Emotions, nature of   
(Robert C. Solomon)

 What is an emotion? This basic question was posed by William James in 1884, and it is still the focus for a number of important arguments in the philosophy of mind and ethics. It is, on the face of it, a quest for a definition, but it is also a larger quest for a way of thinking about ourselves: how should we think about emotions - as intrusive or as essential to our rationality, as dangerous or as indispensable to our humanity, as excuses for irresponsibility or, perhaps, as themselves our responsibilities? Where do emotions fit into the various categories and ‘faculties’ of the mind, and which of the evident aspects of emotion - the various sensory, physiological, behavioural, cognitive and social phenomena that typically correspond with an emotion - should we take to be essential? Which are mere accompaniments or consequences?  
  Many philosophers hold onto the traditional view that an emotion, as a distinctively mental phenomenon, has an essential ’subjective’ or ’introspective’ aspect, although what this means (and how accessible or articulate an emotion must be) is itself a subject of considerable dispute. Many philosophers have become sceptical about such subjectivism, however, and like their associates in the social sciences have turned the analysis of emotions to more public, observable criteria - to the behaviour that ’expresses’ emotion, the physiological disturbances that ‘cause’ emotion, the social circumstances and use of emotion language in the ascription of emotions. Nevertheless, the seemingly self-evident truth is that, whatever else it may be, an emotion is first of all a feeling. But what, then, is a ’feeling’? What differentiates emotions from other feelings, such as pains and headaches? And how does one differentiate, identify and distinguish the enormous number of different emotions? 

1 The nature of emotion: feelings, physiology and behaviour

  William James put his emphasis on the physiological and ’felt’ nature of emotion, arguing that an emotion was a sensation (or set of sensations) caused by a physiological or ’visceral’ disturbance which in turn was prompted by some disturbing perception. James did not adequately distinguish between involuntary physiological changes in the body and minimal expressions of emotion such as weeping and grimacing, but the virtue of the Jamesian theory, nevertheless, is that it specifies the nature of emotional sensation as quite particular and therefore verifiable by reference to its visceral cause. Unfortunately, the Jamesian theory turns out to be wrong, at least in its details. The physiologist W.B. Cannon, early in the century, showed clearly that emotions and changes in the body do not correspond in any convincing way. Moreover, one might feel flushed, uncomfortable and ’as if’ one were afraid, but those feelings need not be fear. Some theorists have tried to save feeling theory by employing the vague, general (and technical) notion of ’affect’, but such terms do no more than cover up the problem with a word. The challenge is to develop an ‘adequate phenomenology’ of felt emotion.
  Recent advances in brain neurology disclose structural and functional patterns in the central nervous system which are correlated with and under experimental conditions bring about certain emotional reactions. Do these patterns dictate the structure of an adequate theory of emotion, or are those findings but one more set of (contingent) considerations for inclusion in an all-embracing theory? Whatever the case, it is now clear that philosophers cannot ignore or neglect the rich neurophysiological literature on emotions. Indeed, there is now a discipline in philosophy called ’neurophilosophy’, which makes the new neurology central to any adequate analysis of emotion and ’the mind’ (Churchland1990). One of the factors that has altered the history of the philosophy of mind most radically has been new advances in previously unknown or undeveloped sciences. Nevertheless, an emotion cannot be only a neurological phenomenon. Neurology may provide the underlying cause, but it does not at present supply an adequate account of the content.
  Virtually all emotions get expressed (however minimally) in behaviour. Should behavioural tendencies or sequences of actions or certain basic gestures be taken as essential? A great deal of detailed work in psychology has shown the enormous subtlety and the seemingly ’hard-wired’ nature of basic patterns of facial expression. Many philosophers, following Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953) and Gilbert Ryle’s Concept of Mind (1949), have suggested that an emotion is nothing but its behavioural expression, though certainly not a single gesture but an open-ended sequence of actions. An emotion is not a ’ghostly inner event’, Ryle tells us, but a ‘multi-track disposition’ to behave in any number of recognizable ways (see Behaviourism, analytic). Thus philosophers have tried to understand the difference between emotions not in terms of inner feeling but rather in terms of value-laden description of the relevant social situations. Errol Bedford (1956) suggested that the difference between shame and embarrassment, for example, was not some shade of difference between internal qualia (see Qualia) but a difference in the descriptions of two different kinds of awkward situations. To be ashamed is to feel oneself blameworthy; to be embarrassed is to feel oneself a victim. In 1962 two psychologists, S. Schachter and J. Singer, agreed with James that an emotion begins with physiological ’arousal’, but they also argued that an emotion requires ’labelling’ on the basis of social context.
  Although behaviour and the social circumstances no doubt have much to do with emotion, they alone cannot account for emotion. Behaviour counts as emotional expression just because it is the expression of something else, and the social circumstances do not define but only provide the context for the emotion. Thus Ryle finds himself discussing, even while dismissing, the various ’twitches and itches’ that make up the mind, and Wittgenstein never denies the existence of inner feelings. He only insists that it is not on that basis that we identify our emotions. Feelings, physiology and behaviour, along with the social circumstances, all fit into the portrait of emotion, but what, nevertheless, seems missing is the emotion. 

2 Emotions and their contents: intentionality

  Emotions presuppose certain sorts of cognitions: an awareness of danger in fear, the judgment that one has been offended in anger, the belief that someone has died in grief, the conviction that someone or something is lovable in love. Emotions, in other words, involve concepts, judgments and beliefs, and they also include ’objects’, persons, things, states of affairs and possibilities, which those concepts, judgments and beliefs are about. Love is love only insofar as it is love of something or someone, and anger is anger only insofar as it is anger about something or at ssomeone. Freud’s ’free-floating anxiety’ counts as an emotion only insofar as it does indeed (as Freud (1935) argued) have an object, albeit ’unconscious’. Philosophers (following Aristotle and the scholastics) have come to call the essential nature of what an emotion is about the ’formal object’ of emotion, and more recent philosophers have come to call the fact that an emotion is (and must be) about something its ’intentionality’ (see Intentionality). It is the intentionality of emotions that provides the ’content’ of emotions. But notice that this content is not an inner feeling, and it may or may not be correlated with any particular physiology or behavioural expression. Nor need it be defined by the immediate circumstances. A person can become embarrassed or angry on account of a sudden thought or association, quite apart from the present situation. Indeed, an emotion is often ’about’ some nonexistent object: the object of fear may be imaginary; the person one still loves may be deceased.
  An emotion, on this cognitive account, consists of a certain way of conceiving of and responding to the world, accompanied, perhaps, by certain feelings, expressed in certain typical types of behaviour and further explained by certain neurophysiological discoveries. But this means that emotions are prone to two very different types of explanation, two different kinds of answers to the question ’why?’ Because they are intentional and involve cognitions, emotions seem to require an explanation that invokes a person’s beliefs and attitudes towards the world. A person is angry because they believe that so-and-so wronged them; someone is saddened because they have found out that they have just lost a loved one. But this cannot be a complete account of emotional explanation. We also explain emotions by citing the fact that a person has been sleepless all week, or is ill, or has been given some medication. In other words, explanation of emotion may cite an underlying cause which may or may not make mention of the object of emotion. The cause may be physiological, for example - an underlying state of irritability, an ingested drug or a direct surgical stimulation of the brain. The cause may be some state of affairs, or incident, that triggered the person’s emotion, but this may not be the object of the person’s emotion nor need they have any memory or awareness of it. But how this causal explanation can be reconciled with an explanation in terms of beliefs and attitudes is not obvious, and many philosophers tend to emphasize the importance of one over the other. One provides a fuller account of the intentionality of an emotion by describing the specific details of the emotion and its content. The other provides an explanation in terms of an underlying cause which may or may not make mention of the contents of the emotion. And to make matters even more complicated, philosophers and psychologists at least since Darwin have also appealed to evolutionary accounts and more general theories of the function of emotions in species survival. Thus the best explanation of some emotions, at least, may be found neither in an immediate set of causes nor in the evident beliefs and desires of the subject but in the evolutionary development of a certain built-in response to the world (De Sousa 1987, Gibbard 1990). 

3 The individuation of emotions

  The cognitive theory also allows a precise answer to the question of how we distinguish and identify different emotions. The difference between shame and embarrassment, for example, cannot be an extremely subtle difference in our sensations (which is not to say that there might not be such differences), nor does it lie in the fact that we tend to behave differently when we are embarrassed and when we are ashamed. The difference is to be found in the content, in the fact that in shame one feels responsible, while in embarrassment one finds oneself caught in but not in control of extremely awkward circumstances. But it is the subject’s view, or perspective, of the circumstances, not the circumstances themselves, that defines the content of the emotion. Furthermore, the label that identifies the emotion is (in part) the subject’s recognition of (what they take to be) the nature of the situation and their proper response to it. Take, for example, the very different emotions of fear and anger. Leaving aside any questions about respective physiological mechanisms and the obvious fact that their expressions (’flight versus fight’) tend to be very different, it is nevertheless clear that the way one identifies one’s own emotion is on the basis of whether the situation is fearful or offensive, respectively. This difference in turn can be explained by elaborating the various beliefs and desires that constitute each emotion.
  Where the cognitive theory becomes most interesting and valuable, however, is in distinguishing and explaining the more subtle nuances between seemingly similar emotions, for example between hatred, indignation, resentment, contempt, scorn and loathing. These are not merely rhetorical differences. Consider hatred, resentment and contempt. Resentment, as Friedrich Nietzsche ([1887] 1967) explained at some length, is an emotion of inferiority, an emotion in which one conceives of oneself as an inferior being compared to those one resents. Contempt, on the other hand, is an emotion of superiority, an emotion in which one conceives of oneself as superior to the other. (Given this ’up-down’ metaphor, consider the significance of finding someone ’beneath contempt’.) Hatred, finally, is an egalitarian emotion, hostile to be sure, but between equals. Hatred, unlike resentment and contempt, can even be an intimate emotion, which is why it so readily finds its place as the ’opposite’ of love. And speaking of love, consider the very significant nuances between love and adoration, admiration and respect, not to mention the various degrees of liking and infatuation. Thus the analysis of emotion and emotion language becomes a detailed and subtle study in differences, a careful account of the very distinctive ways in which we relate to the world. It consists of much more than the crude and unspecified notion of feelings and their relation to the underlying physiology. 

4 The rationality of emotions

  The cognitive basis of emotions also raises another important question, and that is the rationality of emotions. Many thinkers have written as if the emotions were not only irrational but also non-rational, that is, not even candidates for intelligence. Defenders of the cognitive view insist that emotions involve at least a modicum of intelligence and therefore can be irrational. The Stoics, for example, taught that all emotions are mistaken (irrational) judgments. Aristotle, on the other hand, simply assumed that an emotion could be appropriate or inappropriate, foolish or prudent, not just on the basis of whether or not it was acceptable in the circumstance in question (though that social dimension was certainly essential) but on the basis of the perceptions, beliefs and desires of the individual. The fact that emotions consist at least in part of cognitions means that they can be evaluated in terms of the same epistemic and ethical criteria that we use to evaluate other beliefs and intentions: are they appropriate to the context? Do they consider the facts of the matter? Are their perceptions fair and their evaluations reasonable? Indeed the argument is now prevalent and persuasive that emotions cannot be understood without grasping their reasons, and these reasons in turn give us a basis for evaluation (De Sousa 1987, Greenspan 1988). The current debate, however, concerns how these reasons are to be understood, and whether the rationality of emotions can indeed be fairly compared to the evaluation of more fully deliberative, articulate activities. Indeed, to what extent are the emotions not merely suffered but in some sense wilful or voluntary? Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, suggests that emotions are really strategies, ways of coping with a difficult world (Sartre 1948).
  The rationality of emotions also moves to centre-stage the relationship between emotions and ethics. Some philosophers, notoriously Immanuel Kant, tried to remove the emotions (and all such inclinations) from the realm of morality, but others, for example the ’moral sentiment theorists’ who preceded him, made certain emotions, such as sympathy or compassion, the very heart of any adequate ethics. Today the role of the emotions in the formation and the expression of a person’s character is becoming the focus of an extensive debate over the place of the personal virtues (as opposed to impersonal rules and principles) in ethics, and with this the question of how much control a person has over their emotions - whether we cultivate our emotional characters or simply find ourselves with a certain personality - is very much at issue. Indeed, to make this question all the more tantalizing, philosophers are now beginning to look carefully at the variation of emotions from culture to culture. Insofar as emotions are cognitive and based on concepts and ways of engaging the world, it is at least plausible to suggest that they may well differ considerably from one society to another. Too often philosophers have tried to answer such empirical questions a priori, but the facts seem to indicate that not only are different emotions appropriate at different times and in different places, but the emotions themselves differ as well. Some societies do not seem to have either the concept or the emotion of anger, or jealousy, or love, and others have emotions for which we do not even have names. There is nothing in the nature of emotion that assures universality, but neither is it self-evident that emotions differ all that much from place to place. We all share ’the human condition’, after all, and there is good reason to suppose that certain basic emotions or emotion-types may be shared by everyone.
  As for the question of emotions and choice, the supposed passivity of emotions, even those who do not share Sartre’s insistence that emotions are wilful strategies might neverthless agree that emotions are functional and not merely disruptions, that they are indeed ways of coping, whether inherited through natural selection, cultivated in the less articulate practices of a society or, perhaps, unconsciously mustered up by individuals as strategic responses. Obviously a good deal of ethics and our attitudes towards ourselves depend on this. Do we see ourselves as the victims of emotions, or are the emotions rather an essential part of our rationality, a key ingredient in the virtues and a significant part of our conception of ourselves and the world? The study of emotion in philosophy is, accordingly, not a detached and marginal discipline but the very core of our inquiry into ourselves and our own natures. It was Socrates, the great champion of reason, who took as his motto the slogan at Delphi, ’Know thyself’, and the rather extreme injunction that ’the unexamined life is not worth living.’ But part of that knowledge, surely, is our understanding and appreciation of our emotions, which are, after all, much of what makes life worth living. 

See also: Emotion in response to art; Emotions, philosophy of

ROBERT C. SOLOMON 

References and further reading 

Bedford, E. (1956) ’Emotion’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 57: 281-304.(An early attempt to give an analysis of emotion in terms of behaviour and social context.)

Calhoun, C. and Solomon, R. (eds) (1984) What is an Emotion?, New York: Oxford University Press.(A wide-ranging collection of original sources from Aristotle to contemporary philosophy and psychology, including James, Cannon, Bedford, Freud and Sartre.)

Cannon, W. (1929) Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage, New York: Appleton.(An early study of the physiology of emotion and a direct attack on the James-Lange theory.)

Churchland, P.S. (1990) Neurophilosophy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.(The most thoroughgoing exploration of the relevance of neurology to the philosophy of mind to date.)

De Sousa, R. (1987) The Rationality of Emotion, Cambridge, MA: MIT(An original and often exciting exploration of these issues.)

Freud, S. (1915) ’The Unconscious’ in Freud Standard Edition, London: Hogarth, 1935, vol. 14. (The question of ’unconscious emotions’.)

Gibbard, A. (1990) Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.(An insightful revision of the ’emotivist’ view of ethics using an evolutionary model.)

Greenspan, P. (1988) Emotions and Reasons, New York: Routledge.(The most thorough examination of the role of reasons in emotion.)

James, W. (1884) What is an Emotion?, Mind 19: 188-204.

Kenny, A. (1963) Action, Emotion and Will, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.(A classic study of the notion of intentionality and the role of the formal object in emotion.)

Lyons, D. (1980) Emotion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.(An excellent physiological-cognitive analysis of emotion.)

Neu, J. (1977) Emotion, Thought and Therapy, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.(A thorough-going cognitive view of emotion.)

Nietzsche, F. ([1887] 1967) On the Genealogy of Morals, New York: Random House.

Rorty, A. (ed). (1980) Explaining Emotions, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.(An excellent collection of contemporary essays.)

Ryle, G. (1949) The Concept of Mind, New York: Barnes & Noble.(An attempt to eliminate the emotions as aspects of tthe ’ghost in the machine’.)

Sartre, J.-P. (1948) The Emotions: Sketch of A Theory, New York: Philosophical Library.(The innovative conception of emotions as ’magical transformations of the world’.)

Schachter, S. and Singer, J. (1962) ’Cognitive, Social and Physiological Determinants of Emotional State’, Psychology Review 69 (5).(The most influential contemporary response to William James in psychology.)

Solomon, R. (1993) The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company. (Expansion of the cognitive view discussed in this entry.)

Wilson, J.R.S. (1972) Emotion and Object, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.(Perhaps the best and most extended discussion of the ‘intentionality’ of emotion.)

Wittgenstein, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.