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Ethics Chapter
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy CD-ROM, V. 1.0, London: Routledge; Edward Craig (ed).

Emotions, philosophy of

(Robert C. Solomon)

Emotions have always played a role in philosophy, even if philosophers have usually denied them centre stage. Because philosophy has so often been described as first and foremost a discipline of reason, the emotions have often been neglected or attacked as primitive, dangerous or irrational. Socrates reprimanded his pupil Crito, advising that we should not give in to our emotions, and some of the ancient Stoic philosophers urged a life of reason free from the enslavement of the emotions, a life of apatheia (apathy). In

Buddhism

, too, much attention has been given to the emotions, which are treated as ‘agitations’ or klesas. Buddhist ‘liberation’, like the Stoic apatheia, becomes a philosophical ideal, freedom from the emotions.

Philosophers have not always downgraded the emotions, however. Aristotle defended the view that human beings are essentially rational animals, but he also stressed the importance of having the right emotions. David Hume, the eighteenth-century empiricist, insisted that ‘reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions’. In the nineteenth century, although Hegel described the history of philosophy as the development of reason he also argued that ‘nothing great is ever done without passion’. Much of the history of philosophy can be told in terms of the shifting relationship between the emotions (or ‘passions’) and reason, which are often at odds, at times seem to be at war, but ideally should be in harmony. Thus Plato painted a picture of the soul as a chariot with three horses, reason leading the appetites and ‘the spirited part’, working together. Nietzsche, at the end of the nineteenth century, suggested that ‘every passion contains its own quantum of reason’.

Nietzsche

’s suggestion, that emotion and reason are not really opposites but complementary or commingled, has been at the heart of much of the debate about emotions since ancient times. Are emotions intelligent, or are they simply physical reactions? Are they mere ‘feelings’, or do they play a vital role in philosophy and in our lives?

Reason, emotion: master and slave

Perhaps the most striking and definitive metaphor in the history of the philosophy of the emotions is that of master and slave, the wisdom of reason firmly in control and the dangerous impulses of emotion safely suppressed, channelled or forced into submission.

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 dangerous and thus to be controlled by reason (an argument that

Aristotle

and other enlightened Athenians also used to justify the political institution of slavery).

Second, and more profoundly, there is the reason-emotion distinction itself, as 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 judgement’) maintained the distinction and continued to insist on the superiority of reason.

Hume

, famously declaring that reason should be the slave of the passions, ultimately fell back on the same metaphor, simply turning it around.

Philosophical concerns about emotion are often part of some larger ethical or

epistemological

pursuit.

For example,

Descartes

wrote his treatise

On the Passions of the Soul

in part because the emotions played an awkward but central role in his ‘two substance’ view of mind and body.

In his Ethics,

Spinoza

, like the early

Stoics

, saw the passions - and the misunderstanding of the passions - as the key to explaining much of human unhappiness.

Hume devoted the middle third of his

Treatise of Human Nature

to an ingenious analysis of the passions, employing the same

minimalist

ontology

of ‘impressions’, ‘ideas’ and ‘associations’ that he used to describe the workings of the mind in general. Immanuel Kant included virtually all the emotions as ‘inclinations’ in order to distinguish them sharply from reason, the proper realm of ethics. Nietzsche, on the other hand, celebrated the worldliness of the passions in order to chastize philosophical reason as ‘other-worldly’ escapism (see Hume, D.; Kant, I. §9; Nietzsche, F.).

Conceptions of emotion vary with ethical and religious convictions. Virtually every culture distinguishes between good emotions (which are healthy, virtuous and conducive to social harmony) and bad emotions (which tend to be unhealthy, vicious and socially disruptive). Some emotions are said to be pious - love, hope and faith, for example; others are designated as sinful - pride, envy and anger, for instance. How the emotions are viewed also depends on which emotions are taken as exemplary - violent or calm, selfish or other-directed, hostile or benevolent. Compassion and affection suggest a very different view of emotions than do outrage and jealousy. Conceptions of emotion are influenced by the virtues and vices of the time and culture. Consider warrior rage and physical courage in Homeric Greece, the concept of justice in Socratic Athens, the importance of faith in the middle ages, passionate love in twelfth-century France, the ‘gentlemanly’ virtues in eighteenth-century Britain, personal piety and the place of duty in early modern Germany, litigious anger and moral indignation in contemporary USA. In place of the opposition between reason and the emotions, in other words, perhaps we should ask which emotions play what roles in which culture.

Plato to the Stoics

The emotions as such do not form one of the aspects of Plato’s tripartite soul. What we call emotion seems divided not only between spirit and appetite but, considering Plato’s discussion of eros as the lot of the Good in The Symposium, the emotions are involved in reason as well (see Plato §12). Aristotle, by contrast, did seem to have a view of emotion as such, and in his Rhetoric (Bk. II, Ch. 1) he defines emotion ‘ as that which leads one’s condition to become so transformed that his judgment is affected, and which is accompanied by pleasure and pains. Examples of emotion include anger, fear, pity, and the like, as well as the opposites of these’.

Aristotle discussed certain emotions at length, notably anger which he describes in remarkably modern terms. In the Rhetoric he defines anger as ‘ a distressed desire for conspicuous vengeance in return for a conspicuous and unjustifiable contempt of one’s person or friends’. He adds that ‘ anger is always directed towards someone in particular, for example Cleon, and not towards all of humanity’, and mentions if only in passing the physical distress that virtually always accompanies such emotion. The key to his analysis, however, is the notion of a ‘slight’ as the cause of anger, which may be an instance of ‘ scorn, spite or insolence’. Aristotle makes allowances for only imagined slights (in other words, unwarranted anger is nevertheless anger), and he gives a central place to the desire for revenge, thus introducing a behavioural component at the heart of the emotion.

Aristotle’s view of emotion developed in the context of broader ethical concerns. Anger is of interest to him because it is a natural reaction to offence as well as a moral force, which can be cultivated and provoked by reason and rhetoric. There are circumstances in which it is appropriate to get angry, those in which it is not, and only a certain intensity of anger is justified. Here, as elsewhere, Aristotle defines virtue as ‘the mean between the extremes’. So too, courage is not fearlessness nor ‘overcoming’ fear so much as it is having just the right amount of fear, to be neither foolhardy nor a coward. But what is particularly instructive in Aristotle’s accounts of emotion is the fact that the split between rationality and emotion is not much in evidence. The emotions are an essential part of the rational life (see Aristotle §29).

In Roman times, we find a similar conjunction of ethics and emotion in the philosophy of the Stoics. But whereas Aristotle took emotion as essential to the good life, the Stoics analysed emotions as conceptual errors, conducive to misery. Seneca and Chrysippus, for example, developed a theory of the emotions as judgments, judgments about the world and one’s place in it. The Stoics saw the world, however, as out of control and beyond any reasonable expectations, and so they viewed the emotions, which imposed such expectations on the world, as misguided judgments about life and our place in the world. The emotions, consequently, make us miserable and frustrated. The alternative was ‘psychic indifference’ or apatheia. The Stoics believed in a ‘higher’ reason, but - like the Buddhists thousands of miles away - they believed that the best life could be achieved only by realizing the pointlessness of emotional attachments and involvement (see Stoicism).

Descartes to Nietzsche

The study of emotion was central to Christian psychology and theories of human nature throughout the middle ages. But when René Descartes reviewed the literature on emotion in his Passions of the Soul, he concluded that what they taught was ‘ so far from credible, that I am unable to entertain any hope of approximating the truth excepting by shunning the paths they followed’. Descartes, accordingly, tried to start anew, but he was fundamentally a scientist and a mathematician, awed by ‘the natural light of reason’. He also tended to disdain the bodily and the bestial, and the emotions, he argued, were caused by agitations in the ‘animal spirits’, minute particles of blood. The emotions involve sensations caused by this agitation, as well as perceptions, desires and beliefs.

Thus, over and above the physical agitation and familiar sensations, the emotion of hatred, for example, ultimately arises from the perception of an object’s potential harmfulness, and involves a desire to avoid it. Accordingly, an emotion is not merely a perception of the body - it may also be ‘a perception of the soul’ and an essential ingredient in wisdom: ‘ The utility of the passions consist alone in their fortifying and perpetuating the soul thoughts which it is good that it should preserve’. Bad emotions, by contrast, are those which ‘ fortify these thoughts more than necessary, or conserve others on which it is not good to dwell’. Descartes’ six ‘primitive’ passions - wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy and sadness - are thus not mere agitations of the animal spirits but ingredients in the good life as well (see Descartes, R. §10).

Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza might well be considered a latter-day Stoic, for he also regarded emotions as misguided ‘thoughts’ about life and our place in the world (see Spinoza, B. de §9). But unlike the Stoics, Spinoza did not aspire to that ‘psychic indifference’ known as apatheia. Rather, he urged the attainment of a certain sort of ‘bliss’, which could be achieved only by getting straight one’s thinking about the world. In particular, we had to give up the idea that we were or could be in control of our own lives, and adopt instead the all-embracing idea of ourselves and our minds as part of God. Most of the emotions, which are passive reactions to our unwarranted expectations of the world, will leave us hurt, frustrated and enervated. The active emotions, by contrast, emanate from our own true natures and heighten our sense of activity and awareness.

David Hume attacked superstition and irrationality in all quarters, defending the virtues of reason (see Hume, D. §3). But reason, Hume argued, does not have the power to motivate even the most minimal moral behaviour. ‘ It is not contrary to reason’, he declared in one of his outrageous proclamations in the Treatise of Human Nature (Bk II, Pt 3, Sect. iii) ‘ to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger’. What motivates us to right (and wrong) behaviour, Hume insisted, were our passions, the moral sentiments. Rather than being relegated to the margins of ethics and philosophy, the passions deserve central respect and consideration.

Hume’s theory is especially important not only because he challenged the inferior place of passion in philosophy and questioned the role of reason. He also advanced a theory of the passions which, although limited and encumbered by his general theory of mind, displayed dazzling insight and a precocious attempt to account for the place of reason in emotion. Like many of his contemporaries and predecessors, Hume defined an emotion as a certain kind of sensation - what he called an ‘impression’ - whether pleasant or unpleasant, which was physically stimulated by the movement of the ‘animal spirits’ in the blood (as in Descartes).

But the impressions that constituted our emotions were always to be located within a causal network of other impressions and, more importantly, of ideas. Ideas caused our emotional iimpressions, and were caused in turn by them. The pleasant impression of pride, for example, was caused by the idea that one had achieved or accomplished something significant, and the impression in turn caused another idea, which Hume describes as an idea of the self, simpliciter. The emotion, in other words, could not be identified with the impression or sensation alone but could only be identified by virtue of the whole complex of impressions and ideas.

Immanuel Kant was, like Hume, a champion of the Enlightenment, but although he also questioned the capacities and limits of reason, he was uncompromising in its defence against any attempt to replace reason by irrational faith or to ground ethics on fleeting human feeling instead of the universal and necessary dictates of reason (see Kant, I. §2). Thus Kant reinforced the crucial distinction between reason and the ‘inclinations’ and dismissed the latter (including the moral sentiments) as inessential to morals at best, as intrusive and disruptive or worse. And yet although Kant felt no need to develop a theory of emotion, his position on the ‘inclinations’ is more ambiguous than is usually supposed, and his respect for ‘feeling’ more significant.

It was Kant, a quarter century before Hegel, who insisted that ‘nothing great is ever done without passion’, and it was Kant, in his Critique of Judgment, who celebrated the importance of shared feeling in the appreciation of beauty and the awe with which we try to comprehend the wonder of God’s creation (see Kant, I. §12). Indeed, even Kant’s central notions of respect and human dignity, the very heart of his rationalist ethics, are sometimes argued to be matters of feeling as well as reason, thus calling into question the harshness of his ruthlessly divided self. When his successor Hegel took over the reins of German philosophy in the early nineteenth century, Kant’s distinction between reason and emotion was again called into question, and Hegel’s own odyssey of reason (in The Phenomenology of Spirit) has rightly been called a ‘logic of passion’ as well.

Friedrich Nietzsche was a philosopher for whom passion was the watchword and reason a source of suspicion (see Nietzsche, F. §5). He was the culmination of a long line of ‘Romantics’, beginning with the Sturm und Drang poets of the previous century and continuing through the philosophy of his own favourite influence, the Neo-Kantian pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer. Nietzsche anticipated the global scepticism and conceptual chaos of the twentieth century and, like Freud who admired him, he described (and celebrated) the darker, more instinctual and less rational motives of the human mind. Accordingly, he praised the passions and, in an ironic twist, described the passions as themselves having more reason than Reason. But this was not to say that all passions are wise. Some, he declares, ‘drag us down with their stupidity’, and others, notably the ‘slave’ emotion of resentment, are devious and clever but to a disastrous end: the ‘levelling’ of the virtuous passions and the defence of mediocrity.

The twentieth century

In the twentieth century one can trace the fate of emotion in Western philosophy through two very different tracks. In the USA and England, the emotions were given short shrift, in large part because of the emphasis on logic and language. The British philosopher Bertrand Russell elaborately praises love and passion in the opening pages of his autobiography, but in his philosophy says virtually nothing about them. The nature of emotion was a major concern of William James and the young John Dewey in the early years of the century, but it was James, with his emphasis on the physiological nature of emotion, who determined much of the bias against emotion in philosophy and psychology for years to come. James argued that an emotion was a sensation (or set of sensations) caused by a ‘visceral’ disturbance which in turn was prompted by some disturbing ‘perception’.

Perhaps the first major attention to emotion in Anglo-American philosophy came in mid-century, when an ethical theory named ‘emotivism’ came to dominate both the English and the US scene (see Emotivism). But emotivism, which was part and parcel of a cross-the-board philosophical purgative known as ‘logical positivism’, was essentially a dismissal of ethical (and many other) questions in philosophy as ‘meaningless’ (that is, unscientific and without verifiable solutions). Emotion came back onto the stage of philosophy but only as the butt of the argument: ethical statements are meaningless, so they can therefore be nothing but expressions of emotion.

During the same period in Europe, however, the emotions enjoyed more attention. Franz Brentano succeeded the British moral sentiment theorists in attempting to base an ethics on a foundation of emotions. Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger and, more recently, Paul Ricoeur developed ambitious philosophies in which emotions were given central place in human existence and accorded considerable respect. In the shadow of the Second World War, Jean-Paul Sartre offered a slim but important ‘Sketch’ of a Theory of Emotions, followed by his Being and Nothingness which includes within its many pages a number of detailed ‘phenomenological’ analyses of emotion. Sartre’s conception of emotions as ‘magical transformations of the world’ - wilful strategems for coping with a difficult world - added a new ‘existential’ dimension to the investigation of emotion (see Sartre, J.P. §2).

In Anglo-American philosophy, the fortunes of emotion changed slowly. In an article simply entitled ‘Emotion’ (indicating how rarely the topic had even been broached), Errol Bedford addressed the Aristotelian Society in 1956 on the nature of emotion and the errors of thinking of emotions as ‘feelings’. The essay might have sat on the shelves gathering dust except for the fact that the then dean of Oxford philosophers, J.L. Austin, took it upon himself to remark on one of Bedford’s claims. The subsequent attention kept the article alive, and in the 1960s the subject seemed to come to life again. Today, emotions are no longer at the margins of philosophy, and there is a rich variety of debates about the nature and the conceptual structure of emotions, their rationality and their place in the good life.

References and further reading

Aristotle

(c. mid 3rd century BC) Rhetoric, trans. R. McKeon in The Works of Aristotle, New York: Random House, 1941.(See especially his acute analysis of anger at Book II, Chapter 1.)

Augustine

(c.400) Confessions, trans. J.K. Ryan, New York: Doubleday, 1960.(One of the world’s most famous treatises on faith and temptation.)

Bedford

, E. (1956) ‘Emotion’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 57 (1956-7): 281-304.(A classic piece of analytic philosophy on emotion.)

Brentano

, F. (1874) Psychology from the Empirical Standpoint, trans. D.B. Terrell, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971.(Discusses the modern notion of ‘intentionality’ which influenced Freud and phenomenology.)

Calhoun

, C. and Solomon, R. (eds) (1984) What is an Emotion?, New York: Oxford University Press. (A wide-ranging collection of classic sources on emotion.)

Descartes, R. (1649) Passions of the Soul, trans. S. Voss, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1989. (Descartes’ most illuminating work on the ‘mind-body problem’ and the nature of emotion.)

Hegel

, G.W.F. (1807) Phenomenology of Spirit, trans A.V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.(An extremely difficult but essential defence of the ‘dialectic’ - the overcoming of contradictions - in philosophy. See, for example, Chapter 4, ‘Master and Slave’.)

Heidegger

, M. (1927) Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, New York: Harper & Row, 1962. (Equally obscure and important master-text by the most controversial of German authors. See the section on moods.)

Hume

, D. (1738) A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.(Book 2, Part 3, Section 3 contains one of the most insightful and elegantly-written defences and analyses of emotion in the English language.)

James

, W. (1890) What is an Emotion?, New York: Dover.(One of the classic work by the great American philosopher-psychologist, the basis of much debate about emotions ever since.)

Kant

, I. (1790) Critique of Judgment, trans. W.S. Pluhar, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987.(The third of Kant’s Critiques, in part devoted to the anayses of aesthetic judgment and feeling.)

Nietzsche

, F. (1887) On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York: Random House, 1967.(His discussion of resentment in Book I is particularly relevant.)

Plato

(c.380s BC) Symposium, trans. P. Woodruss and A. Nehamas, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1989. (The classic discussion of love.)

Plato

(c.370s BC) The Republic, trans. G.M.A. Grube, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1974.(One of the greatest works in philosophy. The analogy between the ‘parts of the soul’ and the harmonious state are in Book IV.)

Ricoeur

, P. (1950) The Voluntary and the Involuntary, trans E. Kohak, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966.(An original contribution to phenomenology.)

Sartre

, J.P. (1938) The Emotions: Sketch of a Theory, trans. B. Frechtman, New York: Philosophical Library, 1948.(A remarkably clear, single-minded exploration of the ‘existentialist’ view of emotion, focusing on emotions as ‘magical transformations’.)

Sartre

, J.P. (1943) Being and Nothingness, trans. H. Barnes, New York: Washington Square, 1956.(An extremely difficult gigantic tome of a work, devoted to defending in full Sartre’s ‘existentialist’ view of being human, being free and responsible.)

Scheler

, M. (1970) The Nature of Sympathy, trans. P. Heath, New York: Archon, 1970.(A modern defence of the ‘moral sentiments’ in ethics and an original contribution to phenomenology.)

Seneca

(AD 41) De Ira (On Anger), trans. J. Cooper, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. (A classic defence of the Stoic ‘extirpation’ of the passions.)

Spinoza

, B. de (1677) Ethics, trans. S. Shirley, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1982.(A moving and sensitive work on the emotions, despite the mathematico-deductive style and the early books on metaphysics.).

]

Cross-Indexed:

Thomas Hobbes - A Background

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