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Commentary
Paniel Reyes Cárdenas
Universidad Popular Autónoma del Estado de Puebla, Puebla, México
Reyes Cárdenas, Paniel. 2021. “Bringing Emotions To Reason.”
Journal of Philosophy of Emotion 3, no.1: 16-23. https://doi.org/10.33497/2021.summer.4.
Abstract: In his new book Emotion: The Basics, Michael S. Brady introduces the fundamentals on the philosophical approach to emotions: by fleshing out these basic tenets Brady provides insight into a core component of all our lives and covers the nature of emotions, their relationship to knowledge and understanding, and their relationship to our moral and social selves. In my comments, I value the achievements of Brady's work as well as explore a critical approach to the book in which I emphasise how the book deals with the dichotomy between emotions and reasons. I also engage with the limitations that emerge from a viewpoint of a scholar specialised on the history of philosophy and epistemology, and point towards some puzzles that ought to be further considered.
Keywords: emotion, philosophy of emotions, epistemology of emotion, and ethics
Not too many times have I been entrusted with comments on a seminal piece of work such as Michael Brady’s (2019) book on the basics of emotion, but other occasions I have gotten to analyse and offer constructive criticism have represented a workload that demanded energy to leave other projects. Reading Brady’s boo as opposed to a chore—has been a different and enjoyable experience: analysing and reading it has been delightful, hugely engaging and also illuminating. This does not mean that I do not have critical remarks to pinpoint on it, but they should be read as a way of taking very seriously what Brady shows us in the book and engaging with its purpose. In a general sense, I have to acknowledge that a book on emotion touches the right intellectual fibres. The serious consideration of the issues at hand render it possible to emotionally engage with the topic. As my own work is oriented to epistemology and the history of philosophy, the comments I offer here come from a reader that is predisposed in a positive way to the topic, though with a particularly demanding attitude that gives a considerable weight to philosophical traditions. The above background entails that the criticisms and
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comments I offer here are thus envisioned as suggestions to improve an already excellent book. I also bear in mind that the book is a basic introduction to the topic, so the suggestions are adapted for a book of that format and what such format permits.
These comments, in consequence, will be twofold: the first section will reconstruct the narrative of the book in the way I understood it; while the second section will offer some remarks and criticisms prompted by the book. I will conclude by making a general appraisal of what the book means and can mean to the recent philosophical literature on the subject.
THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK
Our author starts the book by explaining the overall plan: he will show us that the study of emotion is more and more prominent for a right understanding of ourselves both from philosophical/intellectual and practical stances. He presents us with three types of theories of emotion (the feeling theory, the cognitive theory, and the perceptual theory) that allow us to delve in the matter by showing that, though contrasting views, they actually complete each other for a more flexible view of the prismatic complexity of emotions.
Then the second chapter moves into explaining how emotions play a fundamental role in conforming intellectual virtues such as curiosity and attentive understanding to the richness of our rational lives. I was glad to see how Brady made crucial points on this. This allows us to consider emotions as integral in the achievement of rational and reflective control. The move is much needed: emotions have been ostracised from epistemology for far too long, as a consequence of that exclusion, there is a limited approach to knowledge: one focused on tokens of knowledge as opposed to a wholesale consciousness of how we know of self-controlled inquiry. This enriched view has made virtue epistemology a key player that values emotion in the philosophical discussion. However, the role of emotions is still to be acknowledged in further epistemological issues, such as the value of emotions involved in shaping the methodology of empirical sciences, a forgotten emotional aspect of our cognitive life.
The third chapter touches on the relationship between emotions and actions: all the components of action (motivations, dispositions, desires, decisions) have an emotional dimension and hence a positive view of their role is a key contribution for a theory of rational action. The question is not so much how we let emotion guide our actions but how we are effectively integrating emotions in action: the more we do it, the more we have reflective control of our lives.
The next chapter shows us how emotions can also be social and how groups can be subjects of emotion. Brady claims that positive social emotions balance our social lives in an appropriate manner, in such a way that helps us overcome a purely self-interested individualism that can appear with the pretence of being “rational.”
A final chapter touches on the place of emotions in morality and aesthetics: emotions appear as essential for a flourishing moral life as well as for a development of the capacities for the appreciation of artistic expression. Without emotion we are left with a fragmented view of the place of humanities and arts. We therefore need to account for emotions should we want an integrated view of these in the personal and social equilibrium.
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In addition, Brady offers us a very useful glossary at the end of the book, perhaps not so much as a way of covering the vocabulary in the manner of a dictionary but as a way of recapitulating the core contributions of some of the concepts formulated and re-formulated throughout the book.
Reviews of the book that offer a comprehensive précis will surely be forthcoming, but I decided to reconstruct Brady’s view as I read it, so that my critical and evaluative comments are apparent from my particular reading, from the perspective of an epistemological hindsight.
ON THE REASON/EMOTION DICHOTOMY
It seems to me that the book represents a key achievement in the effort to overcome the unjustified dichotomy between reason and emotion as opposed states of a conscious being. Indeed, I think Brady’s book explicitly helps to make a turning point in the appreciation of emotions that has been mentioned before, but perhaps not as widely and clearly as an introduction to the topic allows. Brady helps us to understand that the dichotomy between reason and emotion is not only false, but damaging, and step by step shows the different levels in which reasons and emotions are compatible and jointly necessary for human flourishing.
The levels I can clearly see are the following: first, a psychological level in which the emotions are irreducible to irrational reports of behaviour, and that their need for a healthy psychological life. Second, I see an important case made for the fact that they are needed in our epistemic lives: some emotions are essential for achieving intellectual virtues and allow knowledge to flourish. Thirdly, and perhaps, very importantly, I was pleasantly struck by the fact that the book touches on the importance of emotions in our moral and social lives. I can also say that the book helped me to understand the relevant place that emotion plays in the accountability that should be a hallmark of democracies. Thus, for example, one can wonder how social justice is triggered by social emotions, these emotions impede a cause from falling into oblivion and rights the wrong: particularly significant examples, in my opinion, were those of the Hillsborough disaster of 1989 in Sheffield, or the sequels of colonialism worldwide, just to name a few. In spite of the time passed, emotions helped to achieve a mass consciousness of these events and a sense of accountability.
Without exaggerating, I believe that this achievement is a very important one for the self-consciousness that a philosophy for the 21st century needs, as opposed to the previous century. Indeed, we inherited a dualistic view of emotion and reason that is characteristic of modern philosophy, one that takes for granted a dichotomy of emotion and reason as opposed to each other. The dichotomy obscured the place of emotions as well as the value of reason. We reason affectively and we inform our emotions of thought (because, like the book clearly states: emotions are intentional). Charles Sanders Peirce (1879), criticising Cartesian doubt in his famous paper “The Fixation of Belief” said, “let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts” (Pierce 1879, 29). This has been interpreted as a criticism against the possibility of entertaining doubts without the irritation offered by external reality, but most importantly, I believe it also as a prophetic criticism of the dichotomy between emotions and reasons: if our intellects doubt without the support of our positive emotions, we run the risk of creating a gap between them, and damage the value of what the “heart” tells us. It looks as though Brady effectively reconstructs this damaged relationship by showing how necessary the interplay between thought and emotion turns out to be.
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BRINGING PHILOSOPHICAL TRADITIONS TO THE CONVERSATION
As said above, part of the nature of these remarks has to do with the engagement with the philosophical tradition. Hence, what follows are observations as to how the book could perhaps be more grounded in a tradition that goes further than the contemporary literature on the topic. Of course, this is not a criticism on the value of the book, but a proposal for a more substantive connection with the philosophical tradition. Furthermore, I take my cue from the authors cited in the book, whom we benefit from for a closer look to the study of the evolving philosophical ideas on these topics, such as Martha Nussbaum (2001), Christopher Hookway (2000, 2001), Linda Zagzebski (2003) and so forth.
On Emotions and Knowledge
With regards to knowledge and epistemology, the book has made very important contributions that clarify the debate: Brady’s argument for the key role of emotions in the achievement of intellectual virtues seems to me impeccable; the same can be said when it shows how understanding also needs a positive view of emotions. However, little seems to be said about a final step of our epistemic character, which is the role of emotions in self-knowledge, and how emotions contribute to our integration to a community and human flourishing. I believe that the narrative allowed Brady to show us a bit more in the way of the important place of emotions in the knowledge of the convergence of emotions and thought in our intellectual lives, and the need of this to achieve a positive grasp of the meaning of our own selves. All-in-all my criticism is that the book leaves out the crucial motivation of a philosophical approach to emotions: we want to understand emotions philosophically because we want to understand ourselves better, we need to integrate this knowledge to our more ample integration to our community relationships, and, finally, we need to understand emotions in the context of a meaningful life. The understanding of emotions is philosophically salient to value the universe of our social interaction as human beings, because our social lives are emotional interactions. Psychological, sociological, and historical approaches to emotion are very important, but they cannot provide us with the answers of a philosophical approach to emotion. This key aspect of an introductory book to a philosophical understanding of emotions needs a more explicit engagement with the value of such philosophy and its unique contribution.
On Emotions and Morality
On the importance of emotion for moral development and even for flourishing moral lives, I think that though Brady did a great job in explaining step by step how intertwined emotions and reasons are in our moral lives, it is, nonetheless, still lacking in considering one of the most important aspects of the interplay of these. I am particularly thinking about the important phenomenon of conscience and how moral conscience plays a key role in our moral lives. In the philosophical tradition, authors such as the medieval philosophers and theologians (particularly Aquinas (Knutilla 2021) and Duns-Scotus (Knutilla 2021)), and most clearly Hegel(1976), consider that moral conscience cannot even be formed in the first place without the right interplay of emotions. This stance is one of the most striking positive contributions of emotions in the history of philosophy, and has been studied with particular emphasis attending to the interplay of the emotions of shame, pride, guilt and empathy. The work of Jason J. Howard (2014) seems to me highly valuable in explaining this interaction in the emotional forming of conscience, as well as the history of the philosophy of it. Brady’s book has a fair emphasis on the uniqueness of different emotional states, but falls short in showing us how emotions are involved in constructing our moral lives. There are many important works in this direction that pass unnoticed, and the
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outstanding work which I think should be engaged is what Dan Zahavi (2005, 2012, 2014) has done to explain a phenomenology of emotions and the formation of morality and self.
On Emotions and Psychology
The book presents a very clear and concise view of William James’ view of what constitutes his canonical version on emotion, but perhaps one can get a different view of emotion from other works such as The Will to Believe (1897) and The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). In these works, James does not seem to follow-up on the reduction of emotions to the feeling of bodily changes. Other than being one of the founders of experimental psychology, James is known for being one of the great American Pragmatists, and the view of emotion that emerges from his works is impinged by the tenets of the pragmatist tradition. Let me explain myself on this: it seems to me that the view of emotion presented in these other works by James might be worth considering because it offers a way to expand aspects of pragmatist approaches to epistemology. Reasons to believe in p, for example, involve our affections and emotions; these help to warrant our beliefs when we lack the evidence of facts, but are not obliged to suspend our belief. For James it is crucial to accept that reasonable hopes are provided by our “passionate” and “momentous” states; this holds an important value for action. It seems as though while James squares a definition of emotion as feelings of “bodily changes,” he is probably presenting one side of the story, for when he uses the terms “passions” and “affections” he also seems to mean another aspect of emotions that he did not reduce to the feelings of “bodily changes.” This observation about “emotion” and “passion” in James’ philosophy is sadly absent in Brady’s assessment of James.
Ethics and Emotions
When reading the book, one can notice in the section devoted to the importance of emotion in morality that there is a clear explanation of the different dimensions of ethics: normative, applied, and meta-ethics. Brady then moves on to explain the different ways in which morality is helped or indeed formed by emotion. Brady does well in explaining these facts, however, it does not entail adopting an emotivist/sentimentalist stance on ethics. Unfortunately, I think that not mentioning that the emotivist/sentimentalist stance belongs to meta-ethics does not help the cause of the book since the reader might be—as I honestly was—confused and could take him to be talking about different approaches to normative ethics. In such a case, the reader can make an assessment of the importance of emotions in adopting any kind of normative or applied ethics, as Brady states. However, for the case of emotions considered as the ground for meta-ethics—as Hume (2007 [1739]; 1998 [1777]), the most outstanding emotivist, might have it—the reader might risk ending up concluding that Brady is unwittingly positing a dualism between emotion and reason, in which one cannot affect the other, and this is somehow a way to return tentatively to one of the central questions of the book: Do emotions cloud our judgement?
In this sense, I consider it very important for Brady to state more clearly that an emotivist/sentimentalist approach on meta-ethics renders a mistaken view of emotion. Even though an emotivist grounds ethics on emotion—something that seems positive—the ultimate image is one in which emotion is incompatible with reason; being, as it is, a non-cognitivist approach in a Humean fashion. The outcome of such implicit emotivism might be problematic: I believe that a key achievement of the book, as said above, is the casting of doubts on the reason/emotion dichotomy, and a successful argument that emotions are a core tenet of a cogent view of rationality. That is why I consider it to be important to avoid an unintentional regress to a dualistic view.
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WHAT THIS BOOK BRINGS
In conclusion, Brady offers us a long overdue introduction to the topic of emotion from a philosophical perspective. This much needed contribution comes in time to stir up the philosophical community that works on epistemology, ethics, and even metaphysics: something of a gentle call to listen to our emotions.
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Notes
Acknowledgement: I am very grateful to the director of the Society for the Philosophy of Emotion for the opportunity to present this comment at the Central APA 2020.
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References
Brady, Michael. 2019. Emotion: The Basics. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge Press.
Hegel, G. W. F. 1976. Phenomenology of the Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hookway, Christopher. 2001. “Epistemic Akrasia and Epistemic Virtue.” In Virtue Epistemology: Essays on Epistemic Virtue and Responsibility, edited by Abrol Fairweather and Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, 178-99. New York , NY: Oxford University Press.
Hookway, Christopher. 2000. “Regulating Inquiry: Virtue, Doubt, and Sentiment.” The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 5:149-157.
Houser, N. and C. Kloesel, eds. 1992. The Essential Peirce, Volume 1: Selected Philosophical Writings' (1867–1893). Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Accessed May 2, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvpwhg1z.
Howard, Jason J. 2014. Conscience in Moral Life: Rethinking How Our Convictions Structure Self and Society. Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield International.
Hume, David. [1739] 2007. A Treatise of Human Nature: A Critical Edition. Edited by David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.
Hume, David. [1777] 1998. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. The Clarendon Edition of the Works of David Hume. Edited by Tom L. Beauchamp. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Knuuttila, Simo. 2021. "Medieval Theories of the Emotions," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, summer edition, edited by Edward N. Zalta, URL: <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/medieval-emotions/>.
Nussbaum, Martha. 2001. Upheavals of Thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Zahavi, Dan. 2005. Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-person Perspective. Boston: MIT Press.
Zahavi, Dan and Shaun Gallager. 2012. The Phenomenological Mind. 2nd Edition. London: Routledge.
Zahavi, Dan. 2014. Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zagzebski, Linda. 2003. “Emotion and Moral Judgment.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 66, no. 1: 104-124.
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Paniel Reyes Cárdenas © 2021
Author email: panielosberto.reyes[at]upaep.mx
