Commentary
Beyond the Basics of Emotions
Paul Bloomfield
University of Connecticut, Connecticut, USA
Bloomfield, Paul. 2021. “Beyond the Basics of Emotions.”
Journal of Philosophy of Emotion 3, no. 1: 24-30. https://doi.org/10.33497/2021.summer.5.
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Abstract: While emotions can play positive, contributory roles in our cognition and our lives, they frequently have the opposite effect. Michael Brady’s otherwise excellent introduction to the topic of emotion is unbalanced because he does not attend to harms emotions cause. The basic problem is that emotions have a normative aspect: they can be justified or unjustified and Brady does not attend to this. An example of this is Brady’s discussion of curiosity as the emotional motivation for knowledge. More importantly, while emotions can and sometimes do reveal to us what we value, it is far less frequent that emotions reveal objective value.
Keywords: emotion, action, cognition, knowledge, value, and virtue
I am pleased to have the opportunity to comment on Michael Brady’s Emotion: The Basics (2019), which is an excellent introduction to the philosophy of the emotions. It is accessible, clear, well-organized, penetrating, and just polemical enough to have an engaging theoretical edge. Any student using this book as a text or any lay-reader picking the book up just out of curiosity will learn much more from it than its slim size would indicate.
These comments, however, go beyond the book’s function as an introductory text and will instead be a vehicle to go deeper. There is plenty of material to choose from as the theory grounding the book is interesting and often provocative; there are a number of extremely fascinating theses discussed and explored. Brady’s “pluralistic” view of emotions is novel and quite promising from a theoretical point of view. The nuanced discussion of emotion as motivating inquiry was very interesting, and his view that emotions help us bypass unhelpful cognition is also novel—we’ll return to it below—as was the idea of “group emotions”, etc. There is a surplus of good philosophy included, so the challenge for a commentator is in selecting topics for discussion.
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Aside from, and not to detract from this praise, I do have some substantial criticism. Indeed, if I compare my own thoughts on emotion, I come at them with a different sensibility than Brady does. And this is because I am fairly skeptical of emotional reactions; I see them as often specious, so what will be a friendly disagreement between Brady and I naturally ensues. I take a less sanguine view of emotions than he does, and probably less so than most other philosophers of emotion. In general, while I see that emotions can play all or at least many of the positive, contributory roles that Brady lays out so well and clearly—that emotions can help us gain knowledge and act well, that they can inform our moral lives, and social behavior—in fact, I think having reliable emotional reactions, suitable for providing epistemic and moral justification, is more rare than it is typically assumed, for reasons that will hopefully come out below.
We are living in turbulent and emotional times. A lot of this has been brought about by politics, and a global pandemic. In the USA, we are bombarded by Trump and his tweets, and in the UK, we are bombarded by Boris Johnson and his Brexit. Underneath this, causing much of it, is fear, anger, anxiety, loss, desperation, and in many cases despondency so overwhelming that, at least in the USA, suicide rates are tragically up and life expectancy in general is down. Conservatives feel like inevitable demographic changes will end their way of life; and liberals feel like society is regressing back into a more unjust society from which it has struggled to emerge. Pessimism is everywhere, and it seems as if people are regularly and unhelpfully overwhelmed by their own emotions. These days, many appear to have become even more emotional than in the past.
So, as I say, I am not fully sanguine about the emotions, probably less so than most. For example, there is little in Brady’s book about negative emotions or all the ways in which emotions are counterproductive. Consider a list of ugly emotions which all humans would always be better off without: apathy, hopelessness, despair, dread, loneliness, bitterness, spite, greed, jealousy, covetousness, vindictiveness, vengefulness, arrogance, condescension, hubris, wrath, malice, and the granddaddy of all negative emotions: hate.
Natural selection has outfitted us to feel all these things, but we would all be better off, in all respects, without them in our lives. Sure, love, joy, and compassion are wonderful: bring on bounteous love, joy, and compassion, the more the merrier. But the emotions are, taken together, far from sweetness and sunshine. So, though I fear this borders on the edge of misanthropy, it seems to me as if, overall, the theory of emotions in Brady’s book is a bit too positive or rosy. It seems obvious to me that overly emotional decision-making is most often poor decision-making, so I think most people would probably live better lives and make better decisions if they were somewhat more cognitive and less emotional than they actually are. I do not come to bury emotions, but I won’t praise them too highly either. It is quite likely that we would all gain if there were more tranquility in the world, more equanimity. Of course, passion has its place, which is especially the bedroom. But when passion wanders from this home, it often only makes trouble.
These general thoughts about emotions do not take us very far philosophically into Brady’s book, however, and that is the goal. So, I’ll begin by addressing some concerns with what is said about emotion and action, and move onto how emotions are related to knowledge, and close with a short discussion about emotions and virtue. Given constraints of space, my comments will be necessarily brief, but perhaps they will serve to move the dialectic along.
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THE PRACTICAL VALUE OF EMOTIONS
Brady’s view is that emotions help us with action because they forestall forms of cognition which may lead one astray. He writes, “feelings move us to do the things that we ought to do, by overcoming our tendency towards short-term and damaging reflection and decision-making” (89). His discussion of remorse is indicative. Much like learning not to repeat painful actions, when we feel remorse over something we’ve done, we are far less likely to consider doing it again. In this sense, emotions are heuristics which help us to instinctively do the right thing. And indeed, this may be a good place to begin thinking about emotions: as naturally selected reactions to events common in nature. Nevertheless, emotions for most people tend to be coarse-grained and they overspread. Consider, for example, disgust, a basic emotion which helps us avoid contamination and contagion. This efficiently allows us to avoid rotten food and generally unhealthy substances; it is no mystery why the smell of excrement is disgusting (to humans but not to pigs; no disrespect to pigs intended). The problem is that humans have also ended up being disgusted by what is merely unfamiliar and not only what is unhealthy. For example, some find foods of other cultures disgusting. Or, more perniciously, homophobes are often disgusted by homosexuality. So, disgust proves unreliable, and the problem generalizes: emotions are often like a club when, in many complicated human circumstances, something more like a scalpel is needed.
A more pointed criticism is that there is something in Brady’s idea that part of the natural or proper function of emotions is to help us avoid reflection and cognition which strikes me as historically backward. It seems safe to assume that cognition and reflection are phylogenetically more recent than emotions: many animals seem to express anger, and many land and marine mammals seem to grieve death in similar ways. While our emotions are undoubtedly more subtle and nuanced than those of other species, what makes Homo sapiens exceptional on Earth is our cognition not our emotion. Perhaps it is even reasonable to think that humans began to be reflective, thinking creatures because relying on emotional heuristics proved unreliable. Even if not, it seems unlikely to me that it is part of the proper function of emotions that they prevent unhelpful cognition since cognition came after the emotions emerged. Emotions may in fact inhibit cognition, but this is not why we have them. If some berries make us nauseous, we are not tempted by them again. If some action causes us remorse, we are not tempted to repeat it. True: the purpose of remorse is to prevent repeating mistakes. Forestalling cognition may be a means to this end, but I would argue that forestalling cognition is not what remorse or nausea is for, so to speak.
EMOTIONS AND KNOWLEDGE
Normative Assessment of Emotions
And this leads us to the relation of emotions to knowledge. Were I to name a single substantive criticism of the tenor of the book, it would be that it contains only very little about the ways in which emotions are open to normative assessment. Superficially, emotions can be irrational, or rational yet unjustified, or justified yet inapt or, if all goes right, emotions can be fitting. Quick examples of these categories. It is irrational to feel proud of the blue sky (to use Philippa Foot’s [1978] example). It is unjustified but not necessarily irrational to feel jealousy when an attractive stranger smiles at one’s partner. Emotions can be justified even when they are inappropriate or even self-defeating: to take a story from Seneca’s On Anger, I may be justified in my rage at a tyrant who has
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killed one of my children in front of my eyes, but if raging will lead the tyrant to kill me, leaving my other children without a parent, then my rage is inapt, despite its justification (Cooper and Procopé 1995).
What we want are emotions which are fitting, as Brady does mention late in the book in the section on virtue. The cardinal and self-regulating virtue of temperance yields fitting emotions, passions, desires, and appetites, but a full-throated discussion of temperance would take us far afield. The important point here is that only virtuous people have reliably fitting emotions, and emotions will be less fitting the further one is from being virtuous. The obvious problem is that most people are merely average or mediocre when it comes to being virtuous and so their emotions will be less than fitting to that same degree.
So, a central criticism of the book is that it lacks this normative angle. As a result, my perspective on Brady’s position is nuanced. On the one hand, he is certainly right that emotions can lead us to knowledge and appropriate action in the ways he says. On the other hand, it seems likely that this is far less frequent and far more difficult to pull off than he suggests. Of course, how frequently people's emotions are helpful versus how frequently they are deleterious is an empirical question, one it would be very interesting to answer! The point, however, is that we cannot just infer that because emotions can be helpful or deleterious that they often are. There is a reason the ancient Greeks called the emotions "pathos" referring to both emotion and suffering, and it is the root of our word "pathology." Emotions and passions, strong and uncontrolled as they are, seem to distort—Hume's ([1777] 1975) word, "stain"—perception and judgment and are far from reliable in bringing about a deep, veridic, and insightful understanding of the world. They become inarticulate and shade into the ineffable. The Stoics thought that thinking is like walking where we can stop and start at will, while emotions are like running and our momentum makes them impossible to stop at will. When people are angry, we often say things we later regret. They say "love is blind" and it surely often is. Pride can be fine, but more often it "goeth before the fall," etc. As mentioned above, even justified emotions may not be fitting. Even if most of us have an average amount of emotional intelligence, emotionally wise people are as rare as wise people are generally.
Curiosity as an Emotion
There are two central issues in the chapter on emotion and knowledge to address. The first concerns curiosity. When it comes to the motivation for knowledge, Brady puts a lot of weight on curiosity and perhaps too much. The first reason for this is because curiosity seems rare, at least insofar as it goes deeper than merely being interested in a topic and it often implies some mystery to be solved. Curiosity implies some genuine puzzlement, some intrigue and frisson. Perhaps a more pressing worry than frequency is whether or not curiosity really is an emotion at all. Other philosophers, including Lewis Ross (2018), and Lani Watson (2018), think curiosity is a virtue. My own gut feelings about curiosity is that it is really nothing more than an intellectual desire. It is similar to lust, which is a carnal desire and neither curiosity nor lust strike me as emotions. Now, perhaps, of course, Brady is right and curiosity is an emotion, but this seems, at this point, a wide-open theoretical question. This is not to say, of course, that Brady should have engaged this philosophical dispute in an introductory text: it was perfectly fine for him to present curiosity as an emotion in the book and as a main motivation for intellectual inquiry. But from a more advanced philosophical point of view, the point is tendentious.
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Emotions and Knowledge about Value
The other point to make about the chapter on emotion and knowledge concerns Brady’s claims about how we can gain knowledge about value from emotions. There is a good, important, and valuable point to be made here, but perhaps Brady overstated it a bit and has made the emotions seem more valuable for the epistemology of value than is actually the case.
Michael Stocker’s Valuing Emotions (1996) also takes up the question of how we learn about what we value through our emotional reactions. Two of his examples are as follows. The first is that we are to imagine hearing someone from another department be unfairly critical of a new junior colleague of ours and we surprise ourselves by stridently coming to our colleague’s defense, revealing to us that we think more highly or care more about our new colleague than we might have thought. In the second example, imagine we typically don't think much about having “school spirit.” Then, while traveling, we find ourselves elated by news of a big victory for our school’s sports team, from which we learn that we do care more about our school than we had realized. This is all well and good. Emotions can be revelatory to us about what we value in the world.
The concern, however, is the inference from "learning about what we value" to "learning about what is valuable" full stop. Brady writes, "we can't get information about what is charming or erotic or repellent without having the relevant emotions or feelings: we can't get information that someone is charming without being charmed by them" (55). Well, this may well be true. But there is a difference between how our emotions can allow us to detect what is truly or objectively of value in the world and how emotions, as Hume would put it, stain and gild the world with our affect. Pictures of starving children pull sharply on our heartstrings; and we feel pity and simply know, as certainly as we know that 2 + 2 = 4, that there is something tragically unjust and wrong with the depicted state of affairs. But a person who is charming to me might be annoying to you, and it is unlikely that there is any objectivity involved regarding judgments about who is charming and who is not. Too much personal preference is involved here: charm is in the eye of the beholder. Recall the earlier discussion of disgust: while it can reliably help us detect what is unhealthy for us, it is overall unreliable insofar as we can find things disgusting which simply are very much not to our liking. It is good to be charmed by a baby, much less so to be charmed by a con-man or a conniver.
So, again, the point is nuanced. When basic emotions serve as heuristics, so that we fear driving through a blizzard, or we are suspicious of a stranger, or disgusted by a smell, we would be foolish to disregard such emotions. Emotions can reveal what is objectively of value in the world. But again, experience and observation seem to indicate that this is far rarer than Brady suggests. Emotions do reliably reveal to us what we value and disvalue. But whether or not our values reveal what is objectively valuable in the world depends upon what we happen to value and this is another matter entirely.
EMOTIONS AND VIRTUE
A final topic for brief discussion concerns emotion and virtue. For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume some form of eudaimonism. Given eudaimonia, each virtuous action is supposed to aim at what is "to kalon," or what is fine or noble, and not some other end. Phronesis or practical wisdom is supposed to guide our determination of what is valuable in general, our axiology, and what is fine or noble in moral situations. It is then up to the individual virtues to determine what to do in particular cases. So, in thinking about the role of the emotions in virtuous action, there is a question as to how much virtuous people are actually guided by their emotions.
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Now, recall, virtuous people have reliably fitting emotional responses to situations, so we do not have to worry about them feeling the wrong thing. They'll feel the right thing at the right time for the right reasons, etc. Good. But virtues are not emotions and emotions are not virtues, and it seems that virtuous action should be guided by virtue and not by emotion. Virtuous people have inculcated the virtues to the degree that in sudden or emergency situations they respond virtuously. Let’s assume we are all ideally virtuous. So, the enemy launches a surprise attack upon our camp in the middle of the night—do our fears guide our actions in these dangerous circumstances? No, our guide is our courage. We are confronted with injustice in the street and we have to react by being fair and just. Do we use anger or righteous indignation to guide us? No, it is justice which determines the fair response. We are invited to a spontaneous party on a Tuesday night with all our friends when we have an important meeting or exam Wednesday morning. Do we use our love for our friends and joie de vivre to guide us in these tempting circumstances? No, it is temperance which guides us, etc. The point is that virtuous people have trained themselves to be virtuous and they will be guided by emotions only when they have no better decision procedure to use. When we feel suspicious of a stranger and have no other information, then of course we should heed our gut feelings. But in complex situations requiring immediate action, when anything remotely like genuine wisdom is required, emotions become less reliable; and virtuous people will fall back on habituation and training, and not their emotion. Military boot camp is all about training soldiers to follow orders despite whatever they may feel. The point is not that the military's methods are adequate to all purposes, but that we must use our higher cognitive faculties to train our phylogenetically less advanced and more unruly emotions.
In situations in which we have time to deliberate, emotions still do not generally play a decisive role in determining what to do. Of course, virtuous people will consider their emotions in any prolonged deliberation. Their emotions will play the same role in their decision procedure as any other evidence or relevant consideration may. But this does not imply that emotions are in any way dispositive or probative within deliberations, nor a fortiori that we should deliberate while in the grip of emotions. The idea of reflecting in a calm and cool state is an old idea, indeed. Perhaps this will be overstating my own case here, but in many, though not all cases, emotions are to virtue what Aristotle ([340 BCE] 2004) says pleasure is to virtue: taking pleasure in a virtuous action completes the action, but does not motivate it. True, there are times when it is only right to be moved by love or compassion. But such conclusions do not generalize well. So, it is possible that for virtuous people, their emotions will often follow their virtue and not the other way around. In this view, in these situations, virtuous emotions complete virtuous thought but do not guide it. I am choosing between going to school A and B. A is where my family went and I have a heartfelt, sentimental attachment to it, but B is better at my intended field of study. If I am virtuous and choose B, then my emotions will subsequently follow my choice.
FINAL REMARKS
Of course, this is all horribly brief: Brady’s plausible pluralism about theories of emotion has not been addressed, etc., etc. But as space is limited, I will simply close with a final congratulations to Michael Brady for writing such an excellent introduction to the philosophy of emotion.
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References
Aristotle. (340 BCE) 2004 . Nicomachean Ethics. Edited by Roger Crisp. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Brady, Michael. 2019. Emotion: The Basics. Abingdon Oxon: Routledge Press.
Cooper, J. and J. R. Procopé. 1995. Seneca, Moral and Political Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Foot, Philippa. 1978. ‘‘Moral Beliefs.’’ Reprinted in Virtues and Vices. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hume, David. (1777) 1975 . Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge, revised by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ross, Lewis D. 2018. “Curiosity as a Virtue.” Episteme 17, no. 1: 1-16. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2018.31.
Stocker, Michael. 1996. Valuing Emotions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Watson, Lani. 2018. “Educating for Curiosity.” In The Moral Psychology of Curiosity, edited by I. Inan, L. Watson, D. Whitcomb, and S. Yigit, 293-310. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
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Paul Bloomfield © 2021
Author email: phsb[at]uconn.edu
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