marți, 1 iulie 2008
miercuri, 28 mai 2008
luni, 26 mai 2008
Live well
What to eat, do (and not do) to prevent cancer
Small changes can make a big difference in your risk.
When it comes to the question of whether you'll get cancer, it often seems that your fate is a mysterious combination of factors beyond your control. We all know someone who smoked, drank and ate bacon every day yet escaped a diagnosis. And far more disheartening, we also know people who lived a virtuously healthy life only to develop the disease. Add to that the confusion over what actually is the right way to avoid the Big C. In fact, three in four people believe there are so many recommendations about preventing breast, colon, lung and other cancers that it's hard to know which guidelines to follow.
The area that probably generates the most debate? Knowing what to eat. There is such an abundance of contradictory studies about food and cancer that it's nearly impossible to consider any one definitive, let alone keep them all straight. So how do you sort through myriad studies, complete with caveats and exceptions? Well, you don't, because we did it for you. SELF went to the experts and scrutinized the latest research to summarize the best cancer-fighting eating advice so far. We also looked at the news on other lifestyle factors such as stress and exercise to generate a guide that can help cancer-proof your body from head to toe. But first, a list that tells you what to forgo and what to fill up on. Let's eat!
Three foods to feast on frequently
Cruciferous veggies Broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower and kale are all cancer-fighting stars in the produce department, and several studies have linked them to a lower risk for colorectal, lung and stomach cancers, says Lawrence Kushi, Sc.D., associate director for epidemiology at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, California. Plus, research from Michigan State University in East Lansing found that those who ate raw or lightly cooked cabbage and sauerkraut more than three times a week were 72 percent less likely to develop breast cancer than those who had 1.5 or fewer servings. Experts suspect vegetables such as cabbage contain chemicals that turn on your body's natural detoxifying enzymes, Kushi explains.
How much to eat You can't have too much, but five weekly half-cup servings is a reasonable goal.
High-fiber anything Fiber's ability to keep things moving appears to have a protective effect not only on the colon (no surprise) but also on the breasts. Researchers in Sweden followed more than 61,000 women and discovered that those who consumed more than 4.5 servings of whole grains daily had a 35 percent lower risk for colon cancer. Because fiber speeds the passage of stool through the colon, cells have less exposure to potentially carcinogenic waste. Roughage may also sop up excess estrogen and insulin, two hormones linked to breast cancer.
How much to eat Aim for 25 grams (from food) a day. A half cup of a high-fiber cereal, such as All-Bran or Fiber One, can provide about half your daily dose. Beans, whole-grain breads with added fiber, fruit and veggies can help get you there, too.
Foods rich in vitamin D and calcium Your breasts and colon may get protection from this vitamin/mineral combo. Scientists who reviewed 10 studies found that those who consume high amounts of dairy products have a lower risk for colorectal cancer, likely because of calcium's protective effect, according to a report in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. The two nutrients may also help ward off early breast cancer by suppressing the effects of hormones.
How much to consume Women under 50 need 1,000 milligrams of calcium and at least 400 international units of vitamin D a day. Fortified milk and orange juice are good sources of both.
Two foods to enjoy often
Tomatoes and berries There's a bit of evidence that tomatoes and tomato products may reduce the risk for gastric, ovarian, pancreatic and prostate cancers. The theory: Lycopene, which gives tomatoes their red color, may help prevent cell damage. The research, however, is far from proven. "It is one thing to show effects in tissue culture, and another thing to demonstrate conclusively that these effects translate into real health effects in people," Kushi says. Still, these foods are absolutely healthy, so SELF says, Eat them!
Berries, too, have their share of fans, but evidence of their anticancer benefits is still being gathered. Certainly, strawberries, raspberries and blueberries are rich in antioxidants, which protect against cell damage. But as with tomatoes, it's not clear if the findings hold up in the real world. Again, this is not a time to wait for the science to catch up—consuming a variety of fruit and veggies will always be good for you.
How much to eat Make berries and tomatoes a part of your nine fruit and veggie servings a day. Sneak in extra amounts by tossing some berries on your cereal or ordering a little extra sauce for your pasta.
Three foods to cut back on
Red and processed meat Still reluctant to trade your hot dog for a not dog? You may want to reconsider. Studies have found a strong connection between colon cancer and processed meat such as hot dogs and cold cuts, as well as beef, pork and lamb. The stats are pretty convincing: Women who ate approximately 1 ounce of processed meat (about one slice of bologna) two or three times a week for a decade were 50 percent more likely to develop colon cancer; eating only 2 ounces of red meat a day long-term can increase the odds of rectal cancer by as much as 40 percent, according to a large study in The Journal of the American Medical Association. Colon cancer isn't a carnivores-only concern. Women who downed 1.5 servings of meat a day had nearly twice the breast cancer risk of those who ate fewer than three servings per week, according to a study in the Archives of Internal Medicine. One possible reason? Carcinogens are created when meat is cooked at high temperatures as well as when it's processed with substances such as nitrates.
How much to eat Think of meat as a side dish, Kushi says. Stick to less than 3 ounces of red meat a day, and avoid charring as much as possible.
Alcohol Disconcerting news for drinkers: Imbibing alcohol increases the risk of developing breast, colon, esophagus, mouth and throat cancers. "Alcohol is one of the few dietary factors showing a clear and consistent relationship with breast cancer," Kushi says. If you're wondering why total abstinence isn't encouraged, the reason is twofold: "We recognize that a little bit of alcohol reduces risk for cardiovascular disease," Kushi says. Plus, there's nothing wrong with enjoying life!
How much to down It's safest to limit yourself to a drink a night, max—and less if you have a significant risk for breast cancer. Because binge drinking may have other negative health consequences, no divvying up your seven drinks over two days instead of seven. (We asked.)
Fats Although experts agree that maintaining a diet low in saturated fat is smart all around, the research linking fat and cancer is controversial. Still, there is evidence suggesting that keeping fat intake low may offer some breast cancer protection. When researchers from the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, followed nearly 189,000 postmenopausal women for four years, they discovered that the chance of developing breast cancer was 15 percent higher among women whose diets were 40 percent fat versus those that were 20 percent.
How much to eat No more than 30 percent of your calories should come from fat. That's about 60 grams of fat for women eating 1,800 calories a day. And because saturated fat plays a huge role in heart disease, try to get most of your fat from healthy sources such as avocados, fish, nuts and olive oils.
One food to watch carefully
Soy Soy is generally good for you, but its exact relationship with breast cancer is still being sussed out. Studies in the lab show that breast cancer cells proliferate when exposed to isolated soy compounds, most likely because soy contains plant-based estrogens, Kushi says. In the body, however, "these same phytoestrogens seem to be related to some reduction in risk." How much to eat About 20 grams or less daily. You'll be in the healthy range with a cup of tofu, three quarters of a cup of edamame, about half a cup of tempeh or a quarter cup of soy nuts.
Protection in a bottle?
"The best way to get your vitamins is with food," says Larry Norton, M.D., medical director of the Evelyn H. Lauder Breast Center at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. "God put more good things in an apple than I know about," he says. But the one exception may be vitamin D. Women who took nearly three times the recommended amount of this nutrient, as well as about 1,500 milligrams of calcium, reduced their cancer risk by 77 percent, according to a study in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. For now, get at least 400 international units a day. Fortified milk and orange juice are good sources, but ask whether a supplement can help you make up the difference.
Small changes can make a big difference in your risk.
When it comes to the question of whether you'll get cancer, it often seems that your fate is a mysterious combination of factors beyond your control. We all know someone who smoked, drank and ate bacon every day yet escaped a diagnosis. And far more disheartening, we also know people who lived a virtuously healthy life only to develop the disease. Add to that the confusion over what actually is the right way to avoid the Big C. In fact, three in four people believe there are so many recommendations about preventing breast, colon, lung and other cancers that it's hard to know which guidelines to follow.
The area that probably generates the most debate? Knowing what to eat. There is such an abundance of contradictory studies about food and cancer that it's nearly impossible to consider any one definitive, let alone keep them all straight. So how do you sort through myriad studies, complete with caveats and exceptions? Well, you don't, because we did it for you. SELF went to the experts and scrutinized the latest research to summarize the best cancer-fighting eating advice so far. We also looked at the news on other lifestyle factors such as stress and exercise to generate a guide that can help cancer-proof your body from head to toe. But first, a list that tells you what to forgo and what to fill up on. Let's eat!
Three foods to feast on frequently
Cruciferous veggies Broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower and kale are all cancer-fighting stars in the produce department, and several studies have linked them to a lower risk for colorectal, lung and stomach cancers, says Lawrence Kushi, Sc.D., associate director for epidemiology at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, California. Plus, research from Michigan State University in East Lansing found that those who ate raw or lightly cooked cabbage and sauerkraut more than three times a week were 72 percent less likely to develop breast cancer than those who had 1.5 or fewer servings. Experts suspect vegetables such as cabbage contain chemicals that turn on your body's natural detoxifying enzymes, Kushi explains.
How much to eat You can't have too much, but five weekly half-cup servings is a reasonable goal.
High-fiber anything Fiber's ability to keep things moving appears to have a protective effect not only on the colon (no surprise) but also on the breasts. Researchers in Sweden followed more than 61,000 women and discovered that those who consumed more than 4.5 servings of whole grains daily had a 35 percent lower risk for colon cancer. Because fiber speeds the passage of stool through the colon, cells have less exposure to potentially carcinogenic waste. Roughage may also sop up excess estrogen and insulin, two hormones linked to breast cancer.
How much to eat Aim for 25 grams (from food) a day. A half cup of a high-fiber cereal, such as All-Bran or Fiber One, can provide about half your daily dose. Beans, whole-grain breads with added fiber, fruit and veggies can help get you there, too.
Foods rich in vitamin D and calcium Your breasts and colon may get protection from this vitamin/mineral combo. Scientists who reviewed 10 studies found that those who consume high amounts of dairy products have a lower risk for colorectal cancer, likely because of calcium's protective effect, according to a report in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. The two nutrients may also help ward off early breast cancer by suppressing the effects of hormones.
How much to consume Women under 50 need 1,000 milligrams of calcium and at least 400 international units of vitamin D a day. Fortified milk and orange juice are good sources of both.
Two foods to enjoy often
Tomatoes and berries There's a bit of evidence that tomatoes and tomato products may reduce the risk for gastric, ovarian, pancreatic and prostate cancers. The theory: Lycopene, which gives tomatoes their red color, may help prevent cell damage. The research, however, is far from proven. "It is one thing to show effects in tissue culture, and another thing to demonstrate conclusively that these effects translate into real health effects in people," Kushi says. Still, these foods are absolutely healthy, so SELF says, Eat them!
Berries, too, have their share of fans, but evidence of their anticancer benefits is still being gathered. Certainly, strawberries, raspberries and blueberries are rich in antioxidants, which protect against cell damage. But as with tomatoes, it's not clear if the findings hold up in the real world. Again, this is not a time to wait for the science to catch up—consuming a variety of fruit and veggies will always be good for you.
How much to eat Make berries and tomatoes a part of your nine fruit and veggie servings a day. Sneak in extra amounts by tossing some berries on your cereal or ordering a little extra sauce for your pasta.
Three foods to cut back on
Red and processed meat Still reluctant to trade your hot dog for a not dog? You may want to reconsider. Studies have found a strong connection between colon cancer and processed meat such as hot dogs and cold cuts, as well as beef, pork and lamb. The stats are pretty convincing: Women who ate approximately 1 ounce of processed meat (about one slice of bologna) two or three times a week for a decade were 50 percent more likely to develop colon cancer; eating only 2 ounces of red meat a day long-term can increase the odds of rectal cancer by as much as 40 percent, according to a large study in The Journal of the American Medical Association. Colon cancer isn't a carnivores-only concern. Women who downed 1.5 servings of meat a day had nearly twice the breast cancer risk of those who ate fewer than three servings per week, according to a study in the Archives of Internal Medicine. One possible reason? Carcinogens are created when meat is cooked at high temperatures as well as when it's processed with substances such as nitrates.
How much to eat Think of meat as a side dish, Kushi says. Stick to less than 3 ounces of red meat a day, and avoid charring as much as possible.
Alcohol Disconcerting news for drinkers: Imbibing alcohol increases the risk of developing breast, colon, esophagus, mouth and throat cancers. "Alcohol is one of the few dietary factors showing a clear and consistent relationship with breast cancer," Kushi says. If you're wondering why total abstinence isn't encouraged, the reason is twofold: "We recognize that a little bit of alcohol reduces risk for cardiovascular disease," Kushi says. Plus, there's nothing wrong with enjoying life!
How much to down It's safest to limit yourself to a drink a night, max—and less if you have a significant risk for breast cancer. Because binge drinking may have other negative health consequences, no divvying up your seven drinks over two days instead of seven. (We asked.)
Fats Although experts agree that maintaining a diet low in saturated fat is smart all around, the research linking fat and cancer is controversial. Still, there is evidence suggesting that keeping fat intake low may offer some breast cancer protection. When researchers from the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, followed nearly 189,000 postmenopausal women for four years, they discovered that the chance of developing breast cancer was 15 percent higher among women whose diets were 40 percent fat versus those that were 20 percent.
How much to eat No more than 30 percent of your calories should come from fat. That's about 60 grams of fat for women eating 1,800 calories a day. And because saturated fat plays a huge role in heart disease, try to get most of your fat from healthy sources such as avocados, fish, nuts and olive oils.
One food to watch carefully
Soy Soy is generally good for you, but its exact relationship with breast cancer is still being sussed out. Studies in the lab show that breast cancer cells proliferate when exposed to isolated soy compounds, most likely because soy contains plant-based estrogens, Kushi says. In the body, however, "these same phytoestrogens seem to be related to some reduction in risk." How much to eat About 20 grams or less daily. You'll be in the healthy range with a cup of tofu, three quarters of a cup of edamame, about half a cup of tempeh or a quarter cup of soy nuts.
Protection in a bottle?
"The best way to get your vitamins is with food," says Larry Norton, M.D., medical director of the Evelyn H. Lauder Breast Center at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. "God put more good things in an apple than I know about," he says. But the one exception may be vitamin D. Women who took nearly three times the recommended amount of this nutrient, as well as about 1,500 milligrams of calcium, reduced their cancer risk by 77 percent, according to a study in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. For now, get at least 400 international units a day. Fortified milk and orange juice are good sources, but ask whether a supplement can help you make up the difference.
sâmbătă, 24 mai 2008
The Incredible Power of Focus
by Bill Harris, Director,
Centerpointe Research Institute
One of the more important points I have made in my writings over the years has been the idea that you really do create your own life and your own reality.
Many people, after continuing to experience the same old ups and downs and personal dramas over many years, get to the point where they dismiss this idea as charming but useless -- or just plain wrong.
"If I'm creating this, then I'm certainly not doing it on purpose," they say. "It sure seems like this is HAPPENING to me, rather than that I'm creating it." They just assume that it's all BS because "this and this and this and this are going on for me, and I have no control over it, and anyone who thinks I'm creating this doesn't understand what I'm going through."
Essentially, they are resigning themselves to be a victim of their circumstances.
We live in a universe of infinite complexity, and many forces -- way too many to keep track of -- operate on us. Yes, it is true that we are NOT in control of everything that happens, because we are not in control of most of those infinite other parts of the universe.
In fact, the only thing you have total and complete control over is...
...YOUR OWN MIND.
That is, if you learn how to exercise it.
Luckily, this one thing -- your mind -- that you do have control over gives you tremendous power. By exercising control over your mind, you can get the rest of those infinite other parts of the universe to begin to march in formation.
The person who says, "If I'm creating this, it certainly isn't on purpose," is right. They are not creating what is happening to them "on purpose." Who would purposely create failure, or bad relationships, or any other suffering?
You can only do something that is not good for you, that is harmful to you, if you do it unconsciously. This means if you are creating something you don't want, you must be doing so unconsciously.
Your mind is running on automatic pilot, based on "software" (unconscious programming) installed when you were too young to know any better, by parents, teachers, friends, the media, and other experiences and influences. The key is to become more conscious, more aware...to get yourself off automatic pilot. Once you do this, you stop creating all the dramas and other garbage you don't want in your life.
How do you do this? One way, of course, is to use Holosync, because listening to Holosync increases your ability to be consciously aware. As you continue with the program, doing this becomes easier and more automatic. That "watcher" part of you becomes stronger and stronger, until it is watching over everything, and with that degree of conscious awareness, it is pretty difficult to create anything that is not beneficial for you.
You can help things along, however, by remembering and using a very important piece of wisdom.
What is this important piece of wisdom? I'm glad you asked.
It's the fact that whatever you focus on manifests as reality in your life.
You are always focusing on something, whether you are aware of it or not. If I spent some time with you, and heard your history, I could tell you what you are focusing on. How? By looking at the results you are getting in your life. The results you get are always the result of your focus.
The problem is, this focus is usually not conscious focus, it's automatic focus. We unconsciously focus on something we don't want, and then when we get it we feel like a victim and don't even stop to think that we created it in the first place. And what is more, we don't realize we could choose to create something completely different if we could only get out of the cycle of unconsciously focusing on something other than what we want.
If you have a significant negative emotional experience (say, for instance, a relationship in which you are abused or mistreated in some way), a part of you is going to say: "Okay, I get it. There are people out there who can and will hurt me. Relationships can be dangerous and painful. I have to watch out for these people [or sometimes, relationships in general] and avoid them."
Unfortunately, to watch out for them and avoid them, you have to focus your mind on "people who could hurt me," or "bad relationships," and that focus draws more of what you don't want to you...AND...actually makes these things you don't want (at least initially) attractive to you, so when they appear in your life you are drawn to them.
This is why many people keep having one relationship after another with the same person, but in different bodies. This principle, of course, applies to everything, not just relationships.
Focusing on what you do not want, ironically, makes it happen. Focusing on not being poor makes you poor. Focusing on not making mistakes causes you to make mistakes.
Focusing on not having a bad relationship creates bad relationships. Focusing on not being depressed makes you depressed. Focusing on not smoking makes you want to smoke. And so on.
I think you get the idea.
The truth is, your mind cannot tell the difference between something you think about or focus on that you DO want, and something you think about or focus on but do NOT want.
The mind is a goal-seeking mechanism, and an extremely effective one at that. Already, all the time, it is elegantly and precisely creating exactly what you focus on. You are already a World Champion Expert at creating whatever you focus on. You couldn't get any better at it, and you don't need to get any better at it.
When you focus on anything, your mind says: "Okay, we can do that," and starts figuring out how to do it. It doesn't ask whether you're focusing on it because you want it or because you do not want it. It ALWAYS assumes you want what you focus on and then it goes and makes it happen.
The more frequent and the more intense the focus, the faster and more completely you will create what you have focused on, which is why intense negative experiences create intense focus on what you do not want, and tend to make you re-create what you don't want, over and over.
Most of the time, for most people, all the focusing and thinking is going by at warp speed, on automatic, without much, if any, conscious intention.
Your job is to learn how to direct this power by consciously directing your focus to the outcomes you want.
Once you do, everything changes. This does, however, take some work, because at first you have to swim upstream against the current of your old, unconscious habits, and the current can be swift and strong.
First, you have to discover all the things you focus on that you do not want, and I'm willing to bet there are quite a few -- way more than you think. To the degree you're getting what you don't want, you are focusing, albeit unconsciously, on what you don't want.
Spend some time over the next few weeks, then, making a list of all the things you do NOT want as you notice yourself thinking about them.
Second, you have to get very clear about what you DO want. Then, you have to examine each of the things you want and be sure they are not just something you do NOT want in disguise.
For instance, saying "I want a relationship where I am treated well" would not even be an issue if you had not had relationships where you were not treated well, and even in making this seemingly positive statement you are focusing on not wanting to be mistreated.
Saying "I want a reliable car" wouldn't even come up if you weren't focusing on the fact that you don't want a car that breaks down and needs a lot of repairs.
After you've sorted out the things you habitually focus on that you do not want, and know what you do want, you have to begin to notice each time you think about an outcome you do not want, and consciously change your thinking, right in that moment, so you are instead focusing on what you do want.
Remember, you do NOT have to avoid things to be happy and get what you want. The urge to avoid something is a result of having had a negative emotional experience regarding that thing, and trying to avoid things requires you to focus on them, which tells your brain to create them. Not good.
You will be surprised how often you are thinking about what you do not want, how difficult it is to catch yourself doing it every time, and -- most of all – how difficult it is to switch your thinking to what you DO want. There is a strong momentum to keep thinking about that thing you want to avoid. As I said, the current is strong and swift, especially at first.
The solution? Practice, practice, practice. Persistence, persistence, persistence.
It's a very good idea to write down what you want, very specifically, so that your Fairy Godmother, were she to read it, would know exactly what to give you without any additional explanation. Then, read what you have written to yourself, preferably out loud, several times a day, while seeing yourself, in your mind, already having what you want.
The more emotion you can bring to it, the better. Then, take whatever action is available to begin moving toward what you want. A good time to do this reading and visualizing is when you first wake up and right before you go to bed.
I know this is work. Do it anyway. There is a price for everything, and this is the price you must pay to get what you want. Be prepared to pay it. It will be worth it, I promise. And be prepared to pay for a while before you get results. Stick with it.
Another way to change your focus is to ask questions. As an example, I'll ask you one right now. What did you have for breakfast this morning? To answer this question (even to just internally process the question), you had to shift your focus from whatever your mind was focused on (hopefully, this article) to today's breakfast. This means that to change your focus, all you have to do is...ask yourself a question!
It also means you better be careful what questions you ask yourself.
Good questions include "How can I get X?" "How can I do X?" "How can I be X?" By asking these kinds of questions, you get your mind to focus on what you want to have, do, or be. Then, your mind takes over and answers the question...solves the problem...and creates what you want. You just have to provide the focus, take whatever action presents itself, and be persistent (some things take time).
I would do away with questions like "What's wrong with me?" or "Why can't I find someone to love me?" and so on. Your mind will find an answer to any question you give it, including these dis-empowering questions.
Learn to say "How can I...?" when you don't know what to do, instead of "I can't," and (if you are persistent in asking) the universe will send you the answer, every time. Learn to be conscious in what you focus on and your whole life will change.
This all may seem very utopian to you, or overly simplistic, or like a lot of work. I assure you it is not utopian (it's the way all successful people think), it IS simple, but not simplistic, and yes, it is work, at first.
The great Napoleon Hill, who spent over 60 years studying the most effective and most successful people of the 20th century, concluded that -- without exception, mind you -- "whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve." He at first suspected there had to be exceptions, but toward the end of his life he said he had to admit he had not found ANY.
Let's go over that again: "Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve."
It will take some time to learn how to consciously focus your mind. It will require some effort.
You will fail many times, and it will seem difficult. But at a certain point you will "get it" and at that point it will become as automatic as the unconscious focusing you have been doing. When that happens, a whole new universe of power will open to you.
If you'd like to experience the kind of dramatic, positive change Holosync audio technology can create in your life, read the introduction which details all the benefits and reveals the scientific proof behind Holosync (and includes an extremely attractive, money-saving offer) found on the homepage.
Centerpointe Research Institute
One of the more important points I have made in my writings over the years has been the idea that you really do create your own life and your own reality.
Many people, after continuing to experience the same old ups and downs and personal dramas over many years, get to the point where they dismiss this idea as charming but useless -- or just plain wrong.
"If I'm creating this, then I'm certainly not doing it on purpose," they say. "It sure seems like this is HAPPENING to me, rather than that I'm creating it." They just assume that it's all BS because "this and this and this and this are going on for me, and I have no control over it, and anyone who thinks I'm creating this doesn't understand what I'm going through."
Essentially, they are resigning themselves to be a victim of their circumstances.
We live in a universe of infinite complexity, and many forces -- way too many to keep track of -- operate on us. Yes, it is true that we are NOT in control of everything that happens, because we are not in control of most of those infinite other parts of the universe.
In fact, the only thing you have total and complete control over is...
...YOUR OWN MIND.
That is, if you learn how to exercise it.
Luckily, this one thing -- your mind -- that you do have control over gives you tremendous power. By exercising control over your mind, you can get the rest of those infinite other parts of the universe to begin to march in formation.
The person who says, "If I'm creating this, it certainly isn't on purpose," is right. They are not creating what is happening to them "on purpose." Who would purposely create failure, or bad relationships, or any other suffering?
You can only do something that is not good for you, that is harmful to you, if you do it unconsciously. This means if you are creating something you don't want, you must be doing so unconsciously.
Your mind is running on automatic pilot, based on "software" (unconscious programming) installed when you were too young to know any better, by parents, teachers, friends, the media, and other experiences and influences. The key is to become more conscious, more aware...to get yourself off automatic pilot. Once you do this, you stop creating all the dramas and other garbage you don't want in your life.
How do you do this? One way, of course, is to use Holosync, because listening to Holosync increases your ability to be consciously aware. As you continue with the program, doing this becomes easier and more automatic. That "watcher" part of you becomes stronger and stronger, until it is watching over everything, and with that degree of conscious awareness, it is pretty difficult to create anything that is not beneficial for you.
You can help things along, however, by remembering and using a very important piece of wisdom.
What is this important piece of wisdom? I'm glad you asked.
It's the fact that whatever you focus on manifests as reality in your life.
You are always focusing on something, whether you are aware of it or not. If I spent some time with you, and heard your history, I could tell you what you are focusing on. How? By looking at the results you are getting in your life. The results you get are always the result of your focus.
The problem is, this focus is usually not conscious focus, it's automatic focus. We unconsciously focus on something we don't want, and then when we get it we feel like a victim and don't even stop to think that we created it in the first place. And what is more, we don't realize we could choose to create something completely different if we could only get out of the cycle of unconsciously focusing on something other than what we want.
If you have a significant negative emotional experience (say, for instance, a relationship in which you are abused or mistreated in some way), a part of you is going to say: "Okay, I get it. There are people out there who can and will hurt me. Relationships can be dangerous and painful. I have to watch out for these people [or sometimes, relationships in general] and avoid them."
Unfortunately, to watch out for them and avoid them, you have to focus your mind on "people who could hurt me," or "bad relationships," and that focus draws more of what you don't want to you...AND...actually makes these things you don't want (at least initially) attractive to you, so when they appear in your life you are drawn to them.
This is why many people keep having one relationship after another with the same person, but in different bodies. This principle, of course, applies to everything, not just relationships.
Focusing on what you do not want, ironically, makes it happen. Focusing on not being poor makes you poor. Focusing on not making mistakes causes you to make mistakes.
Focusing on not having a bad relationship creates bad relationships. Focusing on not being depressed makes you depressed. Focusing on not smoking makes you want to smoke. And so on.
I think you get the idea.
The truth is, your mind cannot tell the difference between something you think about or focus on that you DO want, and something you think about or focus on but do NOT want.
The mind is a goal-seeking mechanism, and an extremely effective one at that. Already, all the time, it is elegantly and precisely creating exactly what you focus on. You are already a World Champion Expert at creating whatever you focus on. You couldn't get any better at it, and you don't need to get any better at it.
When you focus on anything, your mind says: "Okay, we can do that," and starts figuring out how to do it. It doesn't ask whether you're focusing on it because you want it or because you do not want it. It ALWAYS assumes you want what you focus on and then it goes and makes it happen.
The more frequent and the more intense the focus, the faster and more completely you will create what you have focused on, which is why intense negative experiences create intense focus on what you do not want, and tend to make you re-create what you don't want, over and over.
Most of the time, for most people, all the focusing and thinking is going by at warp speed, on automatic, without much, if any, conscious intention.
Your job is to learn how to direct this power by consciously directing your focus to the outcomes you want.
Once you do, everything changes. This does, however, take some work, because at first you have to swim upstream against the current of your old, unconscious habits, and the current can be swift and strong.
First, you have to discover all the things you focus on that you do not want, and I'm willing to bet there are quite a few -- way more than you think. To the degree you're getting what you don't want, you are focusing, albeit unconsciously, on what you don't want.
Spend some time over the next few weeks, then, making a list of all the things you do NOT want as you notice yourself thinking about them.
Second, you have to get very clear about what you DO want. Then, you have to examine each of the things you want and be sure they are not just something you do NOT want in disguise.
For instance, saying "I want a relationship where I am treated well" would not even be an issue if you had not had relationships where you were not treated well, and even in making this seemingly positive statement you are focusing on not wanting to be mistreated.
Saying "I want a reliable car" wouldn't even come up if you weren't focusing on the fact that you don't want a car that breaks down and needs a lot of repairs.
After you've sorted out the things you habitually focus on that you do not want, and know what you do want, you have to begin to notice each time you think about an outcome you do not want, and consciously change your thinking, right in that moment, so you are instead focusing on what you do want.
Remember, you do NOT have to avoid things to be happy and get what you want. The urge to avoid something is a result of having had a negative emotional experience regarding that thing, and trying to avoid things requires you to focus on them, which tells your brain to create them. Not good.
You will be surprised how often you are thinking about what you do not want, how difficult it is to catch yourself doing it every time, and -- most of all – how difficult it is to switch your thinking to what you DO want. There is a strong momentum to keep thinking about that thing you want to avoid. As I said, the current is strong and swift, especially at first.
The solution? Practice, practice, practice. Persistence, persistence, persistence.
It's a very good idea to write down what you want, very specifically, so that your Fairy Godmother, were she to read it, would know exactly what to give you without any additional explanation. Then, read what you have written to yourself, preferably out loud, several times a day, while seeing yourself, in your mind, already having what you want.
The more emotion you can bring to it, the better. Then, take whatever action is available to begin moving toward what you want. A good time to do this reading and visualizing is when you first wake up and right before you go to bed.
I know this is work. Do it anyway. There is a price for everything, and this is the price you must pay to get what you want. Be prepared to pay it. It will be worth it, I promise. And be prepared to pay for a while before you get results. Stick with it.
Another way to change your focus is to ask questions. As an example, I'll ask you one right now. What did you have for breakfast this morning? To answer this question (even to just internally process the question), you had to shift your focus from whatever your mind was focused on (hopefully, this article) to today's breakfast. This means that to change your focus, all you have to do is...ask yourself a question!
It also means you better be careful what questions you ask yourself.
Good questions include "How can I get X?" "How can I do X?" "How can I be X?" By asking these kinds of questions, you get your mind to focus on what you want to have, do, or be. Then, your mind takes over and answers the question...solves the problem...and creates what you want. You just have to provide the focus, take whatever action presents itself, and be persistent (some things take time).
I would do away with questions like "What's wrong with me?" or "Why can't I find someone to love me?" and so on. Your mind will find an answer to any question you give it, including these dis-empowering questions.
Learn to say "How can I...?" when you don't know what to do, instead of "I can't," and (if you are persistent in asking) the universe will send you the answer, every time. Learn to be conscious in what you focus on and your whole life will change.
This all may seem very utopian to you, or overly simplistic, or like a lot of work. I assure you it is not utopian (it's the way all successful people think), it IS simple, but not simplistic, and yes, it is work, at first.
The great Napoleon Hill, who spent over 60 years studying the most effective and most successful people of the 20th century, concluded that -- without exception, mind you -- "whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve." He at first suspected there had to be exceptions, but toward the end of his life he said he had to admit he had not found ANY.
Let's go over that again: "Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve."
It will take some time to learn how to consciously focus your mind. It will require some effort.
You will fail many times, and it will seem difficult. But at a certain point you will "get it" and at that point it will become as automatic as the unconscious focusing you have been doing. When that happens, a whole new universe of power will open to you.
If you'd like to experience the kind of dramatic, positive change Holosync audio technology can create in your life, read the introduction which details all the benefits and reveals the scientific proof behind Holosync (and includes an extremely attractive, money-saving offer) found on the homepage.
miercuri, 21 mai 2008
Patrick Swayze has pancreatic cancer
.
His prognosis is not for long-term survival.
Some entertainment sources are quoting Patrick's Stanford University cancer doctors gave him five weeks to live.
The common world is stunned by the news that a movie icon and dancing star has little life left.
Why is there such a great outpouring of emotion and love for a celebrity that few people directly know?
What is in the yearning and the pain that brings people to mourn Patrick Swayze when their neighbors are suffering the same dying fate with a different, but similar, result?
Why are celebrity deaths more important than the decaying nameless? The heartbreak is the same, but somehow the attached fame weakens the intimate and strengthens the familiar - and our society is worse for the wear of that disconnect.
Top 5 greatest Patrick Swayze movies ever
1- Point Break
2- Next of Kin
3- Ghost
4- Roadhouse
5- Red Dawn
marți, 20 mai 2008
joi, 15 mai 2008
London - Take a tour
.
With a population of just under eight million, London is Europe's largest city, spreading across an area of more than 620 square miles from its core on the River Thames. Ethnically it's also Europe's most diverse metropolis: around two hundred languages are spoken within its confines, and more than thirty percent of the population is made up of first-, second- and third-generation immigrants.
Despite Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish devolution, London still dominates the national horizon, too: this is where the country's news and money are made, it's where the central government resides and, as far as its inhabitants are concerned, provincial life begins beyond the circuit of the city's orbital motorway. Londoners' sense of superiority causes enormous resentment in the regions, yet it's undeniable that the capital has a unique aura of excitement and success – in most walks of British life, if you want to get on you've got to do it in London.
For the visitor, too, London is a thrilling place – and in the last few years, the city has been in a relatively buoyant mood. Thanks to the national lottery and the millennium-oriented funding frenzy, virtually every one of London's world-class museums, galleries and institutions has been reinvented, from the Royal Opera House to the British Museum. In the Tate Modern and the London Eye, the city can now boast the world's largest modern art gallery and Ferris wheel, and the first new bridge to cross the Thames for over a hundred years. Furthermore, following sixteen years of being the only major city in the world not to have its own governing body, London finally acquired its own elected assembly in 2000, along with a mayor who's determined to try and solve one of London's biggest problems: transport.
In the meantime, London's traditional sights – Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, St Paul's Cathedral and the Tower of London – continue to draw in millions of tourists every year. Monuments from the capital's more glorious past are everywhere to be seen, from medieval banqueting halls and the great churches of Christopher Wren to the eclectic Victorian architecture of the triumphalist British Empire. There is also much enjoyment to be had from the city's quiet Georgian squares, the narrow alleyways of the City of London, the riverside walks, and the quirks of what is still identifiably a collection of villages. And even London's traffic problems are offset by surprisingly large expanses of greenery: Hyde Park, Green Park and St James's Park are all within a few minutes' walk of the West End, while, further afield, you can enjoy the more expansive countryside of Hampstead Heath and Richmond Park.
You could spend days just shopping in London, too, mixing with the upper classes in the tiara triangle around Harrods, or sampling the offbeat weekend markets of Portobello Road, Camden and Greenwich. The music, clubbing and gay/lesbian scenes are second to none, and mainstream arts are no less exciting, with regular opportunities to catch brilliant theatre companies, dance troupes, exhibitions and opera. Restaurants, these days, are an attraction, too. London is now on a par with its European rivals, and offers a range from three-star Michelin establishments to low-cost, high-quality Chinese restaurants and Indian curry houses. Meanwhile, the city's pubs have heaps of atmosphere, especially away from the centre – and an exploration of the farther-flung communities is essential to get the complete picture of this dynamic metropolis.
With a population of just under eight million, London is Europe's largest city, spreading across an area of more than 620 square miles from its core on the River Thames. Ethnically it's also Europe's most diverse metropolis: around two hundred languages are spoken within its confines, and more than thirty percent of the population is made up of first-, second- and third-generation immigrants.
Despite Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish devolution, London still dominates the national horizon, too: this is where the country's news and money are made, it's where the central government resides and, as far as its inhabitants are concerned, provincial life begins beyond the circuit of the city's orbital motorway. Londoners' sense of superiority causes enormous resentment in the regions, yet it's undeniable that the capital has a unique aura of excitement and success – in most walks of British life, if you want to get on you've got to do it in London.
For the visitor, too, London is a thrilling place – and in the last few years, the city has been in a relatively buoyant mood. Thanks to the national lottery and the millennium-oriented funding frenzy, virtually every one of London's world-class museums, galleries and institutions has been reinvented, from the Royal Opera House to the British Museum. In the Tate Modern and the London Eye, the city can now boast the world's largest modern art gallery and Ferris wheel, and the first new bridge to cross the Thames for over a hundred years. Furthermore, following sixteen years of being the only major city in the world not to have its own governing body, London finally acquired its own elected assembly in 2000, along with a mayor who's determined to try and solve one of London's biggest problems: transport.
In the meantime, London's traditional sights – Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, St Paul's Cathedral and the Tower of London – continue to draw in millions of tourists every year. Monuments from the capital's more glorious past are everywhere to be seen, from medieval banqueting halls and the great churches of Christopher Wren to the eclectic Victorian architecture of the triumphalist British Empire. There is also much enjoyment to be had from the city's quiet Georgian squares, the narrow alleyways of the City of London, the riverside walks, and the quirks of what is still identifiably a collection of villages. And even London's traffic problems are offset by surprisingly large expanses of greenery: Hyde Park, Green Park and St James's Park are all within a few minutes' walk of the West End, while, further afield, you can enjoy the more expansive countryside of Hampstead Heath and Richmond Park.
You could spend days just shopping in London, too, mixing with the upper classes in the tiara triangle around Harrods, or sampling the offbeat weekend markets of Portobello Road, Camden and Greenwich. The music, clubbing and gay/lesbian scenes are second to none, and mainstream arts are no less exciting, with regular opportunities to catch brilliant theatre companies, dance troupes, exhibitions and opera. Restaurants, these days, are an attraction, too. London is now on a par with its European rivals, and offers a range from three-star Michelin establishments to low-cost, high-quality Chinese restaurants and Indian curry houses. Meanwhile, the city's pubs have heaps of atmosphere, especially away from the centre – and an exploration of the farther-flung communities is essential to get the complete picture of this dynamic metropolis.
Do narcissists have emotions?
.
Of course they do. All humans have emotions. It is how we choose to relate to our emotions that matters. The narcissist tends to repress them so deeply that, for all practical purposes, they play no conscious role in his life and conduct, though they play an extraordinarily large unconscious role in determining both.
The narcissist's positive emotions come bundled with very negative ones. This is the outcome of frustration and the consequent transformations of aggression. This frustration is connected to the Primary Objects of the narcissist's childhood (parents and caregivers).
Instead of being provided with the unconditional love that he craved, the narcissist was subjected to totally unpredictable and inexplicable bouts of temper, rage, searing sentimentality, envy, prodding, infusion of guilt and other unhealthy parental emotions and behaviour patterns.
The narcissist reacted by retreating to his private world, where he is omnipotent and omniscient and, therefore, immune to such vicious vicissitudes. He stashed his vulnerable True Self in a deep mental cellar – and outwardly presented to the world a False Self.
But bundling is far easier than unbundling. The narcissist is unable to evoke positive feelings without provoking negative ones. Gradually, he becomes phobic: afraid to feel anything, lest it be accompanied by fearsome, guilt inducing, anxiety provoking, out of control emotional complements.
He is thus reduced to experiencing dull stirrings in his soul that he identifies to himself and to others as emotions. Even these are felt only in the presence of someone or something capable of providing the narcissist with his badly needed Narcissistic Supply.
Only when the narcissist is in the overvaluation (idealization) phase of his relationships, does he experience the convulsions that he calls "feelings". These are so transient and fake that they are easily replaced by rage, envy and devaluation. The narcissist really recreates the behaviour patterns of his less than ideal Primary Objects.
Deep inside, the narcissist knows that something is amiss. He does not empathise with other people's feelings. Actually, he holds them in contempt and ridicule. He cannot understand how people are so sentimental, so "irrational" (he identifies being rational with being cool headed and cold blooded).
Often the narcissist believes that other people are "faking it", merely aiming to achieve a goal. He is convinced that their "feelings" are grounded in ulterior, non-emotional, motives. He becomes suspicious, embarrassed, feels compelled to avoid emotion-tinged situations, or, worse, experiences surges of almost uncontrollable aggression in the presence of genuinely expressed sentiments. They remind him how imperfect and poorly equipped he is.
The weaker variety of narcissist tries to emulate and simulate "emotions" – or, at least their expression, the external facet (affect). They mimic and replicate the intricate pantomime that they learn to associate with the existence of feelings. But there are no real emotions there, no emotional correlate.
This is empty affect, devoid of emotion. This being so, the narcissist quickly tires of it, becomes impassive and begins to produce inappropriate affect (e.g., he remains indifferent when grief is the normal reaction). The narcissist subjects his feigned emotions to his cognition. He "decides" that it is appropriate to feel so and so. His "emotions" are invariably the result of analysis, goal setting and planning.
He substitutes "remembering" for "sensing". He relegates his bodily sensations, feelings and emotions to a kind of a memory vault. The short and medium-term memory is exclusively used to store his reactions to his (actual and potential) Narcissistic Supply Sources.
He reacts only to such sources. The narcissist finds it hard to remember or recreate what he ostensibly - though ostentatiously - "felt" (even a short while back) towards a Narcissistic Supply Source once it has ceased to be one. In his attempts to recall his feelings, he draws a mental blank.
It is not that narcissists are incapable of expressing what we would tend to classify as "extreme emotional reactions". They mourn and grieve, rage and smile, excessively "love" and "care". But this is precisely what sets them apart: this rapid movement from one emotional extreme to another and the fact that they never occupy the emotional middle ground.
The narcissist is especially "emotional" when weaned off his drug of Narcissistic Supply. Breaking a habit is always difficult – especially one that defines (and generates) oneself. Getting rid of an addiction is doubly taxing. The narcissist misidentifies these crises with an emotional depth and his self-conviction is so immense, that he mostly succeeds to delude his environment, as well. But a narcissistic crisis (losing a Source of Narcissistic Supply, obtaining an alternative one, moving from one Narcissistic Pathological Space to another) – must never be confused with the real thing, which the narcissist never experiences: emotions.
Many narcissists have "emotional resonance tables". They use words as others use algebraic signs: with meticulousness, with caution, with the precision of the artisan. They sculpt in words the fine tuned reverberations of pain and love and fear. It is the mathematics of emotional grammar, the geometry of the syntax of passions. Devoid of all emotions, narcissists closely monitor people's reactions and adjust their verbal choices accordingly, until their vocabulary resembles that of their listeners. This is as close as narcissists get to empathy.
To summarise, the emotional life of the narcissist is colourless and eventless, as rigidly blind as his disorder, as dead as he. He does feel rage and hurt and inordinate humiliation, envy and fear. These are very dominant, prevalent and recurrent hues in the canvass of his emotional existence. But there is nothing there except these atavistic gut reactions.
Whatever it is that the narcissist experiences as emotions – he experiences in reaction to slights and injuries, real or imagined. His emotions are all reactive, not active. He feels insulted – he sulks. He feels devalued – he rages. He feels ignored – he pouts. He feels humiliated – he lashes out. He feels threatened – he fears. He feels adored – he basks in glory. He is virulently envious of one and all.
The narcissist can appreciate beauty but in a cerebral, cold and "mathematical" way. Many have no mature, adult sex drive to speak of. Their emotional landscape is dim and grey, as though through a glass darkly.
Many narcissists can intelligently discuss those emotions never experienced by them – like empathy, or love – because they make it a point to read a lot and to communicate with people who claim to be experiencing them. Thus, they gradually construct working hypotheses as to what people feel. As far as the narcissist is concerned, it is pointless to try to really understand emotions – but at least these models he does form allow him to better predict people's behaviours and adjust to them.
Narcissists are not envious of others for having emotions. They disdain feelings and sentimental people because they find them to be weak and vulnerable and they deride human frailties and vulnerabilities. Such derision makes the narcissist feel superior and is probably the ossified remains of a defence mechanism gone awry.
Narcissists are afraid of pain. It is the pebble in their Indra's Net – lift it and the whole net moves. Their pains do not come isolated – they constitute families of anguish, tribes of hurt, whole races of agony. The narcissist cannot experience them separately – only collectively.
Narcissism is an effort to contain the ominous onslaught of stale negative emotions, repressed rage, a child's injuries.
Pathological narcissism is useful – this is why it is so resilient and resistant to change. When it is "invented" by the tormented individual, it enhances his functionality and makes life bearable for him. Because it is so successful, it attains religious dimensions – it become rigid, doctrinaire, automatic and ritualistic.
In other words, pathological narcissism becomes a PATTERN of behaviour. This rigidity is like an outer shell, an exoskeleton. It constrains the narcissist and limits him. It is often prohibitive and inhibitive. As a result, the narcissist is afraid to do certain things. He is injured or humiliated when forced to engage in certain activities. He reacts with rage when the mental edifice underlying his disorder is subjected to scrutiny and criticism – no matter how benign.
Narcissism is ridiculous. Narcissists are pompous, grandiose, repulsive and contradictory. There is a serious mismatch between who they really are, their true accomplishments, and how they regard themselves. The narcissist doesn't merely THINK that he is far superior to others. The perception of his superiority is ingrained in him, it is a part of his every mental cell, an all-pervasive sensation, an instinct and a drive.
He feels that he is entitled to special treatment and to outstanding consideration because he is such a unique specimen. He knows this to be true – the same way one knows that one is surrounded by air. It is an integral part of his identity. More integral to him than his body.
This opens a gap – rather, an abyss – between the narcissist and other humans. Because he considers himself so special and so superior, he has no way of knowing how it is to be human, neither the inclination to explore it. In other words, the narcissist cannot and will not empathise.
Can you empathise with an ant? Empathy implies identity or equality with the empathized, both abhorrent to the narcissist. And being perceived by the narcissist to be so inferior, people are reduced to cartoonish, two-dimensional representations of functions. They become instrumental, or useful, or functional, or entertaining, gratifying or infuriating, frustrating or accommodating objects – rather than loving or emotionally responsive.
It leads to ruthlessness and exploitativeness. Narcissists are not "evil" – actually, the narcissist considers himself to be a good person. Many narcissists help people, professionally, or voluntarily. But narcissists are indifferent. They couldn't care less. They help people because it is a way to secure attention, gratitude, adulation and admiration. And because it is the fastest and surest way to get rid of them and their incessant nagging.
The narcissist may realise these unpleasant truths cognitively – but there is no corresponding emotional reaction (emotional correlate) to this realisation. There is no resonance. It is like reading a boring users' manual pertaining to a computer you do not even own. There is no insight, no assimilation of these truths.
Still, to further insulate himself from the improbable possibility of confronting the gulf between reality and grandiose fantasy (the Grandiosity Gap) – the narcissist comes up with the most elaborate mental structure, replete with mechanisms, levers, switches and flickering alarm lights.
Narcissism Isolates the narcissist from the pain of facing reality and allows him to inhabit the fantasyland of ideal perfection and brilliance.
Of course they do. All humans have emotions. It is how we choose to relate to our emotions that matters. The narcissist tends to repress them so deeply that, for all practical purposes, they play no conscious role in his life and conduct, though they play an extraordinarily large unconscious role in determining both.
The narcissist's positive emotions come bundled with very negative ones. This is the outcome of frustration and the consequent transformations of aggression. This frustration is connected to the Primary Objects of the narcissist's childhood (parents and caregivers).
Instead of being provided with the unconditional love that he craved, the narcissist was subjected to totally unpredictable and inexplicable bouts of temper, rage, searing sentimentality, envy, prodding, infusion of guilt and other unhealthy parental emotions and behaviour patterns.
The narcissist reacted by retreating to his private world, where he is omnipotent and omniscient and, therefore, immune to such vicious vicissitudes. He stashed his vulnerable True Self in a deep mental cellar – and outwardly presented to the world a False Self.
But bundling is far easier than unbundling. The narcissist is unable to evoke positive feelings without provoking negative ones. Gradually, he becomes phobic: afraid to feel anything, lest it be accompanied by fearsome, guilt inducing, anxiety provoking, out of control emotional complements.
He is thus reduced to experiencing dull stirrings in his soul that he identifies to himself and to others as emotions. Even these are felt only in the presence of someone or something capable of providing the narcissist with his badly needed Narcissistic Supply.
Only when the narcissist is in the overvaluation (idealization) phase of his relationships, does he experience the convulsions that he calls "feelings". These are so transient and fake that they are easily replaced by rage, envy and devaluation. The narcissist really recreates the behaviour patterns of his less than ideal Primary Objects.
Deep inside, the narcissist knows that something is amiss. He does not empathise with other people's feelings. Actually, he holds them in contempt and ridicule. He cannot understand how people are so sentimental, so "irrational" (he identifies being rational with being cool headed and cold blooded).
Often the narcissist believes that other people are "faking it", merely aiming to achieve a goal. He is convinced that their "feelings" are grounded in ulterior, non-emotional, motives. He becomes suspicious, embarrassed, feels compelled to avoid emotion-tinged situations, or, worse, experiences surges of almost uncontrollable aggression in the presence of genuinely expressed sentiments. They remind him how imperfect and poorly equipped he is.
The weaker variety of narcissist tries to emulate and simulate "emotions" – or, at least their expression, the external facet (affect). They mimic and replicate the intricate pantomime that they learn to associate with the existence of feelings. But there are no real emotions there, no emotional correlate.
This is empty affect, devoid of emotion. This being so, the narcissist quickly tires of it, becomes impassive and begins to produce inappropriate affect (e.g., he remains indifferent when grief is the normal reaction). The narcissist subjects his feigned emotions to his cognition. He "decides" that it is appropriate to feel so and so. His "emotions" are invariably the result of analysis, goal setting and planning.
He substitutes "remembering" for "sensing". He relegates his bodily sensations, feelings and emotions to a kind of a memory vault. The short and medium-term memory is exclusively used to store his reactions to his (actual and potential) Narcissistic Supply Sources.
He reacts only to such sources. The narcissist finds it hard to remember or recreate what he ostensibly - though ostentatiously - "felt" (even a short while back) towards a Narcissistic Supply Source once it has ceased to be one. In his attempts to recall his feelings, he draws a mental blank.
It is not that narcissists are incapable of expressing what we would tend to classify as "extreme emotional reactions". They mourn and grieve, rage and smile, excessively "love" and "care". But this is precisely what sets them apart: this rapid movement from one emotional extreme to another and the fact that they never occupy the emotional middle ground.
The narcissist is especially "emotional" when weaned off his drug of Narcissistic Supply. Breaking a habit is always difficult – especially one that defines (and generates) oneself. Getting rid of an addiction is doubly taxing. The narcissist misidentifies these crises with an emotional depth and his self-conviction is so immense, that he mostly succeeds to delude his environment, as well. But a narcissistic crisis (losing a Source of Narcissistic Supply, obtaining an alternative one, moving from one Narcissistic Pathological Space to another) – must never be confused with the real thing, which the narcissist never experiences: emotions.
Many narcissists have "emotional resonance tables". They use words as others use algebraic signs: with meticulousness, with caution, with the precision of the artisan. They sculpt in words the fine tuned reverberations of pain and love and fear. It is the mathematics of emotional grammar, the geometry of the syntax of passions. Devoid of all emotions, narcissists closely monitor people's reactions and adjust their verbal choices accordingly, until their vocabulary resembles that of their listeners. This is as close as narcissists get to empathy.
To summarise, the emotional life of the narcissist is colourless and eventless, as rigidly blind as his disorder, as dead as he. He does feel rage and hurt and inordinate humiliation, envy and fear. These are very dominant, prevalent and recurrent hues in the canvass of his emotional existence. But there is nothing there except these atavistic gut reactions.
Whatever it is that the narcissist experiences as emotions – he experiences in reaction to slights and injuries, real or imagined. His emotions are all reactive, not active. He feels insulted – he sulks. He feels devalued – he rages. He feels ignored – he pouts. He feels humiliated – he lashes out. He feels threatened – he fears. He feels adored – he basks in glory. He is virulently envious of one and all.
The narcissist can appreciate beauty but in a cerebral, cold and "mathematical" way. Many have no mature, adult sex drive to speak of. Their emotional landscape is dim and grey, as though through a glass darkly.
Many narcissists can intelligently discuss those emotions never experienced by them – like empathy, or love – because they make it a point to read a lot and to communicate with people who claim to be experiencing them. Thus, they gradually construct working hypotheses as to what people feel. As far as the narcissist is concerned, it is pointless to try to really understand emotions – but at least these models he does form allow him to better predict people's behaviours and adjust to them.
Narcissists are not envious of others for having emotions. They disdain feelings and sentimental people because they find them to be weak and vulnerable and they deride human frailties and vulnerabilities. Such derision makes the narcissist feel superior and is probably the ossified remains of a defence mechanism gone awry.
Narcissists are afraid of pain. It is the pebble in their Indra's Net – lift it and the whole net moves. Their pains do not come isolated – they constitute families of anguish, tribes of hurt, whole races of agony. The narcissist cannot experience them separately – only collectively.
Narcissism is an effort to contain the ominous onslaught of stale negative emotions, repressed rage, a child's injuries.
Pathological narcissism is useful – this is why it is so resilient and resistant to change. When it is "invented" by the tormented individual, it enhances his functionality and makes life bearable for him. Because it is so successful, it attains religious dimensions – it become rigid, doctrinaire, automatic and ritualistic.
In other words, pathological narcissism becomes a PATTERN of behaviour. This rigidity is like an outer shell, an exoskeleton. It constrains the narcissist and limits him. It is often prohibitive and inhibitive. As a result, the narcissist is afraid to do certain things. He is injured or humiliated when forced to engage in certain activities. He reacts with rage when the mental edifice underlying his disorder is subjected to scrutiny and criticism – no matter how benign.
Narcissism is ridiculous. Narcissists are pompous, grandiose, repulsive and contradictory. There is a serious mismatch between who they really are, their true accomplishments, and how they regard themselves. The narcissist doesn't merely THINK that he is far superior to others. The perception of his superiority is ingrained in him, it is a part of his every mental cell, an all-pervasive sensation, an instinct and a drive.
He feels that he is entitled to special treatment and to outstanding consideration because he is such a unique specimen. He knows this to be true – the same way one knows that one is surrounded by air. It is an integral part of his identity. More integral to him than his body.
This opens a gap – rather, an abyss – between the narcissist and other humans. Because he considers himself so special and so superior, he has no way of knowing how it is to be human, neither the inclination to explore it. In other words, the narcissist cannot and will not empathise.
Can you empathise with an ant? Empathy implies identity or equality with the empathized, both abhorrent to the narcissist. And being perceived by the narcissist to be so inferior, people are reduced to cartoonish, two-dimensional representations of functions. They become instrumental, or useful, or functional, or entertaining, gratifying or infuriating, frustrating or accommodating objects – rather than loving or emotionally responsive.
It leads to ruthlessness and exploitativeness. Narcissists are not "evil" – actually, the narcissist considers himself to be a good person. Many narcissists help people, professionally, or voluntarily. But narcissists are indifferent. They couldn't care less. They help people because it is a way to secure attention, gratitude, adulation and admiration. And because it is the fastest and surest way to get rid of them and their incessant nagging.
The narcissist may realise these unpleasant truths cognitively – but there is no corresponding emotional reaction (emotional correlate) to this realisation. There is no resonance. It is like reading a boring users' manual pertaining to a computer you do not even own. There is no insight, no assimilation of these truths.
Still, to further insulate himself from the improbable possibility of confronting the gulf between reality and grandiose fantasy (the Grandiosity Gap) – the narcissist comes up with the most elaborate mental structure, replete with mechanisms, levers, switches and flickering alarm lights.
Narcissism Isolates the narcissist from the pain of facing reality and allows him to inhabit the fantasyland of ideal perfection and brilliance.
sâmbătă, 10 mai 2008
Feelings and politics
The politics behind telling you "how to feel"
Recent examples of how political authority under President George W. Bush demands feelings like patriotism or demands reverence for a narrow religious bias and concomitantly creates shame and fear of excommunication from power if you don't play along, have stunned many people. Such demands can only be made successfully under fear -- i.e. when we have been made or manipulated to feel afraid -- when fear is heightened in a group, we are more easily shamed into obedience. Disobediance is then portraied as jeopardizing the safety of all. Hitler knew about and used that psychological phenominon almost like a law of physics.
When we feel free and safe to 'feel what we feel', not necessarily to "act what we feel", but to receive, acknowledge and endevour to understand our feelings and their origin, we are stimulated to increase communication and understanding. Conversely, deception and the ensuing confusion and fear of punitive authority, force both communication and understanding to go underground... the hallmark of dictatorial regimes.
With this dictionary, we try to bring basic feelings back to basic situations -- no shoulds. There is no better way of doing this than to study very young children: how do they react to situations, what are their feelings informing them of ? and how do they express those feelings ?
When you read the feeling definitions, think of them as the gift of information that your body provides. How we act on this information is up to each individual in accordance with competence, knowledge, goals, courage, determination etc. But be aware that those who have an interest to lead you in the direction of their interest (politicians, priests, spindoctors, teachers or experts in general) will attempt to define those feelings for you. So read, as always, with discrimination and see what rings true for you.
Recent examples of how political authority under President George W. Bush demands feelings like patriotism or demands reverence for a narrow religious bias and concomitantly creates shame and fear of excommunication from power if you don't play along, have stunned many people. Such demands can only be made successfully under fear -- i.e. when we have been made or manipulated to feel afraid -- when fear is heightened in a group, we are more easily shamed into obedience. Disobediance is then portraied as jeopardizing the safety of all. Hitler knew about and used that psychological phenominon almost like a law of physics.
When we feel free and safe to 'feel what we feel', not necessarily to "act what we feel", but to receive, acknowledge and endevour to understand our feelings and their origin, we are stimulated to increase communication and understanding. Conversely, deception and the ensuing confusion and fear of punitive authority, force both communication and understanding to go underground... the hallmark of dictatorial regimes.
With this dictionary, we try to bring basic feelings back to basic situations -- no shoulds. There is no better way of doing this than to study very young children: how do they react to situations, what are their feelings informing them of ? and how do they express those feelings ?
When you read the feeling definitions, think of them as the gift of information that your body provides. How we act on this information is up to each individual in accordance with competence, knowledge, goals, courage, determination etc. But be aware that those who have an interest to lead you in the direction of their interest (politicians, priests, spindoctors, teachers or experts in general) will attempt to define those feelings for you. So read, as always, with discrimination and see what rings true for you.
Feelings and Emotions
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Feelings and emotions in your dreams
Fear and anxiety are the most commonly expressed emotions in dreams. Anger ranks next. Fear, anger, and sadness occur twice as often as pleasant emotions. It is important to note that the feelings we experience in dreams are not symbols of something else but are reflections of our real feelings. Such feelings may not have been repressed during the day and as a result are coming out in your dreams.
Abhorrence
To dream that you abhor a person, denotes a strange dislike for some person, and your suspicions of his integrity and honesty will prove correct. Difficult times are also ahead for you in the near future.
To dream that you are being abhorred by others, symbolizes that your good intentions to others will subside into selfishness.
Afraid
To dream that you are afraid to continue on some situation, signifies trouble in the home and failure in business.
To see others afraid in your dream, signifies that some friend will be too wrapped up in his or her own problems then to help you out with some favor.
Aggression
To dream that you exhibit aggression in your dream, denotes repressed sexual needs. It is also a reflection of conflict in your waking life.
Amorous
To dream that you are amorous, denotes that your personal desires and illicit pleasures may land you into trouble. You will find yourself engulfed in scandal.
To dream that others are amorous, signifies that others will try to persuade you into illicit pleasures and abandon your own sense of morality.
To see animals amorous in your dream, signifies that you will engage in degrading pleasures will fast men or women.
Anger
To dream that you are feeling much anger, forewarns that you will be involved in a terrible and tense situation. Your loved ones will let your down and disappoint you. It also forewarns that once solid ties will be broken. Being angry in your dream may have been carried over from your waking life. In your dream, you may have a safe outlet to express such emotions. You may have some suppressed anger and aggression that you have not consciously acknowledged.
To dream that others are angry with you. signifies your struggle to regain their lasting favor and friendships.
Animosity
To dream that there is animosity towards you, suggests that you need to reevaluate a situation and rethink your issues of morality.
Annoyed
To feel annoyed in your dream, signifies that rivals are at work against you.
Anxiety
To dream that you are experiencing some anxiety in some affair, is a reflection of what you may be feeling during your waking life. You may have repressed thoughts, unexpressed emotions, resentment, and hostility that are triggering your anxiety dream. This dream also denotes that you are disastrous mixing business with pleasure.
Betrayal
To dream that you have been betrayed, represents your suspicions about a particular person, relationship or situation. This dream often occurs when you are having feelings of insecurity and are faced with major commitments in your life at the same time.
Confusion
To dream that you are confused, may reflect your true confused state of mind and the nonsensical events of your dream. Isolate the single element in your dream that is confusing to you and analyze the meaning of that particular symbol. Alternatively, dreams of confusion signifies that you are being pulled in opposite directions or do not know which viewpoint is right.
Delight
To dream that you are experiencing delight, signifies a favorable and positive turn of events and much pleasantness.
Depression
To feel depressed in your dream, foretells of the coming of bad news.
Despair
To dream that you are in despair, signifies that you will have many hardships and experience much cruelties in the working world.
To dream that others are in despair, denotes that some friend or relative will be in great distress and find themselves in a unhappy situation.
Devotion
To dream that you are showing your devotion to your beliefs, serves as a reminder that nothing will be gained by deceit.
Disapproval
To dream of disapproval, indicates that you are rejecting or ignoring some aspect of yourself. It may also represent your own feelings of self-worth and being accepted.
Distress
To dream that you or others are in distress, suggest that things will turn out better than you expected. You will find that all your worries were for nothing and need to lighten up. Embarrassment
To dream that you are embarrassed, signifies hidden weaknesses and fears. You may feel that your self-confidence has been undermined. This dream also suggests of insecurities about your sexuality.
Emotionless
To dream that you are emotionless, suggests that you are closing yourself off from those around you. You may be neglecting your own feelings and should start paying more attention to them.
Emotions
Emotions expressed in dreams is a way for people to act out their feelings which they would not normally express if they were awake. This provides a "safe" outlet for these emotions instead of letting them be pent up.
Envy
To dream that you are envious of others, signifies that you will make warm friends by your unselfish deference to the wishes of others.
To dream that you are being envied by others, denotes inconveniences from friends who are overanxious to please you.
Fear
To dream that you feel fear, signifies that you achievements will not be as successful as you had anticipated. You are having anxieties in certain circumstances of your life. However, your worries will be temporary and short-lived.
Frustration
To dream that you feel frustrated, represents your difficulty in coping with a situation in your daily life. It may reflect your concerns that your life is not going in the direction you want.
Guilt
To dream that you feel guilty about something, relates to how you are handling your successes and failures or competence and incompetence. You may feel undeserving of your achievements or on the other hand, you may feel that you have let other down. Alternatively, it is also symbolic of repressed and negative feelings that you may have about yourself.
Happy
To dream that you are happy, may be a compensatory dream and is often a dream of the contrary. You may be trying to compensate for the sadness or stress in your waking life. Hunger
To dream that feel hunger, signifies a feeling of unfulfilment. You may be starving for recognition or longing to achieve something that you have desired for awhile.
Jealousy
To dream that you are jealous of another's fortune, signifies misfortune and difficulties in climbing the social ladder.
To dream that you are jealous of another person, signifies that such feelings may be carried over from your waking life This dream may reveal you unconscious feelings of jealousy toward that particular person.
Joy
To dream that you are joyful, denotes harmony amongst friends and loved ones.
Lazy
To dream that you are feeling lazy, signifies that you will make a terrible error in a business deal resulting in bitter disappointments.
To dream that you lover is lazy, signifies that you will have many rocky and insecure love relationships.
Love
To dream of love of being in love, suggests intense feelings carried over from a waking relationship. It implies happiness and contentment with what you have and where you are in life. On the other hand, you may not be getting enough love in your daily life. We naturally long for the sense to belong and to be accepted.
Malice
To dream that you have malice toward others, signifies that others will look down on you because of your ill temper. You need to control your temper.
To dream that others have malice towards you, denotes a false friend who is working on harming you.
Melancholy
To dream that you are feeling melancholy, signifies disappointment in an event that was assumed to be a success.
To see others melancholy in your dream, signifies unpleasant interruptions in your affairs that need to be tended to immediately.
Merry
To dream that you are merry or in merry company, signifies a time of pleasant engagements and profitable affairs.
Morose
To dream that you are morose, denotes that you pessimistic about the world around you and find that it is going terribly wrong.
To see others morose in your dream, signifies unpleasant situations and disagreeable companions.
Mortification
To dream that you feel mortified over your conduct, signifies that will find yourself in an embarrassing situation before those whom you wish to appear most honorable.
Nausea
To dream that you have nausea, signifies that you are suffering from a sickening situation or condition in which you are trying to rid yourself of.
Numbness
To dream that you feel numbness, signifies illness and unfavorable conditions in your health. Pain
To dream that you are in pain, signifies that you are being too hard on yourself with regards to a situation that was out of your control. It may also be a true reflection of real pain that exists somewhere in your body.
Panic
To dream that you are in a panic, indicates a lack of control and power in your life. You may be feeling helpless in some situation or unable to make a clear decision.
Paranoia
To dream that you are paranoid, indicates your hesitance in moving forward in some situation or relationship. You are not ready for that major step in your life and are overcome with fear and suspicion.
Peace
To feel peace in your dream, indicates an end or a resolution to an emotional issue or inner conflict. It may signal and end of a cycle and the pause before the beginning of a new endeavor. It also suggest that you have reached a new level of stability and calmness. Alternatively, the maddening quietness may refer to the calm before the storm.
Pride
To dream that you have pride, denotes that you will have to stand up and fight against attacks to your integrity. You will be challenged.
To dream that others are displaying pride, signifies that you will soon be invited to be part of a project or accepted into a group.
Rage
To dream that you are in rage, signifies that your bad temper and negative outbursts may lead to loss of friends.
To see others in rage in your dream, signifies an ill turn in your business and social affairs.
To dream that your lover is in rage, denotes an unharmonious relationship stemming from doubts and misunderstandings.
Rejection
To dream that you are rejecting something, indicates that there are feelings or situations that you want to be rid of. Alternatively, you may be refusing to accept a situation that is being imposed and forced upon you.
To dream that you are being rejected, signifies a lack of self-worth and alienation of others.
Sad
To dream that you are sad, signifies a positive turn of events. It is generally a good dream foretelling good things are about to happen in your near future.
Suffocation
To dream that you feel suffocated, signifies that you are feeling smothered by some situation or relationship. It also forewarns that your current love relationship will end in an extremely bitter break up.
Temptation
To dream of temptations, signifies that an envious person will try to turn your friends against you and cause you much problems.
Terror
To dream that you are in terror, forewarns of disappointments and loss.
To see others in terror in your dream, signifies that the unhappiness of friends will impact you as well.
Tipsy
To dream that you are tipsy, signifies your carefree nature and jovial disposition.
To see others tipsy in your dream, denotes that you need to be careful in who you associate yourself with. Their actions may reflect on your own character.
Warmth
To feel warmth in your dream, signifies contentment and satisfaction in your accomplishments. It also symbolizes hope and unconditional love.
Yearn
To dream that you are being yearned for, indicates that you will soon be greeted with a proposal for marriage.
To dream that you yearn for someone, foretells that you will find joy and contentment with your present love.
miercuri, 23 aprilie 2008
More Emotion
First published Mon Feb 3, 2003; substantive revision Tue Jun 5, 2007
No aspect of our mental life is more important to the quality and meaning of our existence than emotions. They are what make life worth living, or sometimes ending. So it is not surprising that most of the great classical philosophers—Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Descartes, Hobbes, Hume—had recognizable theories of emotion, conceived as responses to certain sorts of events of concern to a subject, triggering bodily changes and typically motivating characteristic behavior. What is surprising is that in much of the twentieth-century philosophers of mind and psychologists tended to neglect them—perhaps because the sheer variety of phenomena covered by the word "emotion" and its closest neighbors tends to discourage tidy theory. In recent years, however, emotions have once again become the focus of vigorous interest in philosophy, as well as in other branches of cognitive science. In view of the proliferation of increasingly fruitful exchanges between researches of different stripes, it is no longer useful to speak of the philosophy of emotion in isolation from the approaches of other disciplines, particularly psychology, neurology, evolutionary biology, and even economics. While it is quite impossible to do justice to those approaches here, some sidelong glances in their direction will aim to suggest their philosophical importance.I begin by outlining some of the ways that philosophers have conceived of the place of emotions in the topography of the mind, particularly in their relation to bodily states, to motivation, and to beliefs and desires, as well as some of the ways in which they have envisaged the relation between different emotions. Most emotions have an intentional structure: we shall need to say something about what that means. Psychology and more recently evolutionary biology have offered a number of theories of emotions, stressing their function in the conduct of life. Philosophers have been especially partial to cognitivist theories, emphasizing analogies either with propositional judgments or with perception. But different theories implicitly posit different ontologies of emotion, and there has been some dispute about what emotions really are, and indeed whether they are any kind of thing at all. Emotions also raise normative questions: about the extent to which they can be said to be rational, or can contribute to rationality. In that regard the question of our knowledge of our own emotions is especially problematic, as it seems they are both the object of our most immediate awareness and the most powerful source of our capacity for self-deception. This results in a particularly ambivalent relation between emotions and morality. I will conclude with a recapitulation of the main positions defended by some three dozen philosophers of emotion in the past half century.
1 Emotions and the Topography of the Mind
2. Feeling Theories
3. Emotions and Intentional Objects
4. Psychological and Evolutionary Approaches
5. Cognitivist Theories
6. Perceptual Theories
7. The Ontology of Emotions
8. Rationality and Emotions
9. Emotions and Self-knowledge
10. Morality and Emotions
11. Summary and Guide to the Recent Literature
12. Conclusion: Adequacy Conditions on Theories of Emotion
Bibliography
1. Emotions and the Topography of the Mind
How do emotions fit into different conceptions of the mind? One model, advocated by Descartes as well as by many contemporary psychologists, posits a few basic emotions out of which all others are compounded. An alternative model views every emotion as consisting in, or at least including, some irreducibly specific component not compounded of anything simpler. Again, emotions might form an indefinitely broad continuum comprising a small number of finite dimensions (e.g. level of arousal, intensity, pleasure or aversion, self- or other-directedness, etc.). In much the way that color arises from the visual system's comparison of retinal cones, whose limited sensitivity ranges correspond roughly to primary hues, we might then hope to find relatively simple biological explanations for the rich variety of emotions. Rigid boundaries between them would be arbitrary. Alternative models, based in physiology or evolutionary psychology, have posited modular subsystems or agents the function of which is to coordinate the fulfilment of basic needs, such as mating, affiliation, defense and the avoidance of predators. (Panksepp 1998, Cosmides and Tooby 2000).To date cognitive science does not seem to have provided any crucial tests to decide between competing models of the mind. An eclectic approach therefore seems warranted. What does seem well established in the light of cross-cultural research is that a small number of emotions have inter-translatable names and universally recognizable expressions. According to Ekman and Friesen (1989) these are happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust (the last two of which, however, some researchers consider too simple to be called emotions) (Panksepp 1998). Other emotions are not so easily recognizable cross-culturally, and some expressions are almost as local as dialects. But then this is an issue on which cognitive science alone should not, perhaps, be accorded the last word: what to a neurologist might be classed as two tokens of the same emotion type might seem to have little in common under the magnifying lens of a Marcel Proust.Another range of models propose mutually conflicting ways of locating emotion within the general economy of the mind. Some treat emotion as one of many separate faculties. For Plato in the Republic, there seemed to have been three basic components of the human mind: the reasoning, the desiring, and the emotive parts. For Aristotle, the emotions are not represented as constituting a separate agency or module, but they had even greater importance, particularly in the moral life, our capacity for which Aristotle regarded as largely a result of learning to feel the right emotions in the right circumstances. Hume's notorious dictum that reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions also placed the emotions at the very center of character and agency. For Spinoza, emotions are not lodged in a separate body in conflict with the soul, since soul and body are aspects of a single reality; but emotions, as affections of the soul, make the difference between the best and the worst lives, as they either increase the soul's power to act, or diminish that power. In other models, emotions as a category are apt to be sucked into either of two other faculties of mind. They are then treated as mere composites or offshoots of those other faculties: a peculiar kind of belief, or a vague kind of desire or will. The Stoics made emotions into judgments about the value of things incidental to an agent's virtue, to which we should therefore remain perfectly indifferent. Hobbes assimilated "passions" to specific appetites or aversions. Kant too saw emotions as essentially conative phenomena, but grouped them with inclinations enticing the will to act on motives other than that of duty.Twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy and psychology have also tended to incorporate emotions into other, better understood mental categories. Under the influence of a "tough-minded" ideology committed to behaviorism, it seemed easier to look for adequate theories of action or will, as well as theories of belief or knowledge, than to construct adequate theories of emotion. Economic models of rational decision and agency inspired by Bayesian theory are essentially assimilative models, viewing emotion either as a species of belief, or as a species of desire.That enviably resilient Bayesian model has been cracked, in the eyes of many philosophers, by such refractory phenomena as akrasia or "weakness of will." In cases of akrasia, traditional descriptive rationality seems to be violated, insofar as the "strongest" desire does not win, even when paired with the appropriate belief (Davidson 1980). Emotion is ready to pick up the slack—if only we had a coherent theory of how it does it.It is one thing, however, to recognize the need for a theory of mind that finds a place for the unique role of emotions, and quite another to construct one. Emotions vary so much in a number of dimensions—transparency, intensity, behavioral expression, object-directedness, and susceptibility to rational assessment—as to cast doubt on the assumption that they have anything in common. However, while this variation may have led philosophers to steer clear of emotions in the past, many philosophers are now rising to the challenge. The explanatory inadequacy of theories that shortchange emotion is becoming increasingly apparent, and, as Peter Goldie (2000) observes, it is no longer the case that emotion is treated as a poor relation in the philosophy of mind.
2. Feeling Theories
The simplest theory of emotions, and perhaps the theory most representative of common sense, is that emotions are simply a class of feelings, differentiated from sensation and proprioceptions by their experienced quality. William James proposed a variant of this view (commonly known as the "James-Lange" theory of emotion, after James and Carl G. Lange) according to which emotions are specifically feelings caused by changes in physiological conditions relating to the autonomic and motor functions. When we perceive that we are in danger, for example, this perception sets off a collection of bodily responses, and our awareness of these responses is what constitutes fear. James thus maintained that "we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and [it is] not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be" (James 1884, 190).One problem with this theory is that it is unable to give an adequate account of the differences between emotions. This objection was first voiced by Walter Cannon (1929). According to James, what distinguishes emotions is the fact that each involves the perception of a unique set of bodily changes. Cannon claimed, however, that the visceral reactions characteristic of distinct emotions such as fear and anger are identical, and so these reactions cannot be what allow us to tell emotions apart. The same conclusion is usually drawn from an oft-cited experiment performed by Stanley Schacter and Jerome Singer (1962). Subjects in their study were injected with epinephrine, a stimulant of the sympathetic system. Schacter and Singer found that these subjects tended to interpret the arousal they experienced either as anger or as euphoria, depending on the type of situation they found themselves in. Some were placed in a room where an actor was being angry; others were placed in a room where an actor was being silly and euphoric. In both cases the subjects' mood tended to follow that of the actor. The conclusion most frequently drawn is that, although some forms of general arousal are easily labeled in terms of some emotional state, there is no hope of finding in physiological states any principle of distinction between specific emotions. The differentiae of specific emotions are not physiological, but cognitive or something else.Subsequent research has shown that a limited number of emotions do, in fact, have significantly different bodily profiles. (LeDoux 1996; Panksepp 1998) However, bodily changes and the feelings accompanying these changes get us only part way towards an adequate taxonomy. To account for the differences between guilt, embarrassment, and shame, for example, a plausible theory will have to look beyond physiology and common-sense phenomenology.Another problem with feeling theories is that they tempt one to treat emotions as brute facts, no doubt susceptible of biological or psychological explanation but not otherwise capable of being rationalized. Emotions, however, are capable of being not only explained, but also justified—they are closely related to the reasons that give rise to them. If someone angers me, I can cite my antagonist's deprecatory tone; if someone makes me jealous, I can point to his poaching on my emotional property. (Taylor 1975).Both of these problems—that of differentiating individual emotions, and that of accounting for emotions' various ties to rationality—can be traced, at least in part, to a more fundamental oversight. Feeling theories, by assimilating emotions to sensations, fail to take account of the fact that emotions are typically directed at intentional objects. This defect is to some extent mitigated in what might be regarded as a more sophisticated "feeling theory" elaborated by Antonio Damasio (1999). On Damasio's view the capacity for emotions involves a capacity for the brain to monitor the body's past and hypothetical responses, both in the autonomic and the voluntary systems, in terms of "somatic markers". The association of characteristic bodily states with past and hypothetical experiences and responses establishes some connection between the emotion and the absent world, but falls short of fully explicating the intentional nature of emotion.
3. Emotions and Intentional ObjectsWhat does a mood, such as free-floating depression or euphoria, have in common with an episode of indignation whose reasons can be precisely articulated? The first seems to have as its object nothing and everything, and often admits of no particular justification; the second has a long story to tell, typically involving other people and what they have done or said. Not only these people, but the relevant facts about the situations involved, as well as some of the special facts about those situations, aspects of those facts, the causal role played by these aspects, and even the typical aims of the actions motivated by the emotions can all in some context or other be labeled objects of emotion. The wide range of possible objects is suggested by the many different ways we fill in ascriptions of emotions. If someone is indignant, then there is some object o or proposition p such that the person is indignant at or with o, about p or that p, because of p, or in virtue of p.This variety has led to a good deal of confusion. A long-standing debate, for example, concerns the extent to which the objects of emotions are to be identified with their causes. This identification seems plausible; yet it is easy to construct examples in which being the cause of an emotion is intuitively neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for its being its object: if A gets annoyed at B for some entirely trivial matter, drunkenness may have caused A's annoyance, yet it is in no sense its object. Its object may be some innocent remark of B's, which occasioned the annoyance but which it would be misleading to regard as its cause. In fact the object of the annoyance may be a certain insulting quality in B's remark which is, as a matter of fact, entirely imaginary and therefore could not possibly be its true cause.The right way to deal with these complexities is to embrace them. We need a taxonomy of the different sorts of possible emotional objects. We might then distinguish different types of emotions, not on the basis of their qualitative feel, but—at least in part—according to the different complex structures of their object relations. Many emotions, such as love, necessarily involve a target, or actual particular at which they are directed. Others, such as sadness, do not. On the other hand, although a number of aspects of the loved one may motivate attentional focus, efforts to find a propositional object for love have been unconvincing. (Kraut 1986, Rorty 1988). Sadness may or may not focus on a propositional object; regret, by contrast, cannot be described without specifying such an object. Depression or elation can lack all three kinds of object. Objectless emotions share many properties with other emotions, especially in their physiological and motivational aspects, but they might more properly be classified as moods rather than full-fledged emotions. Moods typically facilitate certain ranges of object-directed emotions, but they form a class apart.Finally, while different emotions may or may not have these various sorts of objects, every emotion has a formal object if it has any object. A formal object is a property implicitly ascribed by the emotion to its target, focus or propositional object, in virtue of which the emotion can be seen as intelligible. My fear of a dog, for example, construes a number of the dog's features (its salivating maw, its ferocious bark) as being frightening, and it is my perception of the dog as frightening that makes my emotion fear, rather than some other emotion. The formal object associated with a given emotion is essential to the definition of that particular emotion. This explains the appearance of tautology in the specification any formal object (I am disgusted because it is disgusting); but it is also, in part, what allows us to speak of emotions being appropriate or inappropriate. If the dog obstructing my path is a shitzu, my fear is mistaken: the target of my fear fails to fit fear's formal object. As we shall see below in section 10 below, appropriateness in this sense does not entail moral correctness; but it makes the emotion intelligible even when it is abhorrent. Thus racist disgust, while obviously morally inappropriate, is nevertheless intelligible in terms of its link to paradigm cases of disgust.
4. Psychological and Evolutionary Approaches
That emotions typically have formal objects highlights another important feature of emotional experience which feeling theories neglect, and which other psychological theories attempt to accommodate: emotions involve evaluations. If someone insults me and I become angry, his impertinence will be the aspect of his behavior that fits the formal object of anger: I only become angry once I construe the person's remark as a slight; the specific nature of my emotion's formal object is a function of my appraisal of the situation. Magna Arnold (1960) introduced the notion of appraisal into psychology, characterizing it as the process through which the significance of a situation for an individual is determined. Appraisal gives rise to attraction or aversion, and emotion is equated with this "felt tendency toward anything intuitively appraised as good (beneficial), or away from anything intuitively appraised as bad (harmful)" (171). Subsequent appraisal theories accept the broad features of Arnold's account, and differ mainly in emphasis. Richard Lazarus (1991) makes the strong claim that appraisals are both necessary and sufficient for emotion, and sees the identity of particular emotions as being completely determined by the patterns of appraisal giving rise to them. Nico Frijda (1986) takes the patterns of action readiness following appraisals to be what characterize different emotions, but departs from Arnold in not characterizing these patterns solely in terms of attraction and aversion. Klaus Scherer and his Geneva school have elaborated appraisal theories into sophisticated models that anatomize different emotions in terms of some eighteen or more dimensions of appraisal. Emotions turn out to be reliably correlated, if not identified, with patterns of such complex appraisals. (Scherer et al., 2001). Appraisal theories can be described as taking a functional approach to emotion, insofar as appraisals lead to reactions whose function is to deal with specific situation types having some significance for an individual (Scherer 2006). This approach suggests that the space of emotions can be conceptualized as multidimensional. In practice, however, so-called dimensional theories simplify the problem of representation by reducing these to just two or three (Russell 2003). Typically these include 'arousal' and 'valence'. This is handy, but tends to flatten out many distinct ways in which one might classify emotional valence as 'positive' or 'negative'.Other theories consider the function of emotions more broadly, and ask, not why we should have particular emotions on specific occasions, but rather why we should have particular emotions at all. This question is often given an evolutionary answer: emotions (or at least many of them) are adaptations whose purpose is to solve basic ecological problems facing organisms (Plutchik 1980; Frank 1988). Darwin (1998[1896]) himself was concerned not so much with the question of how our emotions might have evolved, but rather why they should have the forms of expression that they do. Emotional expressions, he thought, once served particular functions (e.g. baring teeth in anger to prepare for attack), but now accompany particular emotions because of their usefulness in communicating these emotions to others. Paul Ekman (1972), inspired by Darwin's approach, takes emotional expressions to be important parts of "affect programs"—complex responses found in all human populations, which are controlled by mechanisms operating below the level of consciousness. Much research has been done on this group of emotions (usually listed as happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust) and scientifically-minded philosophers often restrict their discussions of emotion to the affect programs, since these are those most well understood of all emotional phenomena (Griffiths 1997; DeLancey 2001; Prinz 2004). However, the affect program model leaves out a good deal. In particular, it ignores those emotions which involve higher cognitive processes, such as jealousy, envy, and Schadenfreude. It is these sorts of emotions which many philosophers have made the focus of their own theories of emotion. The research program of evolutionary psychology (Cosmides et al. 2000) goes some way to filling this lacuna, and emphasizes the modularity that is likely to result on the plausible speculation that different social and psychological emotional functions have been shaped relatively independently by natural selection. The mechanisms elaborated by natural selection in the context of competitive survival, dominance, mating and affiliation are not necessarily harmonious. Philosophers, for their part, have devoted a good deal of attention to the analysis of more subtle differences between "higher" emotions. (Ben-Ze'ev 2000). This has led many philosophers to stress cognitive aspects of emotions.
5. Cognitivist Theories
Most contemporary philosophical theories of emotion resemble psychological appraisal theories, characterizing emotions primarily in terms of their associated cognitions. What distinguishes these "cognitivist" theories is their particular understanding of these cognitions. While appraisal theorists generally allow that the cognitive processes underlying emotion can be either conscious or unconscious, and can involve either propositional or non-propositional content, cognitivists typically claim that emotions involve propositional attitudes. Many emotions are specified in terms of propositions: one can't be angry with someone unless one believes that person guilty of some offense; one can't be envious unless one believes that someone else has something good in her possession. Proponents of cognitivism universalize this feature of certain emotions, and maintain that in order to have an emotion, one must always have some sort of attitude directed at a proposition.The most parsimonious type of cognitivist theory follows the Stoics in identifying emotions with judgments. Robert Solomon (1980), Jerome Neu (2000) and Martha Nussbaum (2001) take this approach. My anger at someone simply is the judgment that I have been wronged by that person. Other cognitivist theories introduce further elements into their analyses. Emotions have been described as sets of beliefs and desires (Marks 1982), affect-laden judgments (Broad 1971; Lyons 1980), and as complexes of beliefs, desires, and feelings (Oakley 1992).Cognitivist theories have faced criticism along a number of fronts. Deigh (1994) has objected that the view of emotions as propositional attitudes has the effect of excluding animals and infants lacking language. Others have argued that if emotions always involve the standard propositional attitudes, namely belief and desire, then an account of the rationality of emotions will collapse into an account of what it is for those standard propositional attitudes to be rational: but emotional rationality is not reducible to the rationality of beliefs or desires (de Sousa 1987; Ben-Ze'ev 2000; Goldie 2000; Elster 2003). Another criticism, stressed by Wollheim (1999) draws upon a difference between transient mental states and mental dispositions. Emotions, like beliefs and desires, can exist either as occurrent events (jealousy of a rival at a party) or as persisting modifications of the mind (a tendency to feel jealousy). However, dispositional beliefs have a straightforward connection with their occurrent manifestations: if I have a standing belief that the world is round, for example, then I will assent to this proposition on particular occasions (sincere avowal of desires also counts as evidence for underlying dispositions, though the connection is not as tight). Dispositional emotions, on the other hand, do not have tailor-made forms of expression, but can be manifested in a whole diverse range of behavior.A frequent objection made to cognitivist theories is the "fear of flying" objection: propositional attitudes are neither necessary nor sufficient for the existence of an emotion, since I may be well aware that flying is the safest means of transport and yet suffer fear of flying. (Stocker 1992). I may feel a twinge of suspicion towards my butler, and yet believe him to be utterly trustworthy; conversely, I may judge that he is up to no good, and yet feel nothing in the way of emotion. These examples suggest an analogy with perceptual illusions, which a correct belief sometimes quite fails to dispel. A cognitivist might reply that this objection merely establishes that the propositional content of emotion (like the propositional content of perception) differs from the propositional content of belief, not that emotions have no propositional content at all. It remains that even if perceptions necessarily have propositional content, they cannot be assimilated to belief: so it seems to be with emotion. Furthermore, it is not obvious that the content of perceptions or emotions are exhausted by their propositional content (Peacocke 2001). Similarly several theorists insist that experiences of emotion have content beyond any propositional content. (Goldie 2000; Wollheim 2000; Charland 2002; Tappolet 2003).
6. Perceptual Theories
A crucial mandate of cognitivist theories is to avert the charge that emotions are merely "subjective." But propositional attitudes are not the only cognitive states. A more basic feature of cognition is that is has a "mind-to-world direction of fit." The expression is meant to sum up the contrast between cognition and the conative orientation, in which success is defined in terms of the opposite, world-to-mind, direction of fit (Searle 1983). We will or desire what does not yet exist, and deem ourselves successful if the world is brought into line with the mind's plan.A view ascribing to emotions a true mind-to-world direction of fit, inspired by the model of perception, would involve a criterion of success that depended on correctness with respect to some objective property. To take this approach is to give a particular answer to a question posed long ago in Plato's Euthyphro (the question, as originally put forward, concerned the nature of piety, but it extends to values in general): Do we love X—mutatis mutandis for the other emotions—because X is lovable, or do we declare X to be lovable merely because we love it? The first alternative is the objectivist one, encouraged by the analogy of perception. It requires that we define clearly the relevant sense of ‘objectivity’. Specifically it promises a valid analogy between some of the ways in which we can speak of perception as aspiring to objectivity and ways in which we can say the same of emotion.Emotions are sometimes said to be subjective in this sense: that they merely reflect something that belongs exclusively and contingently to the mind of the subject of experience, and therefore do not co-vary with any property that could be independently identified. This charge presupposes a sense of "objective" that contrasts with "projective," in something like the psychoanalytic sense. In terms of the analogy of perception, to say that emotions are universally subjective in this sense would be to claim that they resemble hallucinations more than veridical perceptions. The perceptual system is capable of the sort of functioning-in-a-vacuum that leads to perceptual mistakes. Similarly, emotions may mislead us into "hasty" or "emotional" judgments (Solomon 1984). On the other hand, the lack of perceptual capacities can be a crippling handicap in one's attempt to negotiate the world: similarly a lack of adequate emotional responses can hinder our attempts to view the world correctly and act correctly in it (Nussbaum 1990, Thomas 1989). This explains why we are so often tempted to take seriously ascription of reasonableness or unreasonableness, fittingness or inappropriateness, for common emotions. Unfortunately it is unclear how the alleged objective properties identified by emotions might be identified independently.Closely related to the question of the cognitive aspect of emotions is the question of their passivity. Passivity has an ambiguous relation to subjectivity. In one vein, impressed by the bad reputation of the "passions" as taking over our consciousness against our will, philosophers have been tempted to take the passivity of emotions as evidence of their subjectivity. In another vein, however, it has been noted that the passivity of emotions is sometimes precisely analogous to the passivity of perception. How the world is, is not in our power. So it is only to be expected that our emotions, if they actually represent something genuinely and objectively in the world, should not be in our power either: we can no more arbitrarily choose to experience an emotion than we can adopt a belief at will. (Gordon 1987).If the view that emotions are a kind of perception can be sustained, then the connection between emotion and cognition will have been secured. But there is yet another way of establishing this connection, compatible with the perceptual model. This is to draw attention to the role of emotions as providing the framework for cognitions of the more conventional kind. de Sousa (1987) and Amélie Rorty (1980) propose this sort of account, according to which emotions are not so much perceptions as they are ways of seeing—species of determinate patterns of salience among objects of attention, lines of inquiry, and inferential strategies. (See also Roberts 1988) Emotions make certain features of situations or arguments more prominent, giving them a weight in our experience that they would have lacked in the absence of emotion. Consider how Iago proceeds to make Othello jealous. He directs Othello's attention, suggests questions to ask, and insinuates that there are inferences to be drawn without specifying them himself. Once Othello's attention turns to his wife's friendship with Cassio and the lost handkerchief, inferences which on the same evidence would not even have been thought of before are now experienced as compelling: "Farewell, the tranquil mind…."This account does not identify emotions with judgments or desires, but it does explain why cognitivist theorists have been tempted to make this identification. Emotions set the agenda for beliefs and desires: one might say that they ask the questions that judgment answers with beliefs and evaluate the prospects that may or may not arouse desire. As every committee chairperson knows, questions have much to do with the determination of answers: the rest can be left up to the facts. In this way emotions could be said to be judgments, in the sense that they are what we see the world "in terms of." But they need not consist in articulated propositions. Much the same reasons motivate their assimilation to desire. As long as we presuppose some basic or preexisting desires, the directive power of "motivation" belongs to what controls attention, salience, and inference strategies preferred.Some philosophers suggest that the directive power which emotions exert over perception is partly a function of their essentially dramatic or narrative structure (Rorty 1988). It seems conceptually incoherent to suppose that one could have an emotion—say, an intense jealousy or a consuming rage—for only a fraction of a second. (Wollheim 1999) One explanation of this feature of emotions is that a story plays itself out during the course of each emotional episode, and stories take place over stretches of time. de Sousa (1987) has suggested that the stories characteristic of different emotions are learned by association with "paradigm scenarios." These are drawn first from a daily life as small children and later reinforced by the stories, art, and culture to which we are exposed. Later still, they are supplemented and refined by literature and other art forms capable of expanding the range of one's imagination of ways to live. Paradigm scenarios involve two aspects: first, a situation type providing the characteristic objects of the specific emotion-type (where objects can be of the various sorts mentioned above), and second, a set of characteristic or "normal" responses to the situation, where normality is determined by a complex and controversial mix of biological and cultural factors. Once our emotional repertoire is established, we interpret various situations we are faced with through the lens of different paradigm scenarios. When a particular scenario suggests itself as an interpretation, it arranges or rearranges our perceptual, cognitive, and inferential dispositions.A problem with this idea is that each emotion is appropriate to its paradigm scenario by definition, since it is the paradigm scenario which in effect calibrates the emotional repertoire. It is not clear whether this places unreasonable limitations on the range of possible criticism to which emotions give rise. What is certain is that when a paradigm scenario is evoked by a novel situation, the resulting emotion may or may not be appropriate to the situation that triggers it. In that sense at least, then, emotions can be assessed for rationality.This brings up normative issues about emotions, which will be addressed in sections 8-10 below. First, however, I consider what one might conclude about the nature or "ontology" of emotions.
7. The Ontology of Emotions
What, in the end, are emotions? What do they ultimately consist in? A variety of possible answers to this "ontological" question suggest themselves in the light of the above account. They might be physiological processes, or perceptions of physiological processes, or neuro-psychological states, or adaptive dispositions, or evaluative judgments, or computational states, or even social facts or dynamical processes. In fact most philosophers would assent to most of these descriptions while regarding all as partial. In view of the acknowledged complexity of emotional functions, it seems wise to rephrase the question not in terms of ontology, but in terms of levels of explanation. The trichotomy first introduced by David Marr (Marr 1982) remains an excellent starting point. At the computational level (which most would now call the functional level), we need to identify the emotions' basic teleology: what they are for. This will be appropriate even if one believes, as some traditionally have, that emotions actually represent the breakdown of smoothly adaptive functions such as thought, perception, and rational planning. For in that case the emotions will be understood precisely in terms of their failure to promote the smooth working of the cognitive and conative functions. Such a failure will trigger a descent to a lower level of explanation, adverting to the counterproductive exercise of mechanisms at the algorithmic and implementational levels. The first—-more or less equivalent to the design level of (Dennett 1971)—refers to the sub-functions that natural selection has set up to perform the functions said to be disrupted by emotion. The second designates the actual neuro-physiological processes whereby, in animals built on a specific plan such as mammals or humans such as we, these sub-functions are normally carried out.This trichotomy has been reinterpreted in various ways, but it still serves. It is generally agreed that the simpler emotions, those whose expression and recognition Ekman (1972, 1989) has shown to be universal, are driven by the basic needs of organisms such as mating, defense or avoidance of predators, and social affiliation. All complex mammals require swift, relatively stereotyped responses to these challenges. These are the "affect programs" favored by Ekman (1972, 1989), DeLancey (2001) and particularly Griffiths (1997), to be "what emotions really are." Opinions divide as to whether the same sort of functional analysis can be applied to a wider range of what Griffiths has called the "cognitively penetrable" emotions. Placing severe constraints on what is to count as a "natural kind", Griffiths argued that Ekman's six basic affect programs, and only they, form natural kinds: the others, he claimed, are for the moment beyond the reach of useful scientific investigation. Each affect program comprises a coordinated syndrome of responses (which we attribute to the algorithmic level) implemented at the physiological (hormonal and neurological), muscular-skeletal, and expressive levels in ways that owe their uniformity to homology, that is to say their common ancestral origin. Other emotions, however, bear only relations of analogy with these and don't count as natural kinds either singly or as a class.Against this Charland (2002) has argued that a sufficient level of homology can be found to unite at least the basic emotions as a class, and that we should regard emoters, and hence their emotions, as a natural kind. Relying on Panksepp (1998, 2000), Charland argues that the integrated mechanism of seven basic emotions (Panksepp's list differs slightly from Ekman's) are implemented by distinct circuits forming natural kinds not only in the human but more widely in the mammalian brain. Emoters form a distinct kind in view of their ancestral organization in terms of certain basic functions, the specific algorithms that contribute to those functions, and their implementation in terms of physiological, expressive, hormonal, and motivational processes. This is sufficient not only to justify treating the specific emotions as natural kinds, but to treat emotion in general as a natural kind. (Charland 1995, 1997). This view seems to require that we regard emotions as a set of processes distinguished at all three levels of explanation. Emotions in general should then be viewed as a genus of processes typically involving five different component aspects or components, comprising subjective feeling, cognition, motor expression, action tendencies or desire, and neurological processes. (Scherer 2005). On this view, individual emotions would owe their specific identity both to the subfunctions they are designed to serve and to their characteristic physiological implementation.Another way of organizing the various approaches might appeal to the dominant theoretical models on which they rest. It has often been said that in the history of the philosophy of mind, every epoch has tended to redefine its subject matter in terms of the most fashionable technological metaphor. The notion of emotions as "springs of action" alludes to the once fashionable model of clockwork. The dominant metaphor in Freud's early work was hydraulic. (Freud 1895). What does this observation lead us to expect for emotions?Modern conceptions of emotions, as we have seen, have been frequently couched in terms of other mental terms. In these cases, there is nothing sui generis that emotions are: any "ontological" question about their nature belongs derivatively to the ontology of desire and belief. (At a different, more remote level of explanation, theories favoured by cognitive science are likely also to appeal to evolutionary ideas.) This leaves three other dominant contemporary models which one could expect to lay claims on emotion theory: physiology, computation, and dynamical systems.Physiological processes are conceded by all philosophers to be involved in clearly prototypical cases of emotion. But no philosopher, for fear perhaps of defining themselves out of relevant competence, has been willing to concede that emotions just are physiological processes. Instead they are held to be complexes in which physiology plays a part at the level of implementation of some higher-level process. The higher-level process in which an emotion consists owes its overall structure to functional needs, and typically comprises, in addition to physiological aspects, behavioural, expressive, and phenomenological, components.Computational theories of emotion seem to have been particularly attractive to psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. They were broached early by a couple of psychoanalysts turned hackers (Peterfreund 1971), (Shank and Colby 1973) and played an important role in the theoretical elaborations of John Bowlby's work on the mechanisms and psychological consequences of early separation and loss. (Bowlby 1969-1980). These works attempted to model Freudian concepts of the dynamics of conscious and unconscious mental life in computational terms. Colby even constructed a simulation of a paranoid patient, "Parry", which famously fooled some psychiatrists. The key idea was to set up second-order parameters that acted on the first-order modules of perception, belief and desire, thus regulating or disrupting the operation of perceptual and action programs. From the sidelines, de Sousa (1987) suggested that connectionist systems or analog models stand a better chance of modeling emotion than those based on classical von Neuman-type digital computation, but that suggestion hasn't gone anywhere. From the point of view of computational theory, the prevailing wind, backed by both evolutionary speculation and neurological findings on control systems and relatively independent affect-programs, has tended to favour modular conceptions of emotion rather than holistic ones. (Charland 1995, Robinson 2003).Still, some philosophers and computer scientists have continued to be interested in integrating computing theory with emotions. Aaron Sloman has elaborated the sort of ideas that were embryonic in Shank and Colby into a more sophisticated computational theory of the mind in which emotions are virtual machines, playing a crucial role in a complex hierarchic architecture in which they control, monitor, schedule and sometimes disrupt other control modules. (Wright, Sloman and Beaudoin 1996). The notion of architecture here adverts to the complex hierarchy of control of component modular mechanisms. In line with the three-level schema I have cited from Marr, (cf. also (Dennett 1971)) we should understand the approach elaborated in this work as pertaining both to the functional and to the algorithmic level. It explicitly eschews hypotheses about implementation. Joining the growing consensus that emotion phenomena reflect distinct, successively evolved behavioral control systems, Sloman distinguishes between a primitive or primary stream rooted in relatively fixed neuro-physiological response syndromes, a more elaborate control system bringing in cortical control, as well as a third level, probably exclusive to humans, which most closely corresponds to the layer of emotions that we are most concerned with when we think of the emotional charge of art and literature or of the complexity of social intercourse. Rosalind Picard (1997) lays out the evidence for the view that computers will need emotions to be truly intelligent, and in particular to interact intelligently with humans. She also adverts to the role of emotions in evaluation and the pruning of search spaces. But she is as much concerned to provide an emotional theory of computation as to elaborate a computational theory of emotions. Marvin Minsky (2006) explores the many-faceted nature of mental life, including emotions, from a computer modeling point of view. Paul Thagard (2005) has elaborated computer models in which emotional valence interacts with evidential strength to determine a mode of emotional coherence.Dynamical systems theories have been relatively slow to emerge, despite their increasingly fashionable status in more central areas of cognitive science and contrary to the prediction made by de Sousa (1987) that connectionist systems or analog models would be more successful in modeling emotion than those based on classical von Neuman-type digital computation. One remarkable attempt to integrate the perspective of dynamical systems into understanding of emotional life is that of (Magai and Haviland-Jones 2002), who draw on dynamical systems theory to model the elusive combination of unpredictability and patterned coherence found in the life-long evolution of individuality. Like predecessors such as Bowlby (1969-1980), they are motivated by a goal of understanding at the level of conscious experience as well as of underlying mechanisms: dynamical systems theory is only one of their tools. It is therefore particularly pertinent to the preoccupations of those who are interested in the normative dimensions of emotions: their rationality and their irrationality, their capacity for enhancing or inhibiting self-knowledge, and their moral implications. I address these questions in the next three sections.
8. Rationality and Emotions
The clearest notions associated with rationality are coherence and consistency in the sphere of belief, and optimizing outcomes in the sphere of action. But these notions are mainly critical ones. By themselves, they would be not suffice to guide an organism towards any particular course of action. For the number of goals that it is logically possible to posit at any particular time is virtually infinite, and the number of possible strategies that might be employed in pursuit of them is orders of magnitude larger. Moreover, in considering possible strategies, the number of consequences of any one strategy is again infinite, so that unless some drastic pre-selection can be effected among the alternatives their evaluation could never be completed. This gives rise to what is known among cognitive scientists as the "Frame Problem": in deciding among any range of possible actions, most of the consequences of each must be eliminated a priori, i.e. without wasting any time on verifying that they are indeed irrelevant.That this is not as much of a problem for people as it is for machines may well be due to our capacity for emotions. As noted earlier, emotions constitute one of the chief mechanisms whereby attention is constrained and directed. (Matthews and Wells 1994). This allows them to frame our decisions in two important ways. First, they define the parameters taken into account in any particular deliberation. Second, in the process of rational deliberation itself, they render salient only a tiny proportion of the available alternatives and of the conceivably relevant facts. Thus they winnow down to manageable size the number of considerations relevant to deliberation, and help to provide, in any particular situation, the indispensable framework without which the question of rationality could not even be considered. This suggestion, relabeled the "Search hypothesis of emotion", has been elaborated and criticized by Evans (2004), who argues convincingly that it needs to be buttressed by a positive theory of precisely what emotional mechanisms are capable of effecting this task.In a more pervasive and less easily definable way, the capacity to experience emotion seems to be indispensable to the conduct of a rational life over time. Antonio Damasio (1994) has amassed an impressive body of neurological evidence suggesting that emotions do, indeed, have this sort of function in everyday reasoning. Subjects in his studies who, because of injuries sustained to the prefrontal and somatosensory cortices of the brain, had a diminished capacity to experience emotion, were severely hindered in their ability to make intelligent practical decisions. In these ways, then, emotions would be all important to rationality even if they could not themselves be deemed rational or irrational.Nevertheless we should not infer that emotions act consistently as aids to rational thought and action. Researchers in recent decades have identified a large number of cases where emotions are indeed guilty of the lapses in rationality imputed by traditional prejudices of philosophers. Some examples: present emotional attitudes to future emotions are systematically distorted by discounting schemes that invert preference orders (Ainslie 1992); we fail in other ways to estimate correctly what our future emotions and preferences will be (Gilbert 2006); our assessment of the past, too, is systematically partial, in that we ignore all but the "peaks" of unpleasantness or pleasure, and the temporally last segments of time (Kahneman 2000); subjects misinterpret their own experience of fear as sexual excitement (Dutton and Aron 1974); and conversely, a mild stimulus to sexual interest causes men—but not women—to accept severely disadvantageous rates of discounting (Daly and Wilson 2003). The picture is further complicated by the fact that some apparent irrationalities may serve group cohesion. Thus in the much studied "ultimatum game", subjects are generally willing to incur considerable costs to punish unfair behaviour (Oosterbeek, Sloof and van de Kuilen 2004).But can emotions be assessed for rationality in themselves, rather than as components of practical strategies? There is a common prejudice that "feelings," a word now sometimes commonly used interchangeably with "emotions," neither owe nor can give any rational account of themselves. Yet we equally commonly blame others or ourselves for feeling "not wisely, but too well," or for targeting inappropriate objects. The norms appropriate to both these types of judgment are inseparable from social norms, whether or not these are endorsed. Ultimately they are inseparable from conceptions of normality and human nature. Judgments of reasonableness therefore tend to be endorsed or rejected in accordance with one's ideological commitments to this or that conception of human nature. It follows that whether these judgments can be viewed as objective or not will depend on whether there are objective facts to be sought about human nature. On this question there is fortunately no need to pronounce. It is enough to note that there is no logical reason why judgments of reasonableness or irrationality in relation to emotions need be regarded as any more subjective than any other judgments of rationality in human affairs.Exactly how one conceives of the nature of emotional rationality will depend on one's theory of what the emotions are. Cognitivist and appraisal theories will say that a reasonable emotion is one whose constituent propositional attitudes or appraisals are reasonable. Theories which take emotions to be perceptions of objective values will claim that the target of an appropriate emotion possesses the value which the emotion presents it as having. Narrative theories will consider an emotion appropriate if its dramatic structure adequately resembles that of its eliciting situation.Of course, these answers to the question of what it is for an emotion to be reasonable suppose that the relevant notion of rationality is an epistemic one, and that what appropriate emotions succeed in achieving is some sort of representational adequacy. This assumes that emotions are states that we passively undergo. However, the relation of the emotions to the will is not as clear as the word "passion" might suggest. Certain philosophers have argued that emotions are more like actions, for which we must bear responsibility (Sartre 1948; Solomon 1980). If this is true, and emotions are to some extent under our voluntary control, then emotions will also be assessable for their strategic rationality. However, while it may, on occasion, be possible to call up an emotion, it is also possible that the emotion which actually materializes will not be the one which was summoned. If a person is not aware that a substitution has taken place, then she will be self-deceived about her emotions—an all too frequent occurrence, worthy of a brief discussion in its own right.
9. Emotions and Self-knowledge
We often make the "Cartesian" assumption that if anyone can know our emotions it is ourselves. Descartes said it thus: "it is impossible for the soul to feel a passion without that passion being truly as one feels it." Barely a page later, however, he noted that "those that are most agitated by their passions are not those who know them best" (Descartes 1984 [1649], 338, 339). In fact, emotions are one of our avenues to self-knowledge, since few kinds of self-knowledge could matter more than knowing one's own repertoire of emotional responses. At the same time, emotions are both the cause and the subject of many failures of self-knowledge. Their complexity entails much potential to mislead or be misled. Insofar as most emotions involve belief, they inherit the susceptibility of the latter to self-deception. Recent literature on self-deception has striven to dissolve the air of paradox to which this once gave rise (Fingarette 1969, Mele 1987). Furthermore, brain scientists have noted the pervasive nature of self-deception and of different species of "confabulation", and they have begun to make progress in unmasking the underlying neurological processes (Hirstein 2005). But there remain three distinct sources of self-deception that stem from features of emotions already alluded to.The first arises from the connection of emotion with bodily changes. There was something right in James's claim that the emotion follows on, rather than causing the voluntary and involuntary bodily changes which are held to express it. Because some of these changes are either directly or indirectly subject to our choices, we are able to pretend or dissimulate emotion. That implies that we can sometimes be caught in our own pretense. Sometimes we identify our emotions by what we feel: and if what we feel has been distorted by a project of deception, then we will misidentify our own emotions.A second source of self-deception arises from the role of emotions in determining salience among potential objects of attention or concern. Poets have always known that the main effect of love is to redirect attention: when I love, I notice nothing but my beloved, and nothing of his faults. When my love turns to anger I still focus on him, but now attend to a very different set of properties. This suggests one way of controlling or dominating my emotion: think about something else, or think differently about this object (Greenspan 2000). But this carries a risk. It is easier to think of something than to avoid thinking about it; and to many cases of emotional distress only the latter could bring adequate relief. Besides, one is not always able to predict, and therefore to control, the effect that redirected attention might produce. This familiar observation alerts us to the role of the unconscious: if among the associations that are evoked by a given scene are some that I can react to without being aware of them, then I will not always be able to predict my own reactions, even if I have mastered the not altogether trivial task of attending to whatever I choose. Where the unconscious is, self-deception necessarily threatens.This brings us to the third source of emotional self-deception: the involvement of social norms in the determination of our emotions. This possibility arises in two stages from the admission that there are unconscious motivations for emotions. First, if I am experiencing an emotion that seems altogether inappropriate to its occasion, I will naturally confabulate an explanation for it. A neurotic who is unreasonably angry with his wife because he unconsciously identifies her with his mother will not rest content with having no reason for his anger. Instead, he will make one up. Second, the reason he makes up will typically be one that is socially approved (Averill 1982).If we are self-deceived in our emotional responses, or if some emotional state induces self-deception, this may not be merely a failure of self-knowledge. Many have thought that having certain emotions is an important part of what it is to be a virtuous moral agent. If this is true, then being systematically self-deceived about one's emotions will be a kind of moral failure as well.
10. Morality and Emotions
The complexity of emotions and their role in mental life is reflected in the unsettled place they have held in the history of ethics. Often they have been regarded as a dangerous threat to morality and rationality; in the romantic tradition, on the contrary, passions have been placed at the center both of human individuality and of the moral life. This ambivalence is reflected in the close connections between the vocabulary of emotions and that of vices and virtues: envy, spite, jealousy, wrath, and pride are some names of emotions that also refer to common vices. Not coincidentally, some key virtues—love, compassion, benevolence, and sympathy—are also names of emotions. (On the other hand, prudence, fortitude and temperance consist largely in the capacity to resist the motivational power of emotions.)The view that emotions are irrational was eloquently defended by the Epicureans and Stoics. For this reason, these Hellenistic schools pose a particularly interesting challenge for the rest of the Western tradition. The Stoics adapted and made their own the Socratic hypothesis that virtue is nothing else than knowledge, adding the idea that emotions are essentially irrational beliefs. All vice and all suffering is then irrational, and the good life requires the rooting out of all desires and attachments. (As for the third of the major Hellenistic schools, the Skeptics, their view was that it is beliefs as such that were responsible for pain. Hence they recommend the repudiation of opinions of any sort.) All three schools stressed the overarching value of "ataraxia", the absence of disturbance in the soul. Philosophy can then be viewed as therapy, the function of which is to purge emotions from the soul (Nussbaum 1994). In support of this, the Stoics advanced the plausible claim that it is psychologically impossible to keep only nice emotions and give up the nasty ones. For all attachment and all desire, however worthy their objects might seem, entail the capacity for wrenching and destructive negative emotions. Erotic love can bring with it the murderous jealousy of a Medea, and even a commitment to the idea of justice may foster a capacity for destructive anger which is nothing but "furor brevis"— temporary insanity, in Seneca's arresting phrase. Moreover, the usual objects of our attachment are clearly unworthy of a free human being, since they diminish rather than enhance the autonomy those that endure them.The Hellenistic philosophers' observations about nasty emotions are not wholly compelling. Surely it is possible to see at least some emotions as having a positive contribution to make to our moral lives, and indeed we have seen that the verdict of cognitive science is that a capacity for normal emotion appears to be a sine qua non for the rational and moral conduct of life. Outside of this intimate but still somewhat mysterious link between the neurological capacity for emotion and rationality, the exact significance of emotions to the moral life will again depend on one's theory of the emotions. Inasmuch as emotions are partly constituted by desires, as some cognitivist theorists maintain, they will, as David Hume contended, help to motivate decent behavior and cement social life. If emotions are perceptions, and can be more or less epistemically adequate to their objects, then emotions may have a further contribution to make to the moral life, depending on what sort of adequacy and what sort of objects are involved. Max Scheler (1954) was the first to suggest that emotions are in effect perceptions of "tertiary qualities" that supervene in the (human) world on facts about social relations, pleasure and pain, and natural psychological facts, a suggestion recently elaborated by Tappolet (2000).An important amendment to that view, voiced by D'Arms and Jacobson (2000a) is that emotions may have intrinsic criteria of appropriateness that diverge from, and indeed may conflict with, ethical norms. Appropriate emotions are not necessarily moral. Despite that, some emotions, specifically guilt, resentment, shame and anger, may have a special role in the establishment of a range of "response-dependent" values and norms that lie at the heart of the moral life. (Gibbard 1990, D'Arms and Jacobson 1993). Mulligan (1998) advances a related view: though not direct perceptions of value, emotions can be said to justify axiological judgments. Emotions themselves are justified by perceptions and beliefs, and are said to be appropriate if and only if the axiological judgments they support are correct. If any of those variant views is right, then emotions have a crucial role to play in ethics in revealing to us something like moral facts. A consequence of this view is that art and literature, in educating our emotions, will have a substantial role in our moral development (Nussbaum 2001). On the other hand, there remains something "natural" about the emotions concerned, so that moral emotions are sometimes precisely those that resist the principles inculcated by so-called moral education. Hence the view that emotions apprehend real moral properties can explain our approval of those, like Huckleberry Finn when he ignored his "duty" to turn in Jim the slave, whose emotions drive them to act against their own "rational" conscience (Bennett 1974; McIntyre 1990).These suggestions about the relevance of emotion to ethics must be sharply distinguished from "Emotivism"—the claim that emotions can be used to elucidate the concept of evaluation itself. Such elucidation would only be plausible if we understood the explicans more clearly than the explicandum. But the variety and complexity of emotions makes them poor candidates for the role of explicans. The view in question must also be distinguished from the sociobiological hypothesis—which had early precursors in Mencius and Hume—that certain motives of benevolence are part of the genetic equipment which makes ethical behavior possible. That plausible view has attracted surprisingly energetic opposition in recent years. One objection against it is one directed against all forms of ethical naturalism: namely that the biological origins of a sentiment have no obvious bearing on its ethical value. Nevertheless, studies of social interaction among other primates strongly support the hypothesis that our moral intuitions have been shaped by evolution. And although analogies between primate behaviour and human morality are still resisted with desperate energy, it seems hard to deny that we can recognize a surprising range of familiar "moral emotions" in our nearest non-human cousins (de Waal 2006). Such naturalistic studies do promise to explain, at least, both the existence of some of our more benevolent emotions and attitudes, and the way in which their scope often seems so dangerously limited to the members of some restricted in-group.The range of emotions to which the sociobiological hypothesis can be applied, however, is relatively narrow. That many complex emotions are to a certain extent socially constructed, is attested by the fact that what is considered normal emotion varies between epochs and cultures. Feminists have pointed out, in particular, that gender-specific norms on emotional experience and expression have been a standard means of maintaining inequality among the sexes in many cultures (de Beauvoir 1952). Viewed in this light, the emotions in general lack that property of universalizability which many philosophers have regarded as a sine qua non of the ethical (Blum 1980). On the other hand, the extent and significance of cultural differences are still a matter of considerable controversy (Pinker 2002). Any conclusions about the place of emotions in the moral life must therefore remain highly tentative.
11. Summary and Guide to the Recent Literature
It may be useful, in order to provide more efficient entry points into the literature, to summarize the salient doctrines of major contributors to the philosophy of emotions in the past half century. At the risk of some redundancy, since many of these figures have appeared in the story told above, I conclude with the following brief capsules. They are ordered roughly in chronological order of the head author's first major contribution to emotion theory. (Because some articles are reprinted or reprised in more accessible later books or collections, this may not always coincide with the date of the work cited.)The revival of philosophical interest in emotions from the middle of the twentieth century can be traced to an article by Erroll Bedford (1957), and a book by Anthony Kenny (1963) which argued against the assumption that emotions are feelings, impervious to either will or reason. Bedford stressed both the intentionality and the importance of contextual factors on the nature, arousal and expression of emotions. Kenny, reviving some medieval theories of intentionality, urged that emotions should be viewed as intentional states. He defined a notion of a formal object of an intentional state as that characteristic that must belong to something if it is to be possible for the state to relate to it. This implies an excessively strong logical link between the state and its object's actual possession of the characteristic in question. Nevertheless it points to an important condition on the appropriateness of an emotion to a given object, which has been incorporated in the account of formal objects set out above. These papers gave impetus to what became the cognitivist mainstream in philosophy of emotion, some fairly wide variations going from C.D. Broad (1971 [1954])'s "affect-laden judgments" to the "strong desires" theory advocated by Joel Marks (1982).Among other philosophers responsible for the revival of interest in emotions, Irving Thalberg (1977) took as given the cognitive dimension of emotion, and explored some of the subtleties of the different relations of emotions to their objects. The Wittgensteinian flavor of Bedford's second point, about the contextual dependency of emotions, was elaborated into a "social constructionist" view by the psychologist James Averill (1982). On this view, favored later by some feminist philosophers such as Naomi Scheman (1983) and Sue Campbell (1998), spurred also by the influential externalist perspective first advocated by (Burge 1979), emotions are not primarily viewed as individual characteristics of the persons to whom they are attributed, but emerge out of the dynamics of social interaction. The influence of Wittgenstein was also felt in a different respect—stemming from his remarks on "seeing-as" (Wittgenstein 1953)—in a paper by Robert Roberts (1988) which regarded emotions as "concern-based construals".Gabriele Taylor (1975) was among the first to explore the ways in which the justification of emotion differs from the justification of its associated thought. She sought to establish the conditions under which a given emotion would be justified in that more specific sense, and pointed out, following Aristotle, that the absence of appropriate emotion can also be culpable. A later book explored these themes in greater detail (Taylor 1985), and pioneered the exploration of the importance of emotional guilt in the moral life, anticipating later work by Allan Gibbard (1990) and Patricia Greenspan (1995).Amelie Rorty (1980) collected a number of seminal articles in a collection to which she contributed two influential papers of her own, on explaining emotions (Rorty 1980a) and on jealousy (Tov-Ruach 1980). Her articles, as well as the collection as a whole, which included early papers by several of the authors mentioned here, provided a strong stimulus for the revival of the field. Rorty urged a pluralistic, piecemeal approach, skeptical of theory and highly attentive to the multiple psychological, social, and even political dimensions of emotional scenarios. Her explorations, enriched with a rich phenomenology of narrative detail, are developed and amplified in some of her later work (Rorty 1988, 1998, 2003).Robert Solomon (1980) spurred both interest and opposition with his provocative thesis that emotions are judgments, albeit judgments of a particular kind, characterized by their mode of haste and their evaluative content. Under the influence of (Sartre 1948), he also adopted the view that emotions could be understood as strategic choices, collectively driven by the goal of protecting and enhancing self-esteem (Solomon 1984). In his more recent work he has also written about the emotional dimension of justice, and advocated an enrichment of emotion theory through cross-cultural perspectives and the integration of scientific perspectives (Solomon 1999).Jerome Neu (1977) is sympathetic to by psychoanalytic views of the mechanisms underlying the pathology of belief and desire frequently associated with emotion. But he remains among the staunchest defenders of a cognitivist view of the core of emotion, as attested by his book title borrowed from William Blake's line "A tear is an intellectual thing". (Neu 2000). Neu has repeatedly stressed, in particular, that what distinguishes one emotion from another is not how it feels, but what belief is embedded in the emotion about its target. Despite the unifying theoretical vision suggested by this doctrine, much of Neu's work explores the pervasively messy and multifarious ways in which emotions influence our lives.William Lyons (1980), picking up a different strand of Bedford and Kenny's contributions, and also influenced by Wittgenstein, espoused a mitigated form of cognitivism, which he called a "causal-evaluative" theory. On this view, an emotion arises if and only if an abnormal physiological change is caused by an evaluation. This view sought to integrate the insights of James (1884) on the importance of our perception of inner physiological changes triggered by the perception of an object of attention. But it remains cognitivist, in that Lyons claimed that the emotions are differentiated entirely by the evaluations by which they are triggered.Patricia Greenspan first turned her attention to problems of emotional ambivalence and more broadly to the nature of emotional rationality. (Greenspan 1988) She has been particularly persistent in seeking to balance the diverse and conflicting imperatives implicit in emotion theory. One is that we must account for emotions both as conscious mental processes and as involving an important bodily component; another is that emotions play an important role both in determining and in undermining rational thought and action. In later work Greenspan has turned increasingly to the practical, moral and social implications of emotional life, including especially the place of guilt among moral emotions. (Greenspan 1995). She has also returned, in a very different way inspired not by Sartre but by game theory and the influential work of the economist Robert Frank (1988) to the ways in which emotional manifestations can serve as strategies in social interaction. (Greenspan 2000).Among Robert Gordon's distinctive contributions in (Gordon 1987) was the development of an idea first broached by (Thalberg 1977) that most ascriptions of emotions with propositional objects are "factive"—that is, that they presuppose the truth of their propositional objects. A minority (such as worry and hope) are "epistemic", in that they are precisely focused on an uncertainty. Although this proposal has been controversial, it has the virtue of drawing attention to the possibility that in human communication the default assumption is that of a common world. Gordon noted the analogy between the limited sense of passivity that is appropriately ascribed to perception and the passivity of emotions. He was also one of the first to suggest that the knowledge we have of the states of mind of others, and particularly of their emotional condition, is derived not from any psychological theory, but from an active simulation of that other's state. Again, there is suggestive neurological evidence that this might be on the right track from the discovery of "mirror neurons" that to be similarly activated both by a concrete action and by the sight of the same concrete action in another (Gallese and Goldman 1998), though I am not aware of any specific follow up implicating human emotions.Ronald de Sousa (1987) argued that emotions are not reducible to beliefs, desires, or combinations of the two, but represent a logically and functionally separate category of capacities. They contribute essentially to the strategic choices of human rational deliberation, and they are themselves assessable as rational or irrational in accord with criteria which overlap but are not identical with those in terms of which we judge moral and esthetic value.Michael Stocker has stressed the pervasiveness of emotion: emotions are not merely episodes, disruptive or otherwise, but include states and experiences that give color, meaning and motivation to the whole of the vast range of actions of which we are capable, including intellectual action. They are both sources of value in themselves, and sometimes constitute epistemic avenues to value. Stocker was one of the first philosophers to call for a moderation of the intellectualism implied by the dominant cognitivist orthodoxy, by drawing attention to such cases as fear of flying, where the attitude embodied in an emotion conflicts directly with the subject's avowed beliefs. (Stocker and Hegeman 1996).Martha Nussbaum's theory of emotions falls squarely within the "cognitive-evaluative" camp. (Nussbaum 1990, 1994, 2001). But it is one distinction of her approach that it may escape damage from much of the criticism leveled against the standard cognitivist line of thought. This results from her insistence that far from being simple propositional attitudes that can be exhausted by their expression in propositional form, the psychological and moral significance of the emotions can only be grasped through the medium of art, and particularly literature, in which the marriage of form and content alone makes possible an adequately complex message. The deep reason for this is that the kind of knowledge involved in moral appraisal is both affective and cognitive. In her emphasis on the complexity and moral importance of emotions, she is at one with Annette Baier (Baier 1995), whose work has included an exploration of the role of emotional trust in personal relations, a form of trust that cannot simply be described in terms of belief in the truth of promises and undertakings. Both these writers may owe something to the earlier work of Bernard Williams (1973), for its early recognition of the overlap between the vocabulary used in the expression of moral judgments with the vocabulary of emotion, in words such as outrage, indignation, shock or admiration.Laurence Thomas (1989) built a persuasive argument that social life demands that altruistic motives be built into individual character as the foundation of the capacity to lead a moral life, and that this requires a psychological process rooted in the biologically normal relation between parent and infant. Parental love thus forms the basis of the emotional capacities that in turn subtend harmonious social relations.Allan Gibbard (1990) offered an influential twist on the role of emotions in the moral life. Rather than seeing them as perceptions or apprehensions of value, like Stocker and others, he proposed a different sort of "response-based theory" of value. On this view, it is not the traditional virtuous emotions of compassion and sympathy that are of paramount importance in morality, but rather those emotional attitudes that relate to the warrant, or endorsement, of norms, namely guilt and anger or resentment. These emotions are intrinsically social, and the endorsement of norms is therefore enforced both interpersonally, through resentment, and intrapersonally through emotional guilt. This position has been both criticized and expanded by Justin D'Arms and Daniel Jacobson (1993, 2000b). Response-based theories of moral value have sparked much debate, notably from David Wiggins (1987), John McDowell (1985), and Simon Blackburn (1998).Aaron Ben-Ze'ev (2000) advocates a view of emotions as "subtle" mode of mental actualization, not reducible to any of the components that commonly figure in any given episode of emotion. Emotions form a distinct mode or psychological system. They are prototypes concepts rather than names of natural kinds, and their subtlety derives from the fact that the emotional mode constitutes an exercise of all faculties together, particularly in response to change, at the level of perception, intellectual processes, and feeling.Jon Elster (1999) is among those who are skeptical of the prospects for a unified theory of emotions. Instead he describes in some detail the variety of mechanisms associated with emotions which allows them to be used in the explanation of actions. These mechanisms are diverse and unpredictable, and their interactions often result in the "transmutation" of one emotion into another: thus love can turn to jealousy, jealousy to rage, rage to remorse, as the dynamics of the situation evolves. Elster has also added to the argument against assimilating emotions to desires and beliefs: whereas the standard Bayesian type decision theories assume that expected desirability grows with desirability and declines with probability, emotions, as second-order attitudes to probability, can actually increase the desirability of an option as its probability decreases, thus scrambling the standard computation (Elster 2003).Richard Wollheim (2000) comes closer than most current writers to presenting a unified theory of emotions. He views them as dispositional attitudes, which need to be studied both through their history and in terms of their role in regulating or disrupting other psychological mechanisms of belief and desire. That history is understood in psychoanalytic terms (owed primarily to Freud and Melanie Klein): primitive experiences of frustration or satisfaction, stemming from desires that may not necessarily be conscious and may not necessary have propositional objects, give rise to attitudes towards precipitating factors in the outside world. These persisting attitudes are the dispositions that constitute the emotions. Most emotions target the outside world, but guilt and shame are exceptions, as they stem from introjected critical figures which target the self. In all cases emotions "color the world" and hence regulate beliefs and desires.Peter Goldie (2000) is among those who have recently advocated a return to the close identification of emotions with feelings, on the ground that the divorce between them was decreed on false premises: feelings, too, can actually have intentional objects. He resists both reductive theories which regard emotions as mere compounds of belief and desire, and "add-on theories" that view them as beliefs and desires plus something else. Although some experiences plausibly labelled feelings are deprived of intentionality, most feelings are in fact intentional, and only if we understand the crucial component of feeling in emotion are we likely to understand the large nugget of truth in the traditional view of emotions as often irrational and disruptive. Furthermore, Goldie holds that certain primitive emotions, on the analogy of cognitively impenetrable perceptual illusions, influence action tendencies without the mediation of propositions or concepts. (Goldie 2003)In recent years, the most notable development in philosophical treatment of emotions has been the attempt to incorporate interdisciplinary approaches and insights into philosophy. Paul Griffiths (1997), Jessie Prinz (2004) and Craig DeLancey (2002) are the most vigorous exponents of the view that philosophical work on the emotions must be re-oriented away from linguistic analysis and given first roots in science. Both argue that such roots will split off the simpler emotions of "affect programs" from more "cognitively penetrable" ones. Griffiths contends that only affect programs form natural kinds in virtue of common ancestral origins, or homologies. Prinz adopts a radical perceptual view of emotions, reminiscent of James. Citing a wide variety of psychological and neurological research, as well as artificial intelligence models, DeLancey argues for a view of emotions as playing a crucial role in a system of mental activity organized as a hierarchical system of modules.Jenefer Robinson's (2005) book is more eclectic, though also well informed about the science; like Nussbaum (2001), she is particularly interested in the nature and importance of emotions in the understanding and genesis of art, and especially music. A collection A forthcoming book by Charles Nussbaum (forthcoming 2008) relies on biological, evolutionary, neurological and psychological findings to argue for a treatment of musical representation as representational, elaborating on the basic insight that musical represents movement in space. David Pugmire (2005), by contrast, returns to a more traditional point of view with a defense of a broadly Aristotelian point of view on the moral importance of integrity in emotions. Paul Thagard (2006) has also energetically explored the broader area of what he calls "hot thought". This is reasoning variously driven, controlled or distorted by emotions in different areas, such legal, scientific and religious thinking.
12. Conclusion:
Adequacy Conditions on Philosophical Theories of Emotion
In the recent work just all too briefly outlined, one can discern two contrasting trends. We might call their exponents, with apologies to Isaiah Berlin, the hedgehogs and the foxes of emotion theory. The foxes are all keen to emphasize the pervasiveness and diversity of what we call emotions. Emotions are multifarious in their causes, in their effects, in their functions, in their roles both within and among social individuals. Prominent among the foxes are Ben-Ze'ev, Elster, Goldie, Neu, Nussbaum, Robinson, Rorty, Solomon, and Stocker. The hedgehogs, inspired by the preference of for leaner theory, are more interested in parcelling out domains in which reasonably well regimented neuro-psychological entities with clearly identifiable functions can be studied. Chief among this class of philosophers are Griffiths, Prinz, and DeLancey, who regard the psychological work of Ekman, Panksepp and others as providing a class of clearly identifiable emotions, and tend to the view that the rest are too messy to reward serious attention. In a different vein, Wollheim might be classed with the hedgehogs, in that he presents a unified theory of the origins and nature of emotional dispositions. In many of these authors, a consensus may be building, according to which the reaction against "feeling theories" of emotion was excessive, because it was too hastily assumed that feelings could not have intentionality.Despite the contrast between these two trends, current views manifest a good deal of agreement. A broad consensus has emerged on what we might call adequacy conditions on any theory of emotion. An acceptable philosophical theory of emotions should be able to account at least for the following nine characteristics. All the recent and current accounts of emotion discussed here have something to say about most of them, and some have had something to say about all.emotions are typically conscious phenomena; yetthey typically involve more pervasive bodily manifestations than other conscious states;they vary along a number of dimensions: intensity, valence, type and range of intentional objects, etc.they are reputed to be antagonists of rationality; but alsothey play an indispensable role in determining the quality of life;they contribute crucially to defining our ends and priorities;they play a crucial role in the regulation of social life;they protect us from an excessively slavish devotion to narrow conceptions of rationality;they have a central place in moral education and the moral life. The exploration of questions raised by these nine characteristics is a thriving ongoing collaborative project in the theory of emotions, in which philosophy will continue both to inform and to draw on a wide range of philosophical expertise as well as the parallel explorations of other branches of cognitive science.
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London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Niedenthal, Paula M., et al. 2005. "Embodiment in Attitudes, Social Perception, and Emotion." Personality and Social Psychology Review, 9(3): 184-211.-----. 2000. A Tear is an Intellectual Thing: the Meanings of Emotion. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.Nussbaum, Martha. 1990. Love's Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.-----. 1994. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.-----. 2001. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Nussbaum, Charles. Forthcoming 2008. The Musical Representation: Meaning, Ontology, and Emotion. Cambridge, MA: MIT press.Oakley, Justin. 1992. Morality and the Emotions. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Oosterbeek, Hessel, Randolph Sloof, and Gijs van de Kuilen. 2004. "Differences in Ultimatum Game Experiments: Evidence from a Meta-Analysis." Experimental Economics, 7: 177-88.Panksepp, Jaak. 1998. Affective neuroscience: the foundations of human and animal emotions. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.-----. 2000. "Emotion as a Natural Kind Within the Brain." In Handbook of Emotions, M. Lewis and Haviland-Jones (eds), a137-55. New York: Guilford University Press.Peacocke, Christopher. 2001. "Does Perception have a Nonconceptual Content?" Journal of Philosophy, 98: 239-264.Peterfreund, Emmanuel. 1971. Information, Systems, and Psychoanalysis: An Evolutionary Biological Approach to Psychoanalytic Theory. New York: Intrernational Universities Press.Picard, Rosalind. 1997. Affective Computing. Cambridge: MIT Press.Pinker, Steven. 2002. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Viking.Plutchik, Robert. 1980. Emotion: A Psychoevolutionary Synthesis. New York: Harper and Row.Prinz, Jesse. 2004. Gut Reactions: a Perceptual Theory of Emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Pugmire. 2005. Sound Sentiments: Integrity in the Emotions. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Robinson, Jenefer. 2005 Deeper than Reason: Emotion and its Role in Literature, Music, and Art. Oxford: OUP.Rorty, Amélie, ed. 1980. Explaining Emotions 103-126. Los Angeles: University of California Press.-----. 1980a. "Explaining Emotions." In Explaining Emotions, ed. Amélie Rorty, 103-126. Los Angeles: University of California Press.-----. 1988. "The Historicity of Psychological Attitudes: Love is Not Love Which Alters Not When it Alteration Finds." In Mind in Action, 121-134. Boston: Beacon Press.-----. 1998. "Political Sources of Emotions." Mid-West Studies in Philosophy, 12: 21-33.-----. 2003. "Enough Already with Theories of Emotion." In Thinking About Feelings: Philosophers on Emotions, ed. Robert C. Solomon. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.Russell, James A. 2003. "Core Affect and the Construction of Emotions." Psychological Review, 110: 145-72.Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1948. The Emotions: Outline of a Theory. New York: Philosophical Library.Schacter, Stanley, and Jerome Singer. 1962. "Cognitive, Social and Physiological Determinants of Emotional States." Psychological Review, 69: 379-99.Scheler, Max. 1954. The Nature of Sympathy. Translated by Peter Heath. Hamden, CT: Archon.Scheman, Naomi. 1983. "Individualism and the Objects of Psychology." In Discovering Reality, ed. Sandra Harding and Mary B. Hintikka. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983.Scherer, Klaus R., A Schorr, and T. Johnstone, eds. 2001. Appraisal Processes in Emotion: Theory, Methods, Research. Oxford: Oxford University Press.-----. 2005. "What are emotions? and how can they be measured?" Social Science information, 44(4): 695-729.Shank, Roger, and Kenneth Mark Colby, eds. 1973 . Computer Models of Thought and Language. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman.Searle, John. 1983. Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Solomon, Robert. 1980. "Emotions and Choice." In Explaining Emotions, edited by Amélie Rorty, 251-81. Los Angeles: University of California Press.-----. 1984. The Passions: The Myth and Nature of Human Emotions. New York: Doubleday.-----. 1999. "The Philosophy of Emotions." In Handbook of Emotions, ed. Mark Lewis and Jeannette Haviland-Jones, 3-15. New York: Guilford Press.Stocker, Michael, with Elizabeth Hegeman. 1992. Valuing Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Tappolet, Christine. 2000. Emotions et Valeurs. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.-----. 2003. "Emotions and the Intelligibility of Akratic Action". In Sarah Stroud and Christine Tappolet, eds., Weakness of Will and Practical Irrationality, pp. 97-120.Taylor, Gabriele. 1975. "Justifying the Emotions." Mind, 84: 390-402.-----. 1985. Pride, Shame, and Guilt: Emotions of Self-Assessment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Thagard, Paul. 2005. Coherence in Thought and Action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Thagard, Paul. 2006. Hot Thought: Mechanisms and Applications of Emotional Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Thalberg, Irving. 1977. Perception, Emotion and Action. New Haven: Yale University Press.Thomas, Laurence. 1989. Living Morally: A Psychology of Moral Character. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Tov-Ruach, Leila, (pseud for Amelie Rorty). 1980. "Jealousy, Attention and Loss." In Explaining Emotions, ed. Amelie Rorty. Los Angeles: University of California Press.Wiggins, David R. P. 1987. "A Sensible Subjectivism." In Needs, Values, Truth, 185-214. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Williams, Bernard. 1973. "Morality and the Emotions." In Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers 1956-1972, 207-29. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Wilson, J. R. S. 1972. Emotion and Object. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan.Wollheim, Richard. 1999. On the Emotions. New Haven: Yale University Press.Wright, Ian, Aaron Sloman, and Luc Beaudoin. 1996. "Towards a Design-Based Analysis of Emotional Episodes." Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology, 3: 101-126.Other Important Literature, including entry points into "Affective Science"Budd, Malcolm. 1985. Music and the Emotions: The Philosophical Theories. London: Routledge.Evans, Dylan. 2001. Emotions: The Science of Sentiment. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.Davidson, Richard; Scherer, Klaus; Goldsmith, H. Hill(ed.) 2001. Handbook of Affective Sciences. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.Goldie, Peter, (ed.). 2002. Understanding Emotions. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing.Juslin, Patrik N. and John A. Sloboda, eds. Music and Emotion: Theory and Research. Oxford: Oxford University PressOatley, Keith. 1992. Best Laid Schemes: The Psychology of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.----- 2006. Emotions: A Brief History. Oxford: Blackwell.Zajonc, Robert. 2000. "Feeling and Thinking: Closing the Debate over the Independence of Affect." In Feeling and Thinking: The Role of Affect in Social Cognition, ed. Joseph P. Forgas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 31-58.
Deroxas, Florin 2008. Vizualizaţi profilul meu complet
No aspect of our mental life is more important to the quality and meaning of our existence than emotions. They are what make life worth living, or sometimes ending. So it is not surprising that most of the great classical philosophers—Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Descartes, Hobbes, Hume—had recognizable theories of emotion, conceived as responses to certain sorts of events of concern to a subject, triggering bodily changes and typically motivating characteristic behavior. What is surprising is that in much of the twentieth-century philosophers of mind and psychologists tended to neglect them—perhaps because the sheer variety of phenomena covered by the word "emotion" and its closest neighbors tends to discourage tidy theory. In recent years, however, emotions have once again become the focus of vigorous interest in philosophy, as well as in other branches of cognitive science. In view of the proliferation of increasingly fruitful exchanges between researches of different stripes, it is no longer useful to speak of the philosophy of emotion in isolation from the approaches of other disciplines, particularly psychology, neurology, evolutionary biology, and even economics. While it is quite impossible to do justice to those approaches here, some sidelong glances in their direction will aim to suggest their philosophical importance.I begin by outlining some of the ways that philosophers have conceived of the place of emotions in the topography of the mind, particularly in their relation to bodily states, to motivation, and to beliefs and desires, as well as some of the ways in which they have envisaged the relation between different emotions. Most emotions have an intentional structure: we shall need to say something about what that means. Psychology and more recently evolutionary biology have offered a number of theories of emotions, stressing their function in the conduct of life. Philosophers have been especially partial to cognitivist theories, emphasizing analogies either with propositional judgments or with perception. But different theories implicitly posit different ontologies of emotion, and there has been some dispute about what emotions really are, and indeed whether they are any kind of thing at all. Emotions also raise normative questions: about the extent to which they can be said to be rational, or can contribute to rationality. In that regard the question of our knowledge of our own emotions is especially problematic, as it seems they are both the object of our most immediate awareness and the most powerful source of our capacity for self-deception. This results in a particularly ambivalent relation between emotions and morality. I will conclude with a recapitulation of the main positions defended by some three dozen philosophers of emotion in the past half century.
1 Emotions and the Topography of the Mind
2. Feeling Theories
3. Emotions and Intentional Objects
4. Psychological and Evolutionary Approaches
5. Cognitivist Theories
6. Perceptual Theories
7. The Ontology of Emotions
8. Rationality and Emotions
9. Emotions and Self-knowledge
10. Morality and Emotions
11. Summary and Guide to the Recent Literature
12. Conclusion: Adequacy Conditions on Theories of Emotion
Bibliography
1. Emotions and the Topography of the Mind
How do emotions fit into different conceptions of the mind? One model, advocated by Descartes as well as by many contemporary psychologists, posits a few basic emotions out of which all others are compounded. An alternative model views every emotion as consisting in, or at least including, some irreducibly specific component not compounded of anything simpler. Again, emotions might form an indefinitely broad continuum comprising a small number of finite dimensions (e.g. level of arousal, intensity, pleasure or aversion, self- or other-directedness, etc.). In much the way that color arises from the visual system's comparison of retinal cones, whose limited sensitivity ranges correspond roughly to primary hues, we might then hope to find relatively simple biological explanations for the rich variety of emotions. Rigid boundaries between them would be arbitrary. Alternative models, based in physiology or evolutionary psychology, have posited modular subsystems or agents the function of which is to coordinate the fulfilment of basic needs, such as mating, affiliation, defense and the avoidance of predators. (Panksepp 1998, Cosmides and Tooby 2000).To date cognitive science does not seem to have provided any crucial tests to decide between competing models of the mind. An eclectic approach therefore seems warranted. What does seem well established in the light of cross-cultural research is that a small number of emotions have inter-translatable names and universally recognizable expressions. According to Ekman and Friesen (1989) these are happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust (the last two of which, however, some researchers consider too simple to be called emotions) (Panksepp 1998). Other emotions are not so easily recognizable cross-culturally, and some expressions are almost as local as dialects. But then this is an issue on which cognitive science alone should not, perhaps, be accorded the last word: what to a neurologist might be classed as two tokens of the same emotion type might seem to have little in common under the magnifying lens of a Marcel Proust.Another range of models propose mutually conflicting ways of locating emotion within the general economy of the mind. Some treat emotion as one of many separate faculties. For Plato in the Republic, there seemed to have been three basic components of the human mind: the reasoning, the desiring, and the emotive parts. For Aristotle, the emotions are not represented as constituting a separate agency or module, but they had even greater importance, particularly in the moral life, our capacity for which Aristotle regarded as largely a result of learning to feel the right emotions in the right circumstances. Hume's notorious dictum that reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions also placed the emotions at the very center of character and agency. For Spinoza, emotions are not lodged in a separate body in conflict with the soul, since soul and body are aspects of a single reality; but emotions, as affections of the soul, make the difference between the best and the worst lives, as they either increase the soul's power to act, or diminish that power. In other models, emotions as a category are apt to be sucked into either of two other faculties of mind. They are then treated as mere composites or offshoots of those other faculties: a peculiar kind of belief, or a vague kind of desire or will. The Stoics made emotions into judgments about the value of things incidental to an agent's virtue, to which we should therefore remain perfectly indifferent. Hobbes assimilated "passions" to specific appetites or aversions. Kant too saw emotions as essentially conative phenomena, but grouped them with inclinations enticing the will to act on motives other than that of duty.Twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy and psychology have also tended to incorporate emotions into other, better understood mental categories. Under the influence of a "tough-minded" ideology committed to behaviorism, it seemed easier to look for adequate theories of action or will, as well as theories of belief or knowledge, than to construct adequate theories of emotion. Economic models of rational decision and agency inspired by Bayesian theory are essentially assimilative models, viewing emotion either as a species of belief, or as a species of desire.That enviably resilient Bayesian model has been cracked, in the eyes of many philosophers, by such refractory phenomena as akrasia or "weakness of will." In cases of akrasia, traditional descriptive rationality seems to be violated, insofar as the "strongest" desire does not win, even when paired with the appropriate belief (Davidson 1980). Emotion is ready to pick up the slack—if only we had a coherent theory of how it does it.It is one thing, however, to recognize the need for a theory of mind that finds a place for the unique role of emotions, and quite another to construct one. Emotions vary so much in a number of dimensions—transparency, intensity, behavioral expression, object-directedness, and susceptibility to rational assessment—as to cast doubt on the assumption that they have anything in common. However, while this variation may have led philosophers to steer clear of emotions in the past, many philosophers are now rising to the challenge. The explanatory inadequacy of theories that shortchange emotion is becoming increasingly apparent, and, as Peter Goldie (2000) observes, it is no longer the case that emotion is treated as a poor relation in the philosophy of mind.
2. Feeling Theories
The simplest theory of emotions, and perhaps the theory most representative of common sense, is that emotions are simply a class of feelings, differentiated from sensation and proprioceptions by their experienced quality. William James proposed a variant of this view (commonly known as the "James-Lange" theory of emotion, after James and Carl G. Lange) according to which emotions are specifically feelings caused by changes in physiological conditions relating to the autonomic and motor functions. When we perceive that we are in danger, for example, this perception sets off a collection of bodily responses, and our awareness of these responses is what constitutes fear. James thus maintained that "we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and [it is] not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be" (James 1884, 190).One problem with this theory is that it is unable to give an adequate account of the differences between emotions. This objection was first voiced by Walter Cannon (1929). According to James, what distinguishes emotions is the fact that each involves the perception of a unique set of bodily changes. Cannon claimed, however, that the visceral reactions characteristic of distinct emotions such as fear and anger are identical, and so these reactions cannot be what allow us to tell emotions apart. The same conclusion is usually drawn from an oft-cited experiment performed by Stanley Schacter and Jerome Singer (1962). Subjects in their study were injected with epinephrine, a stimulant of the sympathetic system. Schacter and Singer found that these subjects tended to interpret the arousal they experienced either as anger or as euphoria, depending on the type of situation they found themselves in. Some were placed in a room where an actor was being angry; others were placed in a room where an actor was being silly and euphoric. In both cases the subjects' mood tended to follow that of the actor. The conclusion most frequently drawn is that, although some forms of general arousal are easily labeled in terms of some emotional state, there is no hope of finding in physiological states any principle of distinction between specific emotions. The differentiae of specific emotions are not physiological, but cognitive or something else.Subsequent research has shown that a limited number of emotions do, in fact, have significantly different bodily profiles. (LeDoux 1996; Panksepp 1998) However, bodily changes and the feelings accompanying these changes get us only part way towards an adequate taxonomy. To account for the differences between guilt, embarrassment, and shame, for example, a plausible theory will have to look beyond physiology and common-sense phenomenology.Another problem with feeling theories is that they tempt one to treat emotions as brute facts, no doubt susceptible of biological or psychological explanation but not otherwise capable of being rationalized. Emotions, however, are capable of being not only explained, but also justified—they are closely related to the reasons that give rise to them. If someone angers me, I can cite my antagonist's deprecatory tone; if someone makes me jealous, I can point to his poaching on my emotional property. (Taylor 1975).Both of these problems—that of differentiating individual emotions, and that of accounting for emotions' various ties to rationality—can be traced, at least in part, to a more fundamental oversight. Feeling theories, by assimilating emotions to sensations, fail to take account of the fact that emotions are typically directed at intentional objects. This defect is to some extent mitigated in what might be regarded as a more sophisticated "feeling theory" elaborated by Antonio Damasio (1999). On Damasio's view the capacity for emotions involves a capacity for the brain to monitor the body's past and hypothetical responses, both in the autonomic and the voluntary systems, in terms of "somatic markers". The association of characteristic bodily states with past and hypothetical experiences and responses establishes some connection between the emotion and the absent world, but falls short of fully explicating the intentional nature of emotion.
3. Emotions and Intentional ObjectsWhat does a mood, such as free-floating depression or euphoria, have in common with an episode of indignation whose reasons can be precisely articulated? The first seems to have as its object nothing and everything, and often admits of no particular justification; the second has a long story to tell, typically involving other people and what they have done or said. Not only these people, but the relevant facts about the situations involved, as well as some of the special facts about those situations, aspects of those facts, the causal role played by these aspects, and even the typical aims of the actions motivated by the emotions can all in some context or other be labeled objects of emotion. The wide range of possible objects is suggested by the many different ways we fill in ascriptions of emotions. If someone is indignant, then there is some object o or proposition p such that the person is indignant at or with o, about p or that p, because of p, or in virtue of p.This variety has led to a good deal of confusion. A long-standing debate, for example, concerns the extent to which the objects of emotions are to be identified with their causes. This identification seems plausible; yet it is easy to construct examples in which being the cause of an emotion is intuitively neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for its being its object: if A gets annoyed at B for some entirely trivial matter, drunkenness may have caused A's annoyance, yet it is in no sense its object. Its object may be some innocent remark of B's, which occasioned the annoyance but which it would be misleading to regard as its cause. In fact the object of the annoyance may be a certain insulting quality in B's remark which is, as a matter of fact, entirely imaginary and therefore could not possibly be its true cause.The right way to deal with these complexities is to embrace them. We need a taxonomy of the different sorts of possible emotional objects. We might then distinguish different types of emotions, not on the basis of their qualitative feel, but—at least in part—according to the different complex structures of their object relations. Many emotions, such as love, necessarily involve a target, or actual particular at which they are directed. Others, such as sadness, do not. On the other hand, although a number of aspects of the loved one may motivate attentional focus, efforts to find a propositional object for love have been unconvincing. (Kraut 1986, Rorty 1988). Sadness may or may not focus on a propositional object; regret, by contrast, cannot be described without specifying such an object. Depression or elation can lack all three kinds of object. Objectless emotions share many properties with other emotions, especially in their physiological and motivational aspects, but they might more properly be classified as moods rather than full-fledged emotions. Moods typically facilitate certain ranges of object-directed emotions, but they form a class apart.Finally, while different emotions may or may not have these various sorts of objects, every emotion has a formal object if it has any object. A formal object is a property implicitly ascribed by the emotion to its target, focus or propositional object, in virtue of which the emotion can be seen as intelligible. My fear of a dog, for example, construes a number of the dog's features (its salivating maw, its ferocious bark) as being frightening, and it is my perception of the dog as frightening that makes my emotion fear, rather than some other emotion. The formal object associated with a given emotion is essential to the definition of that particular emotion. This explains the appearance of tautology in the specification any formal object (I am disgusted because it is disgusting); but it is also, in part, what allows us to speak of emotions being appropriate or inappropriate. If the dog obstructing my path is a shitzu, my fear is mistaken: the target of my fear fails to fit fear's formal object. As we shall see below in section 10 below, appropriateness in this sense does not entail moral correctness; but it makes the emotion intelligible even when it is abhorrent. Thus racist disgust, while obviously morally inappropriate, is nevertheless intelligible in terms of its link to paradigm cases of disgust.
4. Psychological and Evolutionary Approaches
That emotions typically have formal objects highlights another important feature of emotional experience which feeling theories neglect, and which other psychological theories attempt to accommodate: emotions involve evaluations. If someone insults me and I become angry, his impertinence will be the aspect of his behavior that fits the formal object of anger: I only become angry once I construe the person's remark as a slight; the specific nature of my emotion's formal object is a function of my appraisal of the situation. Magna Arnold (1960) introduced the notion of appraisal into psychology, characterizing it as the process through which the significance of a situation for an individual is determined. Appraisal gives rise to attraction or aversion, and emotion is equated with this "felt tendency toward anything intuitively appraised as good (beneficial), or away from anything intuitively appraised as bad (harmful)" (171). Subsequent appraisal theories accept the broad features of Arnold's account, and differ mainly in emphasis. Richard Lazarus (1991) makes the strong claim that appraisals are both necessary and sufficient for emotion, and sees the identity of particular emotions as being completely determined by the patterns of appraisal giving rise to them. Nico Frijda (1986) takes the patterns of action readiness following appraisals to be what characterize different emotions, but departs from Arnold in not characterizing these patterns solely in terms of attraction and aversion. Klaus Scherer and his Geneva school have elaborated appraisal theories into sophisticated models that anatomize different emotions in terms of some eighteen or more dimensions of appraisal. Emotions turn out to be reliably correlated, if not identified, with patterns of such complex appraisals. (Scherer et al., 2001). Appraisal theories can be described as taking a functional approach to emotion, insofar as appraisals lead to reactions whose function is to deal with specific situation types having some significance for an individual (Scherer 2006). This approach suggests that the space of emotions can be conceptualized as multidimensional. In practice, however, so-called dimensional theories simplify the problem of representation by reducing these to just two or three (Russell 2003). Typically these include 'arousal' and 'valence'. This is handy, but tends to flatten out many distinct ways in which one might classify emotional valence as 'positive' or 'negative'.Other theories consider the function of emotions more broadly, and ask, not why we should have particular emotions on specific occasions, but rather why we should have particular emotions at all. This question is often given an evolutionary answer: emotions (or at least many of them) are adaptations whose purpose is to solve basic ecological problems facing organisms (Plutchik 1980; Frank 1988). Darwin (1998[1896]) himself was concerned not so much with the question of how our emotions might have evolved, but rather why they should have the forms of expression that they do. Emotional expressions, he thought, once served particular functions (e.g. baring teeth in anger to prepare for attack), but now accompany particular emotions because of their usefulness in communicating these emotions to others. Paul Ekman (1972), inspired by Darwin's approach, takes emotional expressions to be important parts of "affect programs"—complex responses found in all human populations, which are controlled by mechanisms operating below the level of consciousness. Much research has been done on this group of emotions (usually listed as happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust) and scientifically-minded philosophers often restrict their discussions of emotion to the affect programs, since these are those most well understood of all emotional phenomena (Griffiths 1997; DeLancey 2001; Prinz 2004). However, the affect program model leaves out a good deal. In particular, it ignores those emotions which involve higher cognitive processes, such as jealousy, envy, and Schadenfreude. It is these sorts of emotions which many philosophers have made the focus of their own theories of emotion. The research program of evolutionary psychology (Cosmides et al. 2000) goes some way to filling this lacuna, and emphasizes the modularity that is likely to result on the plausible speculation that different social and psychological emotional functions have been shaped relatively independently by natural selection. The mechanisms elaborated by natural selection in the context of competitive survival, dominance, mating and affiliation are not necessarily harmonious. Philosophers, for their part, have devoted a good deal of attention to the analysis of more subtle differences between "higher" emotions. (Ben-Ze'ev 2000). This has led many philosophers to stress cognitive aspects of emotions.
5. Cognitivist Theories
Most contemporary philosophical theories of emotion resemble psychological appraisal theories, characterizing emotions primarily in terms of their associated cognitions. What distinguishes these "cognitivist" theories is their particular understanding of these cognitions. While appraisal theorists generally allow that the cognitive processes underlying emotion can be either conscious or unconscious, and can involve either propositional or non-propositional content, cognitivists typically claim that emotions involve propositional attitudes. Many emotions are specified in terms of propositions: one can't be angry with someone unless one believes that person guilty of some offense; one can't be envious unless one believes that someone else has something good in her possession. Proponents of cognitivism universalize this feature of certain emotions, and maintain that in order to have an emotion, one must always have some sort of attitude directed at a proposition.The most parsimonious type of cognitivist theory follows the Stoics in identifying emotions with judgments. Robert Solomon (1980), Jerome Neu (2000) and Martha Nussbaum (2001) take this approach. My anger at someone simply is the judgment that I have been wronged by that person. Other cognitivist theories introduce further elements into their analyses. Emotions have been described as sets of beliefs and desires (Marks 1982), affect-laden judgments (Broad 1971; Lyons 1980), and as complexes of beliefs, desires, and feelings (Oakley 1992).Cognitivist theories have faced criticism along a number of fronts. Deigh (1994) has objected that the view of emotions as propositional attitudes has the effect of excluding animals and infants lacking language. Others have argued that if emotions always involve the standard propositional attitudes, namely belief and desire, then an account of the rationality of emotions will collapse into an account of what it is for those standard propositional attitudes to be rational: but emotional rationality is not reducible to the rationality of beliefs or desires (de Sousa 1987; Ben-Ze'ev 2000; Goldie 2000; Elster 2003). Another criticism, stressed by Wollheim (1999) draws upon a difference between transient mental states and mental dispositions. Emotions, like beliefs and desires, can exist either as occurrent events (jealousy of a rival at a party) or as persisting modifications of the mind (a tendency to feel jealousy). However, dispositional beliefs have a straightforward connection with their occurrent manifestations: if I have a standing belief that the world is round, for example, then I will assent to this proposition on particular occasions (sincere avowal of desires also counts as evidence for underlying dispositions, though the connection is not as tight). Dispositional emotions, on the other hand, do not have tailor-made forms of expression, but can be manifested in a whole diverse range of behavior.A frequent objection made to cognitivist theories is the "fear of flying" objection: propositional attitudes are neither necessary nor sufficient for the existence of an emotion, since I may be well aware that flying is the safest means of transport and yet suffer fear of flying. (Stocker 1992). I may feel a twinge of suspicion towards my butler, and yet believe him to be utterly trustworthy; conversely, I may judge that he is up to no good, and yet feel nothing in the way of emotion. These examples suggest an analogy with perceptual illusions, which a correct belief sometimes quite fails to dispel. A cognitivist might reply that this objection merely establishes that the propositional content of emotion (like the propositional content of perception) differs from the propositional content of belief, not that emotions have no propositional content at all. It remains that even if perceptions necessarily have propositional content, they cannot be assimilated to belief: so it seems to be with emotion. Furthermore, it is not obvious that the content of perceptions or emotions are exhausted by their propositional content (Peacocke 2001). Similarly several theorists insist that experiences of emotion have content beyond any propositional content. (Goldie 2000; Wollheim 2000; Charland 2002; Tappolet 2003).
6. Perceptual Theories
A crucial mandate of cognitivist theories is to avert the charge that emotions are merely "subjective." But propositional attitudes are not the only cognitive states. A more basic feature of cognition is that is has a "mind-to-world direction of fit." The expression is meant to sum up the contrast between cognition and the conative orientation, in which success is defined in terms of the opposite, world-to-mind, direction of fit (Searle 1983). We will or desire what does not yet exist, and deem ourselves successful if the world is brought into line with the mind's plan.A view ascribing to emotions a true mind-to-world direction of fit, inspired by the model of perception, would involve a criterion of success that depended on correctness with respect to some objective property. To take this approach is to give a particular answer to a question posed long ago in Plato's Euthyphro (the question, as originally put forward, concerned the nature of piety, but it extends to values in general): Do we love X—mutatis mutandis for the other emotions—because X is lovable, or do we declare X to be lovable merely because we love it? The first alternative is the objectivist one, encouraged by the analogy of perception. It requires that we define clearly the relevant sense of ‘objectivity’. Specifically it promises a valid analogy between some of the ways in which we can speak of perception as aspiring to objectivity and ways in which we can say the same of emotion.Emotions are sometimes said to be subjective in this sense: that they merely reflect something that belongs exclusively and contingently to the mind of the subject of experience, and therefore do not co-vary with any property that could be independently identified. This charge presupposes a sense of "objective" that contrasts with "projective," in something like the psychoanalytic sense. In terms of the analogy of perception, to say that emotions are universally subjective in this sense would be to claim that they resemble hallucinations more than veridical perceptions. The perceptual system is capable of the sort of functioning-in-a-vacuum that leads to perceptual mistakes. Similarly, emotions may mislead us into "hasty" or "emotional" judgments (Solomon 1984). On the other hand, the lack of perceptual capacities can be a crippling handicap in one's attempt to negotiate the world: similarly a lack of adequate emotional responses can hinder our attempts to view the world correctly and act correctly in it (Nussbaum 1990, Thomas 1989). This explains why we are so often tempted to take seriously ascription of reasonableness or unreasonableness, fittingness or inappropriateness, for common emotions. Unfortunately it is unclear how the alleged objective properties identified by emotions might be identified independently.Closely related to the question of the cognitive aspect of emotions is the question of their passivity. Passivity has an ambiguous relation to subjectivity. In one vein, impressed by the bad reputation of the "passions" as taking over our consciousness against our will, philosophers have been tempted to take the passivity of emotions as evidence of their subjectivity. In another vein, however, it has been noted that the passivity of emotions is sometimes precisely analogous to the passivity of perception. How the world is, is not in our power. So it is only to be expected that our emotions, if they actually represent something genuinely and objectively in the world, should not be in our power either: we can no more arbitrarily choose to experience an emotion than we can adopt a belief at will. (Gordon 1987).If the view that emotions are a kind of perception can be sustained, then the connection between emotion and cognition will have been secured. But there is yet another way of establishing this connection, compatible with the perceptual model. This is to draw attention to the role of emotions as providing the framework for cognitions of the more conventional kind. de Sousa (1987) and Amélie Rorty (1980) propose this sort of account, according to which emotions are not so much perceptions as they are ways of seeing—species of determinate patterns of salience among objects of attention, lines of inquiry, and inferential strategies. (See also Roberts 1988) Emotions make certain features of situations or arguments more prominent, giving them a weight in our experience that they would have lacked in the absence of emotion. Consider how Iago proceeds to make Othello jealous. He directs Othello's attention, suggests questions to ask, and insinuates that there are inferences to be drawn without specifying them himself. Once Othello's attention turns to his wife's friendship with Cassio and the lost handkerchief, inferences which on the same evidence would not even have been thought of before are now experienced as compelling: "Farewell, the tranquil mind…."This account does not identify emotions with judgments or desires, but it does explain why cognitivist theorists have been tempted to make this identification. Emotions set the agenda for beliefs and desires: one might say that they ask the questions that judgment answers with beliefs and evaluate the prospects that may or may not arouse desire. As every committee chairperson knows, questions have much to do with the determination of answers: the rest can be left up to the facts. In this way emotions could be said to be judgments, in the sense that they are what we see the world "in terms of." But they need not consist in articulated propositions. Much the same reasons motivate their assimilation to desire. As long as we presuppose some basic or preexisting desires, the directive power of "motivation" belongs to what controls attention, salience, and inference strategies preferred.Some philosophers suggest that the directive power which emotions exert over perception is partly a function of their essentially dramatic or narrative structure (Rorty 1988). It seems conceptually incoherent to suppose that one could have an emotion—say, an intense jealousy or a consuming rage—for only a fraction of a second. (Wollheim 1999) One explanation of this feature of emotions is that a story plays itself out during the course of each emotional episode, and stories take place over stretches of time. de Sousa (1987) has suggested that the stories characteristic of different emotions are learned by association with "paradigm scenarios." These are drawn first from a daily life as small children and later reinforced by the stories, art, and culture to which we are exposed. Later still, they are supplemented and refined by literature and other art forms capable of expanding the range of one's imagination of ways to live. Paradigm scenarios involve two aspects: first, a situation type providing the characteristic objects of the specific emotion-type (where objects can be of the various sorts mentioned above), and second, a set of characteristic or "normal" responses to the situation, where normality is determined by a complex and controversial mix of biological and cultural factors. Once our emotional repertoire is established, we interpret various situations we are faced with through the lens of different paradigm scenarios. When a particular scenario suggests itself as an interpretation, it arranges or rearranges our perceptual, cognitive, and inferential dispositions.A problem with this idea is that each emotion is appropriate to its paradigm scenario by definition, since it is the paradigm scenario which in effect calibrates the emotional repertoire. It is not clear whether this places unreasonable limitations on the range of possible criticism to which emotions give rise. What is certain is that when a paradigm scenario is evoked by a novel situation, the resulting emotion may or may not be appropriate to the situation that triggers it. In that sense at least, then, emotions can be assessed for rationality.This brings up normative issues about emotions, which will be addressed in sections 8-10 below. First, however, I consider what one might conclude about the nature or "ontology" of emotions.
7. The Ontology of Emotions
What, in the end, are emotions? What do they ultimately consist in? A variety of possible answers to this "ontological" question suggest themselves in the light of the above account. They might be physiological processes, or perceptions of physiological processes, or neuro-psychological states, or adaptive dispositions, or evaluative judgments, or computational states, or even social facts or dynamical processes. In fact most philosophers would assent to most of these descriptions while regarding all as partial. In view of the acknowledged complexity of emotional functions, it seems wise to rephrase the question not in terms of ontology, but in terms of levels of explanation. The trichotomy first introduced by David Marr (Marr 1982) remains an excellent starting point. At the computational level (which most would now call the functional level), we need to identify the emotions' basic teleology: what they are for. This will be appropriate even if one believes, as some traditionally have, that emotions actually represent the breakdown of smoothly adaptive functions such as thought, perception, and rational planning. For in that case the emotions will be understood precisely in terms of their failure to promote the smooth working of the cognitive and conative functions. Such a failure will trigger a descent to a lower level of explanation, adverting to the counterproductive exercise of mechanisms at the algorithmic and implementational levels. The first—-more or less equivalent to the design level of (Dennett 1971)—refers to the sub-functions that natural selection has set up to perform the functions said to be disrupted by emotion. The second designates the actual neuro-physiological processes whereby, in animals built on a specific plan such as mammals or humans such as we, these sub-functions are normally carried out.This trichotomy has been reinterpreted in various ways, but it still serves. It is generally agreed that the simpler emotions, those whose expression and recognition Ekman (1972, 1989) has shown to be universal, are driven by the basic needs of organisms such as mating, defense or avoidance of predators, and social affiliation. All complex mammals require swift, relatively stereotyped responses to these challenges. These are the "affect programs" favored by Ekman (1972, 1989), DeLancey (2001) and particularly Griffiths (1997), to be "what emotions really are." Opinions divide as to whether the same sort of functional analysis can be applied to a wider range of what Griffiths has called the "cognitively penetrable" emotions. Placing severe constraints on what is to count as a "natural kind", Griffiths argued that Ekman's six basic affect programs, and only they, form natural kinds: the others, he claimed, are for the moment beyond the reach of useful scientific investigation. Each affect program comprises a coordinated syndrome of responses (which we attribute to the algorithmic level) implemented at the physiological (hormonal and neurological), muscular-skeletal, and expressive levels in ways that owe their uniformity to homology, that is to say their common ancestral origin. Other emotions, however, bear only relations of analogy with these and don't count as natural kinds either singly or as a class.Against this Charland (2002) has argued that a sufficient level of homology can be found to unite at least the basic emotions as a class, and that we should regard emoters, and hence their emotions, as a natural kind. Relying on Panksepp (1998, 2000), Charland argues that the integrated mechanism of seven basic emotions (Panksepp's list differs slightly from Ekman's) are implemented by distinct circuits forming natural kinds not only in the human but more widely in the mammalian brain. Emoters form a distinct kind in view of their ancestral organization in terms of certain basic functions, the specific algorithms that contribute to those functions, and their implementation in terms of physiological, expressive, hormonal, and motivational processes. This is sufficient not only to justify treating the specific emotions as natural kinds, but to treat emotion in general as a natural kind. (Charland 1995, 1997). This view seems to require that we regard emotions as a set of processes distinguished at all three levels of explanation. Emotions in general should then be viewed as a genus of processes typically involving five different component aspects or components, comprising subjective feeling, cognition, motor expression, action tendencies or desire, and neurological processes. (Scherer 2005). On this view, individual emotions would owe their specific identity both to the subfunctions they are designed to serve and to their characteristic physiological implementation.Another way of organizing the various approaches might appeal to the dominant theoretical models on which they rest. It has often been said that in the history of the philosophy of mind, every epoch has tended to redefine its subject matter in terms of the most fashionable technological metaphor. The notion of emotions as "springs of action" alludes to the once fashionable model of clockwork. The dominant metaphor in Freud's early work was hydraulic. (Freud 1895). What does this observation lead us to expect for emotions?Modern conceptions of emotions, as we have seen, have been frequently couched in terms of other mental terms. In these cases, there is nothing sui generis that emotions are: any "ontological" question about their nature belongs derivatively to the ontology of desire and belief. (At a different, more remote level of explanation, theories favoured by cognitive science are likely also to appeal to evolutionary ideas.) This leaves three other dominant contemporary models which one could expect to lay claims on emotion theory: physiology, computation, and dynamical systems.Physiological processes are conceded by all philosophers to be involved in clearly prototypical cases of emotion. But no philosopher, for fear perhaps of defining themselves out of relevant competence, has been willing to concede that emotions just are physiological processes. Instead they are held to be complexes in which physiology plays a part at the level of implementation of some higher-level process. The higher-level process in which an emotion consists owes its overall structure to functional needs, and typically comprises, in addition to physiological aspects, behavioural, expressive, and phenomenological, components.Computational theories of emotion seem to have been particularly attractive to psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. They were broached early by a couple of psychoanalysts turned hackers (Peterfreund 1971), (Shank and Colby 1973) and played an important role in the theoretical elaborations of John Bowlby's work on the mechanisms and psychological consequences of early separation and loss. (Bowlby 1969-1980). These works attempted to model Freudian concepts of the dynamics of conscious and unconscious mental life in computational terms. Colby even constructed a simulation of a paranoid patient, "Parry", which famously fooled some psychiatrists. The key idea was to set up second-order parameters that acted on the first-order modules of perception, belief and desire, thus regulating or disrupting the operation of perceptual and action programs. From the sidelines, de Sousa (1987) suggested that connectionist systems or analog models stand a better chance of modeling emotion than those based on classical von Neuman-type digital computation, but that suggestion hasn't gone anywhere. From the point of view of computational theory, the prevailing wind, backed by both evolutionary speculation and neurological findings on control systems and relatively independent affect-programs, has tended to favour modular conceptions of emotion rather than holistic ones. (Charland 1995, Robinson 2003).Still, some philosophers and computer scientists have continued to be interested in integrating computing theory with emotions. Aaron Sloman has elaborated the sort of ideas that were embryonic in Shank and Colby into a more sophisticated computational theory of the mind in which emotions are virtual machines, playing a crucial role in a complex hierarchic architecture in which they control, monitor, schedule and sometimes disrupt other control modules. (Wright, Sloman and Beaudoin 1996). The notion of architecture here adverts to the complex hierarchy of control of component modular mechanisms. In line with the three-level schema I have cited from Marr, (cf. also (Dennett 1971)) we should understand the approach elaborated in this work as pertaining both to the functional and to the algorithmic level. It explicitly eschews hypotheses about implementation. Joining the growing consensus that emotion phenomena reflect distinct, successively evolved behavioral control systems, Sloman distinguishes between a primitive or primary stream rooted in relatively fixed neuro-physiological response syndromes, a more elaborate control system bringing in cortical control, as well as a third level, probably exclusive to humans, which most closely corresponds to the layer of emotions that we are most concerned with when we think of the emotional charge of art and literature or of the complexity of social intercourse. Rosalind Picard (1997) lays out the evidence for the view that computers will need emotions to be truly intelligent, and in particular to interact intelligently with humans. She also adverts to the role of emotions in evaluation and the pruning of search spaces. But she is as much concerned to provide an emotional theory of computation as to elaborate a computational theory of emotions. Marvin Minsky (2006) explores the many-faceted nature of mental life, including emotions, from a computer modeling point of view. Paul Thagard (2005) has elaborated computer models in which emotional valence interacts with evidential strength to determine a mode of emotional coherence.Dynamical systems theories have been relatively slow to emerge, despite their increasingly fashionable status in more central areas of cognitive science and contrary to the prediction made by de Sousa (1987) that connectionist systems or analog models would be more successful in modeling emotion than those based on classical von Neuman-type digital computation. One remarkable attempt to integrate the perspective of dynamical systems into understanding of emotional life is that of (Magai and Haviland-Jones 2002), who draw on dynamical systems theory to model the elusive combination of unpredictability and patterned coherence found in the life-long evolution of individuality. Like predecessors such as Bowlby (1969-1980), they are motivated by a goal of understanding at the level of conscious experience as well as of underlying mechanisms: dynamical systems theory is only one of their tools. It is therefore particularly pertinent to the preoccupations of those who are interested in the normative dimensions of emotions: their rationality and their irrationality, their capacity for enhancing or inhibiting self-knowledge, and their moral implications. I address these questions in the next three sections.
8. Rationality and Emotions
The clearest notions associated with rationality are coherence and consistency in the sphere of belief, and optimizing outcomes in the sphere of action. But these notions are mainly critical ones. By themselves, they would be not suffice to guide an organism towards any particular course of action. For the number of goals that it is logically possible to posit at any particular time is virtually infinite, and the number of possible strategies that might be employed in pursuit of them is orders of magnitude larger. Moreover, in considering possible strategies, the number of consequences of any one strategy is again infinite, so that unless some drastic pre-selection can be effected among the alternatives their evaluation could never be completed. This gives rise to what is known among cognitive scientists as the "Frame Problem": in deciding among any range of possible actions, most of the consequences of each must be eliminated a priori, i.e. without wasting any time on verifying that they are indeed irrelevant.That this is not as much of a problem for people as it is for machines may well be due to our capacity for emotions. As noted earlier, emotions constitute one of the chief mechanisms whereby attention is constrained and directed. (Matthews and Wells 1994). This allows them to frame our decisions in two important ways. First, they define the parameters taken into account in any particular deliberation. Second, in the process of rational deliberation itself, they render salient only a tiny proportion of the available alternatives and of the conceivably relevant facts. Thus they winnow down to manageable size the number of considerations relevant to deliberation, and help to provide, in any particular situation, the indispensable framework without which the question of rationality could not even be considered. This suggestion, relabeled the "Search hypothesis of emotion", has been elaborated and criticized by Evans (2004), who argues convincingly that it needs to be buttressed by a positive theory of precisely what emotional mechanisms are capable of effecting this task.In a more pervasive and less easily definable way, the capacity to experience emotion seems to be indispensable to the conduct of a rational life over time. Antonio Damasio (1994) has amassed an impressive body of neurological evidence suggesting that emotions do, indeed, have this sort of function in everyday reasoning. Subjects in his studies who, because of injuries sustained to the prefrontal and somatosensory cortices of the brain, had a diminished capacity to experience emotion, were severely hindered in their ability to make intelligent practical decisions. In these ways, then, emotions would be all important to rationality even if they could not themselves be deemed rational or irrational.Nevertheless we should not infer that emotions act consistently as aids to rational thought and action. Researchers in recent decades have identified a large number of cases where emotions are indeed guilty of the lapses in rationality imputed by traditional prejudices of philosophers. Some examples: present emotional attitudes to future emotions are systematically distorted by discounting schemes that invert preference orders (Ainslie 1992); we fail in other ways to estimate correctly what our future emotions and preferences will be (Gilbert 2006); our assessment of the past, too, is systematically partial, in that we ignore all but the "peaks" of unpleasantness or pleasure, and the temporally last segments of time (Kahneman 2000); subjects misinterpret their own experience of fear as sexual excitement (Dutton and Aron 1974); and conversely, a mild stimulus to sexual interest causes men—but not women—to accept severely disadvantageous rates of discounting (Daly and Wilson 2003). The picture is further complicated by the fact that some apparent irrationalities may serve group cohesion. Thus in the much studied "ultimatum game", subjects are generally willing to incur considerable costs to punish unfair behaviour (Oosterbeek, Sloof and van de Kuilen 2004).But can emotions be assessed for rationality in themselves, rather than as components of practical strategies? There is a common prejudice that "feelings," a word now sometimes commonly used interchangeably with "emotions," neither owe nor can give any rational account of themselves. Yet we equally commonly blame others or ourselves for feeling "not wisely, but too well," or for targeting inappropriate objects. The norms appropriate to both these types of judgment are inseparable from social norms, whether or not these are endorsed. Ultimately they are inseparable from conceptions of normality and human nature. Judgments of reasonableness therefore tend to be endorsed or rejected in accordance with one's ideological commitments to this or that conception of human nature. It follows that whether these judgments can be viewed as objective or not will depend on whether there are objective facts to be sought about human nature. On this question there is fortunately no need to pronounce. It is enough to note that there is no logical reason why judgments of reasonableness or irrationality in relation to emotions need be regarded as any more subjective than any other judgments of rationality in human affairs.Exactly how one conceives of the nature of emotional rationality will depend on one's theory of what the emotions are. Cognitivist and appraisal theories will say that a reasonable emotion is one whose constituent propositional attitudes or appraisals are reasonable. Theories which take emotions to be perceptions of objective values will claim that the target of an appropriate emotion possesses the value which the emotion presents it as having. Narrative theories will consider an emotion appropriate if its dramatic structure adequately resembles that of its eliciting situation.Of course, these answers to the question of what it is for an emotion to be reasonable suppose that the relevant notion of rationality is an epistemic one, and that what appropriate emotions succeed in achieving is some sort of representational adequacy. This assumes that emotions are states that we passively undergo. However, the relation of the emotions to the will is not as clear as the word "passion" might suggest. Certain philosophers have argued that emotions are more like actions, for which we must bear responsibility (Sartre 1948; Solomon 1980). If this is true, and emotions are to some extent under our voluntary control, then emotions will also be assessable for their strategic rationality. However, while it may, on occasion, be possible to call up an emotion, it is also possible that the emotion which actually materializes will not be the one which was summoned. If a person is not aware that a substitution has taken place, then she will be self-deceived about her emotions—an all too frequent occurrence, worthy of a brief discussion in its own right.
9. Emotions and Self-knowledge
We often make the "Cartesian" assumption that if anyone can know our emotions it is ourselves. Descartes said it thus: "it is impossible for the soul to feel a passion without that passion being truly as one feels it." Barely a page later, however, he noted that "those that are most agitated by their passions are not those who know them best" (Descartes 1984 [1649], 338, 339). In fact, emotions are one of our avenues to self-knowledge, since few kinds of self-knowledge could matter more than knowing one's own repertoire of emotional responses. At the same time, emotions are both the cause and the subject of many failures of self-knowledge. Their complexity entails much potential to mislead or be misled. Insofar as most emotions involve belief, they inherit the susceptibility of the latter to self-deception. Recent literature on self-deception has striven to dissolve the air of paradox to which this once gave rise (Fingarette 1969, Mele 1987). Furthermore, brain scientists have noted the pervasive nature of self-deception and of different species of "confabulation", and they have begun to make progress in unmasking the underlying neurological processes (Hirstein 2005). But there remain three distinct sources of self-deception that stem from features of emotions already alluded to.The first arises from the connection of emotion with bodily changes. There was something right in James's claim that the emotion follows on, rather than causing the voluntary and involuntary bodily changes which are held to express it. Because some of these changes are either directly or indirectly subject to our choices, we are able to pretend or dissimulate emotion. That implies that we can sometimes be caught in our own pretense. Sometimes we identify our emotions by what we feel: and if what we feel has been distorted by a project of deception, then we will misidentify our own emotions.A second source of self-deception arises from the role of emotions in determining salience among potential objects of attention or concern. Poets have always known that the main effect of love is to redirect attention: when I love, I notice nothing but my beloved, and nothing of his faults. When my love turns to anger I still focus on him, but now attend to a very different set of properties. This suggests one way of controlling or dominating my emotion: think about something else, or think differently about this object (Greenspan 2000). But this carries a risk. It is easier to think of something than to avoid thinking about it; and to many cases of emotional distress only the latter could bring adequate relief. Besides, one is not always able to predict, and therefore to control, the effect that redirected attention might produce. This familiar observation alerts us to the role of the unconscious: if among the associations that are evoked by a given scene are some that I can react to without being aware of them, then I will not always be able to predict my own reactions, even if I have mastered the not altogether trivial task of attending to whatever I choose. Where the unconscious is, self-deception necessarily threatens.This brings us to the third source of emotional self-deception: the involvement of social norms in the determination of our emotions. This possibility arises in two stages from the admission that there are unconscious motivations for emotions. First, if I am experiencing an emotion that seems altogether inappropriate to its occasion, I will naturally confabulate an explanation for it. A neurotic who is unreasonably angry with his wife because he unconsciously identifies her with his mother will not rest content with having no reason for his anger. Instead, he will make one up. Second, the reason he makes up will typically be one that is socially approved (Averill 1982).If we are self-deceived in our emotional responses, or if some emotional state induces self-deception, this may not be merely a failure of self-knowledge. Many have thought that having certain emotions is an important part of what it is to be a virtuous moral agent. If this is true, then being systematically self-deceived about one's emotions will be a kind of moral failure as well.
10. Morality and Emotions
The complexity of emotions and their role in mental life is reflected in the unsettled place they have held in the history of ethics. Often they have been regarded as a dangerous threat to morality and rationality; in the romantic tradition, on the contrary, passions have been placed at the center both of human individuality and of the moral life. This ambivalence is reflected in the close connections between the vocabulary of emotions and that of vices and virtues: envy, spite, jealousy, wrath, and pride are some names of emotions that also refer to common vices. Not coincidentally, some key virtues—love, compassion, benevolence, and sympathy—are also names of emotions. (On the other hand, prudence, fortitude and temperance consist largely in the capacity to resist the motivational power of emotions.)The view that emotions are irrational was eloquently defended by the Epicureans and Stoics. For this reason, these Hellenistic schools pose a particularly interesting challenge for the rest of the Western tradition. The Stoics adapted and made their own the Socratic hypothesis that virtue is nothing else than knowledge, adding the idea that emotions are essentially irrational beliefs. All vice and all suffering is then irrational, and the good life requires the rooting out of all desires and attachments. (As for the third of the major Hellenistic schools, the Skeptics, their view was that it is beliefs as such that were responsible for pain. Hence they recommend the repudiation of opinions of any sort.) All three schools stressed the overarching value of "ataraxia", the absence of disturbance in the soul. Philosophy can then be viewed as therapy, the function of which is to purge emotions from the soul (Nussbaum 1994). In support of this, the Stoics advanced the plausible claim that it is psychologically impossible to keep only nice emotions and give up the nasty ones. For all attachment and all desire, however worthy their objects might seem, entail the capacity for wrenching and destructive negative emotions. Erotic love can bring with it the murderous jealousy of a Medea, and even a commitment to the idea of justice may foster a capacity for destructive anger which is nothing but "furor brevis"— temporary insanity, in Seneca's arresting phrase. Moreover, the usual objects of our attachment are clearly unworthy of a free human being, since they diminish rather than enhance the autonomy those that endure them.The Hellenistic philosophers' observations about nasty emotions are not wholly compelling. Surely it is possible to see at least some emotions as having a positive contribution to make to our moral lives, and indeed we have seen that the verdict of cognitive science is that a capacity for normal emotion appears to be a sine qua non for the rational and moral conduct of life. Outside of this intimate but still somewhat mysterious link between the neurological capacity for emotion and rationality, the exact significance of emotions to the moral life will again depend on one's theory of the emotions. Inasmuch as emotions are partly constituted by desires, as some cognitivist theorists maintain, they will, as David Hume contended, help to motivate decent behavior and cement social life. If emotions are perceptions, and can be more or less epistemically adequate to their objects, then emotions may have a further contribution to make to the moral life, depending on what sort of adequacy and what sort of objects are involved. Max Scheler (1954) was the first to suggest that emotions are in effect perceptions of "tertiary qualities" that supervene in the (human) world on facts about social relations, pleasure and pain, and natural psychological facts, a suggestion recently elaborated by Tappolet (2000).An important amendment to that view, voiced by D'Arms and Jacobson (2000a) is that emotions may have intrinsic criteria of appropriateness that diverge from, and indeed may conflict with, ethical norms. Appropriate emotions are not necessarily moral. Despite that, some emotions, specifically guilt, resentment, shame and anger, may have a special role in the establishment of a range of "response-dependent" values and norms that lie at the heart of the moral life. (Gibbard 1990, D'Arms and Jacobson 1993). Mulligan (1998) advances a related view: though not direct perceptions of value, emotions can be said to justify axiological judgments. Emotions themselves are justified by perceptions and beliefs, and are said to be appropriate if and only if the axiological judgments they support are correct. If any of those variant views is right, then emotions have a crucial role to play in ethics in revealing to us something like moral facts. A consequence of this view is that art and literature, in educating our emotions, will have a substantial role in our moral development (Nussbaum 2001). On the other hand, there remains something "natural" about the emotions concerned, so that moral emotions are sometimes precisely those that resist the principles inculcated by so-called moral education. Hence the view that emotions apprehend real moral properties can explain our approval of those, like Huckleberry Finn when he ignored his "duty" to turn in Jim the slave, whose emotions drive them to act against their own "rational" conscience (Bennett 1974; McIntyre 1990).These suggestions about the relevance of emotion to ethics must be sharply distinguished from "Emotivism"—the claim that emotions can be used to elucidate the concept of evaluation itself. Such elucidation would only be plausible if we understood the explicans more clearly than the explicandum. But the variety and complexity of emotions makes them poor candidates for the role of explicans. The view in question must also be distinguished from the sociobiological hypothesis—which had early precursors in Mencius and Hume—that certain motives of benevolence are part of the genetic equipment which makes ethical behavior possible. That plausible view has attracted surprisingly energetic opposition in recent years. One objection against it is one directed against all forms of ethical naturalism: namely that the biological origins of a sentiment have no obvious bearing on its ethical value. Nevertheless, studies of social interaction among other primates strongly support the hypothesis that our moral intuitions have been shaped by evolution. And although analogies between primate behaviour and human morality are still resisted with desperate energy, it seems hard to deny that we can recognize a surprising range of familiar "moral emotions" in our nearest non-human cousins (de Waal 2006). Such naturalistic studies do promise to explain, at least, both the existence of some of our more benevolent emotions and attitudes, and the way in which their scope often seems so dangerously limited to the members of some restricted in-group.The range of emotions to which the sociobiological hypothesis can be applied, however, is relatively narrow. That many complex emotions are to a certain extent socially constructed, is attested by the fact that what is considered normal emotion varies between epochs and cultures. Feminists have pointed out, in particular, that gender-specific norms on emotional experience and expression have been a standard means of maintaining inequality among the sexes in many cultures (de Beauvoir 1952). Viewed in this light, the emotions in general lack that property of universalizability which many philosophers have regarded as a sine qua non of the ethical (Blum 1980). On the other hand, the extent and significance of cultural differences are still a matter of considerable controversy (Pinker 2002). Any conclusions about the place of emotions in the moral life must therefore remain highly tentative.
11. Summary and Guide to the Recent Literature
It may be useful, in order to provide more efficient entry points into the literature, to summarize the salient doctrines of major contributors to the philosophy of emotions in the past half century. At the risk of some redundancy, since many of these figures have appeared in the story told above, I conclude with the following brief capsules. They are ordered roughly in chronological order of the head author's first major contribution to emotion theory. (Because some articles are reprinted or reprised in more accessible later books or collections, this may not always coincide with the date of the work cited.)The revival of philosophical interest in emotions from the middle of the twentieth century can be traced to an article by Erroll Bedford (1957), and a book by Anthony Kenny (1963) which argued against the assumption that emotions are feelings, impervious to either will or reason. Bedford stressed both the intentionality and the importance of contextual factors on the nature, arousal and expression of emotions. Kenny, reviving some medieval theories of intentionality, urged that emotions should be viewed as intentional states. He defined a notion of a formal object of an intentional state as that characteristic that must belong to something if it is to be possible for the state to relate to it. This implies an excessively strong logical link between the state and its object's actual possession of the characteristic in question. Nevertheless it points to an important condition on the appropriateness of an emotion to a given object, which has been incorporated in the account of formal objects set out above. These papers gave impetus to what became the cognitivist mainstream in philosophy of emotion, some fairly wide variations going from C.D. Broad (1971 [1954])'s "affect-laden judgments" to the "strong desires" theory advocated by Joel Marks (1982).Among other philosophers responsible for the revival of interest in emotions, Irving Thalberg (1977) took as given the cognitive dimension of emotion, and explored some of the subtleties of the different relations of emotions to their objects. The Wittgensteinian flavor of Bedford's second point, about the contextual dependency of emotions, was elaborated into a "social constructionist" view by the psychologist James Averill (1982). On this view, favored later by some feminist philosophers such as Naomi Scheman (1983) and Sue Campbell (1998), spurred also by the influential externalist perspective first advocated by (Burge 1979), emotions are not primarily viewed as individual characteristics of the persons to whom they are attributed, but emerge out of the dynamics of social interaction. The influence of Wittgenstein was also felt in a different respect—stemming from his remarks on "seeing-as" (Wittgenstein 1953)—in a paper by Robert Roberts (1988) which regarded emotions as "concern-based construals".Gabriele Taylor (1975) was among the first to explore the ways in which the justification of emotion differs from the justification of its associated thought. She sought to establish the conditions under which a given emotion would be justified in that more specific sense, and pointed out, following Aristotle, that the absence of appropriate emotion can also be culpable. A later book explored these themes in greater detail (Taylor 1985), and pioneered the exploration of the importance of emotional guilt in the moral life, anticipating later work by Allan Gibbard (1990) and Patricia Greenspan (1995).Amelie Rorty (1980) collected a number of seminal articles in a collection to which she contributed two influential papers of her own, on explaining emotions (Rorty 1980a) and on jealousy (Tov-Ruach 1980). Her articles, as well as the collection as a whole, which included early papers by several of the authors mentioned here, provided a strong stimulus for the revival of the field. Rorty urged a pluralistic, piecemeal approach, skeptical of theory and highly attentive to the multiple psychological, social, and even political dimensions of emotional scenarios. Her explorations, enriched with a rich phenomenology of narrative detail, are developed and amplified in some of her later work (Rorty 1988, 1998, 2003).Robert Solomon (1980) spurred both interest and opposition with his provocative thesis that emotions are judgments, albeit judgments of a particular kind, characterized by their mode of haste and their evaluative content. Under the influence of (Sartre 1948), he also adopted the view that emotions could be understood as strategic choices, collectively driven by the goal of protecting and enhancing self-esteem (Solomon 1984). In his more recent work he has also written about the emotional dimension of justice, and advocated an enrichment of emotion theory through cross-cultural perspectives and the integration of scientific perspectives (Solomon 1999).Jerome Neu (1977) is sympathetic to by psychoanalytic views of the mechanisms underlying the pathology of belief and desire frequently associated with emotion. But he remains among the staunchest defenders of a cognitivist view of the core of emotion, as attested by his book title borrowed from William Blake's line "A tear is an intellectual thing". (Neu 2000). Neu has repeatedly stressed, in particular, that what distinguishes one emotion from another is not how it feels, but what belief is embedded in the emotion about its target. Despite the unifying theoretical vision suggested by this doctrine, much of Neu's work explores the pervasively messy and multifarious ways in which emotions influence our lives.William Lyons (1980), picking up a different strand of Bedford and Kenny's contributions, and also influenced by Wittgenstein, espoused a mitigated form of cognitivism, which he called a "causal-evaluative" theory. On this view, an emotion arises if and only if an abnormal physiological change is caused by an evaluation. This view sought to integrate the insights of James (1884) on the importance of our perception of inner physiological changes triggered by the perception of an object of attention. But it remains cognitivist, in that Lyons claimed that the emotions are differentiated entirely by the evaluations by which they are triggered.Patricia Greenspan first turned her attention to problems of emotional ambivalence and more broadly to the nature of emotional rationality. (Greenspan 1988) She has been particularly persistent in seeking to balance the diverse and conflicting imperatives implicit in emotion theory. One is that we must account for emotions both as conscious mental processes and as involving an important bodily component; another is that emotions play an important role both in determining and in undermining rational thought and action. In later work Greenspan has turned increasingly to the practical, moral and social implications of emotional life, including especially the place of guilt among moral emotions. (Greenspan 1995). She has also returned, in a very different way inspired not by Sartre but by game theory and the influential work of the economist Robert Frank (1988) to the ways in which emotional manifestations can serve as strategies in social interaction. (Greenspan 2000).Among Robert Gordon's distinctive contributions in (Gordon 1987) was the development of an idea first broached by (Thalberg 1977) that most ascriptions of emotions with propositional objects are "factive"—that is, that they presuppose the truth of their propositional objects. A minority (such as worry and hope) are "epistemic", in that they are precisely focused on an uncertainty. Although this proposal has been controversial, it has the virtue of drawing attention to the possibility that in human communication the default assumption is that of a common world. Gordon noted the analogy between the limited sense of passivity that is appropriately ascribed to perception and the passivity of emotions. He was also one of the first to suggest that the knowledge we have of the states of mind of others, and particularly of their emotional condition, is derived not from any psychological theory, but from an active simulation of that other's state. Again, there is suggestive neurological evidence that this might be on the right track from the discovery of "mirror neurons" that to be similarly activated both by a concrete action and by the sight of the same concrete action in another (Gallese and Goldman 1998), though I am not aware of any specific follow up implicating human emotions.Ronald de Sousa (1987) argued that emotions are not reducible to beliefs, desires, or combinations of the two, but represent a logically and functionally separate category of capacities. They contribute essentially to the strategic choices of human rational deliberation, and they are themselves assessable as rational or irrational in accord with criteria which overlap but are not identical with those in terms of which we judge moral and esthetic value.Michael Stocker has stressed the pervasiveness of emotion: emotions are not merely episodes, disruptive or otherwise, but include states and experiences that give color, meaning and motivation to the whole of the vast range of actions of which we are capable, including intellectual action. They are both sources of value in themselves, and sometimes constitute epistemic avenues to value. Stocker was one of the first philosophers to call for a moderation of the intellectualism implied by the dominant cognitivist orthodoxy, by drawing attention to such cases as fear of flying, where the attitude embodied in an emotion conflicts directly with the subject's avowed beliefs. (Stocker and Hegeman 1996).Martha Nussbaum's theory of emotions falls squarely within the "cognitive-evaluative" camp. (Nussbaum 1990, 1994, 2001). But it is one distinction of her approach that it may escape damage from much of the criticism leveled against the standard cognitivist line of thought. This results from her insistence that far from being simple propositional attitudes that can be exhausted by their expression in propositional form, the psychological and moral significance of the emotions can only be grasped through the medium of art, and particularly literature, in which the marriage of form and content alone makes possible an adequately complex message. The deep reason for this is that the kind of knowledge involved in moral appraisal is both affective and cognitive. In her emphasis on the complexity and moral importance of emotions, she is at one with Annette Baier (Baier 1995), whose work has included an exploration of the role of emotional trust in personal relations, a form of trust that cannot simply be described in terms of belief in the truth of promises and undertakings. Both these writers may owe something to the earlier work of Bernard Williams (1973), for its early recognition of the overlap between the vocabulary used in the expression of moral judgments with the vocabulary of emotion, in words such as outrage, indignation, shock or admiration.Laurence Thomas (1989) built a persuasive argument that social life demands that altruistic motives be built into individual character as the foundation of the capacity to lead a moral life, and that this requires a psychological process rooted in the biologically normal relation between parent and infant. Parental love thus forms the basis of the emotional capacities that in turn subtend harmonious social relations.Allan Gibbard (1990) offered an influential twist on the role of emotions in the moral life. Rather than seeing them as perceptions or apprehensions of value, like Stocker and others, he proposed a different sort of "response-based theory" of value. On this view, it is not the traditional virtuous emotions of compassion and sympathy that are of paramount importance in morality, but rather those emotional attitudes that relate to the warrant, or endorsement, of norms, namely guilt and anger or resentment. These emotions are intrinsically social, and the endorsement of norms is therefore enforced both interpersonally, through resentment, and intrapersonally through emotional guilt. This position has been both criticized and expanded by Justin D'Arms and Daniel Jacobson (1993, 2000b). Response-based theories of moral value have sparked much debate, notably from David Wiggins (1987), John McDowell (1985), and Simon Blackburn (1998).Aaron Ben-Ze'ev (2000) advocates a view of emotions as "subtle" mode of mental actualization, not reducible to any of the components that commonly figure in any given episode of emotion. Emotions form a distinct mode or psychological system. They are prototypes concepts rather than names of natural kinds, and their subtlety derives from the fact that the emotional mode constitutes an exercise of all faculties together, particularly in response to change, at the level of perception, intellectual processes, and feeling.Jon Elster (1999) is among those who are skeptical of the prospects for a unified theory of emotions. Instead he describes in some detail the variety of mechanisms associated with emotions which allows them to be used in the explanation of actions. These mechanisms are diverse and unpredictable, and their interactions often result in the "transmutation" of one emotion into another: thus love can turn to jealousy, jealousy to rage, rage to remorse, as the dynamics of the situation evolves. Elster has also added to the argument against assimilating emotions to desires and beliefs: whereas the standard Bayesian type decision theories assume that expected desirability grows with desirability and declines with probability, emotions, as second-order attitudes to probability, can actually increase the desirability of an option as its probability decreases, thus scrambling the standard computation (Elster 2003).Richard Wollheim (2000) comes closer than most current writers to presenting a unified theory of emotions. He views them as dispositional attitudes, which need to be studied both through their history and in terms of their role in regulating or disrupting other psychological mechanisms of belief and desire. That history is understood in psychoanalytic terms (owed primarily to Freud and Melanie Klein): primitive experiences of frustration or satisfaction, stemming from desires that may not necessarily be conscious and may not necessary have propositional objects, give rise to attitudes towards precipitating factors in the outside world. These persisting attitudes are the dispositions that constitute the emotions. Most emotions target the outside world, but guilt and shame are exceptions, as they stem from introjected critical figures which target the self. In all cases emotions "color the world" and hence regulate beliefs and desires.Peter Goldie (2000) is among those who have recently advocated a return to the close identification of emotions with feelings, on the ground that the divorce between them was decreed on false premises: feelings, too, can actually have intentional objects. He resists both reductive theories which regard emotions as mere compounds of belief and desire, and "add-on theories" that view them as beliefs and desires plus something else. Although some experiences plausibly labelled feelings are deprived of intentionality, most feelings are in fact intentional, and only if we understand the crucial component of feeling in emotion are we likely to understand the large nugget of truth in the traditional view of emotions as often irrational and disruptive. Furthermore, Goldie holds that certain primitive emotions, on the analogy of cognitively impenetrable perceptual illusions, influence action tendencies without the mediation of propositions or concepts. (Goldie 2003)In recent years, the most notable development in philosophical treatment of emotions has been the attempt to incorporate interdisciplinary approaches and insights into philosophy. Paul Griffiths (1997), Jessie Prinz (2004) and Craig DeLancey (2002) are the most vigorous exponents of the view that philosophical work on the emotions must be re-oriented away from linguistic analysis and given first roots in science. Both argue that such roots will split off the simpler emotions of "affect programs" from more "cognitively penetrable" ones. Griffiths contends that only affect programs form natural kinds in virtue of common ancestral origins, or homologies. Prinz adopts a radical perceptual view of emotions, reminiscent of James. Citing a wide variety of psychological and neurological research, as well as artificial intelligence models, DeLancey argues for a view of emotions as playing a crucial role in a system of mental activity organized as a hierarchical system of modules.Jenefer Robinson's (2005) book is more eclectic, though also well informed about the science; like Nussbaum (2001), she is particularly interested in the nature and importance of emotions in the understanding and genesis of art, and especially music. A collection A forthcoming book by Charles Nussbaum (forthcoming 2008) relies on biological, evolutionary, neurological and psychological findings to argue for a treatment of musical representation as representational, elaborating on the basic insight that musical represents movement in space. David Pugmire (2005), by contrast, returns to a more traditional point of view with a defense of a broadly Aristotelian point of view on the moral importance of integrity in emotions. Paul Thagard (2006) has also energetically explored the broader area of what he calls "hot thought". This is reasoning variously driven, controlled or distorted by emotions in different areas, such legal, scientific and religious thinking.
12. Conclusion:
Adequacy Conditions on Philosophical Theories of Emotion
In the recent work just all too briefly outlined, one can discern two contrasting trends. We might call their exponents, with apologies to Isaiah Berlin, the hedgehogs and the foxes of emotion theory. The foxes are all keen to emphasize the pervasiveness and diversity of what we call emotions. Emotions are multifarious in their causes, in their effects, in their functions, in their roles both within and among social individuals. Prominent among the foxes are Ben-Ze'ev, Elster, Goldie, Neu, Nussbaum, Robinson, Rorty, Solomon, and Stocker. The hedgehogs, inspired by the preference of for leaner theory, are more interested in parcelling out domains in which reasonably well regimented neuro-psychological entities with clearly identifiable functions can be studied. Chief among this class of philosophers are Griffiths, Prinz, and DeLancey, who regard the psychological work of Ekman, Panksepp and others as providing a class of clearly identifiable emotions, and tend to the view that the rest are too messy to reward serious attention. In a different vein, Wollheim might be classed with the hedgehogs, in that he presents a unified theory of the origins and nature of emotional dispositions. In many of these authors, a consensus may be building, according to which the reaction against "feeling theories" of emotion was excessive, because it was too hastily assumed that feelings could not have intentionality.Despite the contrast between these two trends, current views manifest a good deal of agreement. A broad consensus has emerged on what we might call adequacy conditions on any theory of emotion. An acceptable philosophical theory of emotions should be able to account at least for the following nine characteristics. All the recent and current accounts of emotion discussed here have something to say about most of them, and some have had something to say about all.emotions are typically conscious phenomena; yetthey typically involve more pervasive bodily manifestations than other conscious states;they vary along a number of dimensions: intensity, valence, type and range of intentional objects, etc.they are reputed to be antagonists of rationality; but alsothey play an indispensable role in determining the quality of life;they contribute crucially to defining our ends and priorities;they play a crucial role in the regulation of social life;they protect us from an excessively slavish devotion to narrow conceptions of rationality;they have a central place in moral education and the moral life. The exploration of questions raised by these nine characteristics is a thriving ongoing collaborative project in the theory of emotions, in which philosophy will continue both to inform and to draw on a wide range of philosophical expertise as well as the parallel explorations of other branches of cognitive science.
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Deroxas, Florin 2008. Vizualizaţi profilul meu complet
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