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VII. Emotions, Rationality, and Mind/Body1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Patricia Greenspan
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Extract

There are now quite a number of popular or semi-popular works urging rejection of the old opposition between rationality and emotion. They present evidence or theoretical arguments that favour a reconception of emotions as providing an indispensable basis for practical rationality. Perhaps the most influential is neuroanatomist Antonio Damasio's Descartes' Error, which argues from cases of brain lesion and other neurological causes of emotional deficit that some sort of emotional ‘marking,’ of memories of the outcomes of our choices with anxiety, is needed to support learning from experience.

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Papers
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Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 52 , March 2003 , pp. 113 - 125
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Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2003

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References

2 Damasio, Antonio R., Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1994)Google Scholar.

3 Cf. Damasio, pp. 178–79. I take these suggestions further in ‘Responsible Psychopaths’ (unpublished).

4 See Damasio, pp. 247ff., for an explanation, towards the end of the book, of what he takes Descartes' error to be.

5 See ibid., e.g. p. 250; cf. p. 248.

6 See The Philosophical Works of Descartes, Vol. I, trans, by Haldane, E. S. and Ross, G. R. T. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 331–99Google Scholar.

7 See esp. ch. 3 in Darwin, Charles, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: Modern Library, n.d. [1871]Google Scholar, chs. 4 and 5.

8 See Pinker, Steven, How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997)Google Scholar, esp. ch. 6. For one of the more emotion-based versions of the sociobiological argument cf. Wilson, Julius Q., The Moral Sense (New York: Free Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

9 Cf. Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), esp. p. 14.Google Scholar

10 See Frank, Robert H., Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988)Google Scholar; cf. my‘Emotional Strategies and Rationality’, Ethics 110 (2000), 469–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Cf. Schelling, Thomas C., The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1980) esp. pp. 22ff.Google Scholar

12 See esp. Stanley, I.Greenspan, M.D. [no relation to the author] with Beryl Lieff Benderly, The Growth of the Mind and the Endangered Origins of Intelligence (Reading, Mass.: Perseus, 1997)Google Scholar.

13 See Griffiths, Paul E., What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cf. my ‘Practical Reasoning and Emotions,’ in A., Mele and P., Rawlings (eds), Rationality (Oxford: Oxford University PressGoogle Scholar, in progress).

14 See, e.g., Arnold, Magda B., ‘Human Emotion and Action,’ in Human Action: Conceptual and Empirical Issues, T., Mischel (ed.), (New York: Academic Press, 1969)Google Scholar; cf. Frijda, Nico, The Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

15 For the re-entry of what I am calling ‘judgmentalism’ into the post-Wittgensteinian Anglo-American literature see Bedford, Erroll, ‘Emotions,’ in The Philosophy of Mind, Chappell, V. C. (ed.), (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962)Google Scholar. Solomon, Robert C., The Passions: The Myth and Nature of Human Emotion (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1976)Google Scholar expands the view and connects it with continental philosophy, especially Nietzsche and Sartre. A more qualified variant of the view with Jamesian physiological elements appears in Lyons, William, Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 See ‘A Case of Mixed Feelings: Ambivalence and the Logic of Emotions,’ in Rorty, A. O. (ed.), Explaining Emotions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 223–50Google Scholar; cf. my extended account in Emotions and Reasons: An Inquiry into Emotional Justification (New York: Routledge Chapman and Hall, 1988)Google Scholar. For a simpler explication of the current point see my Practical Guilt: Moral Dilemmas, Emotions, and Social Norms (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)Google Scholar, ch. 5. I should note that my term ‘perspectival,’ here and in the second book, is not meant to evoke Nietzsche‘s general perspectival theory of truth (or for that matter, various other uses of the term that apply specifically to desires and emotions). Cf. esp. the perspectival account that de Sousa opposes to Solomon’s view of emotions as ‘subjectivity’ in Sousa, Ronald de, The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1987), pp. 146–49.Google Scholar

17 See my ‘Emotional Strategies and Rationality,’ Ethics 110 (2000), 469–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 See Jones, Karen, ‘Emotional Rationality as Practical Rationality’, in C., Calhoun (ed.), Setting the Moral Compass: Essays by Women Philosophers (Oxford University PressGoogle Scholar, forthcoming) for an argument that what is relevant here is not just type-by-type consideration of emotions, of the sort I had in mind in Emotions and Reasons, but also a particular individual's emotional history.

19 Cf. Justin, D'Arms and Jacobson, Daniel, ‘The Moralistic Fallacy: On the “Appropriateness” of Emotions,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 61 (2000), 65–90Google Scholar. At the Manchester conference D'Arms raised the question why emotional appropriateness should be affected by adaptiveness at all. I think the answer has to do with my interpretation of appropriateness as not just the ‘truth’ of emotions (a measure of success or correctness as in de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotions) but rather a matter of fitness to reasons. The relevant reasons are reasons for taking a given thought or state of affairs as meriting attention. My assumption is that these would naturally centre on strategic considerations, though my account is meant to make their influence indirect.

20 I should note that Griffiths' argument often seems to take for granted (or even to represent as a product of scientific theorizing) an assumption of ‘passivity,’ or emotional uncontrol, that essentially erects a barrier against the recognition of emotional strategies—dismissing them as mere ‘pretences’ of emotion in cases where the strategy is social or cultural and involves cultivating the sense of uncontrol; see esp. pp. 155–7, pp. 233f., pp. 242ff.; cf. p. 9, p. 16, p. 118, p. 120. Cf. my ‘Emotional Strategies and Rationality.’ At the Manchester conference Griffiths did allow for what he called ‘Machiavellian emotions,’ but the term suggests a degree of calculation that makes the phenomenon seem more limited than it is. In any case, it is not clear how his argument in the book can survive this modification, as it depends on ruling out cases that do not appear to be subject to evolutionary explanation. The main moral Griffiths drew from his earlier argument at the Manchester conference was that philosophers theorizing about emotions cannot afford to ignore the one area of solid scientific evidence in the area, for ‘basic’ emotions as evolutionarily derived affect-programmes. I take this point but was moved to meditate on it while hiking in the Lake District after the conference: in my effort to avoid muddy patches in one area I often found myself perched on a rock that led nowhere. Griffiths himself discusses many of the difficulties one has in explaining the full range of human emotions in terms of the basic subset, and he grants that getting emotions into ‘the space of reasons’ raises further issues.

21 Cf. the evidence in LeDoux, Joseph, The Emotional Brain (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996)Google Scholar, of a subcortical pathway operating in less complex cases of fear, identified as such by a behavioural (‘freezing’) response, in both humans and lower animals. I take it that any feelings we have in these cases—note that LeDoux takes pains to point out that what he is discussing is fear as a behavioural system rather than a subspecies of fear experience (e.g., p. 28)—would not be subject to rational assessment, except perhaps derivatively, to the extent that they ‘track’ reasons applicable to a sufficiently developed organism. Hence they count as ‘deficient’ cases of my paradigm, but despite my somewhat stipulative use of ‘emotions’ in Emotions and Reasons, I do not object to calling them emotions. I would agree with Griffiths and others that emotions (on anything like our ordinary use of the term) do not constitute a natural kind. A different choice of paradigm would of course be appropriate for other purposes, e.g. explaining the origins of fully developed human emotions. But I take it that LeDoux and other neuroscientists working on emotions mean to allow for links between subcortical and cortical pathways. For discussion of psychological evidence on the subject, see Mohan Matthen, ‘Emotion and Learning’ (unpublished), which argues that even freezing (along with other anticipatory reactions) has to be explained by a kind of ‘displaced conditioning’ (involving instinctive causal reasoning) that is part of the process endowing emotions with cognitive content.

22 Many people like the term ‘construals’—as suggested by Roberts, Robert C., ‘What an Emotion Is: A Sketch,’ Philosophical Review 79 (1988), pp. 183–209CrossRefGoogle Scholar—but for reasons I would want to resist: a construal is not necessarily either propositional or evaluative. My broad use of the term ‘affect’ is meant to leave open questions about the primacy of inner and outer, or mental and bodily, reactions. Though I sometimes speak in terms of feeling, I prefer ‘affect’ as a term less naturally used in the plural, which makes it less tempting to think of emotions as specific introspectible contents— and also to take emotions as episodic (cf. Budd, Malcolm, Music and the Emotions, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985CrossRefGoogle Scholar). However, I do mean to be discussing occurrent emotions as ongoing states of affective evaluation. The term ‘propositional attitudes’—besides carrying suggestions of logical and semantical complexity that I mean to cancel for typical cases of emotion—is standardly used for states of mind taking a propositional object: belief that p, desire that p, and so forth. Though fear that p is also on the standard list, emotions as a general category do not fit this pattern. Love, for instance, normally just has a person as its object. In Emotions and Reasons I distinguished internal components of emotion—in the case of love, e.g., we might have discomfort that one is far from the love object—and applied the standard account of propositional attitudes to the affective aspect of the components, taking propositions as ‘internal objects’ of emotion; but the result confused many readers. I can do without objectterminology and just speak of propositional content here.

23 Cf. Pugmire, David, Rediscovering Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998)Google Scholar, esp. 65ff.

24 Griffiths in some ways creates an opening for this kind of account with his defence of an alternative to propositional ‘content schemata’ in terms of ecological significance for the organism; cf. p. 231. Cf. the evolutionary ‘functionalist’ or teleological conception of intentionality defended in Millikan, Ruth G., Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1984).Google Scholar

25 See de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion, esp. pp. 181–4.

26 See Aristotle, Rhetorica 1378a31–b5.