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The rationality of emotions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2010

Ronald De Sousa
Ronald De Sousa
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Extract

Ira Brevis furor, said the Latins: anger is a brief bout of madness. There is a long tradition that views all emotions as threats to rationality. The crime passionnel belongs to that tradition: in law it is a kind of “brief-insanity defence.” We still say that “passion blinds us;” and in common parlance to be philosophical about life's trials is to be decently unemotional about them. Indeed many philosophers have espoused this view, demanding that Reason conquer Passion. Others — from Hume to the Emotivists — have appeared to reverse this hierarchy (“reason is and ought to be nothing but the slave of the passions).” But those philosophers who refuse to join in the general denigration of emotion as irrational usually share the presupposition that the role of rationality is limited to the calculation of means. In so far as emotions (often confused with desires) are concerned with the determination of ends, they remain, on this view, beyond the pale of rationality. Modern decision theorists have worked out schemes to assess the rationality of desires, as well as actions, against the background of beliefs and other desires.1 But these schemes leave no room at all for emotions, except, by implication, as disrupters of the rational process.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , March 1979 , pp. 41 - 63
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1979

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References

Notes

1 Cf. Jeffrey, Richard C., The Logic of Decision (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965.)Google Scholar The view of emotions as disruptive of normal capacities and activities is not confined to philosophers. For an attack on this conception in psychology, by a psychologist, v. Leeper, R. W., “A Motivational Theory of Emotion to Replace ‘Emotion as Disorganized Response’”, Psych. Rev. vol. 55 (1948), excerpted inCrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMedArnold, M. B., ed., The Nature of Emotion (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968)Google Scholar.

2 Cf. Neu, Jerome, Emotion, Thought, and Therapy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978)Google Scholar.

3 Cf. Sartre, J.-P., The Emotions: Outline of a Theory (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1948),Google Scholar and Solomon, Robert C., The Passions, (Canadian City: Doubleday Anchor, 1976)Google Scholar.

4 The approach goes back at least to Clifford, W., “The Ethics of Belief” and James, W., “The Will to Believe”. Both are reprinted in Kaufman, W., ed., Religionfrom Tolstoy to Camus (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964)Google Scholar.

5 Cf. Dennett, D., “Intentional Systems” (Journal of Philosophy, vol. 68 (1971))CrossRefGoogle Scholar for the distinction between the explanatory stance that attributes goals and beliefs to a person, and the “design stance,” which while it may attribute “goals” or “functions” to organs or mechanisms, does so only in an extended sense and without reference to person or self. The distinction must be made for cognitive no less than for strategic rationality. For in some sense all biological processes might be called “cognitive” in that they involve differentiated responses to complex signal systems. But the teleology involved in processes below the level of the “intentional” is so called only by analogy: it is the outcome of evolutionary process, not of individual mentality. I have tried to clarify this distinction in “Instincts and Teleology” (forthcoming).

6 The notion of “formal object” for beliefs and wants, and the differences between them, are explored in my “The Good and the True”, Mind 68 (1974) 534–551Google Scholar.

7 Quine, W. V., Word and Object (New York & London: Wiley, 1960)Google Scholar Ch. 2. Note that Quine's principle is weaker than the related “principle of charity” espoused by Davidson and recently criticized by Colin McGinn in “Charity, Interpretation, and Belief” (Journal of Philosophy 74 (1977) 521–535,CrossRefGoogle Scholar q.v. for references to Davidson). That principle requires that the work of interpretation begin with the assumption that the subject's beliefs are mostly true; mine requires only that they be supposed not absurd. “You appreciate the reasonableness of an action by putting yourself into its agent's shoes, not by forcing him into yours” (McGinn p. 522).

8 I have tried to explicate and defend Plato's view in “True and False Pleasures in the Philebus” (forthcoming).

9 Some reasons will later become apparent for speaking of ‘evoking situations’. But one reason must be acknowledged right away: it is that I do not propose in this paper to give a typology or analysis of objects of emotion. The phrase “evoking situation” leaves matters intentionally vague in this regard.

10 The view that emotions are purely subjective, and thus lack objective correlates and can be assessed for rationality only in the strategic sense, is curiously coupled with the view that they are judgements in Solomon, op. cit.

11 For a most illuminating elaboration of this line, showing how it helps to dispel some ofthe temptations of phenomenalism, cf. Sellars, W., “Phenomenalism”, in Science, Perception, & Reality (London & New York: Routledge, Kegan Paul, & Humanities Press; 1963.)Google Scholar For the point made in this paragraph, v. also Wiggins, David, “Truth, Invention, and the Meaning of Life” (Annual Philosophical Lecture, British Academy, 1976)Google Scholar.

12 It should not be thought that this remoteness from the essential properties of nature is necessarily linked with the status of colour as a secondary property. For (macroscopic) shape is, in general, equally irrelevant to the deep nature of things (except in crystals.) Yet it is among Locke's typical primary qualities, because its characterization in a particular case does not depend on any particular features of our sensory receptors.

13 George Eliot, Middlemarch.

14 Cf. Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962)Google Scholar.

15 For a discussion of inertia or “emotional akrasia” and of the variable adaptivity of emotions, cf. Rorty, A. O., “Explaining Emotions” (Journal of Philosophy vol. 75, no. 3, 03 1978 pp. 139–161.)CrossRefGoogle Scholar I have derived much help from this paper, as from many conversations with its author.

16 Hence, as Aristotle knew, a central part of moral education has to do with learning to feel the right emotions. (Nicomachean Ethics II–6).

17 Murdoch, I.The Sovereignty of Good (London; Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970) p. 34.Google Scholar There are difficult and fascinating questions here, about the extent to which literature can invent scenarios that when applied to one's own life result in “authentic” emotions. Sociobiology and psychoanalysis are both, from different points of view, concerned with this question. The first asks: how many of the familiar scenarios can be traced to genetically programmed dispositions, and how much does this matter to the malleability of human emotions and social organization? The latter asks: what is “genuine” sublimation, and what “mere” defence mechanism?

18 Inference-making on the basis of appropriate scenarios is an important part of the psychoanalyst's art. But note that such inferences can be made in two ways: one consists in fittingthe situation of the patient into a plausible scenario (“an oedipal problem”, for instance), and making “by the book” the inference that this implies. The other way involves feeling an emotion that seems to spring from a certain scenario, and allowing inferences to be guided by that emotion in the normal way. The second method is the one every good analyst strives for, though it obviously involves great risks if the therapist has not been “successfully analysed.” It is called “working with the transference and the counter-transference.”

19 This suggests an analogue of Donald Davidson's “principle of continence”: “Let your emotions be appropriate to the widest possible range of available scenarios.” (cf. Davidson, D., “How is Weakness of the Will Possible?” in Feinberg, J., ed., Moral Concepts; London: O.U.P., 1969).Google Scholar The complications of working out what thi s would mean in general, however, ar e enormous: because the emotional level of rationality is the deepest, that is, the most inclusive. Some of these complications are hinted at in the text below. See also my “Self-deceptive Emotions,” in The Journal of Philosophy, LXXV (10 1978)Google Scholar.

20 Cf. Meno, lie.

21 “No Comment”, Ms. Magazine, December 1977, p. 97.

22 On the role of the emotions in the moral life, v. Williams, B. A. O., “Morality and the Emotions”, in Problems of the Self (Cambridge, 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Taylor, Gabriele, “Justifying the Emotions”, Mind 84 (1975) pp. 390–402CrossRefGoogle Scholar.