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American
Philosophical Association
Pacific
Division Meeting
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APA PACIFIC DIVISION 2001—March 30, 2001 in San Francisco
AUTHOR MEETS CRITICS—Remarks and Reply by Jerome Neu
Chair:
Amélie O. Rorty, Professor of History of Ideas at Brandeis University
Critics:
Jeffrie G. Murphy, Regents Professor of Law and Philosophy at Arizona State
University, Tempe
Robert C. Solomon, Quincy Lee Centennial Professor of Business and
Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin and President of the
International Society for Research on Emotion (ISRE)
Michael Stocker, Guttag Professor of Ethics and Political Philosophy at Syracuse
University
Author:
Jerome Neu, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
A TEAR IS AN INTELLECTUAL THING:
THE MEANINGS OF EMOTION
RealVideo
INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
I am honored by the attention of the distinguished critics on today’s panel, and will have more to say about their comments once they have had a chance to make them. But I wish to thank them in advance for their thoughtful attention to my book. For now, I would like to make a few brief introductory remarks about the contents and aims of the book.
A Tear Is an Intellectual Thing is a collection of essays written over a fair number of years. The essays range from discussion of particular emotions, such as jealousy, boredom, pride, fear and phobias, joy and happiness, love and hate, to discussion of general emotional phenomena such as the expression of emotion, self-deception about emotion, and the place of sexuality in emotional life in terms, for example, of perversion, and incest, and fantasy. While the book is centrally philosophical, it makes use of psychoanalytic and anthropological insight wherever they seem helpful. The title is of course stolen from a line of William Blake’s, and I hope it gives some hint of the book’s and my philosophical stance, which is fundamentally Spinozist in the sense of giving great prominence to the role of ideas, thoughts, judgments, beliefs, and the like, that is to say, the cognitive, in constituting our emotional lives and in our discrimination of one emotional state from another.
My central interest is moral identity. Whether writing about jealousy, or pride, or incest, or self-deception, I have sought to bring out how particular emotions and particular psychological mechanisms, in light of their conceptual conditions and taking them in their social, cultural, political, instinctual, and developmental contexts, either sustain or threaten our sense of who we are and our hopes for who we might become.
In the book I often focus on particular emotions, not as an illustration of general theory, though I do have a general theory. (The general theory that informs my work is developed more fully in an earlier book, Emotion, Thought, and Therapy.) While I follow Spinoza in emphasizing the role of thought in constituting our emotions, I go a bit beyond Spinoza in emphasizing the role of social and political factors in shaping our thoughts and so our emotional lives. I focus on particular emotions, and particular expressions of emotion, to seek insight into those emotional lives, contrasting the universal and the local, and seeking further insight into to what extent the emotions we experience are natural and inevitable. What would we have to give up if we wanted to eliminate jealousy or envy? How can one make sense of hating people because we love them? How are we to understand the possibility of pride, one of the seven deadly sins, also being the theme of identity politics? What would it take to overcome boredom? What makes a sexual desire “perverse,” or particular sexual relations (such as incestuous ones) undesirable or even unthinkable? Can mental reality have the same effects as material reality—does the difference between fantasy and memory matter? Is it always a good thing to try to cure people of their self-deception? How can one question an individual’s understanding of their own happiness or override a society’s account of its own rituals? As the questions are pursued, various themes recur and are developed: the normal and the pathological, individual development and social and cultural conditions, the relation of conceptual conditions to conditions for change, what counts as an explanation and as evidence, the two faces of many emotions (including jealousy and pride), and the general pervasiveness of ambiguity and ambivalence.
Perhaps a few words about my aims in the essay on pride might help clarify how a structured account of a particular emotion can reveal features of our identity and their dependence on social beliefs and political institutions. Christian theology still condemns the sin of pride, as it has done for centuries. In fact, pride represents the worst sin of all, for in pride a person is thought to turn his back on God. In extreme cases, pride may lead people to imagine that they are themselves God, rulers of their own fate. Humility is urged instead. A great benefit of pride, however, is that it can elevate and even redeem people who are suffering and oppressed. The condemnation of pride has costs. Particularly in the age of identity politics, the invocation pride seems an excellent way of suffusing the downtrodden with the mental attitude necessary for transforming lives of desperate poverty or self-loathing. In my essay on “Pride and Identity,” I argue that to see the appropriate personal and political place of pride, one must properly understand the differing roles of responsibility and value in the constitution of pride. In particular, responsibility for a characteristic is not a conceptual condition for pride in that characteristic (whether it be one’s country, one’s family, one’s race, or even one’s chosen sports team), but by contrast positive valuation is a conceptual condition in pride, and that feature allows room for the transvaluation of values when previously denigrated characteristics claim recognition and acceptance, as in Black Pride, Gay Pride, Deaf Pride, and so on.
Emotions are not simply given, they have their conditions, conceptual and social, and distinguishing among the various conditions and understanding their nature and limits is a step toward controlling our lives. My work in the book under discussion and elsewhere is informed and motivated by the Spinozist hope that, because of the peculiarities of reflexive knowledge, understanding our lives can help change them: can help make us more free.
REPLY TO MY CRITICS
I would like first of all to thank my critics, each of whom has himself made important and valuable contributions to our understanding of the emotions, for their very sympathetic reading of my work and the thoughtfulness with which they have today pressed me to clarify and develop that work.
It is interesting that all three of my critics focus on jealousy. I think this says something about the significance of jealousy in our lives, a significance perhaps not surprising given that it is compounded, in important and complex ways, of fear and anger—two emotions that are, on anybody’s account, “basic” emotions. And jealousy is, I’ve argued, at least in relation to its erotic forms, importantly tied to love. Since jealousy operates in the space of fear, anger, and love, it is natural that it should assume a central place in discussions of emotion of the kind we are having today. I welcome a focus on jealousy (as on other particular emotions) as a source of insight into the complexity of emotions, rather than merely as an illustration of a general theory. (Such illustrations too often assume the role of paradigms and become the source of overgeneralizations that result in much error in thinking and theorizing about emotions.)
Now, in my original discussion of jealousy, I especially emphasized the constitutive role of thoughts, in particular thoughts involving fear of loss, more specifically, fear of alienation of affections (that is, loss of those affections to a rival), and more generally and more deeply, fear of annihilation. This was never meant to deny the importance of other components (if that is what they are) such as anger (which has been usefully emphasized by Solomon among others) and what Stocker calls “affectivity.” It is just that I believe that a focus on fearful thoughts enables us to see many important connections (for example with love) and distinctions (say from envy). The constituent thoughts and beliefs provide a way into understanding the psychological and social conditions and implications of the emotion—including issues about psychogenesis and about eliminability. I do not wish to rehearse all that here, let me focus instead on the specific interesting issues raised by my critics.
MURPHY
I particularly appreciate Jeffrie Murphy’s recognition of some of my book’s unifying themes. A disadvantage in my particularist approach, which may (as I’ve said) help avoid some of the risks of overgeneralization, is that commonalities in my discussions of particular emotions may get obscured. There is an overarching approach and an overarching theory behind my explorations of individual emotions—and much of that is spelled out in A Tear Is an Intellectual Thing especially in (“Mill’s Pig”) the introductory chapter discussion of human nature and in the title chapter discussion of expression of emotion, and also in my earlier book, Emotion, Thought, and Therapy.
EXAMPLES
Let me now shift into defensive mode and respond to a few of Murphy’s particular points by attempting to clarify my views.
Murphy expresses concern about “morbid dependency” and associated fears of literal “disintegration” and “annihilation” and points out cases of jealousy where such fears might be unrealistic. Before addressing the problem of the realism of underlying thoughts directly, I should note that while I do indeed, as Murphy suggests, seek to normalize or “rehabilitate” jealousy, it is only in the sense of showing that it can be normal, can have appropriate objects and valuable connections. In my original essay I also have a section discussing various pathological forms of jealousy (AIAIT 60-63), and I indicate at the outset that “the underlying fears may make us prone to pathological forms of jealousy” (AIAIT 43), and in “Jealous Afterthoughts” I elaborate on various aspects of irrationality and pathology. The mere fact that jealousy may be connected with the development of self-identity rather than the possession of others is not itself enough to ensure that either one’s identity or one’s jealousies will not be pathological. [1]
In any event, Murphy sees that my account of the thoughts and feelings in jealousy is psychogenetic, that in particular the place of identification in making jealousy both more and other than simple possessiveness (in the sense of ownership) is rooted in Freud’s understanding of the Oedipus complex and in Winnicott’s insights about development (having to do not only with transitional objects, but also with points in his discussions of the mother’s face as a mirror in which the infant can recognize himself, of the importance of being alone in the presence of another in relation to developing independence and the capacity to be truly alone, and finally of hatred’s constructive role in identity formation and the ability to love). I need here to emphasize, however, that my discussion of the role of fear of annihilation as a deeper or underlying fear behind or beneath the fear of loss involved in jealousy has to do with the level of fantasy (at least most of the time). At that level, especially at the level of unconscious fantasy, realistic calculations about probabilities are irrelevant, what matters are early experiences and later associations with situations of loss, the sort of associations that can make minor neglect and temporary absence come to seem potential permanent abandonment. These experiences and associations can (and often do) accentuate and exacerbate an individual’s reaction to current situations. Certainly annihilation is not always in fact at stake, but I think it is always in the background and in weak, irrational, vulnerable moments it can provoke and magnify our responses.
There are also the cases of unrequited love and of jealousy over a love one believes is already hopelessly lost. Murphy raises several such cases and also, helpfully, suggests various ways of fitting them into my account. I would add that in my original essay I suggested that such cases may sometimes be better understood as envy or as disappointment rather than straightforward jealousy. Not that it is incorrect to call them “jealousy,” our usages are very flexible in this area, but important connections may be more readily perceived if we preserve certain distinctions that ordinary language does not always insist upon. So the unrequited lover may be envious of the lover of his beloved (think of star-struck fans who consider themselves jealous over movie stars they may never have even met--fans I would generally prefer to describe as envious, though they might indeed sometimes have jealous fantasies) and the resigned lover may simply be a disappointed lover, or in many cases may be regarded as both disappointed and jealous in virtue of the importance of the rival and of the role of anger in his feelings. Jealousy is complex. I emphasize the fear component in my account, but there are anger components (which may be directed both at the rival and at the betraying beloved, as well as, it is worth remembering, at oneself). Such anger may come especially to the fore when loss feared becomes loss actually suffered. The place of vengeful anger in the case of Othello is, as Murphy suggests, particularly prominent. The rival is also indeed significant, and I have some things to say about that significance (not just in my discussion of envy) but in the discussion of what I call a fixed-quantity view of love and of zero-sum games in connection with love and jealousy at the end of my original essay. And picking up on the discussion of idealization and the role of others in identity-formation in my “Jealous Afterthoughts,” Murphy usefully and interestingly develops some aspects of rivalry in terms of shame—though I suspect that as the value of the loved object gets diminished and the opinions of third parties assume greater importance, the jealousy involved, if it is jealousy, may edge towards the pathological. (In Murphy’s own example [17], Achilles’s concern when Briseis is taken from him by Agamemnon is not over lost love, he does not care for the concubine or her affections in particular, but over lost face, lost honor. It is arguable that Achilles is not even jealous, at least not over the slave-girl prize—loss of her affection is not the issue, however considerable his rage at his “rival” Agamemnon.)
I have some similar thoughts about Solomon’s case of professional jealousy. Of course that case does not involve the sort of erotic jealousy that is central to my discussion and also, I think, to jealousy itself. But of course it may properly be called jealousy. I think, however, that given certain of its features it might more illuminatingly be described as envy, precisely because the rivalry is not over someone’s love, is not erotic jealousy (as I say in my original essay, “if we restrict jealousy to relations with people, the place of the desire to be desired and for affection comes into sharper forcus” ATIAIT 47). The fact that the discoveries or ideas that lead to success in Solomon’s story were in some sense previously or simultaneously “owned” by the envious scientist, complicates my preferred way of looking at it. In envy the enviable object need not have been previously owned or even obtainable by the envier (think of envy over someone else’s beauty or intelligence)—but it may be. That feature usually provides a contrast between jealousy and envy in my account. (“Othello is jealous, Iago is envious. Jealousy is typically over what one possesses and fears to lose, while envy may be over something one has never possessed and may never hope to possess" ” ATIAIT 47). Was the lost object (is it “the idea itself,” “the claim of first discovery” or perhaps “fame and reputation”?) itself loved, or is the rival the crucial focus of concern? In envy, the object can drop out (it may not be independently valued), and the rival is typically the true focus of concern--the concern is comparative and positional. On certain readings, professional jealousy of the kind discussed in Solomon’s example is closer to Achilles’ vengeful rage over displaced honors than the romantic jealousy that is at the center of my concern. Much of this depends on the details, which I won’t pursue here because the point I want to make here is about the aim (or aims) of my project.
I have never sought to give an exceptionless definition of jealousy (or of any other emotion for that matter)—of the sort often sought by analytic philosophers. Trying to capture the essence of ordinary language concepts too often presumes that they have a clear essence. An error Wittgenstein tried to warn us against. Instead, I have sought to bring out certain central features of jealousy and envy, the conceptual markings of which have revealing connections and implications of political significance. For example, if we maintain certain distinctions that ordinary language would indeed permit us to ignore, we may achieve an understanding of the instinctual and developmental roots of jealousy and envy that might otherwise elude us. And this may help us better understand the prospects for individual and social transformation. Some, like Paul Griffiths, think projects like mine are based on an antiquated theory of meaning and fail to appreciate the implications of the newer causal and externalist theories of meaning. That is not so, or at least I do not think it need be so—I for one accept the recent advances in philosophy of language. My views do not depend on an essentialism rooted in the dictates of ordinary language, though I am happy to look to ordinary language for clues. (Remember, I am a Spinozist, and he for one never hesitated to reform ordinary language for the sake of clearer understanding.) I am also happy to look elsewhere, especially to literature, psychoanalysis, and anthropology to learn what can be learned from those sources. And I also think there is much to be learned of interest about the emotions from the evolutionary biologists and the neuroscientists, but I should be clear that I do not believe that such scientific knowledge will displace the more ordinary notions that play vital roles in giving shape and meaning to our lives.
EVOLUTIONARY
BIOLOGY
Murphy asks for me to comment on the role of evolutionary biology in understanding emotions. I can be relatively brief. My attitude is basically the same as my attitude towards neurophysiology. Evolutionary biology and neurophysiology both have a valuable place in enriching our understanding, but neither supersedes what is to be learned from literature, from psychoanalysis, from anthropology, and, yes, from conceptual analysis and what might be called the human sciences in general. In this I am with Robert C. Roberts, who in a new book manuscript, entitled The Schooled Heart, offers a useful analogy between the role of the natural sciences in understanding the emotions and their role in understanding music, in particular the relation of the physics of sound to musicology and the appreciation of music. [2] Much can be learned about sound waves and about acoustics, but that knowledge does not displace our distinctively musical categories.
In relation to evolutionary biology, a word of caution should perhaps be added. I assume that there are plausible evolutionary stories to be told about the place of jealousy in human life, just as there are such stories to be told in relation to the central component emotions of jealousy: namely, fear and anger. Indeed, fear and anger, in some of their forms at least, fit reasonably well the sort of affect program model favored by Paul Ekman and other evolutionarily oriented biologists and psychologists. Fear and anger (I might add, unlike the more complex and social emotion of jealousy) have clear physiological syndomes, including stereotypical facial expressions, are reflex-like, pan-cultural, and phylogenetically ancient and do not require (indeed, may be modularly isolated from ) higher cognitive processing. But even someone like Paul Griffiths, who puts perhaps inordinate faith in the ability of evolutionary biology to teach us “what emotions really are” [3] , warns us that adaptationist just-so stories, unconstrained by cross-species homologies and the like, are just too easy to generate. Robert Frank’s [4] sort of claims about possible evolutionary advantages for emotions such as jealousy despite apparent irrationality and individual pain when experiencing the emotion may in fact be correct, as may David Buss’s claims cited by Murphy, [5] but telling a possible and even plausible story is not the same as confirming it. I should perhaps add a second caution. Even where an adaptationist story is known to be true, it does not follow, especially in a world where the environmental conditions to which biology seeks to adapt are subject to constant change, that the evolutionarily explainable (and so perhaps in some sense “justifiable”) feature of human nature is therefore something inevitable and unchangeable. Even the Texas paramour murder statute mentioned by Murphy, the one that until surprisingly recently condoned the killing of unfaithful wives and their lovers by cuckolded husbands who caught them in flagrante delicto, has been repealed.
STOCKER
Michael Stocker’s main concern is the apparent absence of what he calls “affectivity” from my account of jealousy and perhaps from almost all cognitive accounts of emotions, that is from accounts that emphasize conceptual content in constituting emotions.
PHOBIAS
First, an incidental point. Stocker says that the strength of a fear is not by itself enough to make it a phobia. He is right, but I never said that it was. He quotes [18-19] part of a sentence from my essay on Freud’s case of Little Hans: “What marks Hans’s problem as a ‘phobia’ is the strength of his fear (as measured both by the trouble taken to avoid ‘danger’ and by the physiological upset involved) . . .” (ATIAIT 202). Unfortunately, Stocker omits to quote the rest of the sentence. It continues, “What marks Hans’s problem as a ‘phobia’ is the strength of his fear . . . and the irrationality of the fear. It is these two criteria, in general, that make a fear a phobia, though they are not independent. It is not the strength of a reaction by itself that makes a fear a phobia.” The omitted words and the subsequent sentences make it abundantly clear that I believe there are two intertwining criteria, physiological upset does not stand alone.
This might still leave Stocker unsatisfied because he might still feel affectivity is somehow being neglected. So now I must turn to the “are” of identity.
THE
“ARE” OF IDENTITY
Stocker quotes my equation of jealousy with certain thoughts and questions, certain doubts and fears: “To imagine the elimination of jealousy is to imagine the elimination of the possibility of these questions, for these questions are jealousy” (ATIAIT 46). But Stocker again loses sight of the context. The quoted words are immediately followed by these, “To have these doubts and worries is to be jealous. (Jealousy is not a sensation or headache, it is in its essence a set of thoughts and questions, doubts and fears.)” Doubts and fears may well incorporate the affectivity that concerns Stocker, even if bare questions do not—after all, fear is an emotion, the central component emotion in jealousy on my account. Further, in my statement I was seeking to emphasize and reject a particular alternative possibility, namely the equation of jealousy or emotions in general with sensations like headaches, even one’s with distinctive patterns of causation, like Humean impressions of reflection.
In any case, Stocker does acknowledge my later amplification, in “Jealous Afterthoughts,” that makes it clear, if it wasn’t already, that I believe that simple questions or bare thoughts need not amount to jealousy, that they need to be supplemented by something else. [6] I there offer three specific possible supplements: affect or physiological tumult, behavior or dispositions to behavior, and the manner (as opposed to the content) of thought, e.g. obsessive thoughts (ATIAIT 79). Still, Stocker charges me and others with neglecting the distinctive role of affectivity in emotions. This seems to me problematical, whether or not one accepts my amplification and believes that my original “are” was meant as a deliberate exaggeration (unlike President Clinton’s deliberate evasions) to emphasize the importance of neglected features of the emotions—not a statement of necessary and sufficient conditions. (I have already indicated in responding to some of Murphy and Solomon’s potential counterexamples, such definitions have never been my goal in studying the emotions in any case.) What do I mean when I say charges of neglect of affectivity are problematical—apart from my particular views and interests and the three factors mentioned above and their potential roles in affectivity?
AFFECTIVITY
AND THE UNCONSCIOUS
First, if affectivity is a kind of feeling, a subjectively experienced aspect of mental states, it surely is not necessary, at least not if one accepts—as Stocker does—the possibility of unconscious emotions. Even apart from psychoanalysis, being jealous (for example) does not require feeling jealous; individuals are often the last to recognize they are jealous. The crucial clues are typically behavioral.
Actually, while Stocker explicitly allows for unconscious emotions in his book, Valuing Emotions, [7] it is not entirely clear to me what he takes the place of affectivity in such emotions to be. While he equates affectivity with psychic feelings, he claims the feelings can remain unfelt. He writes, “I do not think that the esse of affectivity is percipi” (VE 32). But he also claims that such unfelt feelings are “not merely dispositional,” but occurrent (VE 23). It is easy to understand what he means by this if all he means (as his only example suggests) is that in cases of long-term anger, “my anger might only occasionally rise to the surface” (VE 23). But that is not unconscious anger. Unconscious anger is typically manifested, as I just said of jealousy, in behavior or, as Stocker himself mentions in passing, in apparently “inappropriate and unmotivated thoughts and fantasies” (VE 23). These are among the three factors I mentioned earlier as possible supplements to bare thoughts in making a state of mind an emotion; but when speaking of unconscious emotions these factors would seem to me to leave the underlying state dispositional. Unconscious emotions are manifested in behavior and thoughts and fantasy, but they are not (perhaps cannot be) felt as the particular emotions they are in those forms. It is only when we are directly aware of our emotions or when emotions are consciously expressed, not unconsciously manifested, that they may properly be said to be “felt.” [8] Once more, being jealous or angry is not the same as feeling jealous or angry. Finally, Stocker asserts that it need not “even be allowed that we can be less than fully aware of our feelings” (VE 22). That seems to suggest that we always are, as a matter of fact, conscious of all our feelings and emotions. While I find each of Stocker’s statements in his book puzzling in itself, taken all together, especially with this last, I find them incomprehensible. [9]
AFFECTIVITY
AND THE “OPEN QUESTION” NATURALISTIC FALLACY
When Stocker says in his talk today, “I find it very difficult to accept accounts or understandings of affectivity in terms of bodily states, feelings, and doings” [18] and when he goes on to speak of the “evanescence” of affectivity [24], it begins to sound to me like Moore’s notion of “good” as indefinable and unanalyzable. And his accusation against me and others of leaving something out whenever we try to analyze emotion in non-emotional terms begins to sound like Moore’s charges concerning the “naturalistic fallacy” in the form of his famous “open question” argument.
Moore insisted that one cannot equate the “good” with the pleasant, or the desired, or the approved or anything else, because one can always make sense of the question whether the pleasant or the desired or the approved (or any other stand-in) is itself good. [10]
Stocker argues one cannot equate jealousy with certain thoughts or even thoughts supplemented by feelings (in the sense of sensations), and dispositions to behavior, and the like, because one can always ask whether the thoughts, etc. are had emotionally, or jealously, or with the specific “affectivity” (which is not to be equated with feelings understood as sensations) required.
It turns out, after lengthy consideration in Stocker’s Valuing Emotions, that “affectivity” is irreducible. One is reminded once more of Moore’s conclusion that “good,” like “yellow,” is simple, indefinable, and unanalyzable. Perhaps we can only feel the affectivity in emotions as we can only intuit the goodness in states of affairs. Affectivity and normativity (and everything else for that matter) is what it is and not another thing. But I would argue that in neither case need analysis stop there.
I discuss the meaning of good in the section on “The Good, the Bad, and the Boring” in my essay on boredom in A Tear Is an Intellectual Thing and also in the introductory essay on “Mill’s Pig.” [11] Here I would only wish to remind you that my aim has never been strictly to define jealousy, or any other emotion. As suggested earlier, when I denied the ambition of providing necessary and sufficient conditions, I do not believe that jealousy is a natural kind. It is a concept that usefully organizes aspects of experience and has a shifting and culturally variable usage. The thing that I try to do is to learn from those usages and other sources of insight what is universal and what is local, what might be fixed and what might be variable in our experience—what are the conditions for our becoming who we are, for developing our moral identities, and what are the conditions and possibilities for change.
WILLIAM
JAMES
My focus was and is on what makes a state of mind the state of mind it is, what distinguishes one emotion such as jealousy from another (closely allied) such as envy, and as Stocker grants me, when he exempts me from a specific criticism he makes of Sartre, I wish to embed the conceptual conditions in more concrete contexts and situations. Even the concepts themselves are inevitably shaped by social conditions (hence my discussions of pride, of boredom, and so on), and these are especially crucial when one’s central question (as mine was in relation to jealousy) is about its “eliminability.” I wished to bring out what else might have to be given up or changed to bring that about. And human vulnerability and love seem to me firmly entrenched. The differences between jealousy and envy, which is again what most matters in this connection, are not in their “affectivity”—however we are to account for that.
After mentioning my gloss on “are” in “Jealous Afterthoughts,” where I explicitly grant that there is more to an emotion than bare thoughts, Stocker confronts me with a gloss on William James that allows some place for thoughts in James’s visceral account of the emotions. Stocker himself does not wish to equate affectivity with bodily feelings, so he believes James too leaves something out. But in any case I think Stocker mislocates my disagreement with James. My central complaint about James is that even if feelings (whether bodily or psychic) differentiate between emotions and non-emotions, they do not differentiate among, within and between, emotional states. That is, the differences between regret, remorse, guilt and the like are largely conceptual and not (if I may be permitted the word) “sensational.” In discussing James in the title essay of A Tear Is an Intellectual Thing I say, among other things,
it seems wildly implausible to suppose that there is built into our physiological machinery just those differences needed to mark our subtle emotional discriminations (must shame, embarrassment, guilt, regret, remorse, and other emotions in that neighborhood have different physiological accompaniments?), and even more implausible to suppose that the machinery marks all the very different differences marked by different societies. This remains true despite a recent, post-Cannon, study that has detected differential skin temperature and heart rate in conjunction with facial expressions characteristic of different emotions. This study suggests emotion-specific activity in the autonomic nervous system for at best only a few (six) emotions. The problem never was that there are no physiological differences among emotions; the problem was and remains that there are not enough, or enough of the right kind, to account for our subtle (or even some of our not so subtle) emotion discriminations. And even if physiology is universal across cultures, emotion discriminations are not. Emotions are not natural kinds. They have conventional boundaries. Or at least so I believe. (19)
The crucial view that Stocker and I, and I believe all of today’s panelists, share is that “content [and I would say thought content] helps constitute emotions” (VE 26). I think Stocker and I also both agree, as Richard Wollheim argues in his recent book On the Emotions, [12] emotions cannot be reduced to desire plus belief (VE 27ff). Finally, I would agree with Stocker that there is more to emotions than the thoughts I emphasize—he calls it affectivity, I think it may be a variety of things, and these include the manner (for example, obsessive) in which thoughts themselves may occur.
SOLOMON
Robert Solomon understands all this very well, but in the case of jealousy, he thinks I pay insufficient attention to other differentiating features of jealousy, other than fearful thoughts, namely anger and rights. He also seems to think my use of “thoughts” may be insufficiently rigorous or at any rate potentially misleading.
THOUGHT
THOUGHTS
I think Solomon does a fine job of sorting out various dimensions of the issues concerning cognitive categories and his up-to-date thoughts on judgment and the role of the body (perhaps “judgments of the body” provide another kind of “body language”) are most welcome. Now, in self-defense: my usage of "thought" may seem "too episodic and sophisticated" to Solomon’s ears, but just as Solomon wishes to insist that his usage of "judgment" does not carry the perhaps usual deliberative baggage (itself a rather episodic and sophisticated kind of baggage, to my ears) (p.8), the irksome features he points to are not part of my, admittedly loose, understanding of the notion of thought. In any case, I still find a loose notion of thought useful (perhaps precisely because of its looseness)—and, in defense of Blake, I would add that there are different types of intellectual things, certainly Blake did not think the intellect excluded the imagination (see ATIAIT 38). Despite Solomon’s concerns (p.3), I have no trouble attributing thoughts (e.g. highly affect-laden versions of "It's mine," "You can't have it," or even "I'm being robbed") to territorial two-year olds. Nor even to dogs anticipating their masters’ arrival. Solomon states: “Dogs anxiously anticipate their masters’ coming home and they joyously recognize them when they do. But they don’t have thoughts about them” (p.4). But I don’t see why such anticipations, recognitions, and perceptions cannot be regarded as “thoughts.” Surely that term is at least as applicable to dogs as Solomon’s preferred term of “judgments.” Further, despite Solomon’s remark at one point (p.4), the phenomenological sense of thought is not (or at least not always) what is at stake in my analyses--it cannot be given the role I give to unconscious thoughts.
Indeed, one of the significant advantages I would claim for the notion of thought is that it allows room for a distinction between phenomenological (typically self-conscious and articulate) and explanatory (typically not conscious and not explicit) senses of the term. As I explain in my essay on the case of Little Hans in A Tear Is an Intellectual Thing, that distinction does not depend on belief in the psychoanalytic unconscious, though it importantly leaves room for it:
Many thoughts that we ascribe (both to ourselves and to others) are less than fully explicit without being withheld from consciousness by dynamic forces of repression. Thus, I might explain to the police officer who stops me for jumping a light, that “I thought the light had turned green.” In such a case (assuming I am being as honest as I can), I am not claiming that I explicitly thought “the light has turned green and now I can go forward,” any more than when I change gears I (as an experienced driver) have to think explicitly “I am in neutral and must now shift into first.” Such actions are intentional (I don’t, usually at least, shift gears by accident), they are done knowingly, but they do not require conscious explicit spelling out of their guiding thoughts. Indeed, we only reach for the thought as an explanation for our behavior when things go somehow awry in our usually semi-automatic behavior (and when we can rule out alternative explanations, such as a mechanical failure in the car causing it to lurch forward before the light has changed). In sum, we use the concept of “thought” in both explanatory and phenomenological senses. Sometimes we ascribe a thought on the basis of being explicitly aware of it. (That is the phenomenological sense.) Sometimes we ascribe it on the basis of its filling an explanatory need. (Wittgenstein is full of examples of “thought” in this second, explanatory, sense.) And all of this is part of the perfectly ordinary understanding and functioning of the concept of “thought.” . . . The explanatory use of the concept of thought and thinking [is] essential to self-understanding and our understanding of others. (ATIAIT 213, see also 32)
JEALOUSY,
ANGER, AND RIGHTS
Here I will be (perhaps excessively) brief. I acknowledged in my original essay on “Jealous Thoughts” a place for anger alongside fear in jealousy (anger both towards the rival and towards the betraying beloved, as well as towards oneself). I had been persuaded by Solomon, and also by Rogers Albritton, way back then (as I acknowledged in a footnote at the time). But I do not believe that the notion of anger necessarily brings with it some notion of rights—certainly not property rights or ownership, which usually includes rights of transfer and the like. Still, notions of “belonging” and obligations arising out of a long-term relationship may well have place. The main point remains that while “affront” and “insult” may indeed depend on rights, in the minimalist sense of “legitimate expectations,” anger does not (though “self-righteous anger” might). Frustrated desire is enough. That is one of the reasons it makes sense to ascribe anger (ordinary anger) to even very young children. So the place of anger in jealousy does not necessarily import with it claims of right. As I stated in my original essay on “Jealous Thoughts”:
I am inclined to think that jealousy may not depend on a notion of rights at all (even a notion distinguished from and broader than that of property rights). At the heart of jealousy is fear of loss (specifically, fear of alienation of affections), and to fear loss all that is required is the existence or the believed existence of a state of affairs or relationship, and a desire that it continue. To be jealous over someone, you must believe that they love you (or have loved you), but you need not believe that you have a right to that love; you need not think yourself wonderful and so deserving of love (indeed, the fear of loss is typically tied to fears about one's lovableness), nor need you believe that the other has an obligation built up over time. . . . In the end I think jealousy can stand independent of claims of right. One need not think one has a right to someone else's love in order to fear its loss: all that is necessary is that one believe one has [or has had] the love to begin with. What claims may legitimately be made on the basis of jealousy, on the basis of fear of loss, is a separate and further question. For jealousy to exist all one needs is vulnerability, and we all have that in sufficient abundance. (ATIAIT 56, 57)