25 Aug What is an emotion?” That question wa
What is an emotion?” That question was asked in precisely that form by William James, as the title of an essay he wrote for Mind over 100 years ago (James, 1884). But philosophers have been concerned and often worried about the nature of emotion since Socrates and the “pre-Socratics” who preceded him, and although the discipline has grown up (largely because of Socrates and his student Plato) as the pursuit of reason, the emotions have always lurked in the background–as a threat to reason, as a danger to philosophy and philosophers, as just plain unreasonable. Perhaps that is why one of the most enduring metaphors of reason and emotion has been the metaphor of master and slave, with the wisdom of reason firmly in control and the dangerous impulses of emotion safely suppressed, channeled, or (ideally) in harmony with reason. But the question “What is an emotion? has proved to be as difficult to resolve as the emotions have been to master. Just when it seems an adequate definition is in place, some new theory rears its unwelcome head and challenges our understanding.
The master-slave metaphor displays two features that still determine much of the philosophical view of emotion today. First and foremost, there is the inferior role of emotion–the idea that emotion is as such more primitive, less intelligent, more bestial, less dependable, and more dangerous than reason, and thus needs to be controlled by reason (all argument that Aristotle and other enlightened Athenians used to justify the political institution of slavery as well). Second, and more profoundly, there is the reason-emotion distinction itself–as if we were dealing with two different natural kinds, two conflicting and antagonistic aspects of the soul. Even those philosophers who sought to integrate them and reduce one to the other (typically reducing emotion to an inferior genus of reason, a “confused perception” or “distorted judgment”) maintained the distinction and continued to insist on the superiority of reason. It was thus a mark of his considerable iconoclasm that the Scottish skeptic David Hume (1739/1888), in the 18th century, famously declared that “reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions.” But even Hume, despite an ingenious analysis of the structure of emotions, ultimately fell back on the old models and metaphors.
Whatever else it may be, philosophy is a historical discipline, and the theories and debates of today cannot be understood or appreciated without some understanding of philosophy’s rich and convoluted past. Even when a philosopher pretends to understand the phenomenon of emotion “in itself ” or analyze the language of emotion without reference to history or to any earlier attempts to do so, both the wisdom and the folly of generations of accumulated reflection and argument are already embedded in the subject matter. And although one might impatiently demand from the outset that one “define the terms” before the current discussion commences, the truth is that a definition will emerge only at the end of a long discussion, and even then it will be merely tentative and appropriate only within a limited context and a certain model of culture and personal character.
In what follows, I have tried to sketch a somewhat selective history of philosophical attempts to understand emotion, followed by a brief summary of questions still central to philosophical debate. Given the nature of philosophy and its emphasis on reason, however, we would expect that the focus of most philosophical analysis has been and remains the more cognitive aspects of emotion, with the physiological and to a certain extent the social and behavioral dimensions of emotion diminished or in many cases even denied. That will be, I should admit from the outset, the bias of this account as well. But the dialectic of philosophy tends to go back and forth in its emphasis and rediscovery of these often neglected dimensions. Sometimes emotions are dismissed as mere feelings and physiology, utterly unintelligent, even inhuman. In reaction, emotions are ascribed the virtues of true wisdom; they are seen as the proper masters of reason and the very foundation of our being-in-the-world. Most philosophers, however, try to find some more moderate, multidimensional position.
One might object that philosophical theories of emotion tend to be “armchair” speculation, devoid of the empirical support supplied by social scientists. However, this objection ignores the fact that philosophers, contrary to their own self-styled reputations as men and women of pure reason, have emotions themselves, and in most (but not all) cases a sufficiently rich repertoire of emotions to fund and support a dozen theories of emotion. As Descartes (1649/1989) said, in his introduction to the subject, “everyone has experience of the passions within himself, and there is no necessity to borrow one’s observations from elsewhere in order to discover their nature.” Ultimately, there is no need for the perennial (in fact century-old) feud between philosophy and psychology, and the phenomenon of emotion lies equally open to both of them.
THE HISTORY OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF EMOTION
Although the history of philosophy has often been described as the history of the development of reason-for example, by the great 19th-century German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel-philosophers have never entirely neglected emotion, even if they have almost always denied it center stage. It would be a mistake, however, to put too much emphasis on the term “emotion,” for its range and meaning have altered significantly over the years, in part because of changes in theories about emotion. So, too, the word “passion” has a long and varied history, and we should beware of the misleading assumption that there is a single, orderly, natural class of phenomena that is simply designated by different labels in different languages at different times. The language of “passion” and “emotion” has a history into which various feelings, desires, sentiments, moods, attitudes, and more explosive responses enter and from which they exit, depending not on arbitrary philosophical stipulation but on an extensive network of social, moral, cultural, and psychological factors. Thus we will often find that the focus is not emotion as such, but rather some particular class of emotions or particular emotion and its role in the manners or morals of the time.
The emotions as such, accordingly, do not form one of the three aspects of Plato’s (c. 428-347 B.C.) tripartite soul as defined in The Republic (1974). These aspects are reason, spirit, and appetite; not only does what we call “emotion”
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