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Abstract
Emotions cannot be fully understood in purely cognitive terms. Nor can they be fully understood as mere feelings with no content. But it has not been easy to give an account of the relation of affect and cognition in a way that preserves the perceived unity of emotional experience. Consequently, emotion theories tend to lean either toward cognitivism, or, alternatively, the view that emotions are basically non-cognitive affairs. The aim of this paper is to argue for an account of emotion as a unity of affect and cognition. Emotions, it will be suggested, do not combine, blend, add, or causally relate cognition to affect, or affect to cognition, but are rather original unities which should be viewed as coordinate with, rather than subordinate to, either cognition, perception, feeling, or any other basic mental category.
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank Muwatin, the Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy, for a grant that enabled him to start working on the subject of (political) emotions. Thanks are also due to the editor and anonymous referees of this journal for many constructive remarks and suggestions for improvement.
Notes on contributor
Raja Bahlul is Professor of Philosophy at UAE University. He has publications in the areas of metaphysics (identity of indiscernibles, universals), Islamic philosophy and theology (Ghazali, Avicenna) and contemporary Islamic social and political thought (democracy, secularism). He writes in English and in Arabic.
Notes
1. For a recent defense of ‘feeling’ theories of emotions, see Whiting (Citation2009). In an earlier paper Whiting (Citation2006, 261) recognizes what many people will agree with, namely, that no contemporary philosophers have been willing to defend the view that ‘emotions are nothing more than types of feelings’.
2. For an overview of perceptualist theories of emotion see Salmela (Citation2011, 1–29).
3. Nussbaum's attempt to deal with the problem of emotion-free evaluative judgments is not convincing. Years after a sad event, feelings of sadness subside, but people continue to make the same evaluative judgments as before. Nussbaum speaks of the ‘freshness’ (novelty, newness) of the evaluative judgment that can properly be identified with an emotion. Such a judgment has power to affect our attitude toward other propositions. She even suggests that passage of time may bring about a change in estimate of value. But as Roberts suggests (Citation1999, 797–798), a difference in ‘freshness’ in not a difference in judgment proper, nor does grieving consist in one proposition affecting our attitude toward other propositions, nor is a change in estimate of value necessary for the subsiding of emotion.
4. Cf. also Stocker (Citation1983, 21): ‘ … having fallen on the ice, the very same knowledge of (and wish to avoid) the dangers of walking on ice are “emotionally present” to me’. To speak of ‘the very same knowledge of the dangers’ suggests that there is no change in content before and after.
5. Gunther (Citation2004, 49) seems to go farther than Goldie, holding that there is change in content if and only if there change in feeling (‘emotional phenomenology’). Thus if you find the joke less funny after hearing it for the fourth time, then the content is not the same, even though it may be expressed in the same words. According to the author, ‘we lack the linguistic resources to differentiate … ’ (50). The claim is supported by reference to a comparison with ‘red’, which can refer to different levels of grain. But grain has no clear meaning in the context of a joke's content. It might have some meaning in the context of amusement at a joke's content, as the author seems to suggest. Amusement does come in degrees. But this seems to drag attitude into content – attitude becomes part of content, instead of being attitude toward it.
6. Cf. Deonna and Teroni, (Citation2012, 78): ‘there is no reason to think that [a] general attitude … has psychological reality over and above that of its determinate instances … ’.
7. As Greenspan rightly says (Citation1992, 293), discomfort (like pain) is a ‘general state of feeling of a sort one would naturally want to get out of’.
8. The understanding which Deonna and Teroni (Citation2012, 72), and Herzberg (Citation2012, 76) seem to have of Prinz's view is very much based on this statement.
9. According to Prinz, ‘Dretske's independently motivated theory of representation delivers a very satisfying answer to the question about what sadness represents. It simply falls out of Dretske's theory that sadness represents loss’ (Prinz Citation2007, 62).
10. Peirce is foremost among such philosophers. As Ramsey (Citation2007, 22) reads him, ‘there can be no meaning or representational content unless there is something or someone for whom the sign is meaningful.’
11. This example, calling for cognitive involvement in order to distinguish between envy and resentment, is suggested by Richard Norman's discussion (Citation2002).
12. Prinz practically acknowledges this point when he says that ‘somatic signal [s] of the same bodily pattern can have distinct meanings on different occasions depending on the mental mechanisms that caused that pattern to form’ (Prinz Citation2007, 66). The somatic signals, registering as this emotion or that, are disambiguated by reference to our knowledge of what caused them (in our example, was it a perception of injustice, or seeing someone get ahead of me in the race?).
13. Cf. Ramsey's conclusion about ‘receptors’ (his term for mechanisms, or features, which nomically detect, indicate, or respond to distal stimuli): ‘When we look at the role of receptors inside of cognitive systems, as described by cognitive theories that employ them, we see that the role is better described as something like a reliable causal mediator or relay circuit which, as such, is not representational in nature’ (Ramsey Citation2007, 149).
14. This older meaning of ‘passion’ is well-preserved in the special-purpose religious use of the term ‘the Passion of Christ’.
15. This example is made use of by Pit (Citation2004, 27) in the context of discussing cognitive phenomenology, or ‘what it is like to think that P’.
16. Recall Solomon's statement, quoted earlier, ‘my anger is my judgment that John has wronged me.’
17. For a similar opposition to a dismembering analysis of seeing, see Hyman (Citation1992, 291); for the case of ‘thick’ ethical concepts, see Williams (Citation1973).
18. Cases of blindsight may suggest that there could be ‘perceptual contact with the world unyoked to conscious portrayal’ (Sturgeon Citation2008, 114). It is not clear if ‘perceptual contact’ amounts to a kind of perception. It is probably clearer that blindsight is not a kind of sight or seeing. What matters to us is that sensuousness (‘conscious portrayal’, in Sturgeon's terms), much like pain, or anger, ‘portrays’ things as being a certain way. Portrayal is of the essence.