Back to Bob Solomon. I must read his book. This Great Courses series is a great course - but I listen over and over and end up sort of understanding but knowing that I'm not fully grasping the depth of it. Still, what I do comprehend makes sense to me, seems right and - critically for my project - leads me to feel that emotions do have a distinct role in moral development.
The idea is, to put it very bluntly, that emotions aren't just little butterfly feelings without much context or consequence, but real signals of our world view, powerful parts of how we engage in the world and also involved in how we interpret the world. They go from alpha to omega here in the way we judge others and how we act toward them. It's not a one-way street between mind and world, but very much as if they are there in the space between, as it were. Emotions have consequences on both how we think and what we do. In a way, that seems obvious enough, but his thesis takes it to a deeper level. Which I am going to have an attempt at explaining, but which I strongly sense I am not qualified to do.*
So, a first point - we only tend to fully inhabit, express, experience and understand the emotions that we have had labeled by our society, culture and upbringing. Sure, people may feel schadenfreude and mudita and the rest without knowing the words, but it's rather like listening to a piece of classical music for the first time. It might be rather nice or the opposite, but it doesn't mean a great deal. That's why some schools of psychotherapy encourage people to learn about different emotions - so that they can distinguish between, say, frustration, irritation, resentment, anger and contempt. I'll get back to this.
But before I do, it's also important to note that different societies and cultures value or suppress various emotions. It's cool to be angry and loud in New York, but not in Tokyo. It's great to feel deference in China, but not in the Netherlands. I remember an American woman in Japan when I was working there complaining about how 'false' the Japanese were. They 'put on this show' of respect. When it was suggested that this was a cultural expectation, she remained indignant. In her eyes, it was a culture of fakeness. What she failed to see from her perspective is that respect became, through upbringing and culture, the normal response when greeting a stranger, an elder, a guest, a customer. It was not fake; it was as real as her indignance.
What both these points express is one aspect of Solomon's argument: that emotions are social.
It gets more interesting with his claim that they are ways to engage with the world. We have an emotion to do something - not just to express something. I mentioned this in the previous post - anger is there to help us get back on level terms, to fight our corner, to defend our position, to prevent an injustice or right a wrong.
Because I wanted to make this clear, I aimed to take a direct quote from the pdf that accompanies the course. That would be illegal. So I am upsumming what Solomon says:
Our emotions are entangled in the world. The are constituent to our efforts to get along with other people and cope with various situations. They offer insight and have intelligence - this means they have intentionality. Emotions involve judgments, cognition. Emotions also have the power to be constitute reality in a certain way - they bestow value as well as appraise it. They can best be understood as evaluative judgments.
We can see from this, considering what Murdoch says about the aesthetic sense and its connection with ethics, that there truly is a to-and-fro between how we emotionally see the world and how we ethically - and aesthetically - evaluate it. In all cases, our judgments can be mistaken. We can fail to have the relevant facts. Say, if I am angry with someone for stealing my car, when my car is sitting outside my house where it usually is. We can base our premises on mistaken judgments. Say, if I believe all men are chauvinist pigs, I might interpret genuine care or compassion as a patronising affront. We can be seeing through an emotional distortion. Say that I am in love with a man and fail to see that he is indeed a patronising chauvinist pig. Who just stole my car.
Solomon argues that we can affect our emotions, by rational thought, by reflection, by practice, by education.
What struck me as I was thinking about all this was that emotions maybe are just a different kind of engagement with the world from the language based. I mean, all mammals have emotions. Only we have language. But we know that other animals can function effectively in the world. Corvids, apes, whales and dolphins, dogs, big cats, they all respond to their environment in intelligent ways. They can strategise - working out how to open milk bottles or hide something from a peer. They maintain social relationships. They learn through trial and error and remember what they did. All without words. So it's not like language is the only way that we can gain knowledge and respond effectively. Yet we seem to think that everything else is dumb or instinctual or hardwired. As if only language matters. Our conception of reason and rationality is an entirely symbolic understanding. But maybe emotions are another kind of 'symbol' - just not visual ones or audible ones.
The emotion of anger when an injustice has been done is as rational as the sentence, 'There has been an injustice.'
We privilege thought, I think, because we can, as it were, put it concretely in working memory. We can look at it, turn it around - as my dad does with his 3D imaginings. So we feel that we can analyse it. But we can actually do that with emotions too. It's just that no one really talks about it or practices it. Try it now. What did it feel like when you first realised that you were in love? What did it feel like when you were told the worst news of your life? What did it feel like when you made a huge and public faux pas? We can recall it and we can turn it around - was that an appropriate response? Was it warranted? How did it serve me?
And this is part of the process of becoming truly emotionally intelligent. We can consider how we feel about something - is it anger? In which case I am sensing that someone has unjustly treated me, slighted me, put me down. Is it irritation? In which case, no moral infraction is involved - just something that goes against my preferences or self-interest. Is it resentment? In which case, I feel that the other is above me and has more power than me and I don't like that. Is it contempt? In which case, I feel that the other is below me and I have the power. Each of this can offer further questions - is it true that I have been slighted? That they are above me? That I am below them? The emotions are pointing in the latter two cases to beliefs we have about our position in a hierarchy. Are we right or justified?
We have the sense that emotions are 'just' reactions, over which we have no control. But think about thoughts. When you're trying to meditate you notice that thoughts just pop up too. Both the thoughts and the emotions that pop up suggest at the concerns, beliefs, problems, obsessions that we are engaged with. Both give us clues about the architecture of our minds.
And just consider this: if emotions weren't subject to reason, then how come CBT is as useful in treating depression as anti-depressants? How come DBT is so good for borderline personality disorder which is all about volatile emotions and which none of the chemical interventions resolve?
I'm sorry - but this isn't the end of my brooding on emotions. I have to get onto the social and political part... next time...
NOTES
*Lisa Feldman Barrett's book How Emotions Are Made goes into all this in great detail. I read that - twice - and still feel a bit hazy about it. I seem to recall it's a similar argument.
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