Emotion E-Book

Carolyn Price

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Key Concepts in Philosophy
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 342

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Emotion is at the centre of our personal and social lives. To love or to hate, to be frightened or grateful is not just a matter of how we feel on the inside: our emotional responses direct our thoughts and actions, unleash our imaginations, and structure our relationships with others. Yet the role of emotion in human life has long been disputed. Is emotion reason?s friend or its foe? From where do the emotions really arise? Why do we need them at all?

In this accessible and carefully argued introduction, Carolyn Price focuses on some central questions about the nature and function of emotion. She explores the ways in which emotion contrasts with belief and considers how our emotional responses relate to our values, our likes and our needs. And she investigates some of the different ways in which emotional responses can be judged as fitting or misplaced, rational or irrational, authentic or inauthentic, sentimental or profound. Throughout, she develops a particular view of emotion as a complex and diverse phenomenon, which reflects both our common evolutionary past and our different cultural and personal histories.

Engagingly written with lots of examples to illuminate our understanding, this book provides the ideal introduction to the topic for students and scholars and anyone interested in delving further into the intricate web of human emotion.

Leseprobe

Key Concepts in Philosophy

Heather Battaly,

Virtue

Lisa Bortolotti,

Irrationality

Joseph Keim Campbell,

Free Will

Roy T. Cook,

Paradoxes

Douglas Edwards,

Properties

Bryan Frances,

Disagreement

Amy Kind,

Persons and Personal Identity

Douglas Kutach,

Causation

Ian Evans and Nicholas D. Smith,

Knowledge

Daniel Speak,

The Problem of Evil

Deborah Perron Tollefsen,

Groups as Agents

Joshua Weisberg,

Consciousness

Chase Wrenn,

Truth

Copyright © Carolyn Price 2015

The right of Carolyn Price to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2015 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5635-9

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5636-6 (pb)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8660-8 (epub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8659-2 (mobi)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Price, Carolyn, 1963-

    Emotion / Carolyn Price.

        pages cm

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-7456-5635-9 (hardback : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-7456-5636-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)    1.  Emotions (Philosophy)    2.  Emotions.    I.  Title.

    B815.P75 2015

    128′.37–dc23

                                                            2014036702

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Acknowledgements

The ideas and arguments presented in the book first began to take shape as I wrote a book on emotion for an Open University module on the philosophy of mind a decade ago. Since then I have been developing my own views on the topic through a number of articles and talks. As a result, there are many people to thank for helping me to make progress with these issues. They include numerous Open University students; my colleagues at the Open University; seminar and conference participants at several places (including the Open University, the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris, Friedrich-Alexander Universität at Erlangen-Nürnberg and the Universities of Reading, Northampton, York, Hertfordshire and Manchester); and anonymous referees for a number of journals. Their insights and criticism have been invaluable. Particular thanks should go to my colleague Derek Matravers, who kindly read and commented on a draft of the book, and to three anonymous referees for Polity whose feedback was crucial in helping me to find a workable structure and approach. I would like to thank, too, Emma Hutchinson and Pascal Porcheron at Polity for their encouragement and advice throughout the writing process, and Justin Dyer, who copy-edited the text, for his care and patience.

In certain parts of the book, the discussion is indebted to earlier publications of mine. In the first three sections of Chapter 4, my argument is based in part on my paper ‘Doing without emotions’ which was published in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 93(3) (2012): 317–37. Certain ideas from that article also crop up, in a smaller way, in Chapters 1 and 3. In Chapter 6, I draw on my essay ‘Fearing Fluffy: the content of an emotional appraisal’, published in G. Macdonald and D. Papineau (eds), Teleosemantics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006: 208–28), and also on ‘The problem of emotional significance’, published in Acta Analytica 28(2) (2013): 189–206.

Introduction

Getting Started

As I type this opening sentence, I am feeling mildly frustrated – frustrated because I am having trouble finding a good opening sentence for this book. Earlier, I was feeling anxious about a problem at work, then grateful to hear that someone had sorted it out. When I looked out of the window this morning, I was happy to see that it had snowed. None of this, I take it, is remotely surprising. As with most people, my experience of the world is frequently tinged with emotion. Much of the time, my emotional responses are not intense: often I am hardly aware of them. Only occasionally do I panic, lose my temper or jump for joy. Still, much of what happens in my daily life has at least some emotional significance for me: events are heartening, annoying, worrying, exciting, embarrassing and saddening by turns. And this, I assume, is true for almost everyone.

Yet, for all their familiarity, emotions present some surprisingly complex puzzles. This is partly because, as Peter Goldie (2000) has emphasized, our emotional experiences are themselves complex. The point can be brought home simply by describing an emotional response. Suppose that you have just made a complete fool of yourself in front of a large group of people. You are rigid with embarrassment, and you can feel yourself sweating and blushing. Your attention is fixed on your blunder: embarrassed thoughts crowd into your mind – thoughts about what you have just said and how you might repair the damage. Perhaps you suddenly remember a similarly awful moment last week or start to imagine what your audience must be thinking. Almost certainly, you have an urge to creep away. You might also be doing certain things – spluttering out a retraction, perhaps. An emotional response, then, is not just a matter of feeling a certain way: it can involve thinking, wanting, remembering and imagining; it can involve changes in your body and in your behaviour.

The complexity of emotion makes it a rich topic for investigation. At the same time, this complexity can make the topic hard to approach: it is difficult to know where to start. One of my aims in this opening chapter is to provide a way into the topic, by describing some different kinds of emotional response. My discussion will highlight some features of emotion that will play an important role in the chapters that follow. I shall follow this, in the final section, by setting out my plan for the book.

Emotional Responses

An Emotional Reaction

Alice is in the library, trying to understand something complicated. Her colleague Zack walks into the room: he lets the door slam loudly behind him, breaking Alice's concentration. She bristles with anger. Almost immediately, though, she notices that Zack is struggling with a pile of heavy books, and her anger fades.

Bristling with anger is an example of what I shall call an emotional reaction. Other examples might include a sudden stab of fear, a surge of joy or a rush of tenderness. Emotional reactions are very brief, lasting a matter of seconds. But despite their brevity, they involve several kinds of psychological and physiological change. Alice's angry reaction, for example, might include any or all of the following:

Her attention switches to Zack and the slamming door.

Her heart speeds up and her muscles tense.

She frowns and clenches her fists.

She has an urge to do something about the situation – to shout at Zack, perhaps.

Moreover, Alice's response seems to involve a particular way of experiencing or evaluating the situation: she experiences Zack's behaviour as a kind of attack or offence. When she sees Zack struggling with his pile of books, her evaluation changes, and her anger fades. This suggests that we need to add another item to the list:

She evaluates Zack's behaviour as offensive.

Finally, these changes generate a conscious experience, which is characterized by a particular phenomenology or feel. The feel of anger is determined in part by the bodily feelings that it involves: for example, Alice may feel agitated and tense. On the face of it, though, the feel of anger is not wholly physiological: it is not just tense and agitated; it is focused and vengeful too.

An Emotional Episode

Emotional reactions do not always subside straight away: sometimes they develop into something else – a full-blown episode of emotion. Consider, for example, the following story.

Bill does not get along well with his neighbour Yolanda. The problem is Monty, Yolanda's pampered pet python: Bill hates snakes, and Yolanda is known to be careless. One sunny afternoon, as Bill is sitting in his garden, he spots Monty slithering towards him. Gripped by fear, Bill leaps up, picks up a rake, flings it at Monty and then flees into his house. He spends several agitated minutes locking windows and doors before calling the police. It is some time before he regains his composure.

Bill's initial reaction to Monty's appearance is similar to Alice's reaction to the slamming door. Clearly, Bill evaluates Monty as a threat. We might expect, too, that his attention is fixed on Monty; his heart is racing; he is pale; he wants desperately to escape; he feels tense, jumpy, and so on. But in this case, Bill's response does not end after a few seconds: it continues to develop. As his response progresses, it might come to include any or all the following:

Thoughts, memories and images relating to snakes and the danger they pose flood into Bill's mind.

He casts around for a way to deal with the threat.

He does things (throws the rake, runs into the house, locks doors and windows) designed to deal with the threat.

He is disposed to undergo further emotional reactions – for example, anger when the police fail to arrive immediately; relief when he realizes that the threat has passed.

While the shape of an emotional reaction may be relatively easy to predict, an emotional episode can evolve in all sorts of ways. How Bill's response develops, for example, will depend on his temperament, on his past experience and on how the situation unfolds.

An Extended Emotional Episode

Bill's fearful episode lasted a matter of minutes. Arguably, though, some emotional episodes extend over much longer periods. Suppose that Ceri has discovered that her boyfriend has cheated on her: she is feeling jealous and resentful. Her jealous response might extend for days, weeks or even months.

It might be objected that this is not the right way to describe Ceri's feelings: it would be more accurate to think of her jealousy as series of separate episodes, which are sparked whenever she recalls her boyfriend's infidelity (Ekman, 1994a: 16). On this view, then, Ceri is not in the grip of a single episode of emotion. Rather, she is disposed to become jealous whenever she thinks about her boyfriend's behaviour. In fact, I agree that this will often be the right thing to say. In some cases, though, this way of characterizing the situation misses something important. Suppose that, in her jealousy, Ceri finds it very hard to stop thinking about her boyfriend's infidelity: her thoughts are constantly drawn back to the situation. She begins to see past events in a new light and her plans for the future are on hold. In this case, her jealousy is not just a disposition to become jealous whenever she is reminded about the situation: rather, it is exerting an active influence on her thoughts and plans, continually drawing her attention back to what has happened. In this situation, it makes sense to think of her jealous response as a single, evolving episode, which stretches over days, weeks or months.

An Emotional Attitude

Can there be emotional responses that last even longer – for a lifetime perhaps? I am going to suggest that there can. Here is one possible example.

Dan is an environmental campaigner. He was drawn into politics some years ago, when the government made a decision to expand his local airport. Dan felt very indignant about this decision; although most of his neighbours soon turned their attention to other things, it continued to play on his mind. He joined a campaign group, went on demonstrations and put posters up in his window. As he looked further into the issue, the focus of his indignation moved away from the decision about the airport to what he regarded as a persistent lack of regard for the environment by people in power. In recent years, he has invested a significant amount of time and energy in pursuing environmental issues; he has started to think of himself as an environmental campaigner.

Dan's indignation, we might suppose, has much in common with the other emotional responses I have described: Dan evaluates the government's policies as damaging and unjust; his attention is focused on the issue; and he is motivated to do something about it. He often has indignant thoughts about the situation; and he harbours further emotional dispositions that are explained by his indignation: for example, he is disposed to feel happy should he hear that some goal of the campaign has been achieved. Moreover, his indignation plays an active role in prompting him to look out for news about environmental issues, discuss the matter with friends, and so on. However, Dan's indignation is not a transient episode of emotion that is set to fade away or be resolved after a time: rather, it has the potential to last a lifetime. Indeed, it has come to constitute a significant theme in his life, helping to shape his friendships, interests, values, and even his sense of who he is. In what follows, I shall refer to this kind of enduring emotional response as an emotional attitude.

Novels and films provide plenty of examples of enduring emotional attitudes. The most striking tend to be cases of obsessive and damaging emotion: we might think, for example, of Captain Ahab's obsessive rage in Melville's Moby-Dick, or Miss Havisham's life-long grief and resentment in Dickens's Great Expectations. But it is not hard to think of less disturbing examples. In particular, love seems to be an emotion that is characteristically experienced as an emotional attitude, rather than a transient episode.1 Novels and films provide plenty of examples of that too.

Emotional Responses: Complex, Diverse and Coherent

What can we learn from these stories? I shall suggest that they point to three key features of emotion.

(a)  Complexity. All these stories confirm the point that I made at the start of this chapter: emotional responses are characteristically complex responses, which involve a mix of psychological, physiological and behavioural changes. As we have seen, the longer an emotional response lasts, the more complex it can become.

(b)  Diversity. Emotional responses are not all of a kind. Most obviously, perhaps, there are different types of emotion: in this discussion, I have already mentioned embarrassment, anger, fear, jealousy, indignation, resentment, grief and love. It would not be difficult to come up with a much longer list. Arguably, we can also distinguish between different classes of emotion: for example, theorists of emotion sometimes distinguish between moral emotions (e.g. indignation, remorse), intellectual emotions (e.g. interest, wonder) and personal emotions (e.g. anxiety, sorrow, joy). Finally, emotional responses come in different shapes and sizes. As we have already seen, there can be momentary emotional reactions, full-blown emotional episodes and enduring emotional attitudes. In all these senses, then, emotional responses are interestingly diverse.

It is important to bear this diversity in mind in what follows: in examining any general claim about emotion – including, of course, the ones in this book – it is always worth asking whether it is true of all kinds of emotional response, or whether it fits certain kinds of response better than others.

(c)  Coherence. The third point is more controversial. On the face of it, an emotional response is not just a random assortment of symptoms: it has a coherent structure. Consider, for example, Bill's fearful response to Monty. Having recognized Monty as a threat, Bill's attention is focused on the danger; he is strongly motivated to try to get away; he undergoes physiological changes that prepare him for vigorous action; he cries out and looks frightened – behaviour which might alert others to his situation. Described in this way, Bill's response has every appearance of being a co-ordinated, organized response to danger – one that might give him a chance of escaping unhurt.

It is important to be careful here. I am not suggesting that Bill's fearful response is the most effective response he could have produced. Perhaps it would have been better to have calmly backed away. Indeed, it is possible that, on this occasion, responding with fear made things worse. Nor have I said that Bill's response was one that he would have endorsed himself: perhaps he felt rather embarrassed after the event. I am claiming only that his fearful episode makes sense viewed as aimed at a certain objective – that is, dealing with a physical threat.

The same point applies to the other emotional responses described here. Alice's angry reaction, for example, makes sense as an aggressive response to offence: in her anger, she is motivated to retaliate; she is physically prepared for action; her facial expression and posture make her intentions clear. Again, this is not to say that anger is always (or ever) the best response to offence. Nor does it imply that Alice believed that it was a good response to the situation. The point is just that her reaction looks very much like an organized response to offence, not just a meaningless convulsion. As we shall see later on, there are several ways in which we might try to explain the coherence of emotion. Indeed, this will be an important issue in what follows.

The complexity and diversity claims will also have significant roles to play. In fact, there is one sense in which they are already playing a role in my discussion. These features present a challenge for any would-be theorist of emotion. The problem is that there are very few things to be said about emotion that are true in every case: complications and qualifications are always in the offing. At most, we can make some claims about what is characteristically so. In other words, we can make claims about what is very often true – and, more importantly, what is true in central or paradigm cases.

The Plan

This is a short book, and I shall need to be selective. I shall be selective, first, about the types of emotion that I shall discuss. I shall focus on what I shall call personal emotional responses – that is, responses that are plausibly viewed as relating to the subject's own personal concerns. Fear, anxiety, joy, sorrow, gratitude, jealousy, envy, embarrassment, disgust, love, regret, hope and some cases of anger, shame and pride are all plausibly viewed as emotions of this kind.

As I suggested earlier, personal emotions, in this sense, might be contrasted with moral and intellectual emotions. Admittedly, the boundaries between these categories are not clear-cut. In particular, many types of emotion can occur in both moral and personal contexts. One example is shame: someone might feel ashamed of their unkindness (a moral response); or they might feel ashamed of their lack of sporting prowess (a personal one). Indeed, a shamed response might itself involve a mix of moral and personal shame; and these feelings may be very hard to disentangle. Still, even if it is not always easy in practice to distinguish these different classes of response, there does seem to be a distinction here. (I shall say more about it in Chapter 6.)

I shall also be highly selective in the questions that I shall address. I shall have nothing to say, for example, about the relationship between emotion and morality. That is a very important topic, but it requires a book of its own. Nor shall I address the role of emotion in scientific inquiry; in art, music and literature; or in political life – though these are all important and interesting topics. My primary focus will be the nature of emotions and emotional evaluations, and on some of the different ways in which our emotional responses can be assessed – as fitting or misplaced; rational or irrational; authentic or inauthentic; sentimental or clear-eyed. In exploring these questions, I hope to get a better sense of the role that emotions play in our personal lives.

I shall begin, in Chapter 2, by discussing some existing accounts of emotion. My aim is not to provide a survey of the philosophical literature on emotion. Rather, I shall focus primarily on four theorists. I shall begin with the psychologist and philosopher William James (1890). James's theory of emotion emphasized both the bodily aspects of emotion and its phenomenology. In contrast, Robert Solomon (1993 [1976]) stressed the idea that emotion involves evaluation: to understand our emotions, he thought, we need to focus not on how the subject feels, but on how they take the world to be. I shall end by discussing accounts developed by Peter Goldie (2000) and Jesse Prinz (2004), theorists who set out to accommodate both the phenomenal and the evaluative aspects of emotion. As we shall see, though, they do this in very different ways.

In exploring these views, I hope to provide some background to the discussions that follow. I shall also try to draw out some key questions about emotion:

What is an emotion?

What is an emotional evaluation?

How can we explain why people's emotional responses take the form that they do?

All these questions will be explored in the chapters that follow.

In Chapter 3, I shall begin to develop my own positive account. The chapter focuses on the third of the questions above. This might look like a rather odd way to start my account: it might seem more sensible to begin by deciding what an emotion is. But I want to start with this third question because doing so will allow me to introduce a particular theoretical approach to emotion – one that will play a crucial role throughout the book. I want to suggest that one good way to explain the structure of an emotional response is by appealing to its function – the job that it is supposed to do. The notion of a function, I shall suggest, is a historical one: the functions of our emotional responses are rooted in the past – in our evolutionary history, our cultural background and our personal experience. As I shall make clear, I do not think that this is the only productive way to think about emotion. But as we shall see, this historical, functional approach can help us to answer some important questions about emotional responses and the situations that elicit them.

With this theoretical claim in place, we will now be ready to consider what an emotion actually is. This is the topic of Chapter 4. As I shall explain, the question is ambiguous: in asking it, we might want to know what constitutes a particular instance of emotion – Bill's fear or Ceri's jealousy, for example; alternatively, we might want to know how to distinguish types of emotion (fear, jealousy) from other psychological phenomena or from each other. I shall give some attention to all these questions. But it is the first that will claim most of my attention. In fact, I want to raise the possibility that there is no good way to answer this question. This is not because it is a bad question, but because the particular nature of emotion – as complex, diverse and functionally coherent – makes it very hard to decide on an answer. In contrast, I shall offer a positive account of how we might distinguish between different types of emotion. We can do this, I shall argue, by appealing to their functional and structural properties.

The three chapters that follow are all concerned, in different ways, with emotional evaluations. In fact, as I shall explain in Chapter 5, it might be thought that emotional responses involve several different kinds of intentional state, any of which might reasonably be described as an emotional evaluation. In these chapters, I shall focus particularly on the intentional states that initiate emotional responses. In Chapter 5, I shall investigate what kind of states these are. It might be suggested that we should take these states to be judgements. However, an alternative view is that would do better to view them as a kind of perception, or, at least, as very like perceptions. I am going to argue against the judgement view. Indeed, I shall endorse the view that these intentional states have a number of features in common with perceptions. I shall end, however, on a cautious note: on the face of it, it is also possible to draw some contrasts between these intentional states and perceptions. This is an issue that I shall take up again in Chapter 7.

Chapter 6 is concerned with the content or meaning of these intentional states. What do they say about the situation? In the first part of the chapter, I shall explore some ways in which the content of these states might be thought to reflect the particular structure and function of the responses that they initiate. In the second, I shall explore a specific question about our personal emotions. I suggested earlier that these responses reflect the subject's own concerns. But how should we understand this claim? Are these responses concerned with our well-being? Or do they reflect our preferences – our values, desires or likes? As we shall see, this question is not easy to answer. One possibility is that these emotional responses reflect our likes and dislikes: I shall try to explain why I find this suggestion plausible, at least for a large class of emotional responses.

In Chapter 7, I shall explore some questions about the rationality of emotion. Do we have reasons for feeling as we do? When emotion and judgement conflict with each other, why do we often describe the subject's emotion as irrational? Should cases of conflicting or ambivalent emotion be described as irrational too? I shall argue that consideration of these questions draws our attention to an interesting contrast between emotion and perception. But it also highlights some further contrasts between emotion and judgement. In some respects, emotion can be seen as occupying a position midway between judgement and perception.

The questions considered in Chapters 6 and 7 bear on a broader issue about the role of emotion in our personal lives. When our emotions conflict with our reasoned beliefs, should our emotional response be disregarded, or might our emotional responses sometimes have something important and distinctive to tell us about the situation? In Chapter 7, I shall consider this question.

Finally, in Chapter 8, I shall consider two other ways in which emotional responses can be assessed. What does it mean to say that an emotional response is inauthentic or sentimental? I shall explore how these notions relate to other ways of assessing emotional responses as fitting or rational. I shall also consider the moral dimension of these phenomena: is our capacity to manufacture inauthentic and sentimental responses a morally dangerous one?

Further Reading

For an introductory book on the philosophy of emotion, see Deonna and Teroni (2012). Goldie (2010) contains an extensive collective of papers on the philosophy of emotion, giving an excellent overview of current debate, as well as some insights into the history of the topic. Solomon (2003d) is a collection of readings from Aristotle to the present day. For chapter-length surveys of the contemporary debate, you might try Goldie (2007), Deigh (2010) or de Sousa's (2014) entry in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Note

1

    For a defence of the claim that love is an emotional attitude, and not merely a complex emotional disposition, see Price (2012a).

1Four Theories of Emotion

Introduction

In this chapter, I shall compare and contrast some existing accounts of emotion. I am not going to try to present a comprehensive survey of the field: that would be a mammoth task. Rather, I shall focus on just four accounts (with a very brief nod to a fifth). The accounts that I have chosen represent some key positions in the philosophy of emotion, and they have played a crucial role in shaping the current debate. In investigating these accounts, I shall try to draw out some particular points of comparison and contrast. This will enable me to flag up some fundamental questions that have helped to drive the philosophical debate about emotion – questions that I shall pursue in the chapters that follow. It will allow me, too, to provide some background to the discussions later in the book, helping to put them in a broader context. As I go, I shall flag up some objections that have been raised to the accounts that I describe; but detailed critical discussion is a task for later chapters.

I shall begin with the philosopher and psychologist William James. James's account, developed at the end of the nineteenth century, has played a pivotal role in the history of the topic: many of the theories that followed can be seen as reacting in one way or another to his views. I shall then move on to consider the views of three more recent theorists: Robert Solomon, Peter Goldie and Jesse Prinz; I shall also make very brief reference to the views of the psychologist Paul Ekman.

William James: Emotions as Bodily Feelings

James's Hypothesis

In 1890, James published The Principles of Psychology. The book included a bold new thesis about the nature of emotion.1 James does not simply assert his thesis: rather, he presents it as a hypothesis, standing in need of empirical confirmation. He begins by focusing on what he calls the ‘coarser’ emotions. These are emotions that nearly everyone believes involve bodily changes. They include, he says, fear, rage, grief and love:

Our natural way of thinking about these coarser emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My theory, on the contrary, is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion. (James, 1890: 449–50, italics in the original)

To understand what James means, it helps to think about a particular case. Consider Alice's angry reaction to the slamming door, described in Chapter 1. Hearing the door slam causes Alice to undergo certain bodily changes: her heart speeds up, her muscles tense; she frowns and clenches her fists. These bodily changes, in turn, produce certain bodily feelings: Alice feels tense and agitated. But where in this sequence of events is Alice's anger to be found? According to James, we naturally suppose that Alice's anger sits between her hearing the door slam and the bodily and behavioural changes that follow: the slamming door causes Alice's anger; and her anger, in turn, causes her to tense up and frown. James thinks that this gets things the wrong way round. The true order of events is this: the slamming door causes Alice to tense up and frown; and these bodily changes, in turn, cause Alice's anger. This is because, in James's view, Alice's anger consists of the feelings produced by the bodily changes. Hence her anger is the effect, not the cause, of those bodily changes.

Although James begins by making this claim specifically about the coarser emotions, it soon becomes clear that he thinks it is true of the ‘subtler’ emotions too. These include, for example, wonder or admiration at the aesthetic qualities of a work of art, at the intellectual qualities of a mathematical proof, or at the moral qualities of another person. In these cases, also, James thinks, ‘the bodily sounding board is at work’ (James, 1890: 471). According to James, then, an emotion is essentially a feeling; and, in particular, it is a bodily feeling. On this view, anger, fear, grief and love can be compared with other types of bodily feeling, such as pain, nausea, drowsiness or hunger. These bodily feelings, he thinks, are not bare sensations, devoid of meaning: rather they are ways in which we perceive or become aware of changes that are happening in our bodies.

The Causes of Emotion: Bodily Changes

What kinds of bodily change give rise to emotions, according to James? They include internal, physiological changes – for example, the quickening of the pulse and tensing of the muscles. But James also refers to various kinds of expressive behaviour: blushes, tears, flared nostrils and gritted teeth. In describing rage, he mentions what seems to be a motivational change – an impulse to violent action. This diversity, he thinks, helps to explain the extraordinary richness and subtlety of emotional experience (James, 1890: 450–2).

These bodily changes, James holds, are typically instinctive, automatic reactions to a particular type of situation or event – like blinking in sunlight or flinching at a loud noise. This is not to say, though, that our bodily responses to changes in our environment are necessarily innate or hard-wired. How an individual reacts to a particular situation, he suggests, depends on a range of factors, including their personal history. When a walker meets a bear in the wood, ‘fight or flight’ is likely to be the default reaction; but someone who is familiar with bears might well react quite differently – with curiosity and pleasure. The walker's emotional response, James says, is a response not just to the bear, but to the total situation; and this includes their past experiences (James, 1884: 454, 518).

Nor does James hold that these bodily changes are wholly outside our control. Just as we can put off blinking or hold our breath, we can control the bodily changes that generate our emotions. This is significant, he thinks, because it means that we are able to control our emotions too. Admittedly, James's theory implies that we have no direct control over our emotions: once Alice's heart is racing, her teeth are clenched, and so on, she cannot help feeling these changes, any more than she can help feeling pain if she cuts her hand. Nevertheless, James thinks, she can still try to overcome her anger by controlling the changes that are happening in her body: by making an effort to relax, to breathe more slowly and to smile, she can cause herself to feel more relaxed and friendly. Conversely, she might deliberately stoke up her anger by exaggerating her angry frown and posture, by shouting or shaking the desk (James, 1890: 462–3). On James's account, then, we can control our emotions indirectly – by controlling the bodily changes that cause them.

James's Argument

As we have seen, James gives pride of place to emotion's phenomenology – how it feels. He emphasizes, too, the role of the body in generating emotional experience. This is not to say that he locates emotions in the body. Emotions, for James, are not bodily changes, but bodily feelings, and these are psychological states. Nor does he think that emotions are simply ‘gut feelings’: they are generated by a range of physiological and behavioural changes, which produce a rich and subtle range of emotional experience.

Why, though, does James think that this is the right view to take? His argument relies on the claim that feeling is what is essential to emotion:

If we fancy some strong emotion, and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no ‘mind stuff’ out of which the emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains.…What kind of an emotion of fear would be left if the feeling neither of quickened heart-beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of gooseflesh, nor of visceral stirrings, were present, it is quite impossible for me to think.…In like manner of grief: what would it be without its tears, its sobs, its suffocation of the heart, its pang in the breastbone? A feelingless cognition that something is deplorable and nothing more. (James, 1890: 452, italics in the original)

Exactly the same point, James thinks, can be made about the ‘subtler’ emotional responses: