our thoughts and reflections, and, of course, our thoughts and reflections are often the product of our emotions. Thus the ideas we have about emotions become part and parcel of our emotional lives.