Emotions: Aklishta or Klishta?

Art by Estonian artist, Mirjam Siim,
who lives in Porto, Portugal

We might not think of it unless it is pointed out, but emotions, according to leading research on this "new" topic, help us prioritize and organize our strategy of behavior and inquiry within the complex web of human social life, as Dr. Ronald de Sousa (University of Toronto) says in an interview.

EMOTION. "At first blush, the things we ordinarily call emotions differ from one another along several dimensions. For example, some emotions are occurrences (e.g., panic), and others are dispositions (e.g., hostility); some are short-lived (e.g., anger) and others are long-lived (e.g., grief); some involve primitive cognitive processing (e.g., fear of a suddenly looming object), and others involve sophisticated cognitive processing (e.g., fear of losing a chess match); some are conscious (e.g., disgust about an insect in the mouth) and others are unconscious (e.g., unconscious fear of failing in life); some have prototypical facial expressions (e.g., surprise) and others lack them (e.g., regret). Some involve strong motivations to act (e.g., rage) and others do not (e.g., sadness). Some are present across species (e.g., fear) and others are exclusively human (e.g., schadenfreude). And so on." [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]

My mentor recently directed me to interdisciplinary research being done on emotion and health at the International Society for Research on Emotion (ISRE). I was struck by the comments that seasoned scholar and author Ronald de Sousa makes while discussing his research on emotion and language, as well as the implications of the findings for perception, literature, and art. His thoughts provide insights to the way we actually live our lives: the relation of emotion to truth, a highly individualized experience. The validation of emotion coupled with the search of truths is what I hope to reflect on, as noted in my post from October 26, "Formality of a Punch Line," when I looked to ways of thinking about aklishta versus klishta in order to determine whether emotions are leading me on the right path: As I mused, "To detangle ourselves from our identification with mental thoughts, which are either klishta or aklishta, sounds very easy to say and I wonder how hard it is to do--especially when all areas of life seem to be bound up into one giant ball. But again, the next step is to observe whether our thoughts are colored or uncolored, useful or not useful, and it is said that this can be done as one goes about one's day." De Sousa's work certainly seems to take my question to a more informed level.

What a never-ending effort: sorting out illusions and emotional truths, sifting through them in an analytical way so as to make life decisions that are emotionally and rationally sound. This is essential to directing one's energies in the most efficient, healthy, authentic way, and so this interview is very thought-provoking for anyone looking to be more aware of the role feelings play in our lives.

Here is an excerpt from an interview with De Sousa, courtesy of ISRE. Keep reading for the fuller context, or see the full interview.

To a considerable extent, our emotional life is conditioned by ideology, which in turn is shaped to some (but exactly how large?) extent by words. A leading question concerns the extent to which that ideology is dependent on and malleable on the basis of explicit norms. How, for example, can an experience of indignation, envy, love or jealousy be explicitly rationalized? Emotions are modulated by verbal expressions and descriptions. They also influence behaviour, both intentional and reflexive. The ways in which they do this raise a number of puzzles. One stems from our susceptibility to recalcitrant emotions, i.e. those that subsist despite the removal of their cognitive basis. Another is “imaginative resistance”, which is our inability, first noticed by David Hume, to imagine ourselves endorsing judgments that conflict with our current evaluative and moral commitments. Both raise the question of how our explicit reasons relate to our felt emotions. Yet another example stems from the difficulty of communicating aesthetic judgments by explicit verbal description of works of art, as well as the converse question of the ability of art and literature to influence our emotional repertoire.

Other issues concerning the relation of language to emotion pertain to the norms governing acceptable emotional responses and expressions, such as the quasi-moral demands for sincerity, spontaneity, and emotional authenticity; the culturally variable aesthetics of understatement; the contrary effects on erotic experience of explicit sexual language in different ‘registers’; the power of verbal information on the effects of drugs; the effects of ‘priming’ (subliminal exposure to certain words) on cognition and behaviour; and the surprising enhancement of well-being by sessions spent in writing about emotionally trying experiences demonstrated by some of the work of Jim Pennebaker. All of these phenomena call for a general theory of the way that our emotions relate to our capacity to reason explicitly about them, as well as to their verbal expressions.

This makes me want to delve into De Sousa's book, The Rationality of Emotion, which is described as a urbane and witty book in which Ronald de Sousa disputes the widespread notion that reason and emotion are natural antagonists. He argues that emotions are a kind of perception, that their roots in the paradigm scenarios in which they are learned give them an essentially dramatic structure, and that they have a crucial role to-play in rational beliefs, desires, and decisions by breaking the deadlocks of pure reason.

Here follows more of the interview with Ronald de Sousa, courtesy of ISRE.

When did you first turn your attention to emotion? What was it that drew you to it?

It dawned on me that the topic of emotion would provide a pretense of specialization while inviting me to think, like a true dilettante, about just about everything: mind, language, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, and even life. So that’s when I started thinking about emotions. I wrote an article on “The Rationality of Emotions”, which was published in 1979. The central idea was that emotions have a narrative structure and tend to rehearse “paradigm scenarios” learned in early life. This remained the core idea of The Rationality of Emotion, much of which was written during a blissful sabbatical year spent at the University of British Columbia in 1984. The book was published in 1987 by Bradford Books, a wonderful small press...

Your book The Rationality of Emotion (1989) has been a reference point for philosophers working in emotion ever since it was published, and has inspired a great deal of further research. What do you think were the most influential ideas in the book? Is there anything you think was overlooked? Is there anything you’d change?

The Rationality of Emotion explored two simple ideas, with a few corollaries. First, emotions play too important a role in our life not to be linked to some biological function. Second, whatever function that might be affects our capacity to make intelligent decisions in complex situations, not just to respond reflexively to threats or affordances of daily life. Emotions, I suggested, solve the “Frame Problem”, which is essentially the problem of knowing what to ignore without wasting time examining every possible consequence of a decision, to make sure it can be ignored as irrelevant. Emotions do this by controlling the salience of information, lines of inquiry, and live practical options. They narrow the focus of attention to ranges of factors that we have “learned”, on both the evolutionary and the individual scale, are the most likely to be relevant in any given situation. Emotions therefore contribute to our capacity for rational decision, even though, as is all too obvious, they sometimes distort judgement and interfere with rational deliberation. Emotions can also be said to be “rational” – contrasting not with “irrational” but with “a-rational” – in a second sense, more or less corresponding to what we mean when we describe someone as “reasonable” or “unreasonable”.

"Away from Near," Aida Nayeban

Although the book is quite frequently cited, I’m not sure it has been particularly influential. One idea that has been picked up here and there is the idea of “paradigm scenarios.” Probably the reason this has been picked up his that it was not particularly original in the first place. The core idea goes back to Freud, if not to Aristotle. On the therapeutic side of psychology it has often, if not always, been regarded as obvious that emotional patterns first learned in early childhood can be difficult to shake – both for good and for ill. Several philosophers, notably Martha Nussbaum, have emphasized the role of art and literature in getting us to refine and modify our more primitive patterns of emotional response and the attitudes that go with them. But the idea was, and remains, underdeveloped. I myself explored some of the problems it raises myself in a paper on “Emotions, Education and Time” published in Metaphilosophy in 1990 [....] Paradigm scenarios raise questions about flexibility in personality and emotional temperament which are vital to educational practice: How is it possible to control one’s emotions, to mature emotionally? Much also remains to be done to understand how similarity among situations, triggering similar responses, is implemented in the brain. Recently I have been very interested in the extent to which we can “re-gestalt” situations in such a way as to refashion our emotional responses. This is a domain in which emotional constructionists have much to teach us. We need to be aware of the extent to which we ascribe emotions, not only to others but even to ourselves, in the light of half conscious assumptions about how we are supposed to respond. Our emotional repertoire is partly dependent on our ideology.

We don't see with our eyes and hear with our eyes:
"We see and hear with our brains."
Distinctions help us navigate the world;
it's important that those things be identifiable.
Source: "Gestalt Principles and Why Search for the Whole"

One very influential idea in the book was that in some important ways, emotions are much closer to perception than judgement. In recent years, some philosophers have argued that emotion just is a form of perception. What’s your view of the way in which that idea has been developed since the book was published?

The leading contemporary exponent of the perceptual view is Christine Tappolet, who argues in her most recent book that emotions are essentially perceptions of values. They are therefore susceptible to being either correct or incorrect, depending on whether the value perceived in a given situation or state of affairs is warranted by that situation or state of affairs. This seems to me to be a very nice idea; but I am not convinced that it has any ontological implications. It may seem that if values are perceived, then they must be real and independent of our projections. But perhaps this may signal nothing more than a kind of grammatical fact about the relation between emotions and their “formal objects”.

I am inclined to emphasize the metaphorical character of the analogy between emotions and perception. Analogies are useful in getting us to notice both resemblances and differences. But they don’t really explain anything, and shouldn’t be taken to do more than they can.

‍Another important theme that has emerged in your writings on emotion is that of emotional truth, which you’ve explained in terms of ‘axiological holism’ Can you explain what you mean by that? And why has articulating a notion of emotional truth been important to you?

Insofar as I do agree with Tappolet that emotions are prima facie apprehensions of value, their rationality will be neither purely cognitive nor purely practical, but rather axiological. This raises the question of how our values can be appraised, reappraised, refined, or improved, when the material for doing so ultimately derives from emotions themselves. The thought behind the notion of axiological holism is that all our emotional responses, including all the reasoning and argument that we might bring to debates about their justification, are potentially relevant to our evaluative stance as we face the world. Reflective equilibrium is the best we can hope for in the realm of values, just as, if we give up on epistemic foundationalism and the naïve correspondence theory of truth, epistemic coherence is the best we can aspire to in science.

My thoughts about emotional truth embody a further parallel between emotion and cognition: just as coherence in beliefs guarantees (only) that they could all be true together, so axiological coherence requires that our emotions could all be “correct” together in a relevant sense of correctness. That correctness is what I choose to call emotional truth. The idea actually arose from some earlier work I published in Mind in 1974. Typical intentional states, notably including belief and desire, have both conditions of satisfaction (a correspondence between the representational content of the state and the objective situation they purport to refer to), and conditions of success (which depends on whether the state in question meets its own inherent point, or defining standard of correctness). For belief, both of these coincide: the truth of a proposition constitutes its satisfaction, and it is also sufficient for its success as a state of belief, because belief inherently aims at truth. Desire, by contrast, aims at goodness. So for desire, unlike belief, the two conditions diverge. If I desire something that is not good and get it, then my desire is satisfied, but it was not successful. A similar pattern, it seemed to me, holds for any typical emotion: its formal object both identifies the emotion in question and specifies its condition of success. Thus if “the dangerous” is the proper object of fear, fear will be successful in its own terms only if its target is indeed dangerous. My proposal was that we should focus on the notion of success, and hence extend talk of truth to an emotion in the light of is success or failure in its inherent point. In truth, this idea has gained little traction. In a very sensible article, Mikko Salmela pointed out that it would seem more natural to speak of “true emotions” if and only if they satisfied both satisfaction and success. Since this is to some extent a verbal issue I chose in my later book to dig my heels in. My reason was that I wanted to suggest that the important dimension in which we should evaluate emotions was the one that measured fittingness, not the one that measured their – much disputed – representational function.

Art by Mirjam Siim

In closing this post, I'll add that further interviews and articles on the ISRE site offer a wealth of research on emotions, trustworthy sources for investigating these sneaky things that "make life worth living and sometimes worth ending"--to return to De Sousa's entry on EMOTION in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. . . 

"No aspect of our mental life is more important to the quality and meaning of our existence than the emotions."

Alas!