Squad
Asking whether the MOQ is science or emotivism, presupposes that these are
two distinct modes of evaluation. But there's growing evidence that it
isn't as clear cut as it seems.
http://www.philosophers.co.uk/current/emotions.htm
"Emotions"
by Paul Harkin
Since at least the time of Homer, the emotions have had pretty bad press.
The Iliad opens with an account of 'the rage of Achilles', whose anger and
wounded pride have such devastating consequences. Slightly later, the Greek
tragedians offered their audiences characters such as Medea, a woman
apparently so much in the grip of her spiteful jealousy that she is prepared
to sacrifice her own children to ensure her revenge.
Plato also took a fairly dim view of the emotions, regarding them as agents
of tyranny which enslave the true and rational part of our nature. And it is
to Plato that we originally owe the idea that reason and emotion are
distinct and opposed faculties or aspects of the human psyche. The Stoics
who followed him claimed not merely that the passions are disruptive and
uncontrollable forces, but that they involve false attributions of value to
things (and people) in the world. Such attributions, in the form of love of
family and friends, for instance, make us vulnerable, since we care what
happens to them. When, thanks to the Stoics' own brand of therapy, we rid
ourselves of these false conceptions, we can remain clear-eyed and
unperturbed - 'Stoical', as we would say - in the face of our fate, and
theirs.
Later, Hume, Kant and then Freud, each in his own way confirmed the gulf
between reason and passion, and the events of our own century testify to the
terrible potential of hatred in its different forms. We are, as a result,
well primed to share the dim view of the emotions which has been our
cultural inheritance. It is the view of Bertrand Russell, in his History of
Western Philosophy;
'most of the strongest passions are destructive-hate and resentment and
jealousy, remorse and despair, outraged pride and the fury of the unjustly
oppressed'.
While it is, of course, undeniable that emotions can be unruly and that they
can and have had dreadful consequences, the good news is that many
philosophers and psychologists have for some time been urging us not to
infer from these facts any sweeping negative conclusions about the emotions.
Better news still is that - contrary to appearances - we do not in fact hold
such negative views ourselves. Our own thinking about the emotions is more
ambiguous, perhaps even contradictory. We sometimes speak as if we endorse
Plato's view, but in other respects our sympathies are quite different.
Literature offers some pertinent examples. In The Adventures of Hucklebery
Finn, Huck's moral education - or at least the moral precepts he has been
brought up to believe - tell him to turn in the runaway slave Jim. His
emotions, however, will not allow him to follow the dictates of principle,
and betray his new friend. Readers of the episode, as Twain intended, are on
the side of Huck's emotions. Huck himself remains unsure.
We should not take this, however, as confirmation of a conflict between
brute emotion on the one hand and reasoned precept on the other. The
assumption that these are distinct and opposed forces is mistaken from the
start. More generally, we do not think emotions are merely sources of
potential danger; danger which can only be averted when harnessed to the
constraining influence of reason. If we did, why would we think it a defect
- as we surely do - to lack or be incapable of certain emotions? Camus'
anti-hero Mersault, for example, (in L'tranger) is notable, above all, for
his emotional alienation, his inability to feel. Contrary to the Stoics, who
wanted us to get rid of our emotions, we, in many respects, are anxious to
feel more of them.
Underlying the wholly negative view of the emotions we can discern three
basic claims:
First, emotion and reason are distinct and opposed parts of the psyche. What
is emotional is irrational, and conversely, what is rational is not
emotional. This is the account offered by Plato (in the Republic) in the
form of his 'tri-partite' conception of the soul.
Secondly, it follows from this that there is no question of emotions being
appropriate or inappropriate. We can contrast this with the case of beliefs,
where we assume that questions of appropriateness do apply (for instance;
are beliefs in an immanent Apocalypse appropriate to the available facts?)
Thirdly, if the previous two points are right, they imply a picture of the
sort of thing an emotion is. Divorced from thought and reason, it must be
something of the character of a sensation or feeling - akin to the
appetites, perhaps, and the feeling of hunger.
emotion So here we have an account of what an emotion is ( a sort of
sensation) and of the value it has (i.e. not much, given what it is). In
case anyone should think these views are of strictly historical interest, I
offer the following (not unrepresentative) quotations from the editor of
Living Marxism, writing recently on the subject of the media's handling of
the death of Princess Diana:
'An atmosphere which puts feelings first is hardly conducive to any cool
assessment of what has actually happened, never mind a critical discussion
of the hows and whys behind the events. [...] Public debate was debased by
an editorial elevation of feelings over facts and the insistence that the
heart should rule the head'.
Here we find the same suspicion of the emotions, the same carving-up of the
psyche into warring factions that we find in Plato. Lying behind Hume's view
that emotion has mistakenly been allowed free rein in this particular
instance - with disastrous results - is the more general suggestion that
that could not but have been the outcome. It is reason that brings
understanding, not emotion. The example of Huckleberry Finn should, however,
already give us grounds for discontent with this easy formula.
One of the commendable developments in more recent philosophical writings on
the emotions is that there has recently been a consensus that each of these
three claims is false. To see why, we need to begin with the issue of what
an emotion is. The temptation to think of emotion as a feeling and hence
akin to a sensation, is a strong one. After all, emotions differ from
thoughts, above all in how they feel. When you're angry, you feel a
particular sort of way. It might seem natural, therefore, to conclude that
emotions are feelings. However, for some years now, philosophers have argued
against this line of thought. There are at least three considerations which
can be offered against it.
In the first place, what are the feelings that are involved? Take anger;
there are feelings corresponding to various physiological changes ;
increased heartbeat, blood rushing to the larger muscles, the release of
adrenaline, and so on. In addition, there is much that is unfelt: neuron
firings and complex patterns of electrochemical and neurotransmitter
activity. The difficulty is that if we consider the felt changes, it is
clear that none of them is distinctive or definitive of anger. Many of them
are shared with fear and other emotions.
In addition, experimental evidence also seems to support the suspicion that
we could not easily identify our emotional states if this were the only
basis for such judgements.
The second point is this: if feelings were the basis of our identification
of our emotional states, our judgements would be inferences; we would infer
the identity of the state we were in from the feelings. But while there may
be some instances where this is the case, it is not the typical route to
such knowledge; we seem to know 'from the inside' and not by inference.
Confronted with a large lion, for example, I do not need to observe the
sensation of adrenaline release, note my quickened pulse, feel the shaking
in my legs and conclude from these that I am afraid. I know that without
reference to these things. There must, therefore, be more to emotions than
feelings.
The third point is that when we actually look at what is distinctive about
different emotions, it seems clear that what distinguishes them is the
thoughts that they comprise. Take fear: to fear something is to believe that
it is threatening or dangerous. Or pride: to be proud is to think something
is of value or deserving praise and to believe it is related to you in an
appropriate way. Having these beliefs is what makes your emotion fear or
pride. This is not to say that an emotion just is a set of beliefs (though
the Stoics did think something like that). Most philosophers and
psychologists would now say that thoughts and beliefs identify and in part
constitute emotions, but that other factors such as feelings, dispositions,
pain and pleasure and so on, are also necessary. This view of the emotions -
Cognitivism, as it is known - therefore claims that beliefs are necessary
but not sufficient for emotions. Having the beliefs alone isn't enough.
But even this much is a significant advance on Plato, Hume and the rest. For
if my emotion (fear, say) is based on the belief that the object of my fear
is dangerous and threatening, then, since that belief can be rational or
irrational (appropriate or inappropriate to the facts) so the emotion itself
can also be appropriate or inappropriate. If we accept this, all three of
the claims above must be false. Since emotions are based on beliefs, they
are not merely sensations, they can be appropriate, and furthermore it is a
mistake to characterise the 'rational' and the 'emotional' as mutually
exclusive, to think of them as distinct capacities, because they are in
fact, intertwined.
Many psychologists and neurologists concur. Antonio Damasio, for instance,
argues that neurological research reveals that patients whose emotional
capacities are impaired as a result of brain lesions are also impaired
across a range of cognitive capacities, such as the ability to prioritise,
to deliberate, evaluate and make decisions. At the level of the brain too,
it seems, emotion and reason are inseparable.
Although this new consensus on 'cognitive' theories of the emotions is
welcome, there remains much disagreement and many unanswered questions. Some
philosophers have wondered how the emotions of animals and young children
fit the theory, since we hesitate in attributing beliefs to them. Others
have recently rejected the cognitivist approach altogether and attempted to
put feelings back at the centre of emotions.
And then there is the issue of emotional education. Psychologists and
writers such as Daniel Goleman (in his best-seller, Emotional Intelligence)
are interested in how the emotions are educated. This is an issue that also
preoccupied Aristotle, one of the few early philosophers to have endorsed
the cognitive view. But if, as cognitivists claim, beliefs are not
sufficient for emotion, what else has to be changed in order to educate
someone's emotions? It is one thing to get someone to believe that spiders
aren't dangerous, but another to get them not to be frightened by spiders.
Some therapies, however, achieve high levels of success in treating such
recalcitrant emotions. But does such change amount to education? Education
involves a transformation of understanding. Cognitivism seems, however, to
concede that this will not be enough. How, then, can there be real education
of the emotions? This issue is of abiding general importance as well as
being relevant to all putative 'philosophical therapies', from Stoicism to
the present day.
Suggested Reading
Descartes' Error, Antonio Damasio (Picador)
Emotion, William Lyons (Cambridge)
The Fragility of Goodness, Martha Nussbaum (Cambridge)
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