The Emotions A Philosophical Exploration (Peter Goldie) (z-lib.org)

The Emotions
Peter Goldie opens the path to a deeper understanding of our emotional lives through a lucid philosophical
exploration of this surprisingly neglected topic. He illuminates the phenomena of emotion by drawing not only on
philosophy but also on literature and science. He considers the roles of culture and evolution in the development of
our emotional capabilities. He examines the links between emotion, mood, and character, and places the emotions in
the context of such related phenomena as consciousness, thought, feeling, and imagination. He explains how it is that
we are able to make sense of our own and other people's emotions, and how we can explain the very human things
which emotions lead us to do.
A key theme of The Emotions is the idea of a personal perspective or point of view, contrasted with the impersonal
stance of the empirical sciences. Goldie argues that it is only from the personal point of view that thoughts, reasons,
feelings, and actions come into view. He suggests that there is a tendency for philosophers to over-intellectualize the
emotions, and investigates how far it is possible to explain emotions in terms of rationality. Over-intellectualizing can
also involve neglecting the centrality of feelings, and Goldie shows how to put them where they belong, as part of the
intentionality of emotional experience, directed towards the world from a point of view. Goldie argues that the various
elements of emotional experience—including thought, feeling, bodily change, and expression—are tied together in a
narrative structure. To make sense of one's emotional life one has to see it as part of a larger unfolding narrative. The
narrative is not simply an interpretive framework of a life: it is what that life is. Goldie concludes by applying these
ideas in a close study of one particular emotion: jealousy.
This fascinating book gives an accessible but penetrating exploration of a subject that is important but mysterious to all
of us. Any reader interested in emotion, and its role in our understanding of our lives, will find much to think about
here.
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The Emotions
A Philosophical Exploration
Peter Goldie
CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD
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© Peter Goldie 2000
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First published 2000
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Goldie, Peter.
The emotions : a philosophical exploration / Peter Goldie.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Emotions (Philosophy) I. Title.
B815.G65 2000 128′.37—dc21 00–031350
ISBN 0–19–823891–6 (hbk.)
ISBN 0–19–925304–8 (pbk.)
Contents
1 Introduction
2 What emotions are, and their place in psychological explanation
Introduction
What emotions are
The intentionality of the emotions
Education of the emotions and the recognition–response tie
Explanation of an emotion and of action out of emotion
Conclusion
3 Emotions and feelings
Introduction
Bodily feeling
Feeling towards
Unreflective and reflective consciousness
Feeling towards, believing, and desiring
Conclusion
4 Culture, evolution, and the emotions
Introduction
The evidence across different cultures
Evolutionary explanations and developmental openness
The concepts of commonsense psychology and the concepts of science
Education of the emotions, cognitive impenetrability, and weakness of the will
Conclusion
5 Expression of emotion
Introduction
Expressive actions and the role of belief in explanation
Imagination and the wish
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106
122
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vi
CONTENTS
Expressions of emotion which are not actions
Conclusion
6 Emotion, mood, and traits of character
Introduction
Emotion and mood
Character traits
The fundamental attribution error
Excuses
Conclusion
7 How we think of others' emotions
Introduction
Understanding and explaining another's emotions
Emotional contagion
Empathy, in-his-shoes imagining, and other imaginative processes
Imagination, prediction, and the importance of character
Sympathy
Conclusion
8 Jealousy
Introduction
Envy
Jealousy
An assessment of jealousy
Conclusion
Suggested reading
Bibliography
Index
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1 Introduction
This book is a philosophical essay about emotion. However, in some respects it is, I suppose, not typical of a
philosophical monograph. I do not put forward a single, central claim and then seek to defend it against opposing
positions. The book proceeds, rather, on a more extended front. It does so in two senses. First, it aims to deepen our
everyday commonsense discourse about the phenomena, drawing where relevant both on literature and the empirical
sciences. Secondly, it takes as the phenomena not just the emotions, but looks more widely to related phenomena such
as consciousness, thought, feeling, imagination, interpretation of action out of emotion and of expression of emotion,
moods, and traits of character; emotion cannot be considered in isolation from these other topics. What I hope,
therefore, is that someone who has read this book will come away, not so much persuaded of a single, central claim,
but rather with a deeper and broader overall understanding of the phenomena, perhaps thinking of them in new and
somewhat enlightened ways.
Although, as I say, this book is not centred around a single claim, there are plenty of assertions to be found, and
arguments to support them, as well as criticisms of other, opposing views. But, because of the somewhat unusual
approach, it may not be clear to the reader right from the beginning just what the book's structural framework is as a
whole. So what I would like to do in this chapter is briefly to introduce a number of interlocking themes which run
through the book, and which, so to speak, hold together the overall structure and detailed argument. There are five of
them.
First, there is the idea of a personal perspective or point of view—the point of view of a conscious person, capable of
thoughts and feelings, and able to engage in theoretical and practical reasoning. A point of view in this sense can be
reported on both first-personally and third-personally. Thinking or talking of oneself or of others in
2
INTRODUCTION
this way is thus to be contrasted with the impersonal stance of the empirical sciences, which has no place for a point of
view as such. In the latter stance, human beings are objects of scientific study in just the same way as the planets are
objects of study, things which behave according to the impersonal laws of nature. A number of writers talk of the
stance of the sciences as being ‘third-personal’ or ‘objective’, equating these terms with ‘impersonal’. But ‘thirdpersonal’ and ‘objective’ are, I think, misleading here, and they are misleading for different reasons. ‘Third-personal’ is
misleading because one can think and talk of another third-personally without being impersonal—without losing sight
of the fact that the other person has a point of view; indeed, his having a point of view is presupposed in this way of
thinking and talking. And ‘objective’ is, or at least can be, misleading because it is possible to be, from a personal point
of view, more or less objective; the notion of objectivity admits of degrees, but the notion of a point of view does not.
Therefore, I prefer to talk of the stance of the sciences just as ‘impersonal’, to emphasize the idea that the personal
point of view—and indeed the person—is lost from this stance. I will be trying to show that our ordinary everyday
thought and talk about the emotions and emotional experience is essentially from the personal point of view, and,
according to this way of thinking and talking, there is no equivocation in meaning between the first-personal and the
third-personal: when, for example, I say that I am afraid or that I feel fear, there is no equivocation between this report
and my stating that you are afraid or that you feel fear. As a quite general idea, when I think or talk about other people,
I can do so third-personally, without losing sight of the fact that these other people have a point of view, just as I do.
This leads me to the second theme. It is from the personal point of view that reasons, as such, come into sight, both
when we are ourselves thinking, feeling, and acting, and when we are trying to understand, explain, and predict others'
thoughts, feelings, and actions. This is, at least in part, the point of view of rationality, the point of view from which we
interpret ourselves and others. Now, it is a familiar enough notion in philosophy that rationality is essentially normative.
The very idea of there being a reason to think or to do something implies, according to this notion, that there is
something that you ought to think or to do—and this ‘ought’ is not used impersonally in the sense we intend when we
say that a planet ought to behave according to certain laws of planetary motion.
INTRODUCTION
3
Although there are important and deep dissimilarities between theoretical and practical reasoning, in both sorts of
reasoning, I, the person who is deliberating, have to determine which of the various considerations that might bear on
the issue is to count as a reason, and what importance is to be attached to these reasons in reaching my decision as to
what to think or what to do; my decision cannot be arrived at deductively or mechanistically. Equally, when I am
wondering what you will decide to do, I can wonder what you ought to do, and the ‘ought’ here can have the same
sense as it has when I wonder what I ought to do. In other words, it is personal and normative, just as it is for me.
There is, however—and this is my third theme—a question of how much work any single notion of rationality can do
so far as the emotions are concerned. There are other notions that are also important in understanding, explaining, and
predicting what we think, feel, and do in emotional experience: notions such as intelligibility, appropriateness, and
proportionality. It is, for example, often perfectly intelligible and entirely human to experience an emotion in certain
circumstances (for example, when seeing a low-flying bat on a moonlit night) where we would not want to say that
having this emotional experience was either rational or irrational. Much philosophical work on the emotions tends to
over-intellectualize emotional thought, feeling, and action, seeking to force them into the mould of a rationalizing
explanation when often the best one can hope for is an explanation which makes them intelligible. So far as
appropriateness and proportionality are concerned, these notions have ethical dimensions which go beyond mere
questions of rationality, and which allow for considerable cultural variation through the education of the emotions.
Furthermore, all of these notions, intelligibility included, need to be supplemented to allow for individual variations in
character: without that, there is no way adequately to distinguish one point of view from another. The idea of making
sense of someone thus extends beyond giving a rationalizing explanation of what they think or do, and indeed beyond
any other single explanatory notion which might replace that of rationality.
This leads me to my fourth theme, which is also related to the tendency to over-intellectualize the emotions. I have in
mind the tendency either to fail to find a place for feelings in an account of the emotions, or, perhaps equally egregious,
to misplace feelings. From the outset, I endorse the view, held at least since the time of
4
INTRODUCTION
Aristotle, that the emotions are intentional—they are directed towards an object: if I feel fear, then there is something,
some object, which is the object of my fear. It is often claimed, however, that this intentionality can be fully captured
without reference to feelings, and, further, that this intentionality is sufficient to explain action out of emotion. But
then feelings, and a point of view, are left out of the picture. This would, for example, virtually be forced on someone
who thought that reasons—beliefs, desires, and so forth—can be characterized impersonally and thus from no
particular point of view, say in terms of their causal role, in a way which will enable them fully to explain action out of
emotion (also characterized impersonally). But then, because it is glaringly obvious that feelings are, to say the least,
relevant to emotional experience and cannot be left out of the picture, they then have to be added on, at the end of the
story so to speak, for example as comprising awareness of one's bodily condition. My fourth theme is an extended
attack on this view—what I call the add-on view—combined with an attempt to find the right place for feelings in
emotional experience by introducing the notion of feeling towards. Feeling towards is, I say, an essentially intentional
psychological phenomenon with a special sort of emotionally laden content, and it is also one which essentially involves
feeling. So my position can be seen as retaining what is right about the traditional view that intentionality is essential to
emotion, but bringing in feeling in the right place, as an ineliminable part of the intentionality of emotional experience,
as directed towards the world from a point of view, not merely as an afterthought.
The fifth theme is that of narrative structure. It is really a very simple idea. Our lives have a narrative structure—roughly
speaking, they comprise an unfolding, structured sequence of actions, events, thoughts, and feelings, related from the
individual's point of view. A narrative, of course, can be recounted in vastly varying degrees of detail: I can summarize
my whole life in ten minutes; or I can take an hour to tell you what happened to me in the last twenty-four hours. But,
however much detail is provided, to be faithful to the narrative of my life I must show how its parts fit together in a
structured way—making sense from my point of view as part of the whole. (This, as we all know, is often a difficult
and painful thing to do.) Similarly, with emotional experience, it is the notion of narrative structure which ties together
and makes sense of the individual
INTRODUCTION
5
elements of emotional experience—thought, feeling, bodily change, expression, and so forth—as parts of a structured
episode; and in turn it underpins the way that individual emotional episodes relate to the emotion of which the episode
is a part, and this emotion to mood, to character trait and to character, and to the person's life seen as a whole. To
make sense of one's emotional life, including its surprises, it is thus necessary to see it as part of a larger unfolding
narrative, not merely as a series of discrete episodes taken out of, and considered in abstraction from, the narrative in
which they are embedded. A true narrative, as I understand it, is not simply an interpretive framework, placed, so to
speak, over a person's life; it is, rather, what that life is.
These five themes, then, run through this book. I do not expect them to be persuasive just as they have been put here,
briefly and without argument, but I hope their persuasiveness will be cumulative as I progress. Here now is the
structure and argument of the book.
In Chapter 2, ‘What emotions are, and their place in psychological explanation’, I introduce the theme of narrative
structure in the claim that emotions are complex, episodic, dynamic, and structured. I then go on to discuss the
intentionality of emotion; here I consider how conceptual analysis can reveal certain relations between an emotion and
the sorts of thoughts which are involved. But it is important straight away to appreciate that someone might have
thoughts of the sort which can be part of an emotion, and yet not be experiencing any emotion. At this point I
introduce the notion of feeling towards: without having certain feelings towards something, there would be no
emotion. Then I consider the important claim that the emotions can be educated: we can be taught, as part of the same
education, recognition and emotional response—to recognize things as, for example, dangerous, and to respond,
appropriately and proportionately, with fear. I discuss in some detail the exact nature of the relation between
recognition and response: Is it a conceptual relation or is it merely contingent and psychological? Finally, I consider
certain over-intellectualizing ways of explaining emotion and action out of emotion, showing how these can be faulted
for not finding the right place for feelings, and for placing too much emphasis on rationality, as opposed to
intelligibility. In particular, I put forward the idea that certain thoughts—including certain desires—paradigmatically
involved in emotional experience are primitively intelligible: no further reason (in the personal, normative sense of that
6
INTRODUCTION
term) can be given for these thoughts beyond appeal to the emotion of which the thought is a part.
Chapter 3, ‘Emotion and feelings’, sets out to find the right place for feelings in emotional experience. I argue for an
approach which puts the intentionality of feelings at centre-stage, in the form of feelings towards the object of the
emotion, in contrast to those add-on accounts which merely include feelings—perhaps feelings of one's bodily
condition—as an afterthought, and not as an essential part of the intentionality of emotion. I make two important
distinctions. The first is between bodily feelings and feelings towards. I argue that bodily feelings, such as the feeling of
pain in the heart when you are jealous, can have what I call a borrowed intentionality: the pain in your heart can come
to be about the object of your emotion. Feeling towards, I argue, is not a psychological phenomenon which can be
understood as, or reduced to, any particular sort of attitude or attitudes, such as belief, or desire, or belief and desire;
rather, what is peculiar to feeling towards is its special sort of content—content which would not be what it is if the
emotion were not being experienced. The second distinction is between reflective and unreflective consciousness: one
can be, as I put it, unreflectively emotionally engaged with the world, having feelings towards some object in the world,
and yet at that moment not be reflectively aware of having those feelings. I show how the notion of feeling towards can
be deployed to explain, amongst other phenomena, how we can, without being irrational in the sense of having
conflicting beliefs, feel afraid of something and yet, at the same time, believe that thing not to be dangerous; intuitively,
it is perfectly intelligible to be in this condition, and it is important to make sense of it.
Chapter 4, ‘Culture, evolution, and the emotions’, considers the place of culture and evolution in the development of
our emotional capabilities. Intuitively, we want to find a place for both, but conceptually this is no easy task. My
approach is first to consider how our capabilities for emotional experience could have been shaped by evolution, and
then to see how this can fit in with the idea, introduced in Chapter 1, that an individual's emotional capabilities can be
educated. In finding the right place for evolution and culture, I resist in particular what I call the avocado pear
conception of the emotions—the view that our emotional behaviour comprises an inner core of ‘hard-wired’ reaction,
and an outer element which is open to cultural influence. This conception is, I think, exemplified
INTRODUCTION
7
in recent versions of the age-old idea that there are ‘basic’ emotions which can be identified in commonsense
psychology. I put forward an alternative conception according to which our capabilities for emotional experience are
plastic or developmentally open. In the process of putting forward this conception, I show why an evolutionary
account of the emotions need not be seen as a threat to our everyday commonsense explanations; what such an
account should aim to do is to explain those of our emotional desires which are primitively intelligible. But I try to do
more than that by drawing on evolutionary theory to give a deeper explanation of certain sorts of weakness of the will
or akrasia: when we are in the grip of an emotion we often, as it is sometimes put, get out of control, and act against
our own best interests in a way which we later regret—we ‘unthinkingly’ lash out in anger, for example. The idea of
being in the grip of an emotion—of being out of control—lies behind the thought that the emotions are passions for
which, unlike actions, we are not responsible. I resist this bald conclusion, arguing instead that we can be responsible
for our emotional capabilities, if not for a particular response at a particular time.
Chapter 5, ‘Expression of emotion’, seeks to understand and explain expression of emotion: for example, baring our
teeth in anger, in grief caressing the clothes of the loved one who has just died, and jumping for joy. Expressions of
emotion are, I believe, conceptually located somewhere between bodily changes and actions out of emotion. Unlike
mere bodily changes, they are, at least sometimes, things which we do; yet unlike action out of emotion, they do not
seem to be adequately explicable in terms of beliefs and desires. I try to show that the class of expressions of emotion
is heterogeneous, varying widely from things which are very close to mere bodily changes to things which are actions
proper. But one factor which unites the class, I argue, is that no genuine expression of emotion is expressed as a means
to some further end; to try to explain them thus is to over-intellectualize the emotions. In general, the notion of
rationality can do little to explain expression of emotion; far more important are the notions of intelligibility,
appropriateness, and proportionality. I discuss a fascinating sub-class of expression of emotion, namely actions which
are expressive of a wish, many of which can be explained as a sort of channelling of an inappropriate or
disproportionate response—albeit an intelligible one—away from purposeful action out of emotion into expressive
action.
8
INTRODUCTION
Chapter 6, ‘Emotion, mood, and traits of character’, considers just how closely intertwined these three phenomena are
in our commonsense psychology: a person's emotion, mood, and character traits must be viewed as structured parts of
a single narrative, and not discretely. I first consider the relation between emotion and mood, arguing that they are to
be distinguished, broadly, by the degree of specificity of their object. However, I go on to argue that this broad
distinction should not force us to lose sight of how closely they are related: mood can ‘focus’ into emotion and
emotion can blur out of focus into mood. I also consider how emotion and mood can influence, and be influenced by,
action; action too is an integral part of the narrative. I then turn to character traits. Here my overall strategy is a
defence of our everyday practice of giving explanations and making predictions involving reference to traits. Traits of
character are (at least typically) dispositions of a certain sort, although this should not lead to the idea that character
traits are like dispositions of objects, such as the solubility of a sugar cube; in our practice of trait ascription, when I
wonder what you, a kind person, ought to do in these circumstances, the ‘ought’ is not only predictive; it is also
personal and normative. I consider, and acknowledge, the importance of research in empirical psychology which
shows that our practice of trait ascription is systematically prone to error (the so-called fundamental attribution error),
but I argue that this is exemplified in what I call our default use of trait terms, and that the error cannot be read across
to our more considered trait ascriptions. This considered use of trait terms allows us to find a place for a vital
distinction in explanation of why people do not act according to what might be predicted according to their trait: a
distinction between justifications and excuses, and, within the class of excuses, a distinction between non-rational
influences on thinking and undue influences on thinking. I apply these distinctions to two well-known experiments in
empirical psychology, one concerning Samaritanism, the other Stanley Milgram's famous obedience experiments.
In Chapter 7, ‘How we think of others' emotions’, I have the following broad aim: to clear up a wide range of
confusions about the various ways in which we can think about, and respond emotionally to, the emotions of other
people. Locating my discussion in the context of a debate in the philosophy of mind between proponents of what is
called the ‘theory theory’ and proponents of the ‘simulation approach’, I distinguish five central notions, and show how
they are distinct, but related in interesting ways: understanding
INTRODUCTION
9
and explaining someone's emotion, emotional contagion, empathy, imagining yourself in someone else's shoes, and
sympathy. I go on to discuss in some detail the need to take account of a person's character when trying to understand,
explain, and predict what that person thinks, feels, and does, whether this is done through empathy, through imagining
yourself in the other's shoes, or by some other means. I then return to the topic of excuses, and to our failure
sometimes to be able to imagine how someone, on an occasion, could act out of character. Finally, I consider
sympathy, which is, I argue, quite distinct from the imaginative processes of empathy and imagining yourself in the
other's shoes. It is, I think, best understood as a sort of emotion, involving thought about and feelings towards the
difficulties of another, motivations to alleviate those difficulties where possible, and characteristic facial expressions
and expressive actions.
Finally, Chapter 8, ‘Jealousy’, is not really dialectically structured; what I try to do is to draw together the themes and
arguments of the book into a discussion of a single emotion—one which is, in many respects, philosophically
interesting. Jealousy is especially complex in the thoughts and feelings involved, and in its epistemology; it is almost
paradigmatically a passion, and gets us into all sorts of trouble; thoughts about its aetiology can seem to undermine the
idea that our feelings of sexual jealousy can be well grounded; and these thoughts can lead in turn to the idea that
jealousy is a vice. I argue that this last conclusion is mistaken: a person's disposition to be jealous should be viewed as
part of his overall character, and, in certain cases, it can even be a valued trait.
This, then, is the structure and argument of the book, held together by the five interlocking themes which I have
outlined: the idea of the personal perspective; the normativity of reasons; the importance, in addition to rationality, of
notions of intelligibility, appropriateness, and proportionality; the central place of feelings in emotion, and especially of
feelings towards the object of the emotion; and the idea of a narrative that makes sense of a person's life, from that
person's point of view. This book too has a narrative structure, and it too seeks to make sense of our lives, not just
from my point of view, or just from your point of view, but from each of our points of view.
Until quite recently, it would have been fair to say that the emotions have been pretty much neglected in Anglo-Saxon
philosophy of mind (perhaps unsurprisingly, bearing in mind its often determinedly impersonal stance), albeit less so in
ethics. This is now beginning quite suddenly to change, although the subject is still not
10
INTRODUCTION
accorded the attention that it merits. Given this fairly recent and sudden increase in interest, it can prove difficult for
someone coming new to the subject from a philosophical perspective to orient themselves adequately within the
available literature. So what I thought it would be helpful to do is to provide suggestions for further reading which bear
on the topic of each chapter, and which can be used as a guide into the subject in conjunction with the full bibliography
at the end of the book.
I am very grateful to more people than I can name for the help they have given me in writing this book, and to others
in my life without whom I would not have experienced many emotions of the sorts which I discuss in it. But the
following people have been especially helpful, by talking over ideas, reading drafts, or making suggestions as to how
best to present my thoughts: Bill Brewer, Malcolm Budd, Matt Cavanagh, Martin Davies, Jonathan Lear, Mike Martin,
David Papineau, Tom Pink, C. C. W. Taylor, Bernard Williams, and a number of anonymous readers for Oxford
University Press, for Mind, and for Mind and Language. I am especially grateful to Bill Brewer for persuading me to write
this introductory chapter, and for making me think much harder about several issues, and to Tom Pink for reading the
entire draft at a late stage and for making several very helpful suggestions. I should also like to thank Peter
Momtchiloff and Charlotte Jenkins of Oxford University Press for their support throughout. I have also benefited
enormously from discussions with Jim Hopkins, Gianmatteo Mameli, David Papineau, Ian Ravenscroft, Mark
Sainsbury, Neven Sesardic, and Finn Spicer as part of a King's College London project funded by the Arts and
Humanities Research Board, ‘The Function of the Emotions: An Investigation of their Evolutionary Role and an
Exploration of the Philosophical Consequences’.
An earlier version of Chapter 5 appeared in Mind 109:433 (January 2000), and an earlier version of Chapter 7 in Mind
and Language 14:4 (December 1999). I thank Oxford University Press and Blackwell Publishers Ltd. for the appropriate
permissions.
I dedicate this book to three people: to my wife Sophie Hamilton and to Jo Wolff of University College London,
without whom (for different reasons) I would not have been able to begin in philosophy; and to Bernard Williams,
without whom I would not have had the confidence to continue.
2 What Emotions Are, and Their Place in
Psychological Explanation
Introduction
All five of the themes which I introduced in Chapter 1 are brought to bear in this chapter.
I begin with an important distinction: between emotion and episodes of emotional experience; it is often not obvious
from the way we speak (‘I'm angry with James’) which we mean. An emotion, I argue, is a complex state, relatively
more enduring than an emotional episode, which itself includes various past episodes of emotional experience, as well
as various sorts of disposition to think, feel, and act, all of which can dynamically interweave and interact. What holds
these diverse elements together is their being part of a narrative.
I then turn to the intentionality of the emotions, and the thoughts which can be involved in an emotion. Here begins
my attack on the over-intellectualization of emotion. First, I consider and reject the idea that the intentionality of
emotion can be fully captured by feelingless beliefs and desires. I introduce as an antidote the notion of feeling
towards: the feeling one has towards the object of one's emotion is both essentially intentional and essentially involves
feelings. Feeling towards is the subject of much more detailed discussion in Chapter 3. Next, I consider the education
of the emotions and the relation between recognition and emotional response—what I call the recognition–response
tie. I argue that there is a conceptual relation between recognition and response, because, for example, what is
dangerous is what merits a particular sort of emotional response, namely fear; furthermore, we are typically brought
up, as part of a single educational process, to recognize the dangerous
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EMOTIONS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATION
and to respond to it fearfully—in a way which is appropriate and proportionate to the circumstances. However, we
need not be brought up in this way to have a grasp of the concept of the dangerous or of the concept of fear; and even
if we are brought up in this way, recognition and response can occasionally come apart.
I then consider how we explain emotion and action out of emotion by appeal to the thoughts which are involved. A
further idea which comes from over-intellectualizing the emotions is the claim that beliefs and desires can show a
person's emotion to be rational in the sense of being based on a sort of syllogistic reasoning. I put forward an
alternative, arguing that the thoughts involved in an emotion can show it to be intelligible, intelligibility being a thinner
notion than rationality. I also suggest that what lies behind the over-intellectualizing of emotion is the idea that action
out of emotion can be adequately explained by feelingless beliefs and desires, perhaps characterized impersonally, in the
same way (so it is thought) that other actions can be explained which are not out of emotion. What we need, I argue, is
a notion of action out of emotion which makes it out to be fundamentally different from action not out of emotion.
Then, once this fundamental difference is established, any residual temptation to eliminate feelings—particularly
feelings towards the object of the emotion—or simply to add them on as an afterthought once action has been
explained, should subside.
In sum, then, the aim of this chapter is to show the importance of, and the right place for, the intentionality of emotion
in understanding ourselves and others, but to insist that a proper emphasis on this intentionality should not force
feelings out of the picture. Feelings are, as we all know, at the heart of emotion.
What Emotions Are
An emotion—for example, John's being angry or Jane's being in love—is typically complex, episodic, dynamic, and
structured. An emotion is complex in that it will typically involve many different elements: it involves episodes of
emotional experience, including perceptions, thoughts, and feelings of various kinds, and bodily changes of various
kinds; and it involves dispositions, including dispositions to experience further emotional episodes, to have further
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13
thoughts and feelings, and to behave in certain ways. Emotions are episodic and dynamic, in that, over time, the
elements can come and go, and wax and wane, depending on all sorts of factors, including the way in which the
episodes and dispositions interweave and interact with each other and with other aspects of the person's life. And an
emotion is structured in that it constitutes part of a narrative—roughly, an unfolding sequence of actions and events,
thoughts and feelings—in which the emotion itself is embedded. The different elements of the emotion are conceived
of by us as all being part of the same emotion, in spite of its complex, episodic, and dynamic features. The actions
which we do out of an emotion, and the various ways of expressing an emotion, are also seen as part of the same
narrative, but not themselves as part of the emotion itself.
We should therefore not be misled into thinking that an emotion is unchanging, just because an emotion can be
characterized as a sort of state: ‘He was in a state of anger’. (One particular feature of a state is that when we use a verb
to speak of a state, this verb is not used in the continuous tenses; we do not say that he was being jealous or that she is
being in love, any more than we say that he is being six feet tall; cf. Kenny 1963, Steward 1997, and Mourelatos 1978.) A
state can be a relatively settled disposition of some sort, like a character trait, but an emotion is not at all like this. I will
be discussing character traits in Chapter 6, but, briefly, the contrast with emotion is as follows. If you are a jealous sort
of person, then you are a person who, in some sense, is disposed to be jealous in your relationships. And when you
become jealous of Jane's relationship with John, then you are actually having the emotion. And this emotion—your
jealousy of that relationship—can itself involve all sorts of episodes and dispositions regarding that specific
relationship. Thus, both the character trait of being jealous and the emotion of being jealous involve dispositions, but
the latter are more specific than the former.1 So, to say, for example, that James is jealous can, according to context,
mean one of three things: it can mean that he is a jealous type (the character trait); it can mean that he is jealous of this
relationship (the emotion); or it can mean that he is currently
1
Phobias, like claustrophobia and other phobic fears, are also states—dispositional states—although they are neither character traits nor emotions. A phobic fear, such as a
phobia of dogs, is a disposition to respond and act in certain ways on sight of a dog. So when we say ‘He's afraid of dogs’, it is the disposition to be afraid of dogs which we
are talking about.
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experiencing a particular jealous thought or feeling (the emotional episode).2
An example can illustrate the typical features of an emotion. You are jealous because you think that she has run off
with someone else. You cannot sleep: your heart and mind are racing all night. While you are getting dressed in the
morning you cannot help imagining them together, talking and joking about you perhaps, and you are unable to keep
your mind on anything else. On the way to work, you see another couple in the distance, one of whom looks just like
her, and you practically faint, frozen to the spot in terror. Later in the day, you are preoccupied with work for a while,
and then suddenly, like a blow to the body, you see on your desk something of hers which triggers your feelings again,
and you think ‘If I'm not able to talk to her now then I don't know what I'll do’. The next minute your jealousy takes
another turn, and you hope you never see her again; the telephone rings and the thought that it might be her fills you
with dread. This complex of perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and bodily changes are dynamically related episodes of the
same emotion—the same state of jealousy. And these elements fit in as part of a narrative of this part of your life,
which will include not just these elements but also things which you do out of jealousy and your emotional expressions
of jealousy: one minute you pick up the telephone to ring her, the next you are unplugging it so that she cannot get
through to you; one minute you are biting your knuckles, the next you are hitting the steering wheel of your car. The
narrative will also include all sorts of other aspects of your life on which your feelings of jealousy impinge—aspects
which often cannot be fully understood apart from those feelings: for example, your way of seeing things in general,
your mood, and your character traits.
Consider another example of an emotion, this time love, in this passage from Tolstoy's War and Peace. Pierre is just
coming to realize that he is in love with Natasha:
2
Throughout this book I will try to make clear the sense in which I use emotion terms like ‘jealous’. I will sometimes use the more convenient phrase ‘So-and-so's emotion’
rather than ‘So-and-so's emotional episode’ where it is clear from the context that it is the emotional episode which I have in mind. Wollheim (1999) also distinguishes
emotion and emotional episode, but he insists that emotions are dispositions (which possess ‘psychological reality’). I agree that emotions involve dispositions, but his
account, I think, leaves insufficient place for the narrative of past emotional episodes as being part of a continuing emotion.
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15
When she smiled, doubt was no longer possible, it was Natasha and he loved her.
At that moment Pierre involuntarily betrayed to her, to Princess Mary, and above all to himself, a secret of which he
himself had been unaware. He flushed joyfully yet with painful distress. He tried to hide his agitation. But the more
he tried to hide it the more clearly—clearer than any words could have done—did he betray to himself, to her, to
Princess Mary, that he loved her.
‘No, it's not the unexpectedness of it,’ thought Pierre. But as soon as he tried to continue the conversation he had
begun with Princess Mary he again glanced at Natasha, and a still deeper flush suffused his face and a still stronger
agitation of mingled joy and fear seized his soul. He became confused in his speech and stopped in the middle of
what he was saying. (iii. 398)
Later, as Pierre goes through the routine of the day, his love for Natasha affects his mood, and colours the way things
look to him:
‘And this man too,’ thought Pierre, looking into the face of the Chief of Police. ‘What a fine, good-looking officer,
and how kind! Fancy bothering about such trifles now! And they actually say he is not honest and takes bribes?
That's the way he was brought up and everybody does it. But what a kind, pleasant face and how he smiles as he
looks at me.’
Pierre went to Princess Mary's to dinner.
As he drove through the streets past the houses that had been burnt down [during Napoleon's occupation of
Moscow] he was surprised by the beauty of those ruins. The picturesqueness of the chimney-stacks and tumbledown walls of the burnt-out quarters of the town, stretching out and concealing one another, reminded him of the
Rhine and the Colosseum. The cabmen he met and their passengers, the carpenters cutting the timber for new
houses with their axes, the women hawkers, and the shopkeepers, all looked at him with cheerful beaming eyes that
seemed to say: ‘Ah, there he is! Let's see what will come of it!’ (iii. 409)
What we have is a narrative of this part of Pierre's life, involving his love of Natasha, a love which has existed
unrecognized for some years, which has just been recognized by Pierre and others as being what it is, and which will,
we later find out, continue and mature over many years. That narrative includes his joyful flushing, his painful distress,
his efforts to hide his agitation and to continue the conversation, his thoughts about the unexpectedness of his feelings,
his deeper flushing, his mingled joy and fear, his confused speech; later, his mood, his way of thinking of the Chief of
Police and the ruined buildings of Moscow, and his thinking of the people he passes in
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the street as directing kindly thoughts towards him; and his dispositions to have further loving thoughts, feelings, and
responses towards Natasha. By considering all these things, so wonderfully human and utterly intelligible, as part of a
structured narrative, we can begin to understand this part of Pierre's life.
So an emotion, such as your being jealous, or Pierre's being in love with Natasha, is typically complex, episodic,
dynamic, and structured. Because of these features, it is, as I say, a mistake to think of the emotions as simple and
unchanging. Of course, from a sufficiently distant perspective, seen through the wrong end of a telescope so to speak,
an emotional experience can be described in this way; you might say that you had been in love with Erika from 1963 to
1965. But if the telescope is turned the right way round, and then the telescope exchanged for a microscope, more and
more teeming detail and dynamic structure will emerge.
Perhaps all this is rather obvious. If so, good. For much of what I have just been saying tends to get forgotten in
philosophical discussion of the emotions. In particular, it tends to get forgotten in discussion of how one can
understand and explain a person's emotions, as if an emotional experience or a disposition can be understood and
explained by detaching it from the narrative in which it is embedded, and holding it up for examination as one might
hold up a section of bone tissue in a laboratory. On the contrary, understanding and explanation can only adequately
be achieved from the personal perspective, seeing the emotion as evolving over time, embedded in and interweaving
with the rest of the person's emotional life and other aspects of his mood and character.
The Intentionality of the Emotions
The emotions are intentional. By this I mean that the thoughts and feelings involved in an emotion have a directedness
towards an object. (This way of characterizing intentionality, in preference to involving aboutness or ofness, is very
effectively argued for in Crane 1998. He also argues, as I will, that emotions can be directed onto objects which are not
states of affairs.) So if John is angry or Jane is in love, there will be someone or something with which John is angry
and someone who is loved by Jane. ‘Object’ is to be understood in
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17
the sense of being the object of the transitive verb which refers to the emotional state, as in ‘A φs X’, where A is the
person having the emotion picked out by the emotion-verb φ, and X is the object of the emotion. So when you are
asked, for example, ‘What are you afraid of?’, you are being asked to state the object of your fear; the reply will specify
something—the object—or, more specifically, some feature of the object of which you are afraid. An object of an
emotion, in this sense, could be a particular thing or person (that pudding, this man), an event or an action (the
earthquake, your hitting me), or a state of affairs (my being in an aeroplane).
The nature of the object of the emotion is much more complex in what Hume called the indirect passions: emotions
such as pride and humility (Treatise, bk. II, pt. i). Here, taking my pride in my house as an example, Hume talks of
‘object’ and ‘cause’, where the ‘object’ of the emotion is the self, and the ‘cause’ is my house: something which causes
me to feel pleasure and which is related to me in some way. My approach may be contrary to Hume and to a certain
philosophical tradition, but I prefer the more natural idea that the object of an emotion is that onto which one's
thoughts and feelings are typically directed, and to which they typically return, so the object of my pride in this example
is not just myself, nor just my house, but my-house-which-belongs-to-me. This approach, as well as more naturally
identifying the intentional object, also allows considerable variation in the focus of my thoughts and feelings when they
are directed, proudly, onto their object: I can focus sometimes on the house and those of its features which explain my
pride in it (the number of its storeys, say); sometimes on the relationship between me and the house (one of freehold
ownership, say); sometimes on myself with the house and its features in the background, so to speak (like one of those
Country Life pictures of the lord of the manor sitting proudly in his study with its grand coffered ceiling); and so on.
Moods, as contrasted with emotions, will be the topic of a later discussion in Chapter 6, but I should note here that
what, in part, distinguishes emotions from moods is that emotions have more specific objects than moods. The
distinction is thus a matter of degree. This avoids two unsatisfactory implications: that emotions necessarily have a
specific object; and that moods necessarily are not directed towards an object and thus lack intentionality. Your fear on
waking may have no very specific object—the dark, the shape of the curtains,
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the strange noise which woke you—but it is still an emotional experience and not a mood. And the next morning,
when your fear is gone but you remain anxious, it is natural to say you are anxious about everything this morning, or
about nothing in particular, or that you are anxious about everything and nothing. Making the distinction in this way
between emotion and mood allows, as should be the case, for two things: for a mood to develop into an
emotion—anxiety into fear, for example—by focusing on a more specific object rather in the way that crystals can
form around an object which is dropped into a liquid; and for an emotion to develop into a mood—fear into
anxiety—rather in the way that smoke diffuses in the atmosphere, leaving just a haze through which all sorts of objects
in the world are seen.
Intentionality gives rise to many philosophical problems, and it is not my wish to engage with these problems here:
there is quite enough to be said without getting into those minefields. But I should just point out that, as is generally
agreed, there are two features of intentional states of mind which apply as much to the emotions as they do to other
sorts of intentional state. First, the object of an emotion has to be identified in a sufficiently fine-grained way to capture
why the person feels that emotion about that object: Oedipus might be delighted that he has married Jocasta, but
would not be delighted that he has married his mother. Secondly, the object of an emotion need not exist: Jimmy might
be afraid of the Abominable Snowman, when there is no such creature.
Many philosophers who discuss the intentionality of the emotions seek to capture the intentionality of the emotions in
terms of beliefs, or beliefs and desires. (See, for example, Kenny 1963, Pitcher 1965, Alston 1967, Green 1972,
Davidson 1976, Farrell 1980, Lyons 1993, and G. Taylor 1976 and 1985.) I think that this is a mistake. It runs the risk
of leaving feelings out of emotional experience, for these beliefs and desires could be feelingless, by which I mean they
could be characterized, perhaps impersonally, without any reference to what it is like from the point of view or
perspective of the person experiencing the emotion—the point of view from which feelings are ineliminable. I agree
that when I have an emotion, there will often be beliefs and desires which can be ascribed to me and which will play a
role in making intelligible both my emotion and what I do out of that emotion. But the mistake is to think that these
feelingless beliefs and desires, perhaps characterized impersonally,
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19
exhaust the intentionality of emotional experience, and that they are therefore sufficient to make sense of emotion and
action out of emotion. What I want to do is to emphasize an intentional element which is neither belief nor desire, and
which is, in many respects, more fundamental to emotional experience than either of these. This sort of intentional
element involves feelings which are directed towards objects in the world, typically towards the object of the emotion.
To reflect the fact that this intentional element is both intentional and involves feelings, I will call it feeling towards.
Feelings, as part of emotional experience, will be the topic of the next chapter, and I will there be comparing and
contrasting feelings towards with bodily feelings, such as feeling your heart beating in your chest. But it will be helpful
to the purpose of this chapter to make a few introductory remarks about feeling towards.
Feeling towards is thinking of with feeling, so that your emotional feelings are directed towards the object of your
thought. So, for example, if I feel disgusted by the pudding, my feelings of disgust are directed towards some perceived
or imagined property or feature of the pudding—its sliminess, perhaps—which I apprehend as disgusting. (As will
emerge in due course, this is not to say that you cannot think of something as being, say, disgusting, yet not feel disgust.
)
For each sort of emotion, there will be a broadly characteristic qualitative nature of these feelings. But individual
emotional experiences can vary widely in how they feel. Any suggestion that our emotional feelings towards things can
be understood as, or analysed into, simple terms (such as attraction or aversion, pleasure or distress, feeling
comfortable or uncomfortable, positive or negative evaluation on some rating scale) should be strongly resisted. Surely
we all know that emotional feelings are not that simple. If you ask me to say what the feelings are like when one is
feeling disgusted or jealous or angry or in love, I refuse to answer: if you have experienced the emotion, then you know
very well what these sorts of feeling can be like, and you do not need me to tell you; if you have not experienced the
emotion and want to get at least some idea of what it feels like, then, as Harold Macmillan once said to a young
politician, I suggest you read a good novel. It is, emphatically, not a requirement of my philosophical account that I
should attempt such a thing.
Feeling towards, as it is thinking of with feeling, is a sort of thinking of. One can come to think of something as being a
particular
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way; certain features become salient. And thinking of is related to seeing an aspect, in that it is an intentional episode
which can involve imagination, or perception, or some combination of imagination and perception, often mutually
influential: one can come to see the Moon's surface as being face-like, or to see the duck–rabbit picture as a picture of a
duck; and one can think of one's neighbour as a witch and her two black cats as her familiars. (Cf. Wittgenstein 1958:
II. xi, Budd 1989: ch. 4, Scruton 1974, and Wollheim 1980 and 1987.) The imagination which can be involved in these
sorts of episodes of thought is not imagining that, as one might imagine that Beethoven wrote ten symphonies. The
sort of imagining I have in mind is much closer to perception—it has a perceptual quality; but this is not, of course, to
suggest that the imagining need be imagistic: if you imagine smelling newly baked bread or, like Yeats, hearing lake
water lapping with low sounds by the shore, a visual image of the bread or the Lake of Innisfree need not feature in
what you imagine (although, of course, it may well do). Nor, if the imagining is imagistic, do I want to suggest that what
is perceived or imagined is an image; rather, as Sartre insists (1948), I am talking of the way the object of thought (the
pudding, being in an aeroplane) appears to me in consciousness; imagining something in this way can be understood as
visualizing something in your mind, or, as the saying goes, ‘in your mind's eye’.
Having thus introduced feeling towards, I now want to consider in some more detail the thoughts which can be
involved in the emotions. In doing this I hope to achieve two things, one positive and one negative. First, I will try to
show what is essentially right about the idea that the emotions are intentional, namely that an understanding of the
thoughts involved can play a role in making sense of an emotional experience. Emotions are not brute feelings like
toothache, which we cannot make sense of; all we can do is give toothaches a causal explanation. Secondly, and
negatively, I will try to show up some of the difficulties faced by those accounts of the emotions which, so to speak,
take the feelings out of thought by treating feelingless beliefs and desires as the only intentional episodes involved, thus
over-intellectualizing emotional experience.
The relation between an emotion and the beliefs involved is not a contingent one; that is to say, there are conceptual
relations between an emotion and the beliefs which ground it. Anthony Kenny puts the point in a way which at first
seems rather curious: ‘One cannot be afraid of just anything’ (1963: 192). It is clear, though,
EMOTIONS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATION
21
what he means: ‘If a man says that he is afraid of winning £10,000 in the pools, we want to ask him more: does he
believe that money corrupts, or does he expect to lose his friends, or to be annoyed by begging letters, or what? If we
can elicit from him only descriptions of the good aspects of the situation, then we cannot understand why he reports
his emotion as fear and not as hope. Again, if a man says that he feels remorse for the actions of someone quite
unconnected with him, or is envious of his own vices, we are at a loss to understand him’ (1963: 191). However, as
Kenny continues, ‘it is possible to be envious of one's own fruit trees; but only if one mistakenly believes that the land
on which they stand is part of one's neighbour's property; just as it is possible to feel remorse for the failure of the
crops in Vietnam if one believes that it was due to the inadequacy of one's own prayers. What is not possible is to envy
something which one believes to belong to oneself, or to feel remorse for something in which one believes one has no
part’ (1963: 193).
There are various terms which have been used by philosophers to make this general point about how an emotion is
related to the beliefs which are involved. Emotions have been said to have ‘formal objects’ or ‘proper objects'; they
have been said to involve identificatory beliefs, which identify the emotion as being what it is, and explanatory beliefs,
which give grounds for, or which make intelligible, the identificatory beliefs; and emotions have been said to involve
beliefs about the object of the emotion as having determinable and determinate features, and these beliefs too make the
emotion an intelligible one to experience in the circumstances (see, respectively, Kenny 1963, G. Taylor 1985, and
Taylor 1976). In my view, not much hangs on what terminology is used; but from now on I will usually express the
point in terms of beliefs about the object's determinable and determinate features. (A standard example of the contrast
between determinable and determinate, is this: being coloured is a determinable property, and being red is a
determinate property under the determinable of being coloured.) The idea can be illustrated with a simple example. If
Peter is afraid of the bull, then there will be some feature of the bull which Peter thinks it has. If this feature is a
determinable one (its being dangerous), then he will think it is dangerous in virtue of its having certain determinately
dangerous features (having long horns which could harm him, perhaps), even if he is not able to say what they are.
And if the feature which he thinks it has is a determinate one, then it ought to be possible for Peter to explain why this
determinate feature falls under the determinable one. Thus,
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according to this idea, if Peter did not believe that there was something potentially harmful about the bull's long horns,
then it would be puzzling, to say the least, why he should feel fear of the bull in virtue of its having this feature.
In spite of these conceptual relations between Peter's fear of the bull and his beliefs about it, I suggest that it is possible
for no relevant belief to be present when fear is experienced: I can (changing the example) be afraid of a snake which I
do not believe to be danger-ous in any way. Against this, Roger Scruton (1971) has argued that having a belief that an
object is dangerous is a necessary condition of being afraid; this is an example of the over-intellectualization of
emotion which I want to resist, and I will be showing in the next chapter how it is even perfectly possible to be afraid
of something and yet believe that it is not dangerous. Moreover, others, in particular Robert Gordon (1987), have
argued, in respect of certain emotions which Gordon calls factive, that what is required is not just belief but true belief,
if it is to be the case that the person does indeed have the emotion. This view is also mistaken (cf. Wollheim 1999:
103–10 for a thorough discussion and ultimate rejection of Gordon's view). Again, this is a sort of overintellectualization of the emotions. The idea is based in part on the idea that emotions must have propositions as their
objects: if you are angry, you must be angry that p. And, according to this idea, if I assert that, for example, you are
angry that James stole your shoelaces, this assertion presupposes the truth of the proposition that James stole your
shoelaces. Perhaps it does. But once it is accepted, as it should be, that the object of an emotion need not be a
proposition, and can be, for example, a person, then it becomes clear that I can perfectly coherently say that you are
angry with James (adding, perhaps, that this is because you think he stole your shoelaces) whilst at the same time
insisting that your emotion is entirely ungrounded.
Explaining, or making sense of, an emotion involves more than just establishing the beliefs which putatively ground it.
Doing this is merely to make the emotion intelligible, as your envy of your own fruit trees can be made intelligible by
your false belief that the fruit trees are on your neighbour's land.3 Intelligibility in this sense is a
3
Where there is no relevant belief, as in my fear of the snake which I do not believe to be dangerous, there will still be some thoughts and feelings about it which will make the
emotion intelligible. And, so far as fear of snakes is concerned (see Wilson 1984 and 1998), we do not have to look very far to guess what these might be.
EMOTIONS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATION
23
very thin notion. For one thing, an emotion such as your envy of your own fruit trees may be intelligible but also
irrational if the false belief which putatively grounds it is one which was not arrived at by a suitably rational process.
For another thing, it is possible for an emotion to be intelligible but either inappropriate or disproportionate given the
beliefs which putatively ground it. It is, for example, perfectly intelligible for me to be proud of my ancestors,
including, as Hume puts it, their “riches and credit” (Treatise, 308), whereas it would be unintelligible if I were to say
that I felt proud of the ancestors of someone totally unconnected to me, such as William Hague. But my pride can also
be evaluated according to whether or not it is appropriate or proportionate. These days, it is, I think, inappropriate to
be proud of your ancestral lineage however great their riches and credit—surely I ought to have left all that behind.
Yet, in some other culture, even strong feelings about your ancestors would be entirely appropriate and proportionate.
So the right thing to say so far as concerns an emotion's appropriateness and proportionateness is that they can be, to a
large extent, culturally determined. To consider another example, we might agree that Harriet's feelings of guilt about
forgetting to feed her hamster, thereby bringing about its death, are intelligible, appropriate, and involve beliefs which
are rationally arrived at, but, given the importance and value of so many other things in her life, her feelings might have
reached a level and duration where they have to be said to be disproportionate. These are distinct and complementary
ways of making sense of emotions, and it is a mistake to try to cram them all into one single notion, such as rationality
or intelligibility. And finally, there is the great importance of a person's mood and character in making sense of
someone's emotional responses: for example, judgements about the intelligibility of a particular person's emotional
response are made relative to that person's narrative, extending beyond this particular incident to include his other
emotions, his moods, and his character. Your anger at your wife's harmless remark might only become intelligible in
the light of your enduring jealousy of her relationship with another man, or in the light of the irritable mood you are in
after such a terrible day at the office, or in the light of your general disposition to be irritable.
Emotions can involve certain wants or desires (what I will sometimes call emotional desires) as well as certain beliefs of
the sort I have been discussing. I will call the view that the emotions involve
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beliefs and desires the belief-desire account; I prefer this term to the more frequently used cognitivism because this latter
term is, I think, more accurately applied to the view that the emotions are judgements. (Cognitivism is a view held by
Robert Solomon: he says ‘My shame is my judgement to the effect that I am responsible for an untoward situation or
incident’ (1993: 187).) It is often through detailed consideration of the thoughts which can be involved in an emotion
that we come to see what sort of emotion it is that we are experiencing; this is what is profoundly right about the view
that the emotions are intentional. I will show what I mean by considering envy, an emotion which I dare say we have all
felt at some time or another. (In this discussion, I owe much to Gabrielle Taylor's work, especially Taylor 1988). But
first, a few words about the contrast between beliefs and desires.
Beliefs and desires are often contrasted in terms of their having opposing directions of fit. Mark Platts puts the idea like
this: ‘Beliefs aim at the true, and their being true is their fitting the world; . . . beliefs should be changed to fit the world,
not vice versa. Desires aim at realisation, and their realisation is the world fitting them; . . . the world, crudely, should
be changed to fit with our desires, not vice versa’ (Platts 1979: 256–7; cf. Platts 1991 for further qualification). This
way of contrasting beliefs and desires is, as Platts rightly insists, highly metaphorical, but it does bring out the role of
beliefs and desires in explaining action, exemplified in means–end reasoning: the desire is aimed at some end, and the
belief is about there being some means of achieving that end.
However, there are two cautionary points to be borne in mind when applying the idea of direction of fit to emotional
desires. First, many of our emotional desires are intimately related to our agency: often an emotional desire is not just
that the world be changed to fit our desire, but rather that it should be the agent—the person who has the
emotion—who brings it about that the world is so changed. Thus, taking Aristotle's famous example of a desire for
revenge which is involved in anger (Rhetoric 1378a30), you do not just desire that she suffer; rather, you desire that it be
you who make her suffer. It is thus perfectly intelligible for you, an angry person, to want to bankrupt someone as a
means of getting revenge, and then be disappointed to find that the person who is the object of your anger has already
become a bankrupt before you were able to put your plans for revenge into motion. Maybe the point can be
EMOTIONS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATION
25
accommodated within the direction-of-fit metaphor by saying that what you want is for the world to be changed so
that the person has been bankrupted by you. But this accommodation still seems, to my ear, to omit the actual doing of
the action from what is desired, even if it is, after all, logically equivalent to a formulation given simply in terms of
states of affairs. Anyway, I will not argue the point any further.
The second cautionary point is concerned with whether we should always try to ‘change the world’ to fit our desires.4
The point can be illustrated by a passage from Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. Albertine has left Marcel, the
narrator, and he longs for her return, whether he ‘felt well and not too miserable’, or whether he ‘was in a sombre
mood’, with ‘all [his] anger with her revived’. But he sees that having her back will not satisfy him. He says:
But the outcome of these two opposite moods was identical: it was essential that she should return as soon as
possible. And yet, whatever joy I might feel at the moment of her return, I sensed that very soon the same
difficulties would recur and that to seek happiness in a desire of the mind was as naive as to attempt to reach the
horizon by walking straight ahead. The further the desire advances, the further does real possession recede. So that
if happiness, or at least the absence of suffering, can be found, it is not the satisfaction, but the gradual reduction
and the eventual extinction of desires that one should seek. One seeks to see the beloved object, but one ought to
seek not to: forgetfulness alone brings about the ultimate extinction of desire. (v. 514)
Thus even if the notion of realization of a desire (in the sense of its coming true) is the same as the notion of
satisfaction of that desire (which I doubt; see Wollheim 1999: 30–8), the satisfaction of a desire is not the same as the
satisfaction of the person. This is obviously true of some cravings: I crave this ice-cream, but eating it will not satisfy
me. One might think that in Proust's example Marcel, realizing that satisfaction of his desire will not satisfy him, also
desires not to desire Albertine's return, that he wants the first-order desire
4
Wollheim (1999: 45–51) offers a superb critique of the idea of direction of fit. He says that, because the truth-relation and the satisfaction-relation are both symmetrical (if
X satisfies Y, then Y is satisfied by X ), the idea of direction of fit has no place. So the idea must be prescriptive of what we should try to do: it gives us, as he puts it, ‘an
ethic of belief and desire’ (ibid. 49). But, leaving aside any difficulties with belief, this ethic ‘is surely far too indulgent towards desire’ (ibid. 50). What follows in the text
illustrates this point, I think.
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EMOTIONS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATION
to be eliminated. But Proust is at pains to show that this is not so: one can have, as Marcel does, an emotional desire
for something, and endorse that desire in second-order thought, yet at the same time accept that satisfaction of this
first-order desire will not bring you satisfaction, and that the world should not—even cannot—be changed to fit that
desire. He continues:
And I should have been so afraid of being robbed (had anyone been capable of so robbing me) of this need of her,
this love for her, that I convinced myself that it was a precious necessity in my life. To be able to hear, without being
charmed and pained by them, the names of the stations through which the train passed on its way to Touraine
would have seemed to me a diminution of myself (for no other reason than that it would have proved that I was
becoming indifferent to Albertine). It was right, I told myself, that by incessantly asking myself what she could be
doing, thinking, wishing, at every moment, whether she intended, whether she was going to return, I should keep
open the communicating door which love had opened up in me, and feel another person's life flooding through
open sluices to fill the reservoir which must not again become stagnant. (v. 515)
Having registered these notes of caution about the notion of direction of fit as a way of contrasting beliefs and desires,
I will now consider envy. What will emerge is that detailed consideration of the thoughts which can be involved in envy
can help us to tell just what sort of envy someone is experiencing.
A's envy of B will include the thought that B has a feature X, and either the thought that B's X is, in some determinate
respect, superior to that of A, or the thought that A does not have X: Alex envies Bill his new fast car, and he feels
envy because he thinks that Bill's car is superior to his in virtue of its being faster. Such a thought seems to be common
to what are often called non-malicious and malicious envy, but the two sorts of envy differ in certain of the desires
which are involved; thus thought with a belief-like direction of fit is not sufficient to distinguish all types of envy. Only
if the envy is malicious will Alex also desire that Bill in some way not have the car that Bill does have, perhaps by its
being stolen, written off in a crash, or repossessed, and this will be desired regardless of the fact that satisfaction of the
desire involves no non-relative improvement in Alex's position. Furthermore, with some sorts of envy, your going up
in the world is not sufficient to satisfy you—you want the other to go down. This was what Gore Vidal had in mind
when he said that it is not enough to succeed—others must fail. Furthermore, it
EMOTIONS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATION
27
may be the case that the desire involved in malicious envy is a desire that you be the agent of his failure: ‘If I can't make
it to the top, at least I can make damn sure he won't either’.
Malicious envy can be thought of as the obverse of Schadenfreude: roughly, malicious envy involves resentment at the
fortune of another, and Schadenfreude involves joy at the misfortune of another. Sometimes the frisson of Schadenfreude
that we feel at another's downfall will reveal in us a previously existing malicious envy of which we were not aware,
lurking behind the frequently expressed ‘I knew it couldn't last’ sort of response.
If Alex envies Bill his fast car, then the envy may be particular or general. In particular envy, Alex wants the very car
which Bill has; whereas with general envy, Alex wants the same sort of car. Non-malicious general envy can be quite
harmless so far as the person envied is concerned, and can be an effective spur for the envious person. This sort of
envy is close to role-model emulation: you might envy your cricket coach's cover drive and try to get yours to be as
good as his. Aristotle pithily says that ‘Emulation makes us take steps to secure the good things in question, envy [of a
malicious sort] makes us take steps to stop our neighbour having them’ (Rhetoric 1388a35).
Analysis of an emotion along these lines, by subtly identifying the thoughts which are involved, opens up space to
consider the ethical, and sometimes the political, dimensions of an emotion. For example, is envy necessary for a
successful market economy? Is envy always a sin? It might be that envy is a perfectly intelligible human emotion which
we cannot completely eliminate from our psychology, and it might also be that my envy is an ineliminable spur to my
ambition and drive, which are central to my conception of myself, but it does not follow from either of these points
that envy is an emotion which we should accept as entirely appropriate, or (as the above discussion of direction of fit
has already suggested) that the desires involved in envy are desires whose satisfaction we should aim for, even if they
are endorsed in second-order thought. In Chapter 8, I return to some of these questions, as they bear on envy, and,
especially, on jealousy.
Book II of Aristotle's Rhetoric is replete with definitions of emotions in terms of the beliefs and desires involved. It
should be no surprise that his detailed discussion of the emotions is in a book of this name: the point, of course, being
that in rhetorical discourse we often seek to appeal to the emotions in order to sway people's minds.
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If, as a politician, I can get you to think that the industry for which you work is threatened by competition from
abroad, and that this is unjust or unfair, then you will very likely feel fear and resentment; and if you do, you will
consider your emotions to be justified by the thoughts which ground them, and to be appropriate and proportionate.
Or if, as a defending barrister, I can get a juror to think that my client was wrongly treated by the police, then he is
likely to feel anger at the injustice that was done; and again he will think his emotion to be justified, appropriate, and
proportionate. Then, once these emotional responses have been engaged, your further thoughts, feelings, judgements,
and actions will be influenced by your emotions in ways which the rhetorician hopes will serve his interests and
purposes.
What Aristotle's discussion of the emotions in his Rhetoric brings out is the relationship between beliefs on the one
hand, and desires on the other; or, more broadly, between recognition and response, where the notion of response
includes not just motivating thoughts such as desires but affective elements of the emotion too. Even if,
metaphorically, beliefs and desires have opposing directions of fit, and even if some relevant recognition on an
occasion does not logically or conceptually imply the presence of any response, there is, in our emotional experiences,
an intimate relationship between recognition and emotional response which needs to be understood. It is to this that I
now turn.
Education of the Emotions and the Recognition–Response Tie
The essential idea is that our emotions can be educated: we can be taught to recognize, and to respond emotionally, as
part of the same education. For example, we can be taught to recognize things as dangerous and to respond,
appropriately and proportionately, with fear. From now on I will call the relationship between recognition and response
the recognition–response tie. In order to consider further the nature of the relationship between recognition and response
through the recognition–response tie, I must first examine in some detail what is involved in having a grasp of two
distinct sorts of concept: concepts of features such as dangerousness—what I will
EMOTIONS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATION
29
call concepts of emotion-invoking determinable features—and concepts of emotions such as fear. But before turning
to that, I should say something quite general about our conceptual capacities or abilities.
Like other abilities, such as the ability to ride a bicycle, our conceptual abilities can come in degrees: one can have the
ability to ride a bicycle, but be unable to ride it up Snowdon, or to ride it with one hand on the handlebars, or to ride it
when drunk; but it would still be true that you are able to ride a bicycle, as you can pretty well get around town on one.
Similarly, you can have less than a complete grasp of a concept, yet you can quite reliably use the concept in everyday
thought and talk (cf. Burge 1979 and 1986). It might not unreasonably be suggested that if an incomplete grasp of a
concept is possible, then there must be something that it is to have a complete grasp or mastery of a concept. These
expressions, however, would seem to me to be terms of art and open to significant interpretation; analogously, it is
open to interpretation what it would be to have a complete grasp of bicycle-riding: perhaps being able to ride one up
Snowdon whilst drunk and with one hand on the handlebars. Nevertheless, I think it is definitely possible to say one
thing, at least in respect of the sort of concepts I am concerned with here: the fact that you are able reliably to identify
things of the relevant sort is not sufficient for having a complete grasp of the concept. Consider a colour concept: for
example, what is involved in having the concept of red. If I were colour-blind, but nevertheless could by various means
reliably identify red things in the world (through prosthetic vision, or through having a constant companion who
reliably pointed out to me all and only red things), then I would have a less than complete grasp of this concept. The
reason in this case is that I would be lacking the ability to have a certain sort of visual experience in the presence of red
things, and without that ability I cannot know what it is for things to look red. We might say that my use of the term
‘red’ is ‘piggybacking’ on the usual use of that term. Now let me apply this general point about concept possession to
concepts of emotion-invoking determinable features such as dangerousness, and to concepts of emotions such as fear,
in order to show how we can have a sufficient grasp of these concepts to get the extension of the concept right, whilst
this grasp is still less than complete. I will begin with a discussion of emotion-invoking determinable features.
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EMOTIONS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATION
There are two points to be made about the dangerous. The first is that the class of dangerous things has no unifying
feature or features which can be captured in the language of the sciences. This is because dangerous things are picked
out relative to our particular human, or, more locally, cultural interests: having a concept of the dangerous is essential
to us if we are to find our way safely around the world. One need not be mystified by this sort of feature just because it
is not one that can be unified by the sciences. Roger Scruton (1980) discusses an example which brings out this point.
Being an ornamental marble was an important property for stone merchants searching for stones of the sort which
would look good on rockeries. The class of ornamental marbles groups together a heterogeneous mixture of geological
and chemical types: for example, it includes marble (a carbonate), onyx (an oxide), and porphyry (a silicate), whilst
excluding limestone (which is chemically identical to marble). The property of being an ornamental marble is thus not
one which will be unified by, nor will it even feature in, the geological or chemical sciences. But this fact alone does not
make it suspect or in any sense second-rate. Similarly, the concept of the dangerous groups together all sorts of things
which have no features in common other than that of being dangerous: bulls with long horns, dogs with rabies,
exposed electric fires, icy roads, strangers with sweets, certain ideas, Lord Byron.
This leads to the second point to be made about the dangerous: it is an evaluative property. By an evaluative property I
mean a property whose recognition merits a certain sort of response (McDowell 1979 and 1985b). (So, on this notion of
an evaluative property, the first point might apply to being red and being an ornamental marble, but still they are not
evaluative properties.) The response which is merited by something which is dangerous is not just a recognition or
judgement that it is dangerous (for, on this view, all properties would turn out to be evaluative), nor is it simply moving
to get out of the way of what is dangerous; the response which is merited is one of fear, with all that this emotional
experience involves, including thought, feeling, and action. The process of teaching a child how to identify things
which are dangerous is typically one and the same process as teaching that child when fear is merited: pointing to the
electric fire, we say, in a fearful and urgent tone of voice, ‘You shouldn't touch that, it's dangerous’, or ‘Don't go near
that fire, it'll burn you’. Whilst recognition and response are distinct, and can come
EMOTIONS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATION
31
apart—as I will show shortly—they are related because the emotional response will be of the sort which someone
educated in this way ought to have in dangerous circumstances, and his emotional response will not be intelligible
independent of his conception of the circumstances as dangerous. (This ‘ought’ is, I will later show, both normative
and predictive.) Recognition and response will feature as part of the narrative structure of the person's emotional
experience, and when he acts out of the emotion, they will serve to explain the action, so that it can be understood as
intelligible, and appropriate and proportionate from the agent's perspective.5 Let us say, to use the relevant term of art
and for the sake of argument, that someone so brought up has a complete grasp of both sorts of concept: of the
emotion-invoking determinable property—dangerousness; and of the emotion—fear. Now, there is more than one
way in which someone can fall short of having a complete grasp of these concepts. Let me begin with the
anthropologist.
It has been argued in a number of places, correctly in my view, that it is not possible to grasp an evaluative concept if
you do not appreciate its evaluative point; given the absence of any unifying determinate features, you would not be
able to go on to identify new situations as falling under the relevant concept without such an appreciation (cf.
McDowell 1979 and 1987, Williams 1985, and Wiggins 1987: Essay III and 1996: 262–4). But it need not follow from
this requirement that you yourself have to be a full participant in the evaluation: the recognition–response tie need not
be part of your psychology. To see why, consider Allan Gibbard's made-up story (1992) of the anthropologist who is
visiting the Kumi tribe. He has the ability reliably to judge that situations are gopa, being such as to make appropriate a
pleasurable feeling of glory (or some feeling like glory); Kumi tribesmen consider such an emotional response to be
appropriate, for example, on returning from a successful headhunting expedition. And, let us say, the anthropologist
also has the ability reliably to tell when tribesmen are experiencing the relevant emotion. He has these conceptual
abilities without being able to respond with what the Kumi consider to be the appropriate feelings, as his emotions
have not been educated according to the Kumi way.
5
Of course there are other possibilities: someone's response might be inappropriate or disproportionate from his own perspective; or the response might be appropriate and
proportionate from his perspective, yet inappropriate or disproportionate in the opinion of others. These are possibilities I will come to later.
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But even though the recognition–response tie therefore need not be psychologically effective for him in order to get
the extension of the concepts right, if he is to have at least this grasp of the relevant concepts (a less than complete
grasp, but sufficient to get the extension right), the anthropologist nevertheless needs some appreciation of the
significance or evaluative point for them of the properties picked out by the concept so that he can, at least to some
extent, enter into the Kumi way of thinking of these matters; without that, the concept would, as Charles Taylor puts it,
‘get no grip whatever’ (1985: 53; cf. Williams 1986).
Something of a real-life counterpart to Gibbard's story is to be found in the sensitive writing of the anthropologist
Catherine Lutz about the people of the Ifaluk atoll in Micronesia: there, fago, which she roughly translates as
compassion, love, or sadness, is an emotion which is appropriately felt when another person is gafago, which she
translates as needy, or ‘lacking one or more of the qualities necessary for a good life’ (1995: 237). Echoing Taylor's
point, she says that the relationship between neediness and nurturing feelings ‘is a deep and consistent theme running
through Ifaluk culture’ (ibid.). If you are someone who has been brought up to have the right sort of fago feelings, then
you ought to be able to spot when another person is gafago; and if you have been brought up to recognize when
someone is gafago, then you ought to feel fago on those occasions. But the anthropologist might be able, without being
educated in this way, to gain a grasp of both concepts in a way which is sufficient reliably to get their extensions right,
and she can do this by coming to understand the cultural and ethical relevance of the recognition–response tie for the
islanders.
Of course, what is true of the imaginary concept of gopa and the Ifaluk concepts of gafago and fago is equally true of our
domestic concepts. In the light of what I have said so far, one might at this point be persuaded that we can grasp, albeit
incompletely, an emotion-inducing concept without ever having experienced the related emotion, but surely, one might
go on to protest, one cannot know what someone is feeling if one has not oneself experienced that emotion: for
example, how could I know what you are feeling in a situation which I recognize to be jealousy-invoking if I have never
myself felt jealous? This protest is justified in one sense of the phrase ‘know what someone is feeling’, but not in the
other sense. Let me explain.
EMOTIONS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATION
33
For each sort of emotional experience there will be a paradigmatic narrative structure—paradigmatic recognitional
thoughts, and paradigmatic responses involving motivational thoughts and feelings, as well as bodily changes,
expressive activity, action, and so forth—and this will be epistemologically central to the concept of that emotion and
to how we learn to apply it.6 On the strength of this learning, you can come reliably to judge that a person is
experiencing a particular emotion, jealousy for example. To do this it is not necessary to have experienced jealousy
yourself. This, then, is one sense in which we say that we ‘know what someone is feeling’: the sense in which what is
required is that we be able correctly to answer the question ‘What is he feeling?’ (cf. Austin 1946: 96–7). You might
thus perhaps answer ‘He is jealous’, whilst at the same time admitting that you yourself have never had jealous
thoughts or feelings, and have no idea what it would feel like to be jealous. Similarly, as Christopher Peacocke points
out, it is perfectly possible reliably to judge that people are seasick without ever having felt seasick or without knowing,
or being able to imagine, what it would be like to feel seasick (see Peacocke 1985: 33–4). Of course, experiencing an
emotion is much more complex in its intentionality than experiencing seasickness, but the same point applies. But there
is a second sense in which we use the phrase ‘know what someone is feeling’ when we mean that we know what it is
like to have that feeling, and in this sense I would not be speaking truly if I said ‘I know what you're feeling’ (adding,
perhaps, ‘poor old chap’) if you were feeling violently seasick and I had always had the sea-legs of a Captain Bligh, or if
you were feeling terrible pangs of jealousy and I had never had a jealous thought or feeling in my life.
We might then be tempted to say that it is necessary to know what it is like to feel an emotion if one is to have a
complete grasp
6
It is thus not a contingent matter that when we are taught the meaning of an emotion term, we are naturally taught by reference to what is paradigmatic; what is nonparadigmatic of one emotion will often be paradigmatic of, and epistemologically central to, some other emotion. But what is paradigmatic of an emotion is not constitutive
of what that sort of emotion is; it does not ‘define the very character of our emotions’, as Ronald de Sousa claims (1987: 183). A narrative for a particular emotional
experience can include what is non-paradigmatic just as much as what is paradigmatic: one can laugh out of grief or kill a person out of love for her; analogously (the
example often used against the paradigm or prototype view of concepts), penguins are just as much birds as robins or sparrows, even if they are not epistemologically central
or paradigmatic of birds (cf. Rey 1990 and Gardner 1992; see also Foot 1983 and Lyons 1993).
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EMOTIONS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATION
of the concept of that emotion. (This temptation might be especially strong if one began, as I did, with an analogy with
colour concepts.) But it is in this area that I think one must be particularly careful about the notion of having a
‘complete grasp’ of an emotion concept. Emotions can be experienced with greater or lesser intensity, and in this
respect at least they are like feelings such as toothaches, headaches, and seasickness. My father claimed never to have
experienced a headache, but most of us have had a headache and thus know what it is like to have one. But perhaps
few of us have had a headache of such intensity that words cannot describe how awful it is. Most of us have had to go
hungry for a day or two, but few of us, dear Reader, have felt the pangs of hunger of the sort felt by a person who is
starving. Similarly, perhaps few of us have felt every emotion to an extreme: abject fear, utter despair, amour fou,
gnawing envy, insane jealousy. I would not want to say of us that we do not have a complete grasp or full mastery of
the concept of fear, despair, love, envy, or jealousy just because we have not felt them to this intensity. But at the same
time, if, for example, the most intense despair Harriet had ever experienced was on the occasion of losing her pet
hamster, and this feeling was over in a couple of days, she would surely not be speaking truly if she said to someone in
utter despair at the death in a car-crash of his whole family, ‘I know what you are feeling’, in the sense of knowing what
it is like. Imaginative extrapolation from the one experience will not get Harriet there, any more than I can extrapolate
from the experience of missing both lunch and supper to knowing what it is like to be starving. Concept possession, as
I said at the beginning of this discussion, is an ability which comes in degrees, and I can now add that part of what it is
to have a grasp of an emotion concept, namely knowing what it is like to experience the emotion, comes in degrees
also.
So far, then, I have been discussing the notion of the recognition–response tie in relation to a typical sort of
upbringing, and comparing it with how someone can gain a less than complete grasp of the relevant concepts without
this typical sort of upbringing. There are other ways we can be brought up too. Someone can be badly brought up, as
poacher rather than as gamekeeper so to speak: he can be brought up to recognize situations as emotion-invoking but
to respond in quite a different sort of way to how the rest of us are brought up—to respond with a quite different and
inappropriate emotion perhaps. For example, one might be brought up to respond
EMOTIONS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATION
35
to the dangerous with a thrill of excitement. Or one might not be brought up a poacher, but rather come to be a
poacher in later life—for example, the torturer who learns to be truly sensitive to the suffering of his victim, and who
is moved not to sympathy but to pleasure at inflicting such suffering. And someone can be brought up badly in another
way: to respond in the same sort of way as the rest of us, that is with the same sort of emotion, but disproportionately.
For example, a child who is brought up by very timorous parents might respond with fear to all sorts of thing which
the rest of us consider to be not really dangerous at all: the occasional wasp or a horse in a nearby field at the picnic;
the shooting gallery or the dodgems at the fair; the perfectly friendly dog in the park. This timorousness might well
continue in later life, so that his responses, although certainly intelligible, are not proportionate. Adequately to explain
or make sense of why he, a mature individual, is so afraid of this wasp at the picnic, it is not sufficient to point to the
determinate features of the wasp (its having a painful sting), for the rest of us agree that it has these features, and that
these features merit fear to some degree, but we do not consider it to merit this degree of fear. What we need to do to
explain why he feels as he does is to look into the aetiology of his disposition to respond in this way—the narrative of
his upbringing, and of his failure to shake off the timorousness which he picked up from his parents. Thus we cannot
fully make sense of the emotional experience without taking into account the larger narrative of which it is a part, and,
in particular, without taking account of his character trait.
The gamekeeper-poacher and the timid picnicker are examples of how someone can, on an occasion, respond
inappropriately or disproportionately as a result of having a certain sort of disposition: their recognition–response tie is
not as it should be. This is a subject to which I will return in Chapter 6. But what I want to turn to now is how a
person whose emotions have been educated as they should be could, on an occasion, have the relevant recognitional
thought yet fail to have the related emotion. At this point, we must distinguish two elements of the response which
have so far not been distinguished: feelings of fear, and motivating thoughts—typically desires. (One might broadly
characterize these elements as the affective and the conative.) I shall discuss these two elements separately here,
although I will return to the first in the next chapter.
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It is indeed possible to recognize something as, say, dangerous, and yet not feel fear. (Remember that I am considering
here the person brought up normally, not the person whose use of the concept piggybacks on the normal use.) There
might be one or more of a variety of possible explanations of why this happens on an occasion, and I consider some of
them in Chapter 3. But there is a special, emotionally charged way of recognizing something as dangerous which does
entail that I will feel fear of it, and this way is what I have called feeling towards: feeling fear towards something is
thinking of it as dangerous in that special way which involves feeling fear. What I will argue in Chapter 3 is that the
content of the recognition in feeling towards is different from the content of the recognition where no emotion is
involved. There is thus, in respect of the feeling element of the emotional response, this very intimate connection
between recognition and response, simply because feeling towards is thinking of with feeling, and differs in respect of
content from merely thinking of without feeling.
The second element of the response is the motivation. Here it seems to me that the connection is weaker: I can
recognize something as dangerous and not be motivated at all to act as I ought—in the way I was brought up to act in
response to what is dangerous. And this could be so even if I had feelings of fear towards that thing. Again, there are a
variety of possible explanations of why I might not be motivated to act as I ought. I might at the time be experiencing
different emotions which motivate me otherwise, not just by outweighing my motivations out of fear (for this would
not be a counter-example), but by eliminating them entirely or by preventing them from ever arising. For example, a
soldier in battle might be so committed to his squadron's aim of taking that machine-gun nest that he feels no
motivation appropriate to fear as he advances, even though he sees the dangers. One might deny the possibility of such
an example, insisting that it must be explained either by his not seeing the situation as dangerous, or by his being
motivated to some extent by fear. But there is no reason for this denial other than the prior prejudice that a certain failure
to be motivated appropriately is impossible. Consider a different example: I might love someone very much and have
the opportunity to see her in very congenial circumstances, and yet on this occasion have no motivation at all to be
with her. Does this mean that I do not really love her, or that (as someone might say rather pompously) I do not know
what love
EMOTIONS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATION
37
is? Again, it is surely only prior prejudice which would lead one to say such things. To repeat, someone can be educated
to recognize situations as emotion-invoking, and to respond with appropriate motivations, and can still, on an
occasion, fail to be so motivated. This failure does not show he is not having the emotion after all, or that he does not
have a proper grasp of the concept. The dangerous is, indeed, what merits fear, but it does not follow from this
conceptual truth that I will always respond fearfully to what I recognize as dangerous. The answer to the question of
whether or not someone has a grasp of a concept is to be found through considering the history of his psychological
development, and not every time a situation ‘presents itself ’. An occasional failure to respond appropriately is
consistent both with having the emotion and with having the concept of the emotion.7
I now turn to a more detailed consideration of the explanatory role of the intentional elements of an emotion. Even if
mental states such as toothaches are intentional, in the sense of being directed towards an object, the intentional
elements of an emotion play a much wider explanatory role in our psychology and our behaviour: they ought to be
able to make intelligible the emotion of which they are a part, as we saw earlier with envy; and they ought to be able to
explain action out of the emotion, showing why, from the agent's perspective, it was the thing to do. It is to these
explanations that I turn, and to further dangers of belief-desire accounts leading to over-intellectualization of the
emotions.
Explanation of an Emotion and of Action out of Emotion
Jane hits Jim. Why did she do this? Perhaps she did it out of anger, and she was angry because she thought that Jim
had insulted her. I will explore an account which fleshes out these explanations in terms
7
This discussion is closely related to issues concerning internalism in ethics. See Williams (1995: 569) and Blackburn (1998: ch. 3) for the view, parallel to the one I am
putting forward, that there is an internal, but not strict, relation in ethical thought between recognition and motivational response; as Blackburn nicely puts it (1998: 65):
‘externalists can have individual cases, but internalism wins the war’. However, there is a significant difference between the two issues: so far as emotions are concerned the
relevant response is not just motivation but also feeling.
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of the thoughts involved, and then I will make a number of criticisms of it. Essentially I want to resist the overintellectualization of the emotions and action out of emotion which these sorts of explanation can suggest. The sort of
account I have in mind is something like the one put forward by Donald Davidson in respect of what he calls
‘propositional emotions’ (1976). Whether it is, precisely, Davidson's account which I outline does not concern me; for
it is, I believe, one which is commonly held, either explicitly or implicitly. Having criticized this sort of overintellectualizing account, I put forward an alternative—one which seeks to make an emotional response intelligible
from the agent's perspective.
I will begin with an explanation of the emotional episode: Jane's becoming angry with Jim. What are the intentional
elements involved? One suggestion is as follows: they are attitudes and beliefs, which are related syllogistically. There is
thus a major or universal premise which is a dispositional attitude, and a minor or particular premise which is a belief;
and these premises lead to a conclusion which is the motive or primary reason. So Jane might have the following
thoughts:
(U)Jane has an unfavourable attitude towards people who make unjustified insults.
(P)Jane believes that Jim insulted her without justification.
(C)Jane has an unfavourable attitude towards Jim in so far as he has insulted her without justification.
And Jane's unfavourable attitude towards Jim (C) is her anger with Jim.
But (C) alone is not sufficient to explain her action, although (C) will explain her having a further pro-attitude or desire:
(D)Jane desires to get her own back on Jim.
Jane has this desire because getting one's own back is the sort of thing which angry people want to do. This desire (D)
then combines with a belief, and specifically with a means–end belief:
(B)Jane believes that the best means of getting her own back on Jim is to hit the person whom she believes to be
Jim.
And (D) and (B) then serve to explain the action:
(A)Jane hits Jim.
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39
So, there are two distinct explanations here, the first of Jane's anger at Jim (C), and the second of Jane's action, her
hitting Jim (A). Thus, reading backwards as it were, we can say that Jane hits Jim because she wanted to get her own
back, and because she believed that this was the best means of doing so, given the circumstances. Note that this may
sound a trivial sort of explanation, and in a sense it is, but it would not sound trivial if Jane hit Herbert, thinking that
Herbert was Jim; thus (B) would be at fault. And the reason—the primary reason—why Jane wanted to get her own
back on Jim is that she was angry with him, and she was angry with him because she believed that she had been
insulted by him. Again, this may sound trivial, but it would not sound trivial if Jane's belief, (P), were false and she had
really been insulted by Herbert.
Perhaps the first thing that might strike one about this sort of account is that the explanations proffered are perfectly
consistent with Jane experiencing no emotion at all. And if this is so, surely something has gone badly—and
fundamentally—wrong. I think a large part of the difficulty here can be traced to a particular philosoph-ical conception
of an action and thus of what is to be explained. Consider two particular actions of a hitting of B by A: in the first
action, A is angry with B; and in the second action, A is not angry with B—imagine here the Mafia chief who might
have an unfavourable attitude towards people who do not treat him with due respect, and who might seek his revenge
coldly, without experiencing any anger at all. According to this conception, both actions can be fully explained by
reference to the sorts of belief and desire which I have been discussing. So what could be provided, on this account, to
distinguish the angry action from the action not done out of anger? Well, the explanation might mention anger, perhaps:
so we might say that (C) above is anger, even though it is perfectly possible to deduce (C) from (U) and (P), neither of
which makes any mention at all of anger. And then, if there are further features of the angry action which have to be
explained—such as, say, a certain sort of trembling as the blow is struck—then these can be separated off as
perturbations of rational activity and causally explained by reference perhaps to the physiology of emotion.
This sort of conception seems to me to be quite alien to the nature of emotion and of emotional experience. There is
an important and fundamental contrast between an action done out of an emotion and an action which merely ‘goes
through the motions’. It is not true
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that precisely the same sort of action can be done, sometimes with emotion and sometimes without, where the
emotion is taken as comprising feelingless belief and desire, plus something which is not directed towards the object of
the emotion—a psychological add-on (a visceral feeling perhaps), or a purely physiological add-on (a visceral change
perhaps), or both.8 The person who thinks that additions like these are sufficient to distinguish emotional thought and
action from unemotional thought and action is the add-on theorist. Against this view stands the phenomenology.
Consider doing these things unemotionally: striking a blow; making love; seeking safety. Now consider, and contrast,
acting when you act out of emotion: angrily striking the blow; making love passionately; fearfully running away. The
phenomenology of such actions—what it is like for the agent—is fundamentally different in character. And an action
done with feeling can be distinct in its phenomenology not just for the agent, but also for others involved directly or
peripherally in the action; one just has to think what it is like to be made love to with feeling for this to be obvious: it is
not like being made love to without feeling, plus feeling. Acting out of emotion is not acting without emotion
(explained by feelingless beliefs and desires) plus some added-on ingredient or ingredients. Rather, when an action is
done out of an emotion, the whole action, and the whole experience of the action, is fundamentally different.
This, then, is my diagnosis of the attraction of those add-on theories which appeal to feelingless beliefs and desires as
the only explanatory intentional states which are involved: action out of emotion is not fundamentally different from
other sorts of action; so it can and must be explained, or made intelligible, just like other sorts of action, by appealing
to feelingless beliefs and desires; then, once these explanatory beliefs and desires are in place, postulation of any further
intentional state—one essentially involving feeling—in order to explain the action comes to seem otiose. So, on this
diagnosis, the intentionality of feeling involved in emotional thought comes to be forced out of the picture by the
apparent explanatory sufficiency of feelingless belief and desire to explain emotional action. This will be the subject of a
more extended discussion in the next chapter, where the notion of feeling towards will help to explain what is so
8
It might be said that the visceral feeling is intentional, as it is directed towards the viscera. This may well be true (I think it is), but the point remains that this sort of feeling is
not directed towards the object of the emotion.
EMOTIONS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATION
41
fundamentally different about action out of emotion and action not out of emotion but performed for some other
reason. Once this notion has been accepted, it will become clear that the presence of feelingless belief (or belief and
desire) is not, after all, sufficient—or even necessary—for an emotional experience: feelings, and in particular feelings
towards the object of the emotion, are central to emotional experience, and to exclude these feelings from an explanation of
emotion or of action out of emotion is to over-intellectualize them.
This distinction, between action out of emotion and action not out of emotion, is from the personal point of view:
there is a difference in what it is like to act out of emotion and not out of emotion, but in both cases there is something
that it is like. But there is a further distinction to be made, which is between action as such (whether out of emotion or
not), and movements of bits of the body, characterized impersonally. If one were, first, to conflate action out of
emotion with action not out of emotion (involving, perhaps, a gross description of what is done), and then, further, to
conflate action, as such, with mere bodily movements, the idea that an impersonal characterization can be provided of
action out of emotion might seem more tempting. This, in turn, could lead to a further diagnosis of the appeal of addon theories. They are, I think, particularly appealing to a philosophy of mind which divides the mental, and the causes
and effects of the mental, into two contrasting parts: that part which can be characterized impersonally, postulating
inputs, states of the organism, and outputs in broadly information-processing terms; and that part which can only be
characterized personally, in terms of what it is like. In an important paper, Naomi Eilan (1998) has questioned this way
of dividing things, and has suggested that the impersonal characterization, sometimes described as the ‘easy’ problem
(Chalmers 1996), cannot be completed without reference to what it is like, to ‘phenomenal consciousness’. If I am right
about these things: that intentionality, including feeling towards, is entirely and fundamentally personal; that emotion
both is directed towards an object and involves feelings; and that emotional thought and action do not comprise states
of the organism and bodily movements, impersonally characterized, plus something else (say, in this case, phenomenal
consciousness); then this would lend weight to her point.
A second and related way in which these explanations can over-intellectualize the emotions is to be found in the nature
of the beliefs and desires which are deployed in the means–end explanation
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EMOTIONS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATION
of Jane's action out of anger: they are (again) consistent with Jane not being angry, and with her hitting of Jim not being
a hitting out of anger (cf. the discussion in Stocker 1981 and in Smith 1998). (There is a further issue in this area to do
with actions which are expressions of emotion, such as kicking a chair in anger; expression of emotion will be the subject
of Chapter 5.) The point can best be explained by an example concerning an action out of love. Your wife has just
come home after a terrible journey, and sinks exhausted into a chair. You get up and make her a cup of tea, and this is
an action you do out of love for her. It is therefore, as I have argued above, a fundamentally different sort of action
from one not done out of love, and thus calls for a distinct sort of explanation. But it does not follow from this
requirement that the two explanations cannot also contain many thoughts in common—ones which explain why you
made the cup of tea—set out as means–end belief-desire explanations. There could be a desire to cheer her up and a
belief that making her a cup of tea is the best way of doing this; and there could be a desire to make her a cup of tea,
and a belief that the best way of doing this is to do what you are doing (put the kettle on, and so forth). And there may
well be more explanatory thoughts in common: in both cases, perhaps, you saw that she was exhausted and you
remembered the sort of tea she likes. (Of course if you did not love her you would, perhaps, be less likely to have had
these thoughts, but obviously you could have had them if you did not love her.) But there is one explanation that only
has a place where the action is done out of love, and another explanation that only has a place where it is not the case
that the action was done out of love. The first sort of explanation might be given where someone (a child, a
philosopher) rather tiresomely keeps on and on asking you why you did what you did, and you have given all the
reasons you can think of: ‘She looked exhausted, I felt awful for her, and I thought a cup of tea would cheer her up’
and so forth. Then in despair you shrug your shoulders and say ‘Because I love her’. This is not to give a further reason,
for there is no further reason; it is rather to put in context all the reasons that you have already given—all the episodes
of thought and feeling which are involved—by placing them in the narrative as part of the love you have for her. The
complex web of thoughts and feelings is thus summarized, or concertinaed so to speak, into a single explanatory
phrase: ‘Because I love her’, and your having these thoughts and feelings are made primitively
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43
intelligible by reference to your emotion and to the dispositions which the emotion involves. An emotional thought or
feeling is primitively intelligible if it cannot be better explained by anything else other than the emotion of which it is a
part; thus, Jane's desire to get her own back on Jim (D) is primitively intelligible—it is just the sort of desire which
angry people paradigmatically have. The second sort of explanation, one which only has a place where the action is not
done out of love, is that you did it in order to do a loving act, because this is the sort of thing which loving people do,
or that you did it for the sake of love. Of course, it is consistent with loving a person that you do something for the
sake of your love, but it is not consistent with an action out of love that it be done for the sake of love. If something is
done for the sake of love, the explanatory thoughts and feelings are not made primitively intelligible by reference to the
emotion: further explanation is necessary. Where the answer is that you made her a cup of tea for the sake of your love,
there is always room to ask for a further explanation which is ‘outwith’ your love, to use the Scots phrase: perhaps you
did it for the sake of your love in order to reassure her that you love her; and perhaps you wanted to reassure her
because you thought she was not sure that you loved her; and so on. But where the reason is ‘Because I love her’, there
is no need for further explanation ‘outwith’ your love. Acting out of emotion is not the same as, and is not reducible to,
acting for the sake of an emotion.
The third and final way in which the explanations I have outlined tend to over-intellectualize the emotions and action
out of emotion is well brought out by Gabrielle Taylor (1985), and by an example she gives. She asks what part the
universal pro-attitude (U) plays in making sense of Jane's emotion. This is not the same question as whether a suitable
universal is available. For what is at issue is whether this unfavourable attitude towards other people who make
unjustified insults is a prior dispositional commitment of Jane's, or whether it is merely something which Jane is
subsequently committed to, as a matter of consistency, in virtue of having this emotional response. To draw out this
point, Taylor's central example is of humiliation, drawn from a passage near the end of James Joyce's short story ‘The
Dead’. It is a marvellous example, and as I cannot hope to improve on it, I trust she will forgive me for using it here.
Taylor sets the scene like this: ‘The protagonist, Gabriel, has spent the evening at a party given by his aunts, where his
function was to
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EMOTIONS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATION
see that all went smoothly, and to make the after-dinner speech. He is now alone with his wife Gretta and has just been
listening to her reminiscences. She has been telling him of a boy, a boy employed in the gas-works who years ago was in
love with her and who died, she thinks, for her sake. Gabriel tries to stop her telling the tale by making ironic
comments, but she does not even notice that this is what he is doing’ (1985: 8–9). Taylor then goes on to quote Joyce:
Gabriel felt humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the evocation of this figure from the dead, a boy in the
gasworks. While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she
had been comparing him in her mind with another. A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He
saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a penny-boy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist,
orating to vulgarians and idealizing on his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of
in the mirror. (ibid. 9)
What is the universal to which Gabriel might be committed as a matter of consistency in virtue of his feeling of
humiliation? Might it be the thought that anyone should feel humiliated if he is full of memories of a secret life together
while he is being compared in her mind with another (ibid. 10)? Surely Gabriel might think that it is only people like
him who would have such feelings. But perhaps it is only the presence of his other thoughts and feelings that very evening
that explain why he now feels humiliated. So perhaps we need something like ‘for someone who already thinks of
himself as inadequate in other respects, the present situation is mortifying’ (ibid. 11). But, as Taylor insists, this
universal does not explain his feeling humiliated; this would be to get the order of explanation in reverse. The point is
that even if Gabriel were committed to some such universal, and one can presumably be found on the grounds of the
requirement for consistency, the universal would play no role in explaining his emotion which would not already be
filled by his particular thoughts and feelings which arose that very evening. Rather than over-intellectualizing the
reasoning into a syllogistic form as does Davidson, with the universal as major premise, it would be better, as Taylor
says, to look more widely to all sorts of earlier events and other thoughts and feelings which Gabriel has had in the
past, and to his character more generally, in order to make sense of why he feels as he does on this occasion. As Taylor
puts it, ‘the constraints
EMOTIONS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATION
45
on what is explanatory are not provided by what must be the case in all rationality. The appeal is no longer to the
wholly rational being; it is to the admittedly far less neat and precise notion of what it would be human and natural for
a person to feel under certain circumstances, given that person's relevant other beliefs and attitudes’ (ibid. 14). My
notion of narrative structure captures the same essential point. Gabriel's emotional experience cannot be adequately
made sense of in abstraction from the narrative in which it is embedded, and, in the light of that narrative, including his
other emotions, moods, and character, we can come to see his emotion as intelligible in the circumstances; and, to the
extent that we might consider Gabriel's feelings to be inappropriate or disproportionate, we can also come to see why
they might be so.
But I would go further than Taylor in her resistance to the over-intellectualization of the emotions. Taylor wants, quite
rightly, to resist the model when it relates the attitudes and beliefs which explain the emotion syllogistically; rather, there
may be a complex, dynamic structure of episodes of thought which serve to make sense of the emotion. However, she
still rather suggests a picture where the beliefs which are involved have to be firmly in place as part of the agent's
psychology prior to, or at the same time as, the emotion if they are to be explanatory in the required way. (I infer this to
be her view because her reason for rejecting the postulation of a universal as explanatory is that it need not be in place
in this way.) As Taylor puts it in one example, ‘I am afraid of the snake because its bite is poisonous and poison would
harm me’ (ibid. 2).
I believe that many of our emotional experiences are not like this: there seems to me to be too much talk of belief, and
not enough talk of feeling, perception, and imagination. The point is not easy to express, but what often happens, I
think, is that we first have an emotional response towards an object, a feeling which is often quite primitive in ways
which I will be trying to elucidate in later chapters. Then, in self-interpretation, when we become reflectively aware of
this feeling towards the object of the emotion (as we reflective beings are sometimes able to do), we also normally seek
to make it intelligible by looking for the identificatory and explanatory beliefs of the sort which Taylor discusses. What
really comes first is the emotional response itself—the feeling of fear towards the snake—and not the thought that its
bite is poisonous and the thought that poison would harm me.
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Perhaps there is a more primitive story to be told about many of our emotional responses, particularly those which,
intuitively, we have in common with many other animals. Let us return for a moment to the recognition–response tie in
respect of fear, and consider how an episode of fear might occur in the psychology of a zebra. Intuitively, one wants to
say that there is some sort of primitive fearful recognition by the zebra of, say, the lion, and a response simply in terms
of visceral reactions and an impulse towards flight. And perhaps it is just this sort of recognition and response which
can be operative in we humans when we respond ‘primitively’.
Consider these two stories, both involving fear. In the first, you hear the news that the international pharmaceutical
company for which you work is to merge with another of roughly equal size, and that there will be significant
redundancies in the research and development department where you work. You have not been there for long, and so
the redundancy cost of getting rid of you will be relatively low. Furthermore, you are aware that you have not had any
notable research successes recently. As a result of these and other thoughts and deliberations, you become afraid that
you will be made redundant, and you start to look for another job because you want to avoid being without work. This
is, note, genuine fear that you now feel (as is only too clear when you wake at four o'clock in the morning, bathed in
sweat), and it is fear which explains your action.
In the second story, you are wandering across the road with your thoughts—in that excellent phrase—‘miles away’,
and you suddenly see a bus coming towards you. In fear, you throw yourself out of the way of the bus.
I think that beliefs and desires can be appealed to in order to explain both of these emotional responses. But there does
seem to be some sort of significant difference in the role of beliefs and desires in explaining the two responses. Of
course one difference is that, in the first story, you are very likely to be aware of your beliefs and desires at the time of
the emotional experience, and perhaps aware of them as featuring in your practical reasoning, whereas in the second
story this is less likely. But there is more to the difference than that: in the second story, there seems to be good reason
to say that the beliefs and desires which make sense of the emotional response do not also causally explain the
emotional response: as one might say, they come too late for that.
EMOTIONS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATION
47
This is not as revisionary as it might sound. The idea is not that there is no causal psychological explanation of an
action out of fear such as jumping away from the oncoming bus, for surely it was, after all, something that you
recognized about the bus which causally explains your feelings about it and why you did what you did. It is, rather, just
the idea that dubbing the psychological episodes involved as beliefs gives them all too intellectual a flavour in explaining
such an action: for example, a person's beliefs ought to meet certain rationality constraints, such as being consistent
and coherent. It is as though we almost have to post-rationalize the bus story by ascribing the right beliefs, in order to
throw light onto the emotional response in the context in which it is set. Post-rationalization here does not imply
‘making up’ the beliefs we are to ascribe; ascription of the beliefs which Taylor talks of can be correct or incorrect,
appropriate or inappropriate. But correct and appropriate ascription of such beliefs need not imply, I think, that these
beliefs need play a causal role in explaining the emotional response.
The recognition–response tie which I have introduced is meant to be sufficiently protean that it can accommodate, at
the one extreme, psychological episodes as complex and sophisticated as those involved in the fear of being made
redundant, and, at the other extreme, psychological episodes as primitive and animal-like as those involved in fear of the
oncoming bus. This, I agree, leaves me with the tasks of saying just how some of our more primitive emotional
responses are ‘animal-like’, and of saying what the nature of these primitive responses is. I will be trying, rather
inadequately, to fulfil these tasks in the next two chapters.
Conclusion
There are, then, a number of ways in which explanations of the emotions and of action out of the emotions in terms of
beliefs and desires can over-intellectualize the emotions. But, nevertheless, there is much that is profoundly right about
accounts of emotion which place emphasis on their intentionality and on the sorts of commonsense psychological
explanations of emotion and action out of emotion which I have been discussing—just so long as those explanations
do not over-intellectualize them. I will end this chapter by summarizing what is right about them.
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First, when we have an emotion, we are engaged with the world, grasping what is going on in the world, and responding
accordingly. Psychological states like headaches or toothaches may be intentional, being directed towards a condition
of one's body, but the thoughts and feelings in an emotional experience are (at least typically) directed towards objects
in the world, beyond the bounds of our bodies.
Secondly, an emotional experience, and action out of the emotion, can be made intelligible by reference to the thoughts
which are involved in it. An emotion can be groundless if it is based on false perceptions or beliefs, and it can be
irrational if it is based on irrationally formed beliefs. And emotion, and action out of emotion, can be assessed for
appropriateness and proportionality.
Thirdly, the emotions can be educated; in bringing up a child we use the child's capability for emotional experience, and
our own emotional responses, to educate him or her to recognize certain things as meriting a certain sort of emotional
response. And, through this process of education, the child's responses can come to be both appropriate and
proportionate.
Fourthly, the emotions partially shape and determine what we value. As Hume says (Enquiries: 209): ‘If I have no
vanity, I take no delight in praise: if I be void of ambition, power gives me no enjoyment: if I be not angry, the
punishment of an adversary is totally indifferent to me. In all these cases there is a passion which points immediately to
the object, and constitutes it our good or happiness’. It is thus wrong to say, as does, for example, Paul Griffiths, that
the emotions are conceived of as ‘relatively unintegrated, irruptive sources of motivation’ (Griffiths 1997: 243), and
that ‘The vernacular concept of emotion is an attempt to mark out a category of psychological states which produce
behaviour not integrated into long-term, planned action’ (ibid.). On the contrary, the emotion of being proud of my
son for his academic achievement, or the emotion of loving my wife, hardly needs to be irruptive or to produce
behaviour unintegrated into long-term, planned action. There is a contrast in commonsense psychology which we
would do well to bear in mind here: the contrast between being emotional and having an emotion (see Parrott 1995).
Griffiths' remarks are, if anything, appropriate to being emotional.
Fifthly, and following on from this last point, our emotional responses can reveal to us what we value, and what we
value might
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49
not be epistemically accessible to us if we did not have such responses (cf. Stocker 1996). Recall how a feeling of
Schadenfreude might reveal to you that you had been envious of the other's success. Or I, an Englishman, might think
that I have contempt for everything English, and think that I have no pride in being English; yet when abroad I
suddenly feel a surge of pride when someone says what a wonderful place England must be to live in. Or—a common
enough experience, I think—I might be critical of my parents or siblings to others who are not part of the family; but if
you make the mistake of joining in the criticisms, you will find that I turn angrily and vehemently against you, and start
fiercely to defend my relations, for after all I really do love them, as my angry response reveals to me and to you.
Sixthly therefore, and finally, we should respect our emotional responses, and listen to what they have to say to us and
about us. But they are not the final arbiter: our emotional responses should be held up for examination and reflection.
Of course, this cannot be done from an emotionless, purely rational perspective, for there is no such standpoint, but it
should be done in the light of reason and of our other emotional responses to the other things we value. And if this
examination and reflection shows us that our emotional responses are not appropriate, then the emotion should cease.
That it may not is important, and I will come to why and how it may not in the next chapter.
3 Emotions and Feelings
Introduction
Feelings are an intimate and familiar part of emotional experience; without feelings, emotions would not be what they
are. A common complaint levelled at over-intellectualizing, belief-desire accounts of the emotions is that they fail to do
justice to this fact. It might be characterized as the Mr Spock complaint, named after the character from another planet
in the first Star Trek series who is extremely rational yet has no emotions: for it does seem to be possible to have all the
beliefs and desires which are typical of an emotional experience and yet, like Mr Spock, not have that emotion; so
beliefs and desires are not sufficient for emotional experience.
A discussion of feelings, however, is notoriously difficult to conduct; it is hard both to describe feelings, and to capture
their rightful place in the emotions and in explanation of how we act out of the emotions. Because of these difficulties,
there is the temptation, which I mentioned towards the end of Chapter 2, to put feelings to one side for as long as
possible, in the hope of giving as full an account of emotion as can be given without feelings, and in the hope of
adequately explaining, or making sense of, action out of emotion just in terms of feelingless beliefs and desires,
perhaps characterized impersonally. Then, according to this view, feelings should emerge as a separate component to
round off the account—an add-on—comprising perhaps just awareness of the physiological changes involved in
emotion, and quite distinct from any intentional elements. This approach does not do justice to the fundamental
importance of feelings in emotional experience.
I want to argue for a significantly different approach, one which puts the personal point of view and the intentionality
of feelings at
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51
centre stage in emotional experience. I will be discussing two broad categories of emotional feeling: bodily feelings,
such as the feeling of your heart racing; and—the notion I introduced in Chapter 2—feelings towards, such as feeling
fear towards a snake which you suddenly see on your path. My discussion of feelings towards will, in particular, bring
into focus three elements which a moment's reflection will show to be missing from a feelingless belief-desire account:
perception; imagination; and, of course, emotional feelings towards an object perceived or imagined in some way.
However, making these distinctions between sorts of feeling is not part of a project to show that feelings are to be
understood atomistically, or that they are always epistemologically distinct, so that, for each type of emotion, there will
be a distinctive phenomenology—something which it is like—which is the essence of that type of emotion. The best
understanding of a person's emotions will take account of the distinctions I will be discussing, but will nevertheless be
holistic in its overall approach, seeing feelings as embedded in an emotion's narrative, as part of the person's life. Two
ideas which I want to explore will show just how integrated and entangled feelings are with other elements of one's
psychological life. The first idea is that bodily feelings can have a sort of intentionality which is ‘borrowed’ from the
intentionality of feeling towards. The second idea is that the emotional feeling involved in feeling towards is essentially
bound up with content—with what the feeling is directed towards: content properly captured, from the personal point
of view, is essentially emotion-involving, so that there could not be content captured in that way without the person
experiencing the emotion as he does.
I will now turn to the first sort of feeling I wish to consider, which I will call bodily feeling.
Bodily Feeling
Bodily feeling involves consciousness—from the inside, so to speak—of the condition of your body, or of changes to
it, such as muscular reactions (including changes in facial expression), hormonal changes, and changes to the
autonomic nervous system; I will call these bodily changes. It is very important here, and in what follows,
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that I am concerned with the feeling of bodily changes, not with the bodily changes themselves. That is to say, I am
concerned with the phenomenology or the qualitative nature of our personal experience of these changes rather than
with the impersonally observable, and quantitatively measurable, changes themselves.9 It does not follow, however, that
we cannot talk third-personally of how another person feels; we are not restricted to talking impersonally in the sense
just used. When we say of someone, for example, that he feels his heart racing, we are saying something about how it is
for him—about the qualitative nature of his experience from the personal point of view; that is, from his point of view
(cf. Williams 1978: 295–6 and McDowell 1985a, esp. 395 and n. 24).
Intuitively, it might seem rather obvious that bodily feelings which are characteristic of an emotional experience are not
necessary for it. (They also seem not to be sufficient, for they can be caused in some way which has nothing to do with
an emotional experience; furthermore, first-personal authority about this cannot be relied upon—subjects can, and do,
‘confabulate’; see Nisbett and Wilson 1977 and Griffiths 1997.) They seem not to be necessary for at least two reasons,
which I will explore in some detail: it is possible to have an emotion which involves bodily changes, but without having
bodily feelings—without being conscious of the bodily changes which are part of the emotion; and it surely seems
correct to say that there are certain sorts of emotion which might have associated feelings, but which do not have
associated bodily feelings (pride, perhaps).
In spite of these apparent intuitions, William James, in his famous paper ‘What is an Emotion?’ (1884),10 insists that,
without bodily feelings, there would be no emotion:
9
So far as the bodily changes themselves are concerned, there are therefore a number of issues which are not relevant here, including: whether there are impersonally
observable bodily changes for all emotions; and whether impersonally observable bodily changes are sufficient to differentiate between types of emotion. For discussion, see,
for example, Gordon (1987) and Griffiths (1997). One thing is certain though: impersonally observed bodily changes are not sufficient to determine what an emotion is
directed towards; more on this later.
10
James's paper was the subject of consistent opposition from those who advocated belief-desire accounts of the emotions; see, for example, Kenny (1963). But James is now
having a considerable revival, partly, I think, due to rising dissatisfaction with how belief-desire accounts tend to neglect the importance of feelings; see, for example,
Damasio (1994), Stocker (1983), and Wollheim (1999).
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Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colourless,
destitute of emotional warmth. We might see the bear, and judge it best to run, receive the insult and deem it right
to strike, but we could not actually feel afraid or angry. (190)
This reads as if it is the bodily changes which are required for there to be an emotion, not the bodily feelings, but James
can put it like this because, he says, all bodily changes are felt: ‘every one of the bodily changes, whatsoever it be, is felt,
acutely or obscurely, the moment it occurs’ (192). So it is not really the bodily changes which are the emotion, as the
above citation suggests, but rather the feelings which necessarily accompany them: ‘every change that occurs must be
felt’ (193). The whole position is stated with characteristic verve:
What kind of emotion of fear would be left, if the feelings neither of quickened heart-beats nor of shallow
breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose-flesh nor of visceral stirrings, were
present, it is quite impossible to think. Can one fancy the state of rage and picture no ebullition of it in the chest, no
flushing of the face, no dilation of the nostrils, no clenching of the teeth, no impulse to vigorous action, but in their
stead limp muscles, calm breathing, and a placid face? The present writer, for one, certainly cannot. The rage is as
completely evaporated as the sensations of its so-called manifestations, and the only thing that can possibly be
supposed to take its place is some cold-blooded and dispassionate judicial sentence, confined entirely to the
intellectual realm, to the effect that a certain person or persons merit chastisement for their sins. In like manner of
grief: what would it be without its tears, its suffocation of the heart, its pang in the breast-bone? A feelingless
cognition that certain circumstances are deplorable, and nothing more. Every passion in turn tells the same story. A
purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity. (194)
So James rejects the first intuitively obvious reason why bodily feelings are not necessary for an emotion: for James it is
not possible for you to be, for example, angry and yet not feel angry, since, for him, being angry and feeling angry both
just are bodily feelings, caused by a perception. Although he only expressly considers those emotions ‘that have a
distinct bodily expression’ (189), James also wants to reject the other intuitive reason why bodily feelings are not
necessary for an emotion: that certain sorts of emotion do not have typical bodily feelings. What James says here is
both interesting and important for what follows. He admits that there are ‘moral, intellectual and aesthetic feelings’
(201), but he insists, first, that such
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feelings are not sufficient for an emotion ‘unless in them [the ‘cerebral emotions’] there actually be coupled with the
intellectual feeling a bodily reverberation of some kind’ (201), and, secondly, that ‘as a matter of fact the intellectual
feeling hardly ever does exist thus unaccompanied’ (202). Without the ‘emotional flush and thrill’ (203), all you have is
pure cognition.
I find myself wholeheartedly in agreement with the spirit of what James says, and the emphasis he puts on feelings—for
example, when he contrasts the feeling of grief with ‘a feelingless cognition that certain circumstances are deplorable’.
To my mind, however, in his emphasis on feelings he goes too far in two directions, both of them against the two
intuitions I have been discussing. I want to show that we can retain these intuitions without losing any of the spirit of
James's view.
First, as we have seen, James insists that all bodily changes must be felt—that one must be conscious of those changes
(without saying anything about what this consciousness must consist of). But surely we can experience an emotion and
undergo a bodily change yet not feel that bodily change. To consider an extreme example, it is possible to be so
terrified on first being exposed to shelling in the trenches that you defecate, and yet do not feel that bodily change until
much later. Are we to say, then, that there is no emotion here, but just a ‘feelingless cognition’ of the shellfire? Surely
not. This point I will return to later, when I consider feelings towards.
And secondly, a point which I will address now, James insists that the consciousness has to be of bodily changes, leaving
no obvious place for feelings towards, or what Michael Stocker (1983) has called ‘psychic feelings’. I say that James
leaves no obvious place because it is not entirely clear that all the feelings which he refers to really are simply feelings of
bodily changes. Grief's ‘suffocation of the heart’ and its ‘pang in the breast-bone’ are evocative, almost poetic, phrases,
and I have no quarrel with their use. But are these feelings really purely bodily feelings? I want to suggest that they are
not, and that they have a sort of ‘borrowed intentionality’.
What do I mean by this obscure feature of borrowed intentionality which bodily feelings can have? I do not find this at
all easy to express, but let me begin with what James says:
An object falls on a sense-organ and is apperceived by the appropriate cortical centre; or else the latter, excited in
some other way, gives rise to an
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idea of the same object. Quick as a flash, the reflex currents pass down through their pre-ordained channels, alter
the condition of muscle, skin and viscus; and these alterations, apperceived like the original object, in as many
specific portions of the cortex, combine with it in consciousness and transform it from an object-simplyapprehended into an object-emotionally-felt. (1884: 203)
James's phrase ‘combine with it in consciousness’ is suggestive rather than precise, and I have no comment on his
neurophysiology (remember, my interest here is only in feelings). But the phrase rings true, I think, at least in respect of
those emotional experiences which are more passionately felt: when we talk, taking James's own example, of a grieving
person feeling a pang in the breastbone, we want to say that the pang is a pang for the one who is being grieved over;
although it is undoubtedly a feeling of something bodily, and can be pointed to as being in the chestbone, what makes
it a pang of grief, rather than any old pang in the breastbone, is surely that it has been, as James says, ‘combined in
consciousness’ with the object of the emotion. (Notably, however, not all bodily feelings caused by an emotion have
this feature. For example, if every time I think of the Prince of Wales I get angry, and being angry gives me indigestion
or a splitting headache, there is no borrowed intentionality in these bodily feelings. In this case, the bodily feeling is not
part of the emotion; it is merely an effect of it.)
I might make more clear what I mean by the borrowed intentionality of bodily feelings if I contrast two sorts of view
about the feelings involved in the emotions; neither of these views is James's because each allows both sorts of feeling:
feeling towards and bodily feelings. According to one sort of view, there are these two sorts of feeling involved in an
emotional experience: feelings towards, which are directed towards the object of the emotion; and bodily feelings,
whose intentionality is restricted entirely to being directed towards the condition of the body. This view seems to me to
be false to the phenomenology of emotional experience. According to the other sort of view—the one which I
endorse—our entire mind and body is engaged in the emotional experience, and all the feelings are ‘united in
consciousness’ in being directed towards its object: united ‘body and soul’, ‘heart and mind’. For example, sexual desire
is felt with the whole being—body and soul—for the one we desire. And, likewise, our whole being aches in grief for the
one we have lost. I think something of this phenomenology—something of what it is like for
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one's emotion to be felt in this way—is expressed in two passages by Proust in which the narrator, Marcel, is
expressing his feelings towards a woman: in the first, his feelings of longing for Mme de Guermantes; in the second,
his feelings of jealousy towards Albertine.
If a memory, or a sorrow that weighs on us, are capable of leaving us, to the extent that we no longer notice them,
they can also return and sometimes remain with us for a long time. There were evenings when, as I passed through
the town on my way to the restaurant, I felt so keen a longing for Mme de Guermantes that I could scarcely
breathe; it was as though part of my breast had been cut out by a skilled anatomist and replaced by an equal part of
immaterial suffering, by its equivalent in nostalgia and love. And however neatly the wound may have been stitched
together one lives rather uncomfortably when regret for the loss of another person is substituted for one's entrails;
it seems to be occupying more room than they; one feels it perpetually; and besides, what a contradiction in terms
to be obliged to think a part of one's body. (iii. 131)
But one cannot judge in the same way the charms of a person who is external to oneself like every other person,
painted upon the horizon of one's mind, and that of a person who, as a result of an error in localisation consequent
upon certain accidents but nevertheless tenacious, has lodged herself in one's own body to the point where
wondering retrospectively whether or not she looked at a woman on a particular day on the corridor of a little
seaside railway-train causes one the same pain as would a surgeon probing for a bullet in one's heart. (v. 568)
Is this idea of borrowed intentionality just a matter of phenomenology? I find this question difficult to answer. On the
one hand I am tempted to say Yes: it is through association of ideas that it comes to seem as if our bodily feelings are
directed towards the object of our emotion. But on the other hand I am tempted to say No: for although some
emotional feelings are just bodily and entirely lack any intentionality beyond their directedness towards one's body, and
others are clearly just feeling towards with no bodily feeling, there seems to me no reason other than dogma to insist
that all emotional feelings must be simply one or the other, and cannot have features of both. An example might help
here. You are sitting at your desk, struggling with a particularly intractable philosophical problem and getting more and
more frustrated at your inability to find your way out of it. This is an emotional feeling of frustration towards the
object of your emotion—the philosophical problem. Then, perhaps quite suddenly, you come to have a confined
feeling in your
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57
chest, so that it is hard to take a deep breath. This is a bodily feeling. But not just that, because the two feelings are
immediately combined in consciousness: we might say that you feel physically hemmed in by the philosophical
problem; the room suddenly seems so stuffy, and you feel you just have to get up and get some fresh air—to ‘clear my
head’, you might say, as if getting fresh air is clearing up the philosophical problem. So the bodily feeling is thoroughly
infused with the intentionality of the emotion; and, in turn, the feeling towards is infused with a bodily characterization.
For James, the object of the frustration—the philosophical problem—does not become transformed into an ‘objectemotionally-felt’ until there is the bodily feeling to combine in consciousness with the ‘object simply-apprehended’. I
say, rather, that the philosophical problem is an object-emotionally-felt from the moment you begin to feel frustrated
by it, arising (in this case) prior in time to the bodily feeling in your chest of being hemmed in; then, I say, the two
feelings come together in consciousness so that the bodily feeling becomes, through borrowed intentionality, directed
towards the philosophical problem. It may, then, be right that this happens through association of ideas between the
two elements of the emotion's narrative—feeling towards and bodily feeling. But to leave it at that, adding perhaps that
it is just a matter of association of ideas, is to fail to do justice to the phenomenology: emotions are felt, as I have said,
with the whole being, body and soul. Returning to the second passage from Proust, when the narrator feels pain on
wondering what happened at some time in the past, what his thoughts and feelings are engaged with, body and soul, is
‘wondering retrospectively whether or not she looked at a woman on a particular day in the corridor of a little seaside
railway-train’; these thoughts cause him pain in the heart, but it is not the pain qua brute pain with which he is engaged.
So far, then, I have discussed bodily feelings which, I have argued, can have a sort of borrowed intentionality. I turn
now to feeling towards, whose intentionality is directly towards the emotional object in the world, not borrowed. I
want to show why feeling towards cannot be understood as, or reduced to, one or more of any of the other intentional
phenomena which can be involved in an emotion. To support this, I discuss how feeling towards can be, and is,
deployed in commonsense psychology to explain, or make sense of, many of the things which we think and do when
in the grip of an emotion.
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Feeling Towards
As I said in Chapter 2, emotional feeling towards an object (typically towards the object of the emotion) is a feeling
towards that thing as being a particular way or as having certain properties or features. It follows from the worlddirected intentionality of feeling towards that it is not bodily feeling, for bodily feelings lack the required ‘direct’ (as
contrasted with ‘borrowed’) intentionality. No degree of bodily feeling can alone reveal to you what your emotion is
about; the association of ideas is, initially, from the feeling towards to the bodily feeling, and thus, if you do not know
what your thoughts and feelings are directed towards, you cannot find out merely through introspection of your bodily
feelings. Nor is feeling towards, at least typically, a feeling which is directed towards your own psychological or bodily
condition: this sort of feeling is possible (you might feel disgusted by your constant craving for chocolate, or frustrated
by your stiff arthritic fingers), but it is feeling towards the world which is the more straightforward and usual case.
Feeling towards is thinking of with feeling, and thinking of is subject to the will in that sometimes it is possible, using
your imagination, directly to try to think of something as being a particular way (for example, trying to think of a cloud
as being shaped like a camel). And sometimes it is possible to try to stop thinking of something in one way, perhaps by
trying to think of it in some other way (as being shaped like a weasel). And sometimes thinking of is more intractable,
so that a way of thinking just comes over you, and, once it has, you cannot get out of it, try as you might. And there are
gradations between these possibilities. So to say that thinking of is subject to the will is just to say that it can be directly
subject to the will, not that it necessarily is. In feeling towards, the imagination tends to be much more intractable than
in thinking of; that is to say, the imagination tends to be less subject to the will—it tends actively to ‘run away with you’.
And it is, in part, because of this feature that the emotions are passions: your thoughts and feelings are not always as
much under your control as you would want them to be. When you are afraid, your mind seems almost to seek out,
and return to, features, otherwise quite harmless, which are transformed into being dangerous. Jean-Paul Sartre (1962)
compares this with looking for a hidden shape, the shape of a gun, in a picture:
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‘one's perceptual mechanisms are deployed as if one were looking at a gun’ (64); the consciousness ‘tries to transform
itself in order to transform the object’ (63). Sartre emphasizes that this consciousness is not reflective; rather, it is
unreflective ‘consciousness of the world’ (56); ‘our effort is not conscious of what it is, for then it would be an object of
a reflection’ (63). And, as he forcefully puts it, the ‘emotion returns to the object every moment and feeds upon it’ (57).
When a child listens to the story of Red Riding Hood her imagination is captured by and feeds upon the story: one
after another, the ‘grandmother's’ features, at first seemingly harmless, become fearful ones—teeth, nose, eyes, and so
forth, each one all the better for harming Red Riding Hood.
At this point, it might be thought that when one thinks of something as having the determinate or determinable
features which are typical of an emotion, one will then come to have the emotional feelings which are typical of that
emotion. But this is not so: thinking of and grasping the saliences of a thing is one matter, and having feelings towards
that thing is another. Whilst it is no doubt true that, in grasping certain saliences, one is likely to, or will tend to, have
the emotional experience, this by no means need happen. Perhaps you grasp the emotionally relevant saliences of the
thing, yet, because of depression or accidie, these have no emotional relevance or effect on you: today I can see the
dangerousness yet I do not feel fear as I did yesterday; today I see the loveableness but I do not feel love as I once did.
The difference lies in part, of course, in the qualitative nature of the experience—in the lack of feeling; but it lies too in
the particular way of grasping the saliences of the object of the emotional experience.
To take Michael Stocker's illuminating example, before I fell on the ice I recognized its dangers, but then I had ‘only an
intellectual appreciation of the very same dangers . . . Then I only saw the dangers, now I also feel them’ (1983: 21).
Putting this example in my terms, then I only thought of the ice as dangerous; now I feel fear towards the ice. Of
course it is true that I now do still think of the ice as in some way dangerous, but my way of thinking of it as dangerous
is now distinct. Now I think of its dangerousness as emotionally relevant in a special way. Coming to think of it in this
new way is not to be understood as consisting of thinking of it in the old way, plus some added-on phenomenal
ingredient—feeling, perhaps; rather, the whole way of experiencing, or being conscious
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of, the world is new (cf. Budd 1995: 153, who makes this point in another context). The difference between thinking of
X as Y without feeling and thinking of X as Y with feeling will not just comprise a different attitude towards the same
content—a thinking which earlier was without feeling and now is with feeling. The difference also lies in the content,
although it might be that this difference cannot be captured in words. Recall an analogy I considered in Chapter 2, of
the colour-blind person who can reliably pick out red things because he has a constant companion who points out to
him all and only things of that colour. This person can have the demonstrative thought ‘That ball is red’, but that
thought will differ in respect of its content from that of a thought also expressed as ‘That ball is red’ had by a person
who is using his normal ability to see colours. So it does not follow from the fact that both thoughts are naturally
expressed in the same words that they have the same content; the words used are inadequate to express the difference.
Let me try to develop this point through an analogy with other thoughts, including demonstratives and indexicals.11
In one of John Perry's (1979) examples, ‘a professor, who desires to attend the department meeting on time, and
believes correctly that it begins at noon, sits motionless in his office at that time. Suddenly he begins to move. What
explains his action? A change in belief. He believed all along that the department meeting starts at noon; he came to
believe, as he would have put it, that it starts now’ (4). As Perry points out (5), if we accept the professor's saying ‘I
believe the meeting starts at noon’ as an explanation of his setting off down the hall, we would be assuming that he
believes that it is now noon. Thus the thought, at noon, that the meeting starts at noon, and the thought, at noon, that
the meeting starts now, must differ in their content, even though they have the same truth conditions, because it is
possible to have some attitude towards one thought and not towards the other. And, developing Perry's example
somewhat, the professor might believe that the meeting starts at noon, and believe
11
I appreciate that not everyone will be persuaded by my argument that the difference between thinking of X as Y with, and without, feeling is not just a difference in
attitude but also a difference in content; it always seems possible for an opponent to force all the difference into the attitude, so that the debate degenerates into a matter of
competing intuitions. For those who are unpersuaded, I would just point out that the arguments of the rest of the chapter, including those concerning the intentionality of
feelings, remain unaffected by this point.
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that it is now noon, yet still not believe that the meeting starts now. To appreciate this, imagine that the professor (now
rather absent-minded) is still sitting in his office, preoccupied with the paper which he has to write in time for that
evening's conference. Someone with whom he shares the room asks him the time; he glances at his (reliable) watch and
replies ‘Noon’. He has thus come to believe that it is now noon. But this is not sufficient for action: for a moment he
continues to sit there, until suddenly he puts the two thoughts together, so to speak, and says ‘My God, it's noon! The
meeting starts now!’, and dashes off down the hall.
Analogously, imagine you are in a zoo, looking at a gorilla grimly loping from left to right in its cage. You are thinking
of the gorilla as dangerous, but you do not feel fear, as it seems to be safely behind bars. Then you see that the door to
the cage has been left wide open. Just for a moment, though, you fail to put the two thoughts—the gorilla is
dangerous, the cage is open—together. Then, suddenly, you do put them together: now your way of thinking of the
gorilla as dangerous is new; now it is dangerous in an emotionally relevant way for you. The earlier thought, naturally
expressed as ‘That gorilla is dangerous’, differs in content from the new thought, although this new thought, thought
with emotional feeling, might also be naturally expressed in the same words. Now, in feeling fear towards the gorilla
you are emotionally engaged with the world, and, typically, you are poised for action in a new way—poised for action
out of the emotion.12
I said in Chapter 2 that my account of emotional feelings is not required to say what it is like to experience them. As a
further development of that remark, I can now add that there is no requirement to give a substantial characterization
of what is the difference in content between thinking of something with feeling, and thinking of it without feeling. It
might even be that no words are sufficient to capture this difference. For example, there is undoubtedly a difference in
the way things seem when you are suffering from depression or accidie and are thus not fully engaged emotionally with
the world, but this difference is, I think, not fully describable in words: phrases like ‘things seem flat, lifeless, devoid of
value’ are inadequate to the task. One of the things which is wonderful about great
12
There is another, quite different, sort of case, where you feel fear of the gorilla, in spite of believing it to be safely behind bars. Later on I will look at examples like this.
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novelists is that they are able to go so far in capturing in words what emotional experience is like.
I will return to this discussion at the end of this chapter, relating it to my diagnosis in Chapter 2 of why the add-on
theorist mislocates emotional feelings. But now I want to consider a number of difficult questions that arise concerning
our first-personal authority about our feelings, and about the relationship between awareness of, attention to, and
reflective thought about our feelings. I am not going to consider, let alone try to answer, every question in this area (cf.
Stocker 1983: 14), but I hope to do enough to clear up some ambiguities and obscurities in our ordinary ways of
talking of emotional feelings.
Unreective and Reective Consciousness
Let me introduce the discussion by considering one familiar sort of case where, for one reason or another, you do not
stop to think about your own feelings or state of mind during an emotional experience. You are driving a car, and you
see another car, out of control, approaching you on the wrong side of the road. You realize just what is going on, you
see the danger to yourself and your passengers, and, with great speed and dexterity, you take the necessary evasive
action. Then, when your car has finally come to a halt, you think with horror of just how close you were to death; you
realize that you are bathed in a cold sweat, you see the whiteness of your knuckles as you still clench the steering wheel,
and you feel your heart pumping. Looking back on the experience, you now agree that you were afraid whilst you were
taking evasive action even though, you now can also say, you did not feel fear at that time. Other examples abound:
you were embarrassed as you walked into the room, for your cheeks were bright red, although you did not have any
feeling of being embarrassed or of having burning cheeks—you were concentrating on how to shake hands with such
an eminent person; before setting off in the car for the meeting, you felt angry with your partner for making you both
late, but during the journey you were so intent on finding the way that you did not feel angry, although your grim face
showed you were still angry; you became immediately jealous at her teasing remark, but you did not realize its impact
on you until after the dinner was over; and so on.
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There is no doubt that it is entirely natural for us to accept as true a person's sincere assertion about whether or not
they are currently feeling an emotion, or whether they felt that emotion at an earlier time. But we should ask whether
we are right to do so—and the answer to this depends, of course, on what it means to say, of a person, that he feels an
emotion. And if we are right to do so, so that it is possible for someone to be having an emotion without feeling it,
then we should ask whether this means that it is possible to be having an emotion without any emotional feelings at all.
The questions which I want to answer, then, are as follows:
(1)What does it mean to say that A feels emotion E?
(2)Is it possible that A can be having E and yet not feel E?
(3)If the answer to (2) is Yes, does it follow that, if A has but does not feel E, then A has no E-related feelings at all?
Then, if the answer to (3) is Yes, we might ask how it is possible to distinguish those cases where it is correct to say of
you that you had the emotion (without feeling it) from those cases where you did not have it at all—such cases as
where you have a cold intellectual appreciation of the situation as meriting a certain sort of response and the emotion
is, in fact, absent: for example, how to distinguish the case of your fearful response to the oncoming car (where you did
not feel fear) from the case of a different sort of person in the same circumstances—a rally driver, say—who had,
perhaps, the same beliefs and desires, and who responds in his actions in just the same way, but who really felt no fear
and really was not afraid.13 James would have to insist that you must have felt the bodily changes—the sweating, the
heart pumping—in spite of your sincere assertion that you did not. This outright rejection of first-personal authority is
surely not the way to make out the difference between you and the rally driver (although it is, of course, possible to be
wrong on occasions about what you feel, including believing that you feel an emotion
13
It seems to me that it is the pressing need to distinguish these two sorts of case which motivates both James and Stocker to insist that feelings are essential for an emotion.
James's remark, cited above, that without the feelings of rage, all there would be is ‘some cold-blooded and dispassionate judicial sentence, confined entirely to the
intellectual realm, to the effect that a certain person or persons merit chastisement for their sins’ (1884: 194), is cited with approval by Stocker (1983: 8), even though, of
course, Stocker is arguing for those psychic feelings which James is concerned to leave out of the picture. I will be trying to show that we can make this all-important
distinction without insisting that feelings are at all times essential for emotion.
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when you do not feel it). So should we resort to saying that the difference is just in the bodily changes, and not in the
feelings? Surely this is not right either. Surely there was also a difference in the way you and the rally driver felt towards
things, even if that difference is not properly captured by saying that you felt fear and he did not. At least, so I will be
arguing. To show this, I will need to say more about the distinction between reflective consciousness and
consciousness of the world, and about an ambiguity in what we mean when we say that a person feels an emotion.
So far, I have said that feeling towards is thinking of something with feeling, and that the feelings and thoughts are
directed towards an object, typically the object of one's emotion: they are part of one's consciousness of the world with
which one is emotionally engaged. This consciousness of the world is to be distinguished from reflective consciousness
or consciousness of my own thoughts and feelings. The following are examples of reflective consciousness: being
aware that I feel afraid; being aware that I feel afraid of the oncoming vehicle; and being aware that I am thinking of
the oncoming vehicle as out of control, and as something to be avoided—that I am thinking of it in that special
emotionally engaged way which is feeling fear of it.
Turning now to question (1), I think that there is quite a deep ambiguity in the meaning of ‘A feels emotion E’: in one
sense we mean that A has those feelings which are part of his being unreflectively emotionally engaged with the world;
in another sense we mean that A is reflectively aware of having certain feelings which he recognizes as being E-related
feelings—either bodily feelings or feelings towards something, or both.
It is notable that there is no such ambiguity when considering what we say about non-human animals. Imagine seeing a
dog about to be attacked. It is showing every sign of fear. Assume two (I hope uncontroversial) things for the sake of
argument: that the dog is afraid; and that dogs are not capable of reflective consciousness. Now, let us ask the question:
Does the dog feel fear? The answer must be ‘Of course it does!’: it is emotionally engaged with the world, not a
Cartesian bête-machine with no perspective or point of view. Because the question of whether or not it is reflectively
conscious does not arise, it makes no sense to say, of a dog, that it either feels fear, or does not feel fear, in the sense of
being reflectively conscious. So the only way to take the question when we are concerned with
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animals not capable of reflective consciousness (including, I assume, babies and toddlers) is in the first sense. As
applied to dogs, the predicates ‘feels fear’ and ‘is afraid’ have the same meaning. But when we consider human beings
which are capable of reflective thought, there is this ambiguity in the meaning of ‘A feels E’. The sense can, however,
sometimes be surmised from the overall context. Specifically, in the sentence ‘Looking back on the experience, I was
obviously afraid whilst it was going on, but I didn't feel any fear at the time’, the phrase ‘didn't feel fear’ is being used in
the second sense of not being reflectively aware of one's feelings.14
So when the answer to question (1)—What does it mean to say that A feels emotion E?—is taken in this second sense,
then the answer to question (2) is plainly Yes: it is possible that A can be having E and yet not feel it; I can, for
example, be afraid without being reflectively conscious of my thoughts and feelings. You can accept first-personal
authority that I did not feel E because, for one reason or another, I was not reflectively conscious of whatever feelings
I might have had towards the object of my emotion. The phrase ‘one reason or another’ is intended here to cover a
multitude of sorts of reason, for example: I was too rushed; I was too absorbed in the situation; I was too absorbed in
something else which was going on; I was so emotionally engaged with doing what had to be done that, as I might later
put it, the last thing I had time to think of was how I was feeling; and so forth. But it clearly does not follow—and this
is the answer to question (3)—that there are no emotion-related feelings at all if I have E and do not feel it in this
sense, for my thoughts and feelings—and my actions—were unreflectively, but nevertheless emotionally, engaged with
the world. All that follows is that I lacked reflective consciousness of whatever unreflective thoughts and feelings I did
have.
It is important to appreciate just how much of our emotional thought, feeling, and action is unreflective, when our
emotional engagement with the world is direct, without the addition of reflective consciousness of ourselves as being
so engaged. In this context, Sartre discusses the act of writing: when writing, I am not normally reflectively conscious
of writing; but, he says, ‘the act of writing is
14
I do not speak other languages well enough to be sure, but I believe that not all languages have this second sense: in these languages it does not make sense to say that
someone is afraid of something but does not feel fear (except where dispositional fear is being spoken of, such as being afraid of snakes).
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not at all unconscious, it is an actual structure of my consciousness. Only it is not conscious of itself. To write is to
maintain an active awareness of the words as they come to birth under my pen. Not of the words inasmuch as they are
written by me: I apprehend the words intuitively inasmuch as they have that structural quality, that they emerge ex nihilo
and yet do not create themselves, that they are passively created’ (1962: 59).
Returning, then, to you and the rally driver, we can accept that at the time of the accident you did not feel fear, because
you were not at that time reflectively conscious of your feelings. But we can still explain in terms of feelings why you
were afraid and the rally driver was not, whilst at the same time accepting the truth of your sincere assertion that you
did not feel afraid. The feelings which you had, as part of your consciousness of the world, will explain what is
observably distinct about your bodily states (your trembling, your eyes staring at the oncoming vehicle, your white
knuckles) and about the way in which you act (the way you grip the wheel as you swerve, the rigidity of your body); and
these distinct bodily changes and ways of acting will not be there to be observed in the rally driver. And, of course, at
any time—the timing often being due to the contingencies of the situation—you yourself might become aware of your
feelings directly, or possibly indirectly, as another might, through observing your own bodily condition or ways of
acting: for example, you see your white knuckles, you realize how tightly you are gripping the wheel, and then you turn
your mind inwards towards your own bodily feelings and feelings towards the world.15 Furthermore, even if you do not
at the time become reflectively conscious of your bodily feelings or feelings towards the world as feelings of fear,
looking back on the experience you will be able (barring amnesia and the like) to say all sorts of things about how you
felt at the time: in particular, you will be able to talk about your feelings towards the world in terms of your special way
of thinking of the world. And these ways of feeling will be fully understandable and explicable as being episodes which
are typical of fear: ‘Everything seemed to be
15
I believe that this process, where one becomes aware of the nature of one's emotion and mood through observation—from the outside as it were—of one's bodily condition
or ways of acting, is much more common than is generally supposed. You see a gloomy face in the shaving mirror and realize that you feel gloomy; you find yourself
plodding wearily up the steps and realize that you are tired; you feel that you are going red in the face and realize that you are embarrassed.
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happening incredibly slowly’; ‘I felt strangely distant from what was going on in front of me, as if I was in a dream’. So,
to say that you did not feel fear in the sense of being reflectively aware of your feelings does not imply that you did not
have any feelings that might be part of fear.
William James, when considering bodily changes, insisted that all bodily changes must be felt, or that one must be
conscious of them, but he did not make clear what it is to be conscious of a bodily change. I want to suggest, both as
regards bodily feelings, and as regards feelings towards something, that there are degrees to which you can be
reflectively aware of those feelings, and there are degrees to which you can in thought recognize the feelings as being
what they are. Further, as regards feelings towards something, there are degrees to which you can recognize them as
being about what they are about. So, rather than draw sharp boundaries in this area, it is better to think of the
possibility of a ‘movement’ in consciousness from outer to inner—from fully unreflective emotional engagement with
the world towards, in those creatures capable of it, a reflective (possibly even solipsistic) turning inwards and complete
absorption in one's own thoughts and feelings. By its very nature, saying what it is, or what it is like, to be unreflectively
engaged with the world is no easy task. You can spot someone else thus engaged, for example doing a crossword
puzzle or listening to a piece of music, and this need not interrupt their lack of reflectiveness; but if you ‘spot’ yourself
unreflectively engaged in some activity, just by starting thus to turn inwards you start to be reflective, and the
experience of what it is like to be spontaneously and unreflectively engaged is immediately lost; or, to be precise, it is
never achieved.
I have chosen a passage from Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov to illustrate these observations about the possibility
of movement in consciousness from outer to inner and from inner to outer. Ivan Karamazov is walking towards his
father's house:
It was strange, however: he was suddenly assailed by an unendurable anguish, one which, he could not help noting,
with each step he took in the direction of the house increased further and further. The strangeness lay not in the
anguish itself, but in the fact that Ivan Fyodorovich could not for the life of him determine what it concerned. [He
then tries, without success, to work out what it might be.]
Ivan Fyodorovich proceeded to attempt ‘not to think’, but even that did not help. The main thing that annoyed him
about this anguish, the main
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reason that it irritated him, was that it possessed a sort of accidental, wholly external aspect; this he could feel. Some
being or object stood constantly somewhere, rather in the way something may on occasion constantly present itself
to one's gaze, while for a long time, as one works or engages in heated conversation, one fails to notice it yet all the
while grows visibly irritated, almost tormented, until at last it dawns on one to move aside the worthless object,
frequently a very trivial and absurd one, some item that has been left where it does not belong: a handkerchief fallen
to the floor, a book not returned to the bookcase, and so on and so forth. At last Ivan Fyodorovich, in a most foul
and irritated condition of spirit, attained his parental home and suddenly, some fifteen paces from the wicker gate,
as he glanced at the entrance way, realised in a flash what it was that had so tormented and disturbed him.
On the bench by the entrance sat the lackey Smerdyakov, and from a first glance at him Ivan Fyodorovich
understood that the lackey Smerdyakov also sat in his soul and that it was precisely this person it was unable to
endure. Everything was suddenly bathed in light and became clear. Earlier, as Alyosha [Ivan's younger brother] had
described his encounter with Smerdyakov, something dark and repulsive had suddenly penetrated his heart,
instantly evoking within him a reciprocal malice. Later, during their conversation, Smerdyakov had been forgotten
for a while, but had nevertheless remained in his soul, and no sooner had Ivan Fyodorovich parted from Alyosha
and walked alone to the house, than the forgotten emotion had instantly begun to surface again. ‘Can it really be
true that this good-for-nothing scoundrel is able to upset me to such a degree?’ he wondered with intolerable
malice. (304–6)
This question which Ivan asks himself at the end of this passage reveals that, even then, Ivan does not realize why
Smerdyakov so upsets him, and it is only as the novel progresses towards and beyond the horrifying murder of Fyodor
Karamazov that this begins to become clear—to Ivan and to the reader. And, as Ivan finds out more about his feelings
towards Smerdyakov, he finds out more—dark truths, indeed—about himself.
Once the importance of feelings in unreflective emotional experience is appreciated, and we can appeal to feelings of
this sort to distinguish in principle between an emotional experience and ‘feelingless cognition’ (between you and the
rally driver), I see no need to insist, as do James (1884: passim) and Stocker (1983: 8, 14), that feelings, whether or not
you are reflectively conscious of them, are necessary for an emotion in the sense that such feelings must be present at
all times whilst you are having a particular emotion. What
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I have emphasized is the importance of episodes of feeling towards the world, and I think it is reasonable to say that,
without at least episodes of such feeling, of which you can be more or less aware, an experience would not be an
emotional one. But once the distinction between an emotion and an emotional episode is clear, I do not need to insist,
for example, that my enduring love for her (the emotion) need involve feelings at all times, even when I am playing
football, although it will be true that my emotion at that time involves various dispositions to have loving thoughts and
feelings towards her. So, looking back, I can truly say ‘I have loved her for twenty years, without ceasing to do so for a
second’.16
Nor do I need to insist, as James (1884: 192) and Stocker (1983: 8–9) seem to do, that we can always tell emotional
experiences apart by how they feel. For where there are episodes of feeling, it will often be a difficult matter of
interpretation (and of self-interpretation) to determine what particular sort of emotion is felt, and no precise answer
may be forthcoming. This is so partly because of the diversity of feelings which can be involved in the narrative of one
emotional experience. It is also so because two or more sorts of emotion are often experienced at the same time and
can involve qualitatively similar feelings. Is the feeling of numbness or dislocatedness on being told of the death of a
loved one a feeling of shock or of grief or of both? (Note that a feeling of numbness is not no feeling at all.) Or is the
feeling you experience on seeing your daughter perform in the concert a feeling of love or of pride or of both?
So I think it is possible to do justice to the importance of feelings in emotional experience without needing to claim
either that emotions must involve feelings at all times, or that, for each type of emotional experience, there will be a
distinctive phenomenology which is uniquely identifiable with it.
The importance of narrative structure comes out again at this point. In understanding and interpretation, we seek to
locate the person's episodes of thought and feeling, which go to form part of his emotional experience, in the overall
narrative which makes best sense of this part of his life. The narrative can be given in the broadest of terms, through
the wrong end of the telescope as I put it in Chapter 2, where the emotion state alone is named: he felt——. Or it can
be
16
Are feelings always present which are unconscious in the technical, Freudian sense of being repressed? Perhaps, but it would be a desperate move to say that my love for her
necessarily includes feelings which are unconscious in this sense.
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given with a high degree of sensitivity to the detail of the emotional experience, and then, once this has been done, the
need falls away to determine precisely which emotion is being experienced and at precisely what time: enough will have
been said.
To illustrate this, consider the following passage from War and Peace, recounting an incident at the Battle of Schön
Grabern, and involving two central characters, Prince Andrew and Captain Túshin. I ask you to read the passage from
the point of view of Captain Túshin, the Russian battery commander, an intelligent, sensitive, and rather unmilitary
figure. (In Chapter 7 I will return to this passage, considering it from the point of view of Prince Andrew.) In the heat
of the battle Túshin and his men are fiercely fighting on, in spite of heavy losses:
Little Túshin, moving feebly and awkwardly, kept telling his orderly to ‘refill my pipe for that one!’, and then,
scattering sparks from it, ran forward shading his eyes with his small hand to look at the French.
‘Smack at 'em, lads!’ he kept saying, seizing the guns by the wheels and working the screws himself.
Amid the smoke, deafened by the incessant reports which always made him jump, Túshin not taking his pipe from
his mouth ran from gun to gun, now aiming, now counting the charges, now giving orders about replacing dead or
wounded horses and harnessing fresh ones, and shouting in his feeble voice, so high-pitched and irresolute. His face
grew more and more animated. Only when a man was killed or wounded did he frown and turn away from the
sight, shouting angrily at the men who, as is always the case, hesitated about lifting the injured or dead. . . .
Owing to the terrible uproar and the necessity for concentration and activity, Túshin did not experience the slightest
unpleasant sense of fear, and the thought that he might be killed or badly wounded never occurred to him. On the
contrary he became more and more elated. It seemed to him that it was a very long time ago, almost a day, since he
had first seen the enemy and fired the first shot, and that the corner of the field he stood on was very well known
and familiar ground. Though he thought of everything, considered everything, and did everything the best of
officers could do in his position, he was in a state akin to feverish delirium or drunkenness. (i. 249–50)
After Túshin had received several orders to retreat, an adjutant arrived to repeat the order once more:
It was Prince Andrew. The first thing he saw on riding up to the space where Túshin's guns were stationed was an
unharnessed horse with a broken leg,
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71
that lay screaming piteously beside the harnessed horses. Blood was gushing from its leg as from a spring. Among
the limbers lay several dead men. One ball after another passed over as he approached and he felt a nervous
shudder run down his spine. But the mere thought of being afraid roused him again. ‘I cannot be afraid,’ thought
he, and dismounted slowly among the guns. He delivered the order and did not leave the battery. He decided to
have the guns removed from their positions and withdrawn in his presence. Together with Túshin, stepping across
the bodies and under a terrible fire from the French, he attended to the removal of the guns.
‘A staff officer was here a minute ago but skipped off,’ said an artilleryman to Prince Andrew. ‘Not like your
honour!’
Prince Andrew said nothing to Túshin. They were both so busy as to seem not to notice one another. When, having
limbered up the only two cannon that remained uninjured out of the four, they began moving down the hill . . . ,
Prince Andrew rode up to Túshin.
‘Well, till we meet again . . . ’ he said, holding out his hand to Túshin.
‘Goodbye, my dear fellow,’ said Túshin. ‘Dear soul! Good-bye, my dear fellow!’ and for some unknown reason tears
suddenly filled his eyes. (i. 252)
‘For some unknown reason’, says Tolstoy, and this is the end of the chapter. Of course, we know the reason why tears
suddenly filled Túshin's eyes: enough has been said. And, if someone were to ask just what emotion or emotions it was
that Túshin was experiencing at the time he shook hands with Prince Andrew, there would, I think, be something
wooden in an answer like this: ‘Well, he felt love or fellow-feeling for——; he was in a state of unconscious or
repressed horror at——; he felt relief at——; he was drained after——; and so on.’ Better just to tell the story again,
and let the narrative structure speak for itself in all its detail.17
I have said that feeling towards, or thinking of with feeling, is intentional: the feelings involved are directed towards the
world—typically towards the object of the emotion. Now, the paradigmatic intentional state which is world-directed is
often taken to be belief, not thinking of or feeling towards (and not perception, surprisingly enough), and the question
arises whether I am right that beliefs, together with desires, are not the only intentional states involved in emotional
experience. (For resistance to the belief-desire view along these lines, see, for example, Calhoun 1984, Roberts 1988,
17
Undoubtedly, there can be occasions, such as where psychotherapy is involved, when putting a name to your emotional experience is important, involving a sort of
acceptance.
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Armon-Jones 1991, and Deigh 1994.) I have said something about this already, but I now want to go into more detail.
Feeling Towards, Believing, and Desiring
In Chapter 2, I discussed the contrast, often made, between beliefs and desires in terms of direction of fit. Beliefs and
desires are attitudes, held by a person towards a particular content; thus, when we say that James believes that it is
raining, we are reporting James's attitude, namely one of belief, towards a content, namely that it is raining. On this
view, it is possible for there to be two thoughts which involve different attitudes towards the same content (believing
that p and desiring that p), and these attitudes are contrasted by what they ‘aim at’, namely, it is said, truth and
realization or satisfaction, respectively. And it is possible for there to be two thoughts which involve the same attitude,
but which differ in their content (believing that p and believing that q). In regard to this view, there are two claims that I
want to make in respect of feeling towards. First, feeling towards is not an attitude which is equivalent to believing, or
to desiring, or to believing and desiring; in fact it is not an ‘attitude’ which is defined in terms of any particular
‘direction of fit’. And secondly, as I have already suggested, in feeling towards, the feeling is essentially related to the
content, so there could not be some other psychological episode, say belief or thinking of, with the same content but
with no feeling.
The first respect in which feeling towards is unlike believing is in its relation to the will. The point can initially be made
in terms of thinking of. Because thinking of is subject to the will, it can make sense to say to a person ‘Think of X as
Y!’ But believing at will is, as is generally accepted, impossible; one cannot directly try to believe something; at best one
can indirectly (albeit irrationally) try to come to believe that thing by, for example, putting oneself in an environment
where one is likely to do so (cf. Williams 1970). So it does not make sense to say to a person, except in special
circumstances, ‘Believe that X is Y!’ (An example of special circumstances is where, in saying ‘Believe that p!’, you are
vouching for the truth of p, and thus giving your hearer additional evidence, through your known sincerity and
reliability on the matter (cf. Scruton 1974: 96).)
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There may seem to be a problem here when the point is made in terms of feeling towards: it seems that it equally does
not make sense to say to a person ‘Feel disgust towards this pudding!’; this is just why the passions are so called—they
are passive. But this is not really a difficulty, because the contrast remains between believing and feeling towards: there
is no indirect route (at least not a rational one) by which one can try to believe the pudding to be disgusting, but there is
an indirect route (moreover, one that is not irrational) by which one can try to feel disgust towards it—by trying to
think of it as disgusting (trying to think of it as vomit perhaps).
Secondly, feeling towards is unlike believing because a person can, without necessarily being irrational, oscillate
between feeling a certain way towards something (for example, the pudding) and not feeling that way, without having
any evidence or reason which justifies the change; this is not so for believing. The same point applies mutatis mutandis to
thinking of (and to seeing an aspect, and ambiguous figures such as the duck–rabbit figure). Beliefs, once rationally
arrived at (at least ideally) on the basis of evidence, tend to persist until further evidence becomes available which
should lead to their revision; whereas feeling towards something is much more episodic. It is relatively unproblematic
to ascribe to you the belief that camels have humps, which you had before reading this sentence, and which you will
continue to have long after this sentence is forgotten; whereas, as we have seen, emotional feelings typically come and
go, or wax and wane, as episodes of emotional experience. You may, for example, persistently (and to a persistent
degree of probability) believe that your beloved partner has recently died, but the feelings of grief and longing which
you have towards her will come and go. It is thus an entirely apposite metaphor to talk of being overcome with a wave
of grief: perhaps at the moment when you catch sight of her shoes in the hall. But to talk of being overcome with a
wave of belief is an absurdly inapposite metaphor. (There is of course the occasional shock of recognition, but this is at
the onset of a belief.)
A third, related reason why feeling towards is unlike believing is its phenomenology. Feeling towards and thinking of,
involving as they do perception and imagination, tend to have a perceptual quality of a sort which is, at least usually,
lacking in belief. This perceptual quality is frequently imagistic, fitting well with the second point, about the episodic
nature of feeling towards: images do tend to come and go and vary in intensity. Anyone who has been
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in the grip of the sorts of visual imagination involved in sexual jealousy will know exactly what I mean. And the point
applies also to emotions whose objects are of a less visually imaginable nature. If, say, you loathe a certain ideology, you
will, as part of the emotion, be disposed to have episodes of feeling towards more visually imaginable things which
exemplify the ideology: a particular act of oppression, perhaps. One would not tend to have these feelings if one's
negative view of the ideology were dispassionate, involving merely a cold, feelingless belief that the ideology is not a
sound one.
The fourth consideration is a little more complicated, and I will spend some time on developing it. Like other creatures
with emotions, we can express our feeling towards something (say by wrinkling up our noses or by uttering ‘Ugh!’ or
‘Yuk!’), but we linguistic crea-tures can go further, not only by reporting our feelings towards something (‘I feel
disgusted by it’), but also by having a belief about the way things in the world are (the belief that this thing is
disgusting); and this belief too can be expressed or reported. Feeling towards can thus be common both to a person
who has such a belief (that it is disgusting), making appropriate by his lights the way he is feeling (disgust) towards the
object of his emotion, and to a person who does not have such a belief—either believing the contrary, thus making
inappropriate the feeling towards, or perhaps having no particular relevant belief. It follows from this that the relation
between feeling towards and assent is not the same as the relation between belief and assent. If one believes that
something has a certain feature, then one will be disposed, ceteris paribus, to assent to a question as to whether that
thing does have that feature; whereas one can feel an emotion towards something as being a sort of way, yet not be
disposed to assent to its being that way, because you have a belief that the feeling is inappropriate or disproportionate.
So feeling towards (like thinking of) is not open to Moore's paradox in the same way as is belief: one can coherently say
‘I feel fear of the ice, yet it is not dangerous’. There is an analogy in this area with the Müller-Lyer illusion, to which I
will return, which suggests that seeing and believing are distinct attitudes: when you are made aware that it is an
illusion, that the lines may appear to have different lengths but are really of the same length, you still see the lines as
being of different lengths, even though you now believe them to be of the same length.
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This consideration can be developed to show how the notion of feeling towards can be brought to bear in
commonsense psychological explanations of how, at times, our thoughts, feelings, and actions ‘run away with us’, often
in spite of our efforts to keep them under control. This approach provides a more subtle account of how the emotions
affect us than an account which does not make use of feeling towards, relying just on the beliefs and desires which can
be involved in the emotions as the only elements with content.
As I have been arguing, if, for example, you feel insulted by something and believe that it is insulting, then the emotion
and your action out of the emotion will be well grounded from your point of view.18 Now, there may be a temptation
towards the idea that once you come to realize that your belief, say that this flippant remark was an insult deserving of
a rebuke in return, is in fact a false one, then not only will the belief cease but so also will the emotional feelings. But
this is not correct. It is, for example, perfectly possible for you yourself to appreciate that you have a disposition to take
remarks to be insulting when they are not. This disposition might be part of a character trait, or it could be more
specific and part of an emotion, for example where you thoroughly loathe Smith and feel he has this unbearably
superior attitude towards you. You might then, on an occasion, feel insulted by a remark of Smith's, whilst at the same
time believing it not to be insulting, because you know you have this disposition; here the way you feel and your
reaction will be ungrounded and inappropriate by your own lights as well as by those of others. (Realizing that you are
in the wrong in such cases can even exacerbate the ungrounded feeling—a well-known phenomenon.) So, by bringing
to bear in an explanation your disposition to think of, and have feelings towards, Smith's remarks as insulting when
they are not (or as more insulting than they really are), we can ascribe to you thoughts and feelings which are common
to the situations where you have a relevant belief, that the remark was insulting, and where you have no such belief.
And when you are in the know about your disposition, we are not obliged to ascribe beliefs to you which are, if not
contradictory, at least in tension. It
18
On this account, we can say that some creatures, such as non-human animals and very young children, lack the ability to ask themselves whether their emotions are wellgrounded. When we say, of them, that their responses are not well-grounded or are inappropriate, what we are doing is judging their emotional responses according to our
beliefs.
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would be a pity to have to say that you are, simply, irrational, for we might well think more highly of you than of
someone not in the know about his tendency: perhaps you have just recently been told by a friend how often you react
inappropriately, and you are now in a position where you have the right beliefs yet, try as you might, you are still not
able to resist feeling a sting at Smith's remark and reacting accordingly. As Aristotle points out in book VII of the
Nicomachean Ethics, at least the akratic or weak-willed person has the right beliefs, even if he does not act in accordance
with them.
Rather than thinking of you as, simply, irrational, I find it more helpful to bring to bear the notion of cognitive
impenetrability in emotional experience; for the purposes of these discussions, someone's emotion or emotional
experience is cognitively penetrable only if it can be affected by his relevant beliefs (cf. Nichols et al. 1996: 46).
Analogously, seeing the lines as being of different lengths in the Müller-Lyer illusion is cognitively impenetrable, as it
cannot be affected by the belief that the lines are of the same length. Consider an example. You are on a cliff walk, and
you turn towards the sea view. You believe that you are at a perfectly safe distance from the edge of the cliff (ten
metres, say), and that there is no wind or slippery slope to drive you towards it. So, according to your beliefs, there is
absolutely no reason to feel fear, as there is no possibility of falling. Yet you feel fear. The edge looms large in your
gaze, and somehow seems to be pulling you towards it; you imagine yourself slipping, being pushed, or caught by an
unexpected burst of wind, or even suicidally throwing yourself over the cliff. You feel a bit faint—as Edgar says in King
Lear, ‘How fearful | And dizzy 'tis to cast one's eyes so low!’ Even though you may be able to control your actions,
managing simply to turn away from the view and proceed on your cliff walk, nevertheless you tremble, feel a damp
sweat, and cling rather pathetically to your partner's clothes, and, as you proceed, you glance frequently towards the
cliff. Furthermore, you cannot help but feel fear: waves of fear overcome you, and these feelings are not cognitively
penetrable as they are not affected by your persistent beliefs about the cliff—that you could not slip that far, that no
one is going to push you, and so forth—in sum, that you are in no danger. Hume discusses a similar example, of a man
who, ‘being hung out from a high tower in a cage of iron cannot forbear trembling, when he surveys the precipice
below him, tho' he knows himself to be perfectly secure from falling, by his experience of the
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solidity of the iron, which supports him’. He goes on, ‘The circumstances of depth and descent strike so strongly upon
him, that their influence cannot be destroy'd by the contrary circumstances of support and solidity, which ought to give
him a perfect security. His imagination runs away with its object, and excites a passion proportion'd to it’ (Treatise, 148;
cf. Sartre 1943: 29–32 in relation to anguish and the possibility of suicide). But cognitive impenetrability admits of
degrees, and need not be total, for, as in my example, you might act in accordance with your beliefs, for example by
turning away from the view of the cliff and proceeding on your walk, yet your trembling and sweating, and your
generally nervous air, are still clear signs that you feel fear.
So-called cognitive therapy aims in part to combat inappropriate emotions, and can in part succeed in its aim. A
familiar example illustrates this: cognitive therapy with regard to fear of flying has been shown markedly to reduce such
fear; if people face up to what they are afraid of, and to the risks involved, then things go better for them when they fly.
But, again, success need not be total. After successful cognitive therapy you might believe to a high degree of
probability that flying on scheduled aircraft is very unlikely to result in injury or death, yet flying can still seem to you to
be terrifying—you still feel fear. When you hear a change in the aircraft's engine noise, or feel a bump as the wheels are
lowered before landing, a wave of fear overwhelms you: you grasp the sound as the sound of an engine in trouble, and
the bump as that of something failing to work properly. You look for signs of worry in the faces of the flight
attendants, find yourself imagining the panic as the aircraft goes into a dive, and the other passengers trampling you
underfoot as they rush towards the emergency exit. Yet at the same time you can be struggling to keep your
imagination under control, talking to yourself and reminding yourself of your persistent beliefs: ‘No, the engine noise
always dips like this on descent; there's always a bump like this when the wheels are lowered’. Though the struggle may
well not be revealed in action, for the fear—ungrounded and inappropriate by your lights—is partly under control, yet,
like the fear of heights, your feelings can be revealed in bodily changes, in expressive action, and in mood. Thus, you
managed to persuade yourself to take the flight, and you do not demand an emergency landing so you can get off, but
you cannot stop yourself from trembling and sweating; you fiddle nervously with your seat-belt, twisting your body
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in dread at the change in engine noise and the bump of the wheels. And for the rest of the day, long after you have
safely landed, you feel nervous about things in general.
What these examples show about what might be called partial cognitive therapy is that in such circumstances as I have
been discussing, a person's bodily changes, expressive actions, and mood can best be explained by thinking of and
feeling towards things as being a particular way, whilst at the same time believing them not to be so. This sort of
explanation is appropriate not only for the more primitive emotions such as fear (fear of falling, for example, is found
in extremely young babies), but also for the more cultivated emotions. For example, the man who is quick to anger and
offence might be able to control his actions if he knows he has this trait. But on hearing what he knows really to be a
fairly anodyne remark, he might nevertheless clench his fists in his pocket and bite his lip, and feel in a generally snappy
and irritable mood for some time afterwards. Perhaps his tendency to think of things as insulting is so well entrenched
that, even though he is well aware in reflective moments that he is quick to anger, he has rather given up on trying to
control his tendency to respond in this way to everything—and to nothing in particular. And perhaps his permanently
red face might reveal his failure to control his irritable trait; as George Orwell said (his last words in his notebook, 17
Apr. 1949): at fifty, everyone has the face he deserves.
These points show that feeling towards is properly distinguished from believing: feeling towards is subject to the will; it
is not based on evidence in the same way as belief; it is distinct in its phenomenology; and it is not always fully
cognitively penetrable.
But might not feeling towards be equivalent or reducible to desiring? So, according to this idea, feeling disgusted by the
pudding would be something like desiring (perhaps in a special way) not to have to eat or look at it, and feeling fear of
the ice would be desiring to be off it. But the idea cannot be made to work, because of the nature of feeling towards.
The first difficulty with this idea is that there can be emotional experiences where there is no desire involved but there
are feelings towards the object of the emotion. For example, if I am feeling pride at my daughter's performance in the
school concert, my feelings are directed towards the way things are in the world, and not towards the way I might want
them to be; put loosely, the direction of fit is
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more like that of perception than that of desire. Perhaps there may be some desires involved in my feelings of pride
(for example, a desire to kiss and hug her afterwards), but it need not be that this is what my feelings of pride are
directed towards; the object of my feeling is not the object of my desire. And the second difficulty is that desire does
not always have a phenomenology. For example, if you reach out for your spectacles which are on the table, and put
them on, this action might be explained in part by reference to a desire to do just that, but there is typically no
phenomenology to such a desire, and it is not a desire which you are typically aware of having. But feeling towards has
a phenomenology essentially. So feeling towards cannot be desiring.
In response to this last point, it has been suggested that what is special about emotional experience is felt desire or
strong desire (cf. Marks 1982), which is supposed to have a special phenomenology that distinguishes it from desire in
general. The problem with this view is that emotional desires often have no phenomenology. For example, when we
act spontaneously out of an emotion, the desire which serves to explain the action will itself typically have no
phenomenology. But that is not to say that there is no phenomenology involved in what you do, for in such cases what
actually has the phenomenology is not the desire, but the feelings you have towards your action, towards what you are
actually doing. For example, in a fit of anger at what he did, you just lash out and hit him: here it is false to say that it is
the desire to hit him which is felt, or which has the phenomenology. When you spontaneously hit him, what has the
phenomenology is hitting him, by which I mean actually doing the action. Thus, although a desire to hit him has to be
attributed to you to explain your action, in such cases the desire may not be a thought of which you are aware, nor
need it be a thought with an emotionally felt quality. This point alone is sufficient to spoil those accounts of the
emotions which seek fully to capture their phenomenology by appealing to felt desires or to strong desires. No doubt
there can be a special phenomenology related to emotional desire where the desire is, for some reason, not readily
satisfiable or is frustrated. You want to hit him, but he is too strong or important to hit, and you have to restrain
yourself; here there will be the phenomenology which people think of as peculiar to a felt desire, including perhaps a
disposition to imagine yourself hitting him with feeling. But, even in these cases, there is something about the notion
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of felt desire which, I think, misdescribes the object of awareness. For when an emotional desire cannot readily be
satisfied or is frustrated, it is not really the desire which is felt; it is, rather, your feelings towards the imagined object of
desire—in this example, the action of hitting him.
Feelings towards the object of one's emotional desire can come over one in waves, and this is to be explained by the
nature of the relation between the emotional desire and the imagining which is expressive of that desire—for example,
imagining a state of affairs, or imagining oneself performing an action. One's desire, as part of the enduring emotion,
need not be expressed in imagining at all times, nor need the imagining when present be of a constant vividness. But
when the imagining comes to be present as part of an emotional episode, one will at that time tend also to experience
an episode of emotional feelings directed towards the object of the desire. And when the imagining is especially vivid,
the feelings will tend to be especially strong. And, of course, it is at just such times that imagination, and thus
desire—and thus, perhaps, action—will get out of control. For not only is there the tendency of unsatisfied or
frustrated emotional desire to express itself in imagination, and thus in feeling towards, but there is also the tendency
of imagination and feelings to feed desire. Consider, for example, what it is like to long to be with someone whom you
love. The frustrated desire to be with her (and the related beliefs, about her absence and so forth) will be relatively
enduring, and then suddenly something perhaps reminds you of her, and a feeling of longing washes over you as you
vividly imagine her, at this very moment sitting just there, laughing into your eyes. And we all know this truth about the
nature of emotional experience: when you want to control your emotion, dwelling in imagination on the object of your
desire is to be avoided. What you should do is try to think about something else, or (a phrase I owe to Bernard
Williams) try to take the intentionality out of the feelings: try to turn the feelings which are directed towards the object of
your desire into just a feeling directed towards the condition of your body—a dull ache perhaps. (This is, incidentally, a
good way to try to give up smoking cigarettes.)
This leaves one other possibility to reject: that feeling towards is both believing and desiring; put loosely, it is an
attitude with both directions of fit. Here I can be quite quick. The first two difficulties with this we have already
encountered in relation to desire. Some
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emotional experiences, such as pride, involve feelings towards but do not involve desires. And, secondly, in respect of
some emotions which do involve desires, those desires need not have the phenomenology which is essential to feelings
towards. Thirdly, as we have also already seen, it is possible for there to be feeling towards with no relevant beliefs. The
fourth difficulty is connected with a point discussed in Chapter 2 in relation to the recognition–response tie: if feeling
towards has both directions of fit, then it is not possible, for example, to have feelings of fear towards something and
yet not be motivated at all to act appropriately. Of course, such a case would be unusual and require explanation in
terms of a wider narrative, but the claim that feeling towards is believing and desiring entails that it is impossible
(conceptually impossible) to be in a feeling-towards condition without motivation. Being impossible is one thing; being
unusual and requiring explanation is another.
It should now be clear what is the right thing to say about feeling towards. It is not essentially any particular sort of
attitude. When we have an emotion, we are disposed to have feelings towards a variety of things in a variety of ways.
Thus, in an emotional experience, some of the feelings towards may be perceptual in quality, directed towards the
object of the emotion as it is perceived or imagined to be (feeling disgust towards that pudding, feeling pride in her
performance); some may be directed towards the object of desire, especially when that desire is not readily satisfiable
or is frustrated (when you long to see someone you love who is far away, having feelings towards being with her again);
some may be directed towards an action of yours as it takes place (having feelings towards hitting him whilst you hit
him); and sometimes there may be more than one of these. What is essential to feeling towards, as I have already
emphasized, is a special emotional feeling and a special content—a content which is distinct from the content of any
other attitude which is held without this feeling.
I can at this point be somewhat irenic towards the belief-desire view and allow that emotional experience can involve
‘feelingful’ beliefs and desires, hopes, wishes, imaginings, and other attitudes, as well as feelings towards, which also
essentially involve both this special emotional feeling and this special content. But allowing this does not eliminate the
need for feeling towards, because there must be room to have, for example, feelings of fear towards something whilst
believing that thing not to be dangerous. Moreover, I only
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make this irenic remark about the belief-desire view on a condition: that feelingful beliefs, desires, and so forth be
characterized from the outset from the personal point of view. Let me return to my diagnosis in Chapter 2 of the
appeal of the add-on theory—the theory that emotional experience, and action out of emotion, can be adequately
explained by reference to feelingless beliefs and desires, leaving feelings to be added on at the end of the story, as
sensations not directed towards objects in the world. What sometimes lies behind this view is that, for example, an
action out of emotion can be explained by beliefs and desires characterized impersonally, as items defined or analysed in
terms of their causal role or in terms of their direction of fit, with the content of those attitudes captured relatively
sparsely, but adequately, in a ‘that-clause’. Then, on belated realization that what this approach leaves out is the
personal point of view—the way things are from the perspective of the person experiencing the emotion—feelings are
then added on after the intentional core has been specified. But, as I hope is now clear, this approach irretrievably
mixes up the impersonal and the personal. In contrast, my approach, and the approach of commonsense psychology,
is ineliminably personal, so that the project of properly capturing the content of the intentional episodes involved in
emotion (whether feelings towards, beliefs, desires, hopes, imaginings, or wishes) is done not impersonally in the first
instance and then personally as an add-on, but from the personal point of view (first- or third-personal) from the
outset. When I say that you are angry with Mary, I am saying how things are from your point of view, just as when I say
that I am angry with Mary I am saying how things are from my point of view. Thus emotions, to repeat, involve
thoughts and feelings which are directed towards the world—from a point of view, one hopefully by now hardly needs
to add—and which have a special sort of emotional content.
Of course one should accept that there remains the logical possibility, in the third-personal case, of being mistaken in
thinking that the other has a point of view: the possibility that you (impersonally described) could be identical to
another thing (impersonally described) which has no point of view but which behaves just like you (so long as this
behaviour is also impersonally described). But we should not be hypnotized by this possibility into thinking that the
mental in general, and emotions in particular, are, for safety's sake, best characterized impersonally, leaving the worry
until later of
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how to deal with a point of view (assuming that there is one). In ordinary commonsense psychology I presuppose that
you have a point of view; if I thought you did not, I would have an entirely different way of thinking and talking about
you and your behaviour, namely impersonally. I accept that I could be wrong in this presupposition, although I do not
for a second seriously contemplate the possibility; to do so would be a form of insanity—indeed, it has a name.
Conclusion
I hope that these reflections on feelings have not only undermined the idea that the intentionality of the emotions can
be fully captured in terms of feelingless attitudes, but, more positively, that they have also reinforced the centrality of
feelings in emotional experience. The existence of bodily feelings, as I have called them, is relatively uncontroversial,
although many may disagree with what I have had to say about them, and about the notion of borrowed intentionality.
As for what I have called feelings towards, I hope to have gone some way to showing that this notion is not suspect in
respect of its essentially combining feeling and intentionality. Furthermore, allowing for emotional feelings directed
towards an object in the world makes it possible to explain other important aspects of emotional experience: the fact
that emotions are passive and not entirely under our control; the possibility of cognitive impenetrability; and the
possibility of emotional weakness of the will or akrasia. I return to these issues in the next chapter.
4 Culture, Evolution, and the Emotions
Introduction
To what extent are our emotional responses, and our concepts of emotions and of emotion-invoking features, shared
cross-culturally, and to what extent are they local or culturally determined? What role does evolution play in
determining human capabilities for emotional experience, as compared with the role of culture, and in particular the
education of the emotions? Does the fact that our concepts of emotions and of emotion-invoking features are interestrelative imply that the emotions as understood by commonsense psychology are not a respectable kind as compared
with the taxonomy of the sciences, and would this conclusion lead to the claim that they should ideally be eliminated
from our thought and talk, to be replaced by something altogether different? Is evolutionary theory a threat to the
sorts of reasons that we give, from a personal perspective, for our emotional experiences and for our actions out of
emotion? Can evolutionary theory be called on to provide a deeper explanation of why, in emotional experience, our
thoughts, feelings, and actions can sometimes fail to be fully under our control? These are some of the questions I will
be addressing in the chapter.
One place to start is with a distinction made by Sir Peter Strawson in a different context (1979): he was concerned with
the nature of perception, but his distinction can be applied equally to consideration of the emotions. Strawson
distinguished two sorts of theory: an analytic-philosophical theory and a genetic-psychological theory. An analyticphilosophical theory about the emotions would be a theory about mature human emotional experience. A geneticpsychological theory, on the other hand, would try to describe the development of a capability for the emotions.
Strawson suggested that the genetic-psychological theory would address development in
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the individual or ontogenetically; a theory of this sort would be the concern of the developmental psychologist. But there
is another sort of genetic-psychological theory, one which addresses development of a capability for an emotion in the
species or phylogenetically; and this would be the concern of the evolutionary theorist.
So one way of thinking about the questions I am addressing is to consider just how these three kinds of theory relate to
each other. One might think that the two sorts of genetic-psychological theory should be kept strictly apart; there is,
however, an obvious sense in which they address the same question, namely the question of how we each (you and I,
mature human beings) come to have the capabilities for emotional experience which we do have. It is, I believe, for this
reason that the two should not ultimately be kept apart, at least where emotional experience is concerned, and why,
furthermore, the two genetic-psychological theories should not be kept apart from the domain of the analyticphilosophical theory, which seeks to understand and explain mature human emotional experience.
My strategy will be as follows. I will begin by considering the evidence across cultures of similarities and differences in
our conception of the emotions, and in certain aspects of emotional experience, including bodily changes and the
manner of expression of emotion. I argue that the notion of a paradigmatic narrative structure for an emotion can help
here: the paradigmatic narrative structure for anger, for example, and for its close ‘relations’ in other cultures, will have
many, but not all, of its elements in common.
Evidence of what is common points towards an evolutionary explanation, and evidence of diversity points towards the
local influence of culture; so I then turn to the question of the respective roles of evolution and culture in shaping our
emotional capabilities. What I will argue is that our capabilities for emotional experience are significantly
developmentally open or plastic (a notion which comes in degrees). To be developmentally open is to be open (to some
degree) to moulding by culture and the environment. I put this forward as an alternative to a view which I call the
avocado pear conception of the emotions: the view that what is evolved in human emotional capabilities is, in some
sense, ‘hard-wired’, and that it is only the ‘softer’ outer element which is culturally influenced.
I then turn to a defence of commonsense psychology—our everyday commonsense way of thinking and talking of the
emotions and of emotional experiences—arguing that neither the sciences nor
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cross-cultural diversity need threaten our concepts of emotions and of emotion-invoking features. The fact that these
concepts are, unlike scientific concepts, interest-relative need not undermine our confidence in them, nor need it imply
any sort of relativism about the truth of claims we might make about our emotions or about emotion-invoking features
of things in our environment.
Finally, I try to show how commonsense psychology can draw on, and learn from, evolutionary theory. In particular, it
can be deployed, I will show, to explain, and to deepen our discourse about, two phenomena of our emotional
experiences which I have already discussed in earlier chapters: how certain emotional responses and feelings towards
the object of an emotion can be cognitively impenetrable; and how we sometimes find ourselves in the grip of an
emotion, out of control, so that we act against our own best interests in ways which we later regret—we are weakwilled or akratic. This last explanation helps also to throw light on a further issue which is of concern to commonsense
psychology: to what extent we are responsible for our emotions and for our actions out of emotion.
I should first make clear what I mean by an emotional capability. It is, simply, a capability to have a certain sort of
emotional experience, and to respond in a certain sort of way, in certain sorts of circumstance. Three points follow
from this simple definition. First, most normal humans have a capability for fear (or for something like fear), and
someone without the capability for fear would be someone incapable of experiencing fear in dangerous circumstances,
and of responding to that danger as a result of that experience—that is, through the recognition–response tie. (So someone
who is incapable of fear might nevertheless be capable of responding to danger.) Secondly, to have an emotional
capability does not require that one have a concept of that emotion. And thirdly, an emotional capability is not the
same as a character trait; clearly, someone can have the capability for fear but not be a timorous sort of person.
The Evidence Across Different Cultures
It is an often expressed thought (not always a belief—sometimes more like a wish) that human beings of all races and
cultures are, in many significant respects, the same once one gets ‘under the surface’. A thought of this type is
frequently expressed with regard to the
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emotions. It seems to be strongly intuitive that humans have, in some sense, many sorts of emotional experience in
common, and that they share many emotion concepts. But what does the phrase ‘under the surface’ mean, and how
can we hope to point to any non-trivial cross-cultural universality in the face of the vast human diversity that is to be
found both geographically and historically, as well as across individuals in a particular place and time? The influence of
culture and the environment is such that one might despair of getting ‘under the surface’ to what might be
fundamental or universal.
One intuition with which many begin is that, even if some of the more complex emotions are specific to particular
cultures, there will be certain less complex, more primitive emotions, such as fear and anger perhaps, which are to be
found everywhere (even, perhaps, in some non-human animals). In philosophy, this has often involved the claim that
there are basic emotions. The idea of basic emotions is that our concepts of emotions are organized hierarchically, with
the non-basic emotions falling under one or more of the basic emotions. So, for example, if anger is a basic emotion,
then less basic species of anger might be annoyance, fury, rage, indignation, and so forth. Other non-basic emotions
could then be comprised of a cocktail of basic emotions; jealousy, for example, might include fear and anger.
According to this view, then, basic emotions are themselves common to all humans, and other sorts of emotion need
not be. This sort of view can be traced back a long way. Li Chi, a first-century BC Chinese encyclopaedia, said that there
are seven ‘feelings of men’: ‘joy, anger, sadness, fear, love, disliking, and liking’ (quoted by Russell 1991a: 426). The
Stoics named four basic emotions: pleasure or delight, distress, appetite, and fear (Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, iv.
13–15). Descartes said that there are just six ‘simple and primitive’ passions, namely wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy,
and sadness, and ‘all the others are either composed from some of these six or they are a species of them’ (Passions,
353); Spinoza held that the three primary emotions are pleasure, pain, and desire (Ethics, pt. III, prop. 59); and
Hobbes's ‘simple passions’ were appetite, desire, love, aversion, hate, joy, and grief (Leviathan, pt. I, ch. 6).
But this belies an undeniably wide cultural diversity in our ideas about the emotions, and in the emotions themselves:
as I will show shortly, there is evidence from ethnography and cross-cultural studies of significant cultural differences
in our conception of what
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an emotion is, of what emotions there are, and, as the previous paragraph shows, of what ‘basic’ emotions there are.
Furthermore, the influence of culture goes deep in determining emotional experience, and in the way emotions, even
the ‘basic’ ones, are expressed. For example, even if it is true, and non-question-beggingly true, that a laugh everywhere
is typically expressive of joy or happiness, and not of anger or fear, laughter varies enormously across cultures. Of
course, there are variations in what makes people laugh, but people's ways of laughing vary too, being culturally
influenced in all sorts of ways—not least by whether or not it is considered appropriate; one might recall here the
advice of an eighteenth-century peer of the realm, the Earl of Chesterfield, in his letters to his son, that ‘there is
nothing so illiberal, and so ill-bred, as audible laughter’ (Letters, 49; there is no evidence that this advice, or any other
advice contained in his letters, was taken). And when we come to an emotion such as romantic love, perhaps the whole
experience is just an artefact of our cultural situation, as the social constructionist would insist (I will consider social
constructionism later). In Flaubert's Madame Bovary, we are given a description of how Emma, being brought up in a
convent at the age of 16, was introduced to romantic love through ‘the refuse of old lending libraries’ (50). The books
which she read ‘were all about love and lovers, damsels in distress swooning in lonely lodges, postillions slaughtered all
along the road, horses ridden to death on every page, gloomy forests, troubles of the heart, vows, sobs, tears, kisses,
rowing-boats in the moonlight, nightingales in the grove, gentlemen brave as lions and gentle as lambs, too virtuous to
be true, invariably well-dressed, and weeping like fountains’ (50). And all this before she started on Sir Walter Scott. As
the novel progresses Flaubert makes it clear that Emma would neither have had these feelings, nor have behaved so
stupidly, if she had not been brought up on such stuff. And, if this is right, then emotional experience itself can be
influenced by our conception of emotion. This is an important point, and I will return to it later.
But leaving aside anecdote, what we read in novels, a priori armchair speculation, and philosophical prejudice, how
might one go about providing empirical evidence as to what is to be found in all cultures or is pan-cultural and what is
culturally relative? Evidence for emotions being pan-cultural seems to come from two main sources: judgement tests and
component analyses. These sources provide interesting material, but should, I think, be treated with considerable
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caution: first, they both focus almost exclusively on what might be called the output side of the emotions (cf. Griffiths
1997), and on facial expression in particular—those involuntary movements of the facial muscles which are involved in
some emotions; and secondly—a point which applies especially to judgement tests—the evidence seems to be more
about how emotions are conceived of than about the emotions themselves.
Judgement tests have often involved showing photographs of posed facial expressions of emotion to subjects, and
asking those subjects to identify what emotion the person in the photo is experiencing. This method has been deployed
particularly by Paul Ekman (see, for example, Ekman 1972, and Ekman and Friesen 1971 and 1986), and he has
concentrated especially on what he considers to be the six or seven ‘basic’ emotions: surprise, joy, sadness, fear, anger,
and disgust, and possibly contempt. (But see Ekman 1992 and 1994 for much longer lists of ‘basic’ emotions.) He (and
others) claim that their cross-cultural studies of facial expression indicate that recognition of facial expressions
associated with these emotions is pan-cultural. Notably, this extends to cultures which have been isolated from
outsiders—such as the Fore group of New Guinea (see Ekman and Friesen 1971). Cultural differences are much more
significant in facial expressions for the ‘non-basic’ emotions, and in what Ekman calls ‘partial facial expressions’; these
‘may occur when a person attempts to control or manage facial appearance’ (1980: 95), through the deployment of
various coping techniques, and ‘display rules’, being ‘the conventions, norms, and habits that develop regarding the
management of emotional responses’ (87).
Component analyses involve measurement of facial expressions of emotion and of those bodily changes involved in
emotional experience which are measurable. In one well-known experiment, stress-inducing films were shown to
Japanese and American viewers, and their spontaneous facial expressions and bodily changes measured when the
participants were not aware that they were being observed. Ekman claims that the results indicated ‘strikingly similar
facial responses in these two cultures’ (Ekman 1972: 259, cited in Ekman 1994: 278). Other experiments have focused
on facial expressions of children, observing the expressions of blind children, and finding that they show the same
sorts of muscular activity as children who are not blind. (The importance of component analyses is especially
emphasized by Izard; see, for example, Izard 1994.)
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The evidence from these studies (which I cannot review in detail here) does seem to me to be robust: there is good
reason to believe that there is significant cross-cultural commonality in facial expression and in judgements of facial
expression of certain emotions, which (as the Fore studies indicate) is not explicable by cross-cultural transmission
alone. But let me now say in a little more detail why I think that the findings of these studies should be treated with
caution. The first point to be careful about is that the studies really focus on just two aspects of our emotional
capabilities: those for emotional responses in terms of bodily changes and facial expression, and those for recognition
of certain sorts of facial expression as being expressions of a certain sort of emotion. The studies show nothing about
the universality of other aspects or elements of the emotions, such as, for example, the intentional elements. (This is
not to suggest for a minute that Ekman, Izard, or others working in this field claim more than is warranted here; it is
just to say that those who read their work should not leap to conclusions.)
The second, deeper note of caution is that one has to ask exactly what it is that the expressions are expressions of.
Judgement tests especially seem to be significantly influenced by how a particular culture conceives of emotions.
Unsurprisingly, agreement on what emotions are being expressed is clearer when people are asked to associate a facial
expression with one of a fixed number of specified terms for emotions (what is called a forced choice), rather than it being
left up to the subject to name the emotion associated with the expression. In one test (noted by Russell 1994) where
160 subjects were asked freely to choose a single word for expressions for which the forced-choice tests limited the
options to ‘anger’ and ‘contempt’, there were 40 different emotions named in responses to the ‘anger’ expression, and
81 for the ‘contempt’ expression, including disgust (16 subjects), boredom (10), disappointment (9), puzzlement (6),
confusion (6), and frustration (5); only 3 subjects chose contempt (Russell 1994: 119). Furthermore, subjects are often
disinclined to give a single emotion word in response, preferring instead to tell a story.
These difficulties are compounded when the studies are crosscultural: simple terms for emotion or for particular
emotions in one language often do not translate into simple terms in another language. A few examples will serve to
bring out this point. To begin with, our concept of emotion is not the same as some other languages'
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nearest equivalent simple term. In Polish and Russian one noun, ‘uczucie’ in Polish and ‘cuvstvo’ in Russian,
corresponds to both ‘emotion’ and ‘feeling’ (Wierzbicka 1995: 21). The Italian ‘emozione’ and the Spanish ‘emoción’
do not mean what we mean by ‘emotion’ in English (Wierzbicka 1995: 22). Tahitians, the Bimin-Kushusmin of Papua
New Guinea, the Gidjingal Aborigines of Australia, the Ifalukians of Micronesia, the Chewong of Malaysia, and the
Samoans do not have a word that translates as ‘emotion’ (Russell 1991a: 229, with detailed references to
ethnographical research papers), although many of these peoples have a term which subsumes what we would think of
as emotion under feeling and sensation. Next, there are differences between cultures in what are taken to be ‘basic’
emotions. They are usually taken to be between five and nine in number: often anger, fear, sadness, happiness, and
disgust are listed; more if surprise, contempt, interest, love, or shame is included (see Russell 1991a: 440; cf.
Wierzbicka 1995). This may partly explain the diversity of response, referred to earlier, in certain free-choice
judgement tests. Thirdly, single English words for specific emotions frequently do not translate into single terms in
other languages. The Yorubas lack a word for anxiety, and the Tahitians lack a word for sadness. Conversely, some
single terms for a type of emotion in other languages require a phrase in English: ‘Schadenfreude’ in German, of
course; ‘amae’ in Japanese, meaning something like a pleasant feeling of dependence on someone (Morsbach and Tyler
1986); and ‘awumbuk’ for the Baining of Papua New Guinea, meaning a sadness, tiredness, or boredom caused by the
departure of visitors, friends, or relatives (Russell 1991a: 432).19 Fourthly, some words for emotion in other languages
are not possible to translate into a single English word, requiring either a disjunction of emotion terms, or a phrase
which qualifies an English emotion term. Samoans use one word for hate or disgust; Ifaluk has ‘ker’ for pleasant
surprise and ‘rus’ for unpleasant surprise; and the Pintupi Aborigines of the Western Australian Desert have no less
than fifteen distinct words for different types of fear, including for example ‘nginyiwarrarringu’ for a sudden fear that
leads one to stand up to see what caused it (Russell 1991a: 431). (See also Russell 1994, and Ekman 1994 and Izard
1994 for their replies to Russell.)
19
Perhaps the English language could do with a single word for the feeling of sadness, tiredness, or boredom caused by the arrival of relatives.
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These cross-cultural differences in our conceptions of emotions may seem to point towards social constructionism. On
this view, not only our conceptions of the emotions, but also emotional experience itself, is socially determined;
emotions are, as one social constructionist puts it, ‘socioculturally determined patterns of experience and expression
which are acquired, and subsequently feature in, specifically social situations’ (Armon-Jones 1986: 33). Furthermore, as
another social constructionist puts it, ‘Despite their both being made up of stars, galaxies are, and constellations are
not, complex objects with respect to astronomy. . . . Emotions, I argue, are constellation-like, not galaxy-like. Their
identity as complex entities is relative to explanatory schemes that rely on social meaning and interpretation’ (Scheman
1996: 222).
This conclusion of social constructionism seems to me to be a significant overstatement. It leaves no room for
explanation of the deeper cross-cultural commonalities in emotional experience, and in our conceptions of these
experiences which the judgement tests and component analyses point towards. (One can find acknowledgements of
this by social constructionists, for example in Armon-Jones 1986, cited above.) The social constructionist might,
perhaps, seek to explain cross-cultural overlaps in terms of socio-cultural influences, for example by appealing to the
fact that human societies and cultures will typically develop along similar lines if located in essentially similar
circumstances. But this response still does not go deep enough, even if there is much truth in it.
How to make progress here? How to find a place for what is pan-cultural in our conceptions of emotions whilst
allowing for the undoubted cultural diversity? My answer is that we should begin with a notion which is already familiar
from earlier chapters, and which is, in fact, not entirely alien to the social constructionist—that of narrative structure:
there is, across cultures, a shared conception of emotional experience as comprising a number of elements which are
part of a narrative, so that, for each sort of emotion, there will be a paradigmatic narrative structure of elements of
emotional experience. Thus, the paradigmatic narrative structure for an emotion could vary across cultures, depending
in part on the interests which are peculiar or special to that culture.
James Russell has argued for a somewhat similar idea (Russell 1991a and 1991b). (There are a number of differences
between Russell's account and mine, particularly in his emphasis on prototypes as
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defining emotions, and in the claim that the causes and the effects of the emotions are part of the emotion. However, the
similarities are what is important here.) Russell's idea is that each sort of emotion will have what he calls a
script—essentially the same notion as that of a narrative structure—and some of the features which go to make up the
script will be pan-cultural, while some will be specific to a culture. He says:
The script hypothesis offers a simple and straightforward account of cross-cultural similarities and differences.
Those languages with fewer emotion categories would have more general scripts: Each script would have fewer
features and cover a broader range of phenomena. Languages with many emotion categories have more specific
scripts: Each script would have more features and cover a narrower range of phenomena. Moreover, some features
are culture specific, and others are pancultural. Or, better, culture specific and pancultural define two ends of a
continuum. Some features may be limited to few cultures; others found in all or almost all. . . . Whether any . . .
feature is actually universal is naturally an empirical question. Even if universal, a particular feature may be
emphasised, de-emphasised, or ignored. For example, even though arousal feelings appear to be a good candidate
for a universal dimension, the Ifaluk pay them little attention. (1991a: 443)
Russell puts forward a script for anger which looks like this (see Russell 1991a and 1991b):
Step1 The person is offended; the offence is intentional and harmful. The person is innocent. An injustice has been
done.
2
The person glares and scowls at the offender.
3
The person feels internal tension and agitation, as if heat and pressure were rapidly mounting inside. He feels his
heart pounding and his muscles tightening.
4
The person desires retribution.
5
The person loses control and strikes out, harming the offender.
These ‘steps’, as Russell calls them, could be related as follows to my idea of the paradigmatic narrative structure for an
experience of anger:
step 1:paradigmatic recognitional element involved in anger (although Russell's step 1 makes no reference to the
person's recognition—that he has been offended—this is not a significant difference here);
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step
step
step
step
2:paradigmatic
3:paradigmatic
4:paradigmatic
5:paradigmatic
facial expression for anger;
bodily changes and feeling of those changes (cf. Kövescses 1995);
motivational response involved in anger;
action out of anger.
The idea, then, is that the paradigmatic narrative structure for anger and its close ‘relations’ will vary across cultures,
reflecting differences in precisely how the emotion is conceived of, and in what emphasis is put on what elements. And
so on for other sorts of emotion. For example, the fifteen different sorts of fear picked out in the Pintupi language will
each have a distinct paradigmatic narrative structure which is considerably more specific than our narrative structure
for fear: ‘nginyiwarrarringu’, presumably, will involve something like ‘standing up to see what caused it’ as paradigmatic
action out of the emotion (step 5). And, within our own culture, there will be distinct paradigmatic narrative structures
for our distinct sorts of fear: dread, terror, alarm, and so forth.
With these remarks in place, we can say at least this much, I think: that the empirical evidence, especially from
judgement tests, indicates that there is a significant amount in common between different cultures' conceptions of
certain emotions (that is, in their paradigmatic narrative structure), and that there is much in common between certain
elements of emotional experience and expression. Taking for example anger and its close ‘relations’ across other
cultures, the precise paradigmatic narrative structure may vary across cultures, depending on precisely how the
emotion is conceived of, but underlying that diversity will be a notable commonality in the elements which comprise
the narrative structure. So we must now ask what it is that explains this commonality. At this point, the social
constructionist might say that a sort of narrative structure is paradigmatic of anger, and of anger's ‘relations’ in other
cultures, simply because of the shared cross-cultural politics of social interaction: following Hume, they might say that
justice is an artificial virtue, and actions deemed unjust are offences (step 1 of Russell's script), to which retribution is
an appropriate response (steps 4 and 5). Even if this were so, and even if this were sufficient to explain these elements
of anger, it would still leave unexplained the cross-cultural commonalities in bodily changes, and in facial and other
expressions, associated with anger and its close relations (steps 3 and 2 of
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Russell's script), and these are, after all, the main objects of focus in the judgement tests and component analyses
which I have been considering. We have to look deeper for an explanation of why these things are pan-cultural.
To do that, I turn now to the argument that there is an evolutionary explanation of why certain elements of certain
emotions (on the ‘input’ side as well as on the ‘output’ side) are pan-cultural. However, the right place must be found
for the potentially profound influence of culture—including the education of the emotions—and of the environment
on the development of an individual's emotional capabilities, and thus on his manner of expression of them. I will
argue that emotional capabilities are developmentally open or plastic, and therefore the expression of these capabilities,
in thought, feeling, bodily change, and action, will be open to significant cultural variation.
Evolutionary Explanations and Developmental Openness
We now have a very persuasive explanation of why certain capabilities for the emotions might be pan-cultural. In his
book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1889), Darwin asked the question: Why do involuntary
expressions of emotion occur in the way that they do? Darwin put forward three explanatory principles, but I will just
concentrate on the first, which he called the principle of serviceable associated habits (Darwin 1889: ch. 1; cf. Griffiths
1997: 64 ff.). Many of our psychological capabilities for emotional responses could, Darwin claimed, be explained
through natural selection in the same way as many physical characteristics. Through heritability and variation (Darwin's
‘descent with modification’), psychological capabilities would evolve which have survival value, being adaptive
functions or ‘solutions’ to adaptive problems which in the past improved on average an individual's chances of survival
and reproduction. So if a capability is an adaptation, it evolved because it was selectionally advantageous for our
ancestors; in the relevant environment it must have had some effect on the behaviour of the phenotype which
improved the average chances of survival and reproduction, and thus the survival of the genotype which
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the phenotype expresses (cf. de Sousa 1987, Plutchik 1980, and the collection of papers in Barkow, Cosmides, and
Tooby 1992).20
Of course, it does not follow from this that behaviour expressive of an adaptation is currently adaptive in today's
world, even though such behaviour was once (by definition) adaptive. Some such behaviour is currently fairly
harmless; one of Darwin's delightful examples is how domestic dogs turn round and round in their baskets before
going to sleep—once presumably useful for ensuring there were no snakes or bugs lurking about. But other sorts of
behaviour can be positively harmful in the current environment. Humans' liking for salt on their food is thought to be
an adaptation, but the current behaviour of putting salt on one's boiled eggs does not enhance one's chances of
survival and reproductive success. Some of our emotional desires might be like this: not currently adaptive, but
springing from a capability which is an adaptation. That might be why we have these desires. Emotional desires which
serve to explain action out of emotion are, I argued in Chapter 2, primitively intelligible: they cannot be better
explained than by reference to the emotion of which they are a part. This definition now ought to be qualified to say
that no better explanation can be given in terms of the agent's reasons—that is, from his personal point of view. This
qualification leaves room for the idea that certain of these primitively intelligible desires, and the emotional behaviour
which they express, could be given an evolutionary explanation. Equally, one may be able to give no reason why one has
a preference for salt on one's food (one just does have this preference), but there may be a further, evolutionary
explanation in terms of the adaptive advantages of salt intake for
20
There are at least three reasons why a feature might be pan-cultural and not have an evolutionary explanation. First, a feature might be pan-cultural because of cross-cultural
transmission—a sort of McDonaldization of the emotions. But the evidence from Ekman and Friesen's (1971) studies of the Fore group of New Guinea, a culture which
had been isolated from outside influence, would count against this. Secondly, the feature might have developed in all cultures by massive coincidence (cf. Kövescses 1995:
50). This seems just too unlikely to deserve further consideration. And thirdly, much more worthy of consideration, is the possibility of independent local rediscoveries in
response to environmental conditions which are common across cultures—so-called ‘forced moves’ (cf. Dennett 1995). However, this is not a plausible explanation of
those facial expressions where the form of the expression is arbitrary (cf. Griffiths 1997: 58), or of those bodily changes which are involuntary. It might also be argued, as it
was before Darwin, that the explanation for certain facial expressions of emotion being pan-cultural is that they are God's work (see Russell 1994). Many theists think that
this sort of explanation is not incompatible with an evolutionary one, but see Dennett (1995) for arguments why it is incompatible.
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our remote ancestors. This evolutionary explanation is a remote explanation rather than a proximate explanation in
terms of the agent's reasons, and the two explanations are not necessarily in competition (cf. de Sousa 1987: 78, Tooby
and Cosmides 1990 and 1992, Symons 1992, Kitcher 1990).
A capability for behaviour which was once adaptive, the behaviour having been serviceable for some purpose or other,
may become as it were ‘co-opted’ for some other purpose—a process known as secondary adaptation. In particular, as
Darwin argued, some sorts of facial expression—for example the baring of the teeth in anger—which were serviceable
for some purpose in our remote ancestors may in humans have taken on the secondary function of signalling an
emotion to other members of the same species. (The fact that certain forms of expression of emotion in humans are
similar to, or homologous with, expressions in those species which are our evolutionary ancestors is further and very
powerful support for an evolutionary explanation.) There are three things to note here about this notion of secondary
adaptation of facial expression. First, the idea of signalling of emotion does not imply intention on behalf of the
individual doing the signalling—something which Darwin often suggested, partly because he believed in the nowdiscredited Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics through learning by the individual. As Carroll Izard puts
it, ‘If expressions [of emotion] are anything, they are a functional communication system that preceded language in
evolution and that precedes language in ontogeny’ (1994: 290). Secondly, if, for example, baring of the teeth in anger
has survived in humans as a secondary adaptation because of its communicative function, then this presupposes that
humans also have the capability of recognizing baring of teeth as an expression of anger. Thirdly, some capabilities for
expression of emotion (for example, perhaps, the widening of the eyes in surprise) may be both primary and secondary
adaptations.
Let us recapitulate where we have got to so far. First, there is good empirical evidence that certain emotional
capabilities are pan-cultural. Secondly, this may be because they evolved for reasons of utility as ‘solutions’ to adaptive
‘problems’: they are adaptations—primary, secondary, or both.21 And thirdly, the form of facial
21
There is considerable debate as to how, if at all, evolutionary claims, including those about the emotions, can be verified—the so-called Problem of Confirmation. Are they
condemned to remaining mere ‘just so stories’? And how can it be shown that traits have survived as primary or secondary adaptations and not as ‘spandrels’ without any
specific adaptive advantages (see Gould and Lewontin 1979) ? I will not dwell on these questions here, as they are not directly relevant to the issues I wish to address. But
see Griffiths (1997) for a discussion of various fallacious inferences from problem to solution and from solution to problem, and of how empirical testing of adaptationist
explanations is possible.
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expressions in humans may to some extent be arbitrary: what matters for communication is its near-universality within
a species.
I now want to introduce to the discussion the notion of developmental openness or plasticity in order to enable us to find the
right way to allow for an evolutionary account of our emotional capabilities and also for the role of education of these
capabilities. Developmental openness comes in degrees. Furthermore, a capability can be developmentally open in at
least two ways. It can be open to influence from the environment, as are many of our biological capabilities: for
example, an organism's capability for growth will be significantly constrained by the extent to which it is properly
nurtured in its early years. Secondly, and this applies especially to humans' psychological capabilities, it can be
developmentally open to cultural influences: for example, our language capabilities are developmentally open in this
way, as are, I believe, many of our emotional capabilities. Consider the sort of account put forward by Stephen Pinker
and others of the development of our language capability. Language capabilities differ across mature individuals, for
some can speak English, some can speak Bengali, and so on. Yet all (normal) individuals may have been born with a
developmentally open universal grammar as underlying structure. This capability is developmentally open in that the
actual first language that a mature individual speaks will be determined in part by the culture in which he is placed,
although the range of possible languages for us humans will be constrained by the capabilities we inherit (cf. Fodor
1983, Pinker 1994, Pinker and Bloom 1992, and Segal 1996, who characterizes this sort of capability as a ‘diachronic
module’22). As I have said, many biological capabilities are developmentally open, but not to this degree and not in this
way. In a non-trivial sense, a child is born with a capability to grow wisdom teeth in later life, but this capability, unlike
those for language and the emotions, lacks the same degree of developmental openness, although the environment has
22
In earlier drafts of this chapter, I tried to express many of its ideas in terms of the modularity of our emotional capabilities. However, I have been persuaded, notably by
David Papineau, that this notion can be more confusing than helpful to discussion in this area.
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some relevance to whether and how the growth of the maturing individual's wisdom teeth takes place; furthermore,
culture does not have the same role in how wisdom teeth develop as it does in the development of psychological
capabilities for language and the emotions. One way of capturing what is special about these latter sorts of
capabilities—and here I follow Simon Blackburn—is to describe them as second-order capabilities or dispositions. In
Blackburn's words, referring here to our linguistic capability: ‘What our biological endowment gives us is a disposition
to fit in with the linguistic dispositions of those around us, or in other words, a second-order disposition’ (1998: 147).
Our capabilities for the emotions too, like those for language, are ‘plastic second-order disposition[s] to form different
affective responses of various kinds in various social environments’ (ibid. 147). Also like our language capability, the
range of possible emotions and emotional experiences is constrained to a degree by our genetic endowment: it might,
for example, be logically possible that the bodily change involved in a fear response be different, but it might not be
nomologically possible (cf. Fodor's remarks about language, 1983: 50).
Thus, lack of universality in humans' actual emotional behaviour or in their mature emotional capabilities (just like lack
of universality in language capabilities of mature individuals) is an unsurprising consequence of diversity in the culture
and environment in which a child can be placed, and is entirely consistent with nearly universal genetic endowment.
The idea can then be rejected that similarities across cultures in certain aspects of our emotional lives point towards
some sort of fundamental underlying cross-cultural universality which is to be found either at the level of actual
emotional experience or at the level of developed capability. This idea involves what I have called the avocado pear
misconception of the emotions: thinking of the emotions as structured like an avocado pear, comprising, under the
surface skin, a soft outer structure (that which varies culturally), and a hard inner core (that which is biological and
universal). The idea is expressed in part by remarks such as ‘Underneath the superficial differences, deep down we all
experience emotions in the same way; after all, if you strip away cultural influences, we are all the same biologically.’
Robert Solomon (1995: 267) puts the idea in the form of a question: ‘But once one subtracts all those differences [as
revealed by cross-cultural comparisons], what is left?’
I think the avocado pear misconception can also find expression in the notion, as traditionally conceived, of the ‘basic’
emotions,
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pointing towards what are essentially types of mature emotional experience and claiming that certain of these
experiences—those involving the basic emotions—are common to all humans, or at least are pan-cultural. At this
level, it is not really a coherent project to try to identify clearly what is pan-cultural and biologically determined after
stripping away variations brought about by cultural and environmental influence. This is not to say that the evidence
that certain sorts of facial expression are broadly similar does not point towards an evolutionary explanation of
commonality—I have already argued that it does. The point is rather one about the coherence of the project of what
might be called disentanglement: if we try to disentangle any deep commonality in mature individuals' emotional
behaviour or in their developed psychological capabilities for ‘basic’ emotions, the best we can hope for is an endless
debate about where to put the emphasis: the social constructionist will emphasize the cultural differences, pointing out
that even the basic-emotion theorists cannot agree on what the basic emotions are (see Ortony and Turner 1990); and
the basic-emotion theorist will emphasize what is roughly universal or pan-cultural, explaining cultural
differences—the soft part of the avocado pear—as unsurprising and not significant. For example, Paul Ekman,
who argues for ‘basic’ emotions, calls his theory neuro-cultural ‘because it emphasises two very different sets of
determinants of facial expressions, one which is responsible for universals and the other for cultural differences’ (1972:
212), the latter including the various coping techniques and ‘display rules’ which can vary across cultures. Thus, if I
interpret him correctly, he seems to suggest that there are two distinct things at work on the occasion of what he calls a
partial facial expression: the ‘neuro’ and the ‘cultural’. He says in one place, for example, ‘When the management [of
facial expression] is habitual due to a culturally shared or personal display rule, the management efforts may be set into
operation just about as quickly as the emotional responses dictated by the affect program’ (Ekman 1980: 89). This
gives the impression—a misleading one I think—that the capability for emotional responses itself lacks the sorts of
plasticity or developmental openness which I have been discussing, thus forcing the conclusion that particular facial
expressions of emotion must be a product of two capabilities acting in rough synchronization, one responsible for
what is universal (the ‘neuro’, the hard inner core of the avocado), and one responsible for what is culturally diverse
(the ‘cultural’ in ‘neuro-cultural’, the soft outer core of the avocado); whereas the picture
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I urge is of a single developed capability which has itself been shaped by the culture and environment in which the
individual is placed.
A comparison and contrast with a truly instinctual response may be helpful here—such responses as the eye-blink or the
knee-jerk. If I quickly flick my finger close to your eye, you will find it impossible not to blink; the blink is, as Jerry
Fodor puts it, ‘mandatory’ (1983: 71). It is, however, possible to try to control your eye-blink, and you might just
succeed in not blinking if my flicking of my finger is not close enough or quick enough. If you do succeed in this
effort, there will be a sort of facial expression which you produce: hard to describe, but I hope it is clear what I have in
mind. Arguably, this sort of expression is ‘decomposable’ into what is reflex and what is voluntarily controlled. But I
think that the ‘cultured’ but natural smile of the mature human is not typically like this. Smiling is developmentally
open or plastic to a different degree, and in a different way: its manner of expression is not ‘decomposable’—there are
not two things, the involuntary emotional response and a voluntary control thereof; there is just a smile, a natural, but
culturally influenced, expression of emotion. Moreover, of course, the occasion of such expression (roughly, when
something is found to be amusing) is culturally influenced in a way the eye-blink is not.
So, developed emotional capabilities can—and often do—vary significantly across cultures, as will the ways those
capabilities are expressed. And these variations will be reflected in culturally local concepts of emotions and of
emotion-invoking features. These are the concepts of everyday commonsense psychology. The question I now want to
address is whether this cultural diversity suggests that the emotions as conceived in commonsense psychology are
suspect categories, perhaps to be replaced by something more scientifically respectable. I will argue that there is no
threat to commonsense psychology from science here: the two are, so to speak, in different businesses.
The Concepts of Commonsense Psychology and the Concepts of
Science
Cultural diversity in concepts of emotions, and in concepts of emotion-invoking features, need not, in itself, unsettle us
in our everyday
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use of such concepts. We have seen that fear has a paradigmatic narrative structure—a paradigmatic structure of
recognition of the dangerous, and of response to it in terms of thought, feeling, bodily change, expression of emotion,
and action; and the dangerous is what merits fear—what merits this recognition and these responses. Thus the two
concepts emerge and have a life together. All sorts of things are picked out by us using concepts whose sense is fixed
relative to our particular—human or cultural, but not scientific—interests. Here are some examples: the already
familiar one, ornamental marbles, which we pick out by whether they look good on rockeries; peppers, spices, and
chillies by how hot they are; plants and flowers by whether or not they will look nice on your kitchen table; remarks by
whether or not they are funny or spiteful; actions by whether or not they are cruel; pictures by whether or not they are
evocative of the scene which they depict; and so on and so forth. These concepts do not hold themselves out, as it
were, to be concepts of scientific properties. Rather, they serve their purpose according to our human interests, or,
more locally, our cultural interests. So, for example, our confidence in our use of our concept of ornamental marble
need not be threatened if we were to find out that this is not how the best scientific practice taxonomizes rocks. Nor
need it be threatened if we were to find out that another culture had some other concept, let us call it ornamental
marble*, where the class of ornamental marble* included overlapping but not identical sorts of rocks to those included
in the class of ornamental marble. Just the same points can be made about our concepts of emotions and of emotioninvoking features. For example, the concepts of alarm and of nginyiwarrarringu very likely pick out different but
overlapping emotions, and the respective emotions are very likely merited in response to different but overlapping
features of things in the world: respectively, the alarming and what merits nginyiwarrarringu. And neither sets itself up to
be a scientific concept.
Let me try to express, and then to respond to, an objection which might nevertheless threaten to unsettle our
confidence in our commonsense psychological conceptions of such things. The objection is that most, or many, of the
concepts listed in the preceding paragraph—concepts of the dangerous, the funny, the cruel, the evocative, and so
forth—are really rather superficial in the sense that the best one can do is explicate them in terms of their meriting
certain sorts of response. Scientific concepts, on the other hand, go deep,
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being embedded in a nest of interlocking theories which can both explain and predict all sorts of phenomena. This
objection, I think, gives voice to a certain philosophical prejudice in favour of scientific explanation and prediction as
against other sorts of explanation and prediction. Our thought and talk of emotions is embedded in an interpretive
(and sometimes predictive) narrative which aims to make sense of an aspect of someone's life. These concepts give us,
so to speak, the equipment with which to understand, explain, and predict what people think, feel, and do: a personal
and thoroughly normative approach; thus the normative force of something meriting an emotional response, as
opposed to, say, merely causing a response. And, in just that respect, these concepts serve us very well (although, of
course, they can always be improved on, drawing, perhaps, on scientific knowledge where appropriate). Given that the
dangerous is what merits fear, our concept of fear is inextricably entwined with our concept of the evaluative property
of the dangerous, and, as we saw in Chapter 2, all sorts of thing can be dangerous, including snakes, Lord Byron, and
certain ideas. One can put it like this: our concepts of fear and of the dangerous play their parts very well in our
normative practice (or ‘theory’ in the most etiolated sense of that term) of understanding, explaining, and predicting
others' thoughts, feelings, and actions from the personal point of view; and to replace these concepts with some others,
just on the ground that they are interest-relative and not scientifically kosher, is to fail to appreciate the human or
cultural purposes which they serve in the ‘theory’ in which they are embedded. Thus, our confidence in our everyday
thought and talk about the emotions need not be unsettled.23
23
Griffiths says this about anger (1997: 79): ‘If psychologists cannot induce suitable changes in the concept of anger they might give their own concept a new label like “affect
program anger”, just as botanists have given up the term lilies in favour of the family name Liliaceae, which includes onions, garlic, and much else.’ Griffiths himself adopts
and argues for what he calls the ‘theory view’ of concepts; and, as we all know, theories are interest-relative. So it may well be, as he says, that if you are a botanist then the
‘folk category of lilies is of little use for explanation and induction’ (1997: 191). But it does not follow that this category will be of little use if you are a florist or an interior
decorator, and not a botanist: for these people the concept of the lily may have significant explanatory and inductive use. Similarly, it would take more than the theory view
of concepts to warrant the thought that one might reasonably try to ‘induce’ commonsense psychology to drop our ordinary concepts of emotion, for these concepts already
serve our interests very well in our ‘theory’ (in the etiolated sense) of making sense of people.
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Moreover, I cannot emphasize enough that these observations about cultural diversity do not imply any relativism
about the truth of the claims we might make about individual emotional responses. To think that they do is to confuse
the sense and reference of these anthropocentric or culturally local terms (cf. the marvellous discussion of ethical
concepts in Wiggins 1990). The sense of the term we use to think and talk about a particular emotion is contingently
shaped by the sorts of responses involved in that emotion's narrative structure (thoughts, feelings, facial and other
expressions, bodily changes, and so forth), and by the sorts of object that merit those responses, and these are
themselves contingently shaped by the culture and the demands of the environment in which that culture is embedded.
But once the sense of the term that we use to think and talk about that emotion is fixed, so that the meaning of our
utterances containing them is determinate, the truth of those utterances will not be culturally relative. The judgement
‘This is an ornamental marble’ will be true just if this is an ornamental marble, and ‘He is experiencing nginyiwarrarringu’
will be true just if he is experiencing that emotion. There is no cultural relativism here, nor is there any other sort of
relativism.
Some writers, especially those coming from the stance of the sciences, tend to generate a certain confusion about the
relation between everyday concepts and scientific concepts by failing to take note of the distinction which we make in
commonsense psychology between an emotion and an emotional episode. An emotion, such as love or jealousy, may
last for years; as part of this emotion—part of the narrative—there can be particular emotional episodes or
experiences, and these will be relatively short-lived. If this distinction is ignored, and if one focuses mainly on
emotional episodes, as these writers tend to do, then there may seem to be no place for emotion as we ordinarily think
of it. Another threat therefore arises to our confidence in our everyday emotional concepts. Paul Ekman, for example,
says, ‘Here is not the place to argue about just how long an emotion typically lasts, but certainly it is not hours or days,
but more in the realm of minutes and seconds. I believe those who claim emotions endure for much longer time
periods are summating what is actually a series of briefer emotion episodes’ (1994: 16). Then, when the domain of
enquiry is restricted to emotional episodes, the idea begins to gain some degree of credibility—unearned, I think—that
every ‘emotion’ has the following seven characteristics which
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Ekman cites: ‘automatic appraisal, commonalities in antecedent events, presence in other primates, quick onset, brief
duration, unbidden occurrence, and distinctive physiology’, plus, in many cases, ‘a distinctive universal signal’ (1994:
18; cf. Ekman 1992). Furthermore, these ‘emotions’, it is said, are basic emotions, and there are no emotions which are
not basic emotions. On this account, love, like that of Pierre for Natasha, or jealousy, like that of Marcel towards
Albertine, are not emotions, and do not feature on Ekman's list. They get some other title, such as ‘emotional attitude’
or ‘emotional plot’ (Ekman 1992: 194). This is unfortunate. To avoid confusion, it is better not to describe short-term
episodes of emotional experience as ‘basic’ emotions or even as ‘emotions’, but to give them some other name, if, for
some reason, ‘emotional episode’ will not do. And there is a term which has been used, by Ekman, Paul Griffiths, and
others: affect-program responses. These are, as Griffiths puts it, ‘complex, coordinated, and automated’ (1997: 77). They are
complex because they include ‘(a) expressive facial changes, (b) musculoskeletal responses such as flinching and
orienting, (c) expressive vocal changes, (d) endocrine system changes and consequent changes in the level of
hormones, and (e) autonomic system changes’, as well as ‘emotion feelings and cognitive phenomena’; they are
coordinated because ‘the various elements occur together in recognisable patterns or sequences’; they are automated
because ‘they unfold in this coordinated fashion without the need for conscious direction’ (ibid.). This is a good
characterization of some short-term episodes of emotional experience involved in the recognition–response tie, which
could be a suitable object of study for evolutionary science. But, for example, anger (the emotion as we understand it in
commonsense psychology) can be much more complex and enduring than the short-term responses involved in
affect-program anger, and not ‘automated’ in all its expressions. Consider, for example, a person who has built up, over
a long period, an enduring anger at the way she is being treated at her place of work. This emotion (for that is what it
is) could include, as part of its narrative, the occasional episode or ‘outburst’ of anger directed specifically at, for
example, a teasing remark by her boss, as well as the vocal and facial expressions, hormonal and autonomic nervous
system changes of which Griffiths speaks. Now even if commonsense psychology were to have fully absorbed the
scientific concept of affect-program responses, perhaps using it to replace our concept of emotional episode, it is very
likely
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that it will continue to be an ineliminable part of the best explanation of this person's thoughts and actions to say that
she is angry, where her anger is understood as her emotion, involving a narrative which includes her long-term nagging
grievances, her short-term responses, and her enduring disposition to have further angry responses to the way she is
treated at work. It is clearly just wrong to call anger in this sense a ‘basic’ emotion, because basic emotions are supposed
to be equivalent to affect-program responses—that is, to emotional episodes. But it is an emotion. So commonsense
psychology has no need for talk of ‘basic’ emotions, but it does need to talk of emotions. Furthermore, evolutionary
science could, I think, helpfully abandon talk of ‘basic’ emotions, and replace it exclusively with talk of affect programs.
It could also happily drop the two rather curious claims that there are no emotions but only emotional episodes, and
that what we think of as paradigmatic emotions—Marcel's enduring jealousy of Albertine, for example—are really
‘emotional plots’. So let us all stop talking about ‘basic’ emotions: it just generates confusion.
The conclusion, then, is that there is no threat from science, or, in particular, from evolutionary theory, to our
culturally influenced everyday conceptions of emotions and of emotion-invoking features. Commonsense psychology
is in the business of making sense of people from the personal point of view. Science is not.
I now want to turn to how commonsense psychology can learn from evolutionary theory: in particular, I want to
consider how the fact that many of our evolutionary capabilities have evolved can provide the basis for explaining the
phenomena of cognitive impenetrability and of weakness of the will or akrasia.
Education of the Emotions, Cognitive Impenetrability, and Weakness
of the Will
If an emotional capability is an adaptation, then it was selected for because it was advantageous for our remote
ancestors. It is sometimes claimed in evolutionary psychology that capabilities were selected for because they were
advantageous for our hunter-gatherer forebears in the so-called environment of evolutionary adaptedness (see, for
example, Cosmides, Tooby, and Barkow 1992: 5, and
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Symons 1992: 143), which is often taken to be the Pleistocene era, beginning about two million years ago. But the
environment in which adaptations evolved need not be restricted to the one which obtained over this period: some of
our physical traits—for example the human heart—must have evolved over a much longer period than that; and it is
an empirical matter when each one of our emotional capabilities evolved. So it is an unwarranted assumption that the
only relevant evolutionary period in which our capabilities for emotions evolved is the period in which our ancestors
were hunting and gathering (see Daly and Wilson 1999). In fact, genetically inherited emotional capabilities may be
much more task-specific than a single capability for, say, fear, and each capability may have evolved over a different
period: there may be a specific capability for its facial expression, another for recognition of these facial expressions,
others for the kinds of hormonal and autonomic system responses which are involved, others for recognition of and
behavioural response to certain sorts of stimuli, and so forth, each having evolved over different periods in our
evolutionary past; for example, the capability to recognize fear in oneself may have evolved fairly recently (cf. Damasio
1994, LeDoux 1998, and Griffiths 1997). And furthermore, each specific capability may be developmentally open to a
different degree and in a different way: for example, facial expression of fear may be more developmentally open than
hormonal fear responses.
But, for my purposes, there is a more important point about the period in which our emotional capabilities evolved.
The point is that the period over which any capability has evolved (possibly over thousands of generations) is vast in
comparison to the amount of time which has elapsed since the Neolithic Age, when animals were first domesticated
and agriculture began. It is a consequence of this that there can have been very little change in our genetically inherited
psychological capabilities since then: even though the problems thrown up by our environment are now so vastly
different from those of our remote ancestors, there can be no ‘new’ genetically inherited ‘solutions’ to these new
problems. As John Maynard Smith says, ‘we can be fairly sure that the nature (i.e. the genetically determined capacities)
of human beings has not greatly changed since the neolithic revolution, since 7,000 years is too short a period for
major evolutionary changes’ (1993: 328). He illustrates just how long the period of evolution is with this dramatic
characterization: ‘If a film, greatly
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speeded up, were to be made of vertebrate evolution, to run for a total of two hours, tool-making man would appear
only in the last minute. If another two-hour film were made of the history of tool-making man, the domestication of
animals and plants would be shown only during the last half-minute’ (1993: 327). The ‘mismatch’ between genetically
inherited capability and the current environment is thus twofold: first, as I explained earlier, we may have genetically
inherited capabilities for behaviour which is no longer adaptive in the current environment (putting too much salt on
our food); and secondly, we cannot have genetically inherited capabilities for behaviour which would be adaptive in the
current environment (for writing, say, or driving a car) if such behaviour would not have been adaptive in the
environment of our remote ancestors. If this mismatch is to be put right, so to speak, it has to be done ontogenetically,
by education of the individual.
The capabilities and traits of animals, and even plants, can sometimes be developmentally open to a very high degree.
For example, the leaf shape of the arrowhead plant is extraordinarily protean, with no known genetic difference
between individual plants: it is like a lily-pad when it grows in shallow water; it is like an eelgrass ribbon in deeper
water; and it is shaped like an arrowhead when it grows on land (I owe this example to Wilson 1998: 151). But, as I
have been discussing, humans' capabilities for emotional experience are uniquely influenced by transmission of cultural
norms, including through speech and writing. The especially high degree of variation in human culture—variation both
geographically and historically—arises largely through humans' unique linguistic capability. The very idea of the
education of the emotions points towards the importance of culture. Consider the importance of the notions of
appropriateness and proportionateness in the education of the emotions, whereby one can be taught, for example, not
only to recognize a personal slight or injury, but also to realize what sort and level of angry response is required in the
circumstances. That this varies enormously across cultures is undeniable; one cannot reasonably deny, for example,
that it is largely a cultural matter what the appropriate and proportionate response should be to finding someone
making sexual advances to your not-unwilling sixteen-year-old daughter or younger sister.
At the same time, perhaps, the idea of education of the emotions (and the etymology of the word ‘educate’) correctly
suggests that
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there are plastic capabilities which can be ‘exploited’ in the education process.24 We humans can be educated to adapt to
our cultural environment so that our emotional responses are in tune with those of others in our culture. We inherit
not only our parents' genes but also, in an important sense, their environment—an environment which has already had
a wealth of cultural influence imprinted on it. Given a relatively stable environment across generations, adults'
developed emotional capabilities will also be relatively stable; but, as this way of putting the point suggests, the fact that
our emotional capabilities are stable does not alone show that environment has little or no influence, as could be
demonstrated if the environment in which a child is nurtured were to be turned upside down from that of earlier
generations.
There are two further significant points arising from our unique linguistic and conceptual capabilities. The first point is
that we humans are capable of understanding our emotional experiences as being emotional experiences of a certain
sort. In self-interpretation, coming to see or to accept that one's emotional experience is what it is can sometimes
change the experience itself: for example, coming to accept that all this time you have been jealous can lead you not
only to see your emotional experience in a new light, but also to have emotional experiences that you would not
otherwise have had—the narrative of your experience changes in virtue of your interpretation. We are, as Charles
Taylor has said, self-interpreting animals (1985: ch. 2). The second point is that the presence of a concept of an
emotion in a particular culture can play a further role in shaping the very experience that the concept picks out. To
return to Flaubert's Madame Bovary, the presence of the concept of romantic love (by which I mean the general grasp of
that concept by individuals in the culture concerned) played a role (a causally explanatory role) in shaping—and this is
not putting it too strongly—the narrative of Emma Bovary's whole life, including
24
The notions of exploitation and education must not be misunderstood in this context: education of the emotions, in exploiting our plastic capabilities, need not involve an
intentional ‘exploitation’ by the ‘educator’. For one thing—obviously—there need be no such person as an educator; the ‘education’ may be more an informal matter of the
learner being present, watching, listening, imitating, and the like—just as children do. For another thing—equally obviously—even if there is, literally, an educator, such a
person need not be aware of ‘exploiting’ anything like a genetically endowed capability, any more than someone pouring water down a slope need be aware that he is
exploiting gravity.
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her ultimate suicide. Not only would Emma not have had these experiences in the absence of her grasp of this concept
and her belief that it was romantic love which she was experiencing (the first point); other people, including in
particular those who tried to seduce her, would not have acted as they did without their also having a grasp of the
concept, and believing that Emma too had such a grasp, and believing that Emma believed that she was experiencing
romantic love. And so on. We are, one might add, other-interpreting animals.
I now want to argue that our emotional capabilities are not fully open to be developed, ontogenetically, through culture
and education, in two important ways. First, they are, to some extent, cognitively impenetrable. And secondly, they can
ground certain sorts of weakness of the will or akrasia. I will deal with each of these in turn.
I discussed the notion of cognitive impenetrability in Chapter 3. The fact that you feel fear towards the cliff, in spite of
believing the cliff not to be dangerous, might explain your fearful behaviour, although in such a case one might be able
to control one's fear and its expression to some extent (as I said in the earlier discussion, cognitive impenetrability
admits of degrees). In other cases one's emotional responses can be as entirely beyond voluntary control as is the eyeblink when someone flicks a finger at speed close to your eye, or the jerk of the knee when it is hit by the doctor with a
mallet: they are more reactions than actions. Darwin (1889: 43–4) gives a good example, of an experiment he performed
on himself: ‘I put my face close to the thick glass-plate in front of a puff-adder in the Zoological Gardens, with the
firm determination of not starting back if the snake struck at me; but, as soon as the blow was struck, my resolution
went for nothing, and I jumped a yard or two backwards with astonishing rapidity. My will and reason were powerless
against the imagination of a danger which had never been experienced’.
The cognitive impenetrability of responses like this might be the evolutionary ‘price’ which is paid for speed of
response. The selectional advantages of an affect-program recognition–response tie which operates without practical
reasoning could be considerable: not only will there be the benefit of a relatively speedy response to dangerous
situations (flows of adrenalin, muscular contractions, freezing to the spot, and so forth); there may also be a benefit in
there being a tendency to respond to the slightest sign of danger
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(fear-response first, think later), with consequent occasional ‘false positive’ responses—responses to things which are
not, in fact, dangerous but towards which you nevertheless feel fear. So the price of these ‘quick and dirty’ responses is
the sort of cognitive impenetrability experienced by Darwin in the zoo. In his example, the response takes place in spite
of prior thought: the information delivered through the recognition–response tie (snake-strike in my direction: jump
backwards) can be in conflict with, and not penetrable by, the deliverances of more general cognitive capabilities for
practical and theoretical reasoning (a snake-bite cannot get through thick glass-plate; therefore the snake is of no
danger to me and no fear-response is required).25
These points about cognitive impenetrability give rise to important philosophical questions about the extent to which
we can be said to be responsible for our feelings, and for our emotional actions and reactions. But before I turn to
these questions, I want to examine another issue. If some of our capabilities for emotional responses are cognitively
impenetrable in the way I have been suggesting, then we may also have the basis for explaining certain sorts of
weakness of the will or akrasia: first, those cases where, having deliberated, we decide to do something, and then we
either fail to do that thing or do something else instead (I will call this last-ditch akrasia); and secondly, those cases
where, without having deliberated, we rush into doing something which, if we had deliberated, we would not have
done (what I will call impetuous akrasia). In both sorts of case, you act against your best interests, and, characteristically,
afterwards you regret what you did.
Some philosophers are of the view that akrasia is impossible. Simon Blackburn, for example, adopting the sort of
analysis of F. P. Ramsey (1978), takes it to be ‘analytic or definitional’ that ‘rational persons always act on the principle
of maximising their own expected utility’ (Blackburn 1998: 135). Taking an example of last-ditch akrasia, Blackburn
says:
25
It would be a fallacy to leap from cognitive impenetrability of emotional response direct to an evolutionary explanation of it, for cognitive impenetrability is consistent with
other explanations; we should not underestimate the power of education of the emotions to shape our feelings from scratch. For example, I might have been brought up to
use a butter-knife, even when I am alone; now I might not be able to get rid of feelings of guilt whenever I breach this rule, even though I now know it, and the feelings, to
be absurd.
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Ramsey's framework enables us to put aside the futile business of discussing whether a person of weak will is or is
not rational in favour of the more fruitful issues of interpretation and self-interpretation. Consider someone taking
a decision that somehow surprises us and them. Thinking about it, I decide that one course of action is the one to
take. But when the time comes, I find myself doing another. The natural response is to suppose that, perhaps as a
surprise to me and others, I actually cared more about some aspect of the situation than I realized. . . . If I behave
worse, I can . . . learn that my greed, fears, lusts, imprudence, or whatever are stronger than I had realized. To make
my emotion intelligible is to look back and recognize that my emotions and dispositions were not quite as I had
taken them to be. It is quite useless in such a case to invoke a blanket diagnosis of ‘irrationality’. (1998: 191)
So it would seem that, according to this view, being weak-willed is not acting against my interests; rather, my interests
are not what I thought they were. For the purposes of my discussion here, I do not mind whether one takes this sort of
view of akrasia or whether one insists (as I would prefer to do) that it is possible, logically and psychologically,
intentionally to act against your own best interests. For, on either view, it will be true that the akratic person acts
contrary to what he (and others) believed his best interests to be; it is just that on one view (mine), the failure can be
between judgement of what action is best and action itself; and on the other view (Blackburn's) the failure must be in
judgement—the agent is, roughly, wrong in self-interpretation. In either case there is a difficulty of interpretation and
self-interpretation, and, as Blackburn rightly points out, just to diagnose someone as irrational in these circumstances is
not explanatory of what he did—any more than it is, in other circumstances, explanatory to diagnose someone as evil
to explain the terrible things that he did.
Two further preliminary points will narrow the scope of my interest. First, it is my concern to consider akrasia
specifically as an ethical problem, not as a general conceptual problem in action explanation as to how an agent can
intentionally fail to do the action which he has decided to do (cf. Davidson 1969). Secondly, the akrasia in which I am
interested relates specifically to cases where the agent's deliberation and action is unduly influenced by emotional desires.
Although there are obviously many other sorts of akrasia, I take this sort to be quite familiar to all of us: in some sense
we get ‘carried away’ by our emotions, which interfere with or prevent
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deliberation, or which cloud our self-understanding, and which thereby lead us to act in ways we later regret.
Plato had a conception of the emotions and our bodily appetites as being like wild horses, to be harnessed and
controlled by reason. Aristotle also admitted non-rational desires (in the non-rational part of the soul), but it was his
view that these desires could be trained by habituation rather than just having to be held on a constant tight rein. He
divided these non-rational desires into two types, emotion (thumos) and appetite (epithumia), and he contrasted them
with rational desire (boulesis), for a rationally conceived good or end, usually of a longer-term nature. Only rational
animals have rational desires, but appetite and emotion are shared with other animals.
This tripartite analysis of our faculties for desire is essential to Aristotle's philosophical examination of akrasia in book
VII of the Nicomachean Ethics, and it is one I shall broadly follow for reasons which will emerge. The importance of the
analysis can best be seen by considering Aristotle's account of temperance, intemperance, and akrasia. (Although this
sort of akrasia involves appetitive desires, just the same sort of account of akrasia can be given in relation to akrasia
involving emotional desires.) The temperate person will not be one who avoids all pleasures of appetite, but will enjoy
them as he ought, appropriately and proportionately, or, as Aristotle puts it, in the right amount, at the right time, and
in the right way, and he will not feel any pain from pleasures forgone (NE 1118b34 ff.), because the appetitive, nonrational part of his soul will have been trained to be consonant with the rational part. An unconflicted temperate
person like this cannot be akratic: he need not, as it were, be looking over his shoulder at his non-rational appetites,
because he can be sure that those he does have will have been properly habituated through moral education so that
they are fully consonant with rational choice. Moral education, as Aristotle emphasizes throughout the Nicomachean
Ethics, is altogether a matter of habit. He says: ‘it is not unimportant, then, to acquire one sort of habit or another, right
from our youth; rather it is very important, indeed all-important’ (NE 1103b25).
The person who is not yet fully temperate, but who has reached the same rational choice as the temperate person, may
still feel the pull of his non-consonant appetites, and may or may not act in accordance with his rational choice. Such a
person, enkratic (strong-willed) or akratic, is further along the road to being temperate than
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the intemperate man, for at least he has made the right choice, but he is not far enough along to be sure that his action
will conform with his choice, because he still has the appetites of an intemperate man; thus, Aristotle says, rational
choice is more revelatory of character than is action (NE 1111b5). Both the enkratic and the akratic person make the
same rational choice, and they both face the same challenge of proper habituation of their non-rational appetites, but
the akratic person is one who acts against his rational choice, regretting his action afterwards. The akratic person,
Aristotle says, is like the city that has good laws but makes no use of them (NE 1152a20–2).26
Now, I was earlier following Aristotle in contrasting last-ditch and impetuous akrasia. Aristotle discussed two sorts of
akratic person—what he calls the weak akratic, who deliberates before acting akratically, and the impetuous akratic
(usually influenced by emotion rather than appetite), who rushes into action without deliberation: ‘For the weak person
deliberates, but then his feeling makes him abandon the result of his deliberation; but the impetuous person is led on
by his feelings because he has not deliberated’ (NE 1150b19 ff.). Aristotle has two delightful analogies in the case of
the impetuous person who is ‘led on’ by his feelings. Emotion, he says, ‘is like over-hasty servants who run out before
they have heard all their instructions, and then carry them out wrongly, or dogs who bark at any noise at all, before
investigating to see if it is a friend’ (NE 1149a25 ff.). But, in both sorts of akrasia, Aristotle's account points towards
the same physiological source of the failure: nonconsonant appetite or emotion leading the agent to act contrary to
rational choice. In the last-ditch case, the action is contrary to
26
There is enormous controversy over how to interpret Aristotle's account of akrasia, and his explanation in terms of having and not using knowledge. I cannot go into the
details here, but I should just say that the interpretation I prefer of the two ways of having knowledge distinguished in NE 1146b31–5 is literal and straightforward, leaving
room for all sorts of akrasia, including the last-ditch variety. On this interpretation the distinction is simply between on the one side having and using knowledge and on the
other side having and not using knowledge, with the test of whether or not the knowledge is used simply being whether or not the agent acts according to his rational choice:
if he does not, then he is not using the knowledge which he has. (So ‘having and using’ knowledge is a sort of success verb tested in right action, and is not to be equated
with knowledge being actualized in conscious awareness.) Thus the intellectual failure which comprises having and not using the particular premise of the ‘good syllogism’ is
not the explanation of akrasia; rather, it is part of the nature of the condition itself. I have been very influenced by Broadie (1991) in adopting this interpretation, and by
Burnyeat (1980) in understanding Aristotle's account of moral education and akrasia.
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actual rational choice, and in the impetuous case, the action is contrary to what rational choice would have been had
the person not rushed into action without deliberation.
It should by now be clear why Aristotle's distinction between rational and non-rational desire, and his notion of
rational choice, are both so important to his account of akrasia, and why I find his account so helpful. What I want to
do is to supplement Aristotle's account by drawing on the idea that some of our emotional capabilities are genetically
endowed: like Aristotle's faculties for non-rational desires, they too can be educated through habituation, but they can
nevertheless remain not entirely penetrable to reason.
Now, someone's action, as such, can be explained by citing his reasons for doing what he did, and I have shown in
Chapter 2 how the emotions can feature in such explanations. But in Chapter 2 I also contrasted two stories, both
involving fear: in one, after considerable deliberation, you become afraid that you might be made redundant; in the
other, you become afraid on suddenly seeing a bus hurtling towards you as you are crossing the road. I suggested that
the latter sort of response is much more primitive and animal-like than the former, and that, in such a case, talk of
beliefs and desires as playing a causally explanatory role seems in some sense to be out of place. What I want to
suggest here (and these remarks have to be speculative) is that the fear of redundancy involves practical reasoning,
whereas the fear of the bus does not. This is in part because the response to the bus is so immediate and unreflective
(‘quick and dirty’) that it seems very doubtful that practical reasoning would have taken place; and it is in part because
the response is so like that of other creatures in dangerous situations where we have no inclination to ascribe to such
creatures any abilities to engage in practical reasoning. This, however, does not mean that what you did in the bus story
is instinctual behaviour. (‘I did it instinctively’ is a massively over-used explanation—or excuse.) Instinctual behaviour,
such as an eye-blink, is not an action but a reaction: a reflex response, explicable in exclusively neurophysiological
terms, where the capability for such behaviour is not developmentally open. What you did in the bus story is, rather,
action, which, in contrast to instinct, is out of a developmentally open capability which can be educated.
No doubt it is true that fear responses of other animals can be ‘educated’, but it may well be that, unlike human beings,
the ‘education’ is restricted to fear-conditioning of the sort discussed by Joseph
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LeDoux (1998). In rats, for example, an ‘unconditioned stimulus’ such as a mild electric shock will give rise to a
response typical of fear—both in terms of behavioural response (freezing to the spot), and in terms of hormonal and
autonomic system responses. If on a few occasions the shock is delivered after a neutral ‘conditioned stimulus’ such as
a tone or a light, the rat will begin to respond in the same fearful way prior to the administering of the unconditioned
stimulus, just on experiencing the tone or the light. As LeDoux reminds us, this sort of experiment is based on
Pavlov's famous conditioning experiments with dogs in the early 1900s. ‘Fear conditioning responses’, LeDoux says,
‘can be used to couple defensive responses to neutral stimuli in worms, flies, and snails, as well as in fish, frogs, lizards,
pigeons, rats, cats, dogs, monkeys, and people’ (1998: 146). But the plasticity of humans' capabilities for emotions is of
a different order to that of other creatures. Not only do we have language and the capability for conceptual thought,
becoming, as we mature, self-interpreting and other-interpreting animals; we also have the capability for practical and
theoretical reasoning about our emotional responses, and this is absent in most, if not all, of the other creatures on
LeDoux's list. It is in virtue of having these additional features that humans' fear can be directly and indirectly open to
the influence of reason as well as to simple fear-conditioning: directly, through the influence of reason on the
capabilities for fear themselves; and indirectly through the influence of reason to, for example, restrain our responses
out of the capabilities for fear. And it follows that in humans, unlike creatures without these additional features, there is
the possibility that the deliverances of reason can conflict with (as well as agree with) the deliverances of an ‘educated’
or partially educated capability for recognizing and responding to fear.
I now have the material I need to explain impetuous emotional akrasia. Your impetuous response to a situation is an
action out of a genetically inherited, developmentally open emotional capability (for recognition and response), and it
takes place without practical reasoning, or perhaps, to use the Scots phrase again, ‘outwith’ practical reasoning. This,
however, is not sufficient for impetuous akrasia, for often such a response will turn out to be just what you would have
done if you had had time to deliberate: in the bus example, assuming that suicide was not on your mind, the beliefdesire explanation of your action which you might provide afterwards is, in a sense, an ‘endorsement’ by you of what
you did. What is also needed for
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impetuous akrasia is that the action be one which you do not later endorse in this way, and which you would not have
endorsed if you had deliberated at the time: you were rushed into action, just like Aristotle's analogy of the dogs ‘who
bark at any noise at all, before investigating to see if it is a friend’. (This is still not sufficient for akrasia though, for this
would admit your jumping out of the way of the bus with suicide in mind as an instance of akratic action. What is also
needed, at least for Aristotle's account, is that the action be, in some sense, contrary to virtue.)
We can then agree that there is a sense in which it is right to say that you are not entirely responsible for impetuous
akratic action: as Aristotle says, akrasia involving emotion is more pardonable and less shameful than other sorts. But
we cannot accept that one can simply deny responsibility for one's action out of emotion (‘It wasn't my fault: I was
built to respond that way, and I didn't have time to think’), for you are, to some extent, responsible for being in, and
for remaining in, the condition which is such that you do respond in this way: you are, that is, responsible to some
extent for your developed emotional capability. Consider, for example, a person who used to be in the Parachute
Regiment, and was trained to respond very aggressively whenever approached in any sort of threatening way. He has
now retired early, and is no longer physically threatened in his daily life, but he cannot stop himself from responding as
he was trained to do, even when someone utters some mildly aggressive words. After he has acted, he realizes that this
is just another ‘false positive’, but his deliberation is too late. Nevertheless, over time he could change his capability (he
ought to change it, and ‘ought’ is supposed to imply ‘can’); whereas there is probably nothing Darwin could do over
time to stop his reacting to the puff-adder as he did. A developed capability for emotion can thus continue to be
developed in the mature individual; it may be harder to teach new tricks to an old dog who barks at any noise at all, but
it is not impossible. It is, therefore, a mistake to speak as if emotional control is always a matter of controlling a token
emotional response or action, like redirecting a rolling ball onto a new path; rather, it is a matter of education of one's
capability for the emotions—of reshaping the channel along which future balls can run. Unlike our capabilities for
instinctual reaction, which lack the plasticity for being educated or transformed into a culturally informed developed
capability, many of our emotional capabilities can be so
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educated and transformed, not only during a child's upbringing but in later life also. Education of the emotions is thus,
in part, a matter of habituating our emotional capabilities to be consonant with practical reason: a continuing, lifelong
struggle.
Last-ditch akrasia, where deliberation is involved prior to action, requires a different sort of explanation. Here, as
Simon Blackburn rightly pointed out, the agent will be surprised to find that he did what he did. At the cocktail party,
the other person's sneeringly patronizing remark makes you very angry, and you want to throw your glass of wine over
him. This is your emotional desire, and it is an intelligible one. But, in spite of this desire, you decide that, all things
considered, it is best to restrain yourself. The presence of your emotional desire, although strong, does not give you
sufficient reason for trying to satisfy it in these circumstances; as it is sometimes put, echoing Bishop Butler (1726), the
emotional desire may have power, but it lacks authority. Then, as Blackburn puts it, you ‘find yourself ’ throwing wine
over the other person. On Blackburn's account, your action reveals that you were angrier than you realized. Equally,
on an account which admits akrasia, your action reveals this; but it also reveals that you acted against your reasoned
choice, or what you determined to be in your best interests. But on either account, an explanation can be given of why
you did what you did: you did not realize how powerful an influence your emotional desire was (your non-rational
desire, as Aristotle would say). If you had fully appreciated its power, you might have been able to do more to restrain
yourself. So education of the emotions is, in part, also a matter of coming to understand your emotional capabilities,
and the power of the emotional desires which are expressions of these capabilities. Once you do have this
understanding, you are in a better position further to educate your capabilities over time, and in a better position to
exercise authority on an occasion over your emotional desires.
Perhaps evolutionary theory can help here, in showing us what our emotional capabilities have developed from, and
why we have such primitively intelligible desires. Knowing in this way why you have a primitively intelligible desire does
not in itself give you any further normative reason for seeking its satisfaction, any more than knowing why you like salt
gives you reason to be liberal in sprinkling the stuff on your food. In fact, such knowledge can actually help to increase
your authority over your emotional desires (that is, to
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be strong-willed), and, ultimately and ideally, to eliminate them (and thus to have no further need of strength of will).
Realizing that the aetiology (the remote explanation) of your liking for salt is what it is, you see how little authority this
liking ought to have over your own reasons for action; you like it because substantial salt intake was adaptive for your
remote ancestors, but it is not adaptive for you, given the sedentary life you lead. Similarly, it is perhaps helpful to have
an appreciation of the aetiology of why I want to do terrible things to people when I am angry or sexually jealous.
Thus, knowledge of evolutionary explanations can help in health education and in moral education.
Aristotle thought that the fully virtuous person will never be akratic, because his non-rational desires will always be
fully consonant with rational desire; he does not even need the ‘executive virtue’ of strength of will. But most of us are
not fully virtuous, and so we do sometimes act akratically because our emotional capabilities are not fully trained, and
not under our control. We thus begin to see that the process of education of the emotions put forward with such
sensitivity by Aristotle takes on a darker tone: emotional capabilities need to be controlled in upbringing as well as simply
exploited. As Freud said in his New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis:
We realised that the difficulties of childhood lie in the fact that in a short span of time a child has to appropriate the
results of a cultural evolution which stretches over thousands of years, including the acquisition of control over his
drives and adaptation to society—or at least the first beginnings of these two. He can only achieve a part of this
modification through his own development; much must be imposed on him by education. [As the translators point
out, Freud's term, Erziehung, has a wider meaning than ‘education’, including ‘upbringing’ in a general sense.] We are
not surprised that children often carry out this task very imperfectly. [And, two pages later:] let us be clear as to
what the first task of education is. The child must learn to control his drives.27 (no. 32, PFL ii. 182)
27
Similar remarks by Freud are to be found elsewhere: ‘But ethics is a limitation of drive’ (Moses and Monotheism, PFL xiii. 366); ‘the renunciation of drive which it
[civilization] demands’ (The Future of an Illusion, PFL xii. 194; cf. §II passim ). I do not want to get into the details of Freud's notion of drive—there are all sorts of exegetical
issues to avoid here, and, in any event, as Ronald de Sousa says (1987: 92), Freud's notion of drive is ‘hardly more than a place-holder for a lacuna’ (although de Sousa
nevertheless also tries to relate this notion to an evolutionary account of the emotions). But it is clear that Freud wishes, as I do, to distinguish his notion of drive (Trieb )
from instinct (Instinkt ).
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But this darker tone, as Myles Burnyeat saw, is after all not as far from Aristotle as it might at first appear. Burnyeat
pointed out that Aristotle shared with Plato ‘the underlying idea . . . that the child's sense of pleasure, which to begin
with and for a long while is his only motive, should be hooked up with just and noble things so that his unreasoned
evaluative responses [unreasoned because of their source in an unreasoning part of the soul] may develop in connection
with the right objects’ (1980: 80). Yet this process may well fail to be completed:
There are, as it were, pockets of thought in us which can remain relatively unaffected by our overall view of things.
This is a phenomenon which the century of psychoanalysis is well-placed to understand, but the Greek
philosophers already saw that it must be central to any plausible account of akrasia. It is that insight which backs
their interweaving of the topics of akrasia and moral development.
From all this it follows not only that for a long time moral development must be less than a fully rational process
but also, what is less often acknowledged, that a mature morality must in large part continue to be what it originally was, a
matter of responses deriving from sources other than reflective reason. (Burnyeat 1980: 80, my emphasis)
These ‘responses deriving from sources other than reflective reason’—from our perhaps less than fully educated
emotional capabilities—can be revealed not only in cognitive impenetrability and in akratic action, as I have shown, but
also in expressive action, in ways which I will be discussing further in Chapter 5. And Freud thought that unreasoned
responses can also be revealed in dreams. He made this remark in a footnote to the last chapter of The Interpretation of
Dreams:
dreaming is on the whole an example of regression to the dreamer's earliest condition, a revival of his childhood, of
the instinctual impulses which dominated it and of the methods of expression which were then available to him.
Behind this childhood of the individual we are promised a picture of a phylogenetic childhood—a picture of the
development of the human race, of which the individual's development is in fact an abbreviated recapitulation
influenced by the chance circumstances of life. We can guess how much to the point is Nietzsche's assertion that in
dreams ‘some primaeval relic of humanity is at work which we can now scarcely reach any longer by a direct path’;
and we may expect that the analysis of dreams will lead us to a knowledge of man's archaic heritage, of what is
physically innate in him. (PFL iv. 699–700)
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In his ‘cultural books’ Freud made frequent reference to the analogy, pointed towards in this citation, between the
process of cultural evolution and the path of individual development.28 There is certainly no reason to believe that
ontogenetic development always literally recapitulates phylogenetic development (the so-called Law of Recapitulation;
cf. Paul 1991), or that ‘primitive’ tribes and cultures are developmentally closer to the myth of the ‘primal horde’ of the
Pleistocene Age. Furthermore, it is of course absurd to suggest that there is in the human phenotype literally a memory
of its phylogenetic origins—an error which some wish to attribute to Freud (cf. Paul 1991: 283). Nevertheless, we can
make sense of the analogy without making any of these errors. As I have tried to argue in this chapter, humans'
psychological capabilities for emotion can be transmitted genetically through sexual reproduction, and this account has
no need for anything like phylogenetic ‘memory’ or for the inheritance of acquired characteristics (again, cf. Paul 1991:
283).29 That these capabilities, so little changed since the Neolithic Age, are inherited by the child at birth shows both
why the analogy has the force it does, and why it is more than just an analogy. Freud's phrase, ‘man's archaic heritage’,
can be understood phylogenetically and ontogenetically: the education (in the widest sense of that word) of the
emotions of a child coming into a culturally informed world is, in part, the development of his uncultured, genetically
endowed psychological capabilities for the emotions into something culturally informed, although, as Burnyeat insists,
‘a mature morality must in large part continue to be what it originally was.’
In summary, then, to some extent our emotions and emotional responses are passive, as tradition has it, and cannot be
controlled. But to go on to say that we are not responsible for our emotions is to ignore the central idea of the
possibility of the education of the emotions over time, so that, at least ideally, our emotional responses can come to be
consonant with our deliberated rational choices. Habit is here the whole story, as Aristotle insisted.
28
Especially in The Future of an Illusion, Civilisation and its Discontents, Totem and Taboo, Moses and Monotheism, and A Phylogenetic Fantasy. See also New Introductory Lectures on
Psychoanalysis, no. 32. I do not want to say how closely Freud drew this analogy.
29
This is how I understand Freud when he says (SE xi. 120), ‘there is naturally nothing to prevent our supposing that the drives themselves are, at least in part, precipitates of
the effects of external stimulation, which in the source of the phylogenesis have brought about modifications in the living substance’.
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Conclusion
We adult humans may be animals of a special sort—ones with culture, language, and the capabilities for practical and
theoretical reasoning and for reflective thought. But there is much that study of the emotions in evolutionary theory
can reveal of our primitively intelligible emotional desires and their source in our remote past. This will come further to
the fore in the next chapter, where I consider expression of emotion, and how cultural influences and practical
considerations can lead us to channel some of our emotional responses into expressive action and away from action
out of emotion.
5 Expression of Emotion
Introduction
Expressions of emotion are a very heterogeneous class, including such diverse things as smiling, baring the teeth in
anger, jumping for joy, stroking the face of a person you love, kicking a chair in anger, and, out of grief, kissing or
caressing the clothes of a loved one who has just died. How wonderfully human this sort of behaviour is! And how
complex and subtle in its variety! For example, people's smiles when alone in a public place, lost in their private
thoughts, can vary in their expression, depending on just what sort of thoughts they are having. A person smiles one
way whilst walking down the street alone, remembering some amusing incident or story; he smiles another way whilst
waiting at the railway station for the arrival of the woman he loves as the train which she is on begins to disgorge its
passengers; and he smiles yet another way whilst looking through the photographs which he has just collected from the
chemist's. . . . Each, expressive of a subtly different emotion, is different in a way which almost beggars description.
And yet we can and do recognize them as different, and can, if pressed, describe the differences. A person who could
not express his emotions in such ways, or who could not recognize such expressions of emotion in others, would really
be lost from his fellow human beings.
In this chapter, I want to see how we can begin to understand and explain expression of emotion. Why do we do these
strange things? I say ‘strange’ not because they are unnatural or unintelligible—far from it—but because expressive
behaviour can come to seem strange if one dwells on it, rather in the way a familiar word can come to seem strange if
intensely looked at on the page. Wittgenstein reminds us of this:
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Two people are laughing together, say at a joke. One of them has used certain somewhat unusual words and now
they both break out into a sort of bleating. That might appear very extraordinary to a visitor coming from quite a
different environment. Whereas we find it completely reasonable. (I recently witnessed this scene on a bus and was
able to think myself into the position of someone to whom this would be unfamiliar. From that point of view it
struck me as quite irrational, like the responses of an outlandish animal.) (1980: 78)
Expressions of emotions are, like those bodily changes which are part of an emotion, and like actions out of an
emotion, part of the narrative of emotional episodes. But they differ in important respects from these other elements
of the narrative. Bodily changes just happen to us; they are not things which we do or can directly try to do: my palms
sweat, but I do not actively sweat my palms, although we can try, directly or indirectly, to restrain or control at least
some bodily changes. In contrast, actions which we do out of the emotions can be explained by reference to
appropriate combinations of beliefs and desires. I will be trying to show that, unlike actions out of emotion, many
expressions of emotion do not seem to be satisfactorily or adequately explicable in this way by reference just to an
appropriate belief and desire. However, unlike bodily changes, an expression of emotion can at least sometimes be
something which we do, and can directly try to do. So there is this puzzle in explaining expression of emotion. Is it the
case that, if expression of emotion really cannot be satisfactorily explained in terms of reasons from the personal point
of view, then our explanations must be limited to mere causal explanations of the sort which is provided for bodily
changes which are part of an emotion? If this were so, then we would have to accept that there are things which we
do—as contrasted with things that happen to us—which cannot be made sense of from the personal point of view any
more than we can make sense of the movements of the planets; expression of emotion would just be some sort of
perturbation of rational action as such. We need to find out if an explanation is available that might enable us to make
sense of expression of emotion, whilst perhaps being different from the sort of explanation which is accorded to action
out of emotion.
Given the extraordinary diversity of ways in which we express our emotions, and given the diversity of emotions which
we can experience, it would, perhaps, be surprising if the form of explanation turned out to be the same for each
particular expression. And they are not
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the same, as I will show. What I will do to explore the various forms of explanation is draw a very broad and crude
distinction between expressions which are actions and those which are not. In respect of expressions of emotion which
are actions, I will begin by making a distinction between actions which are genuine expressions of emotion and those
which are not. I will argue that a genuine expression of emotion is one which is not performed as a means to some
further end. Nevertheless, it is still possible to explain actions expressive of emotion in terms of reasons: they can be
made sense of. I then go on to consider those expressions of emotion which can best be explained by appeal to a wish.
Here I will return to the discussion of Chapter 4; I will try to show that expressive actions of this sort can reveal a
certain lack of appropriateness and proportionality in our emotional desires, which are channelled away from being
expressed in action out of emotion to being expressed in expressive action. Finally, I will consider those expressions of
emotion, including facial expression, which are really not actions at all, any more than are the sweatings, tremblings,
and flows of adrenalin which are bodily changes. Here again I want to consider further the influence of culture and
education, not just on facial expression of emotion, but also on those extraordinarily puzzling things which we do, such
as jumping for joy.
Expressions of emotion are not only heterogeneous; it is also hard to draw clear lines between different sorts of
expression of emotion, and between bodily changes, expressions of emotion, and actions out of emotion (cf. Sartre
1962: 76–7). Furthermore, no doubt it is also possible to classify expressions of emotion in all sorts of other ways,
perhaps orthogonal to my classification. All I want to achieve here is to say something of philosophical interest about
this much-neglected aspect of human behaviour. Much more work needs to be done, and what I say is, I appreciate,
only a beginning.
Expressive Actions and the Role of Belief in Explanation
An expression of emotion is genuine only if it is not done as a means to some further end. Here are three ways in
which an expression of emotion would fail to satisfy this condition, and thus not be
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genuine. First, an action would not be genuinely expressive of emotion if it was not sincere and was done in order to
give the impression that one was experiencing that emotion. For example, the expression might be merely the
expression of an accepted social norm, as one might, in a foreign country, send a strange sort of gift to express
gratitude for the host's hospitality, after having established that this is the appropriate way to express gratitude; or as
one might, for the sake of good manners, manage a smile of gladness on saying hello to someone you simply cannot
abide (cf. Williams 1965, who discusses these sorts of example). These are not sincere expressions of emotion at all,
because there is no such emotion being experienced: one is just ‘going through the motions’. Secondly, an expression
of emotion would not be genuine if it was sincere, but was done in order that others should recognize that one is
experiencing the emotion, and in the belief that, by doing what one is doing, this further end will be satisfied. This sort
of explanation might on occasions be the appropriate one: for example, you ruffle his hair to show him that you love
him; or you frown to show how upset you are by his remark. But, if all one's expressions of emotion had to be so
explicable, then one would be (and probably seem) a very odd sort of person: sincere in your expressions perhaps,
unlike in the first sort of explanation, but totally lacking in spontaneity, always calculating the effect of what you do on
those who are the object of your emotion or on others who are present. Surely what is characteristic of genuine
expression of emotion is just that it is not explicable in this way. Thirdly, an expression of emotion would not be
genuine in the sense I mean if it was done, say, for the sake of pleasure: for example, you angrily kick the desk in order
to feel better.
All these sorts of action are, of course, possible, and they can be explained relatively straightforwardly by appeal to a
desire and a means–end belief, but none of them is a genuine expression of emotion. How, then, do we give beliefdesire explanations of actions which are genuine expressions of emotion, given that they cannot be done as a means to
some further end? Rosalind Hursthouse, in her important paper ‘Arational Actions’ (1991), has argued that beliefdesire explanations cannot be given. In respect of those actions which I call genuine expressions of emotion, she
maintains that it would be true to say that ‘the agent did not do it for a reason in the sense that there is a true
description of action of the form “X did it (in order) to . . . ” or “X was trying to . . . ” which will reveal the
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favourable light in which the agent saw what he did, and hence involve, or imply, the ascription of a suitable belief ’
(1991: 58–9). She maintains, instead, that simply being in the grip of whatever emotion it is explains the action as much
as anything else does (59).
However, we need not accept the revisionary view that we have here a class of intentional action that cannot be
explained by a belief and a desire, even if we want to say, as I do, that these actions are not done as a means to some
further end. What we can do is put forward a means–end belief-desire explanation which, in effect, identifies the end
and the means. Michael Smith (1998) puts forward just this sort of response to Hursthouse. Taking one of
Hursthouse's examples, that of ‘Jane, who, in a wave of hatred for Joan, tears at Joan's photo with her nails, and gouges
holes in her eyes’ (Hursthouse 1991: 59), we can truly say that Jane is doing what she is doing because she desires to
gouge out the eyes in the photograph of Joan and believes that she can do this by doing just what she is doing—that is,
in this case, by tearing at this particular photograph. As Smith emphasizes, the importance of this explanation comes
out in situations where the belief is false, such as a situation where Jane hates Joan and gouges out the eyes in a photo of
Cherie Blair in the false belief that it is a photo of Joan. The explanation of why she did this will thus involve the belief
that she can do what she wants to do—gouge out the eyes in the photo of Joan—by doing what she is doing, namely
tearing at a photo of the person she thinks is Joan.
How are we to assess this sort of belief-desire explanation? Although it is, so far as it goes, a good one, it is, as Smith
says, ‘distinctly unsatisfying’, because the belief-desire pair is ‘relatively bizarre’, and the explanation is unhelpful in
explaining why Jane should want to do what she is doing; so the explanation requires what Smith describes as a
‘supplement’ by reference to an emotion (1998: 22). The question, then, is whether this sort of supplement is
satisfactory. What Smith does is not to introduce a further reason for the agent (for if he did, then the action would no
longer be a genuine expression of emotion); his supplement is, rather, that a type of emotion—hatred in this case—‘is,
by definition, a state in which we are disposed to think, and to desire, and to do, all sorts of things’ (ibid.), including, in
this case, desiring to gouge out the eyes in a photograph of the person we are angry with. Jane is thus acting on a desire
and a belief that are typical for someone to have when experiencing this sort of emotion.
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This sort of supplement is unsatisfactory in this case. It does not really make it at all clear why someone should be
disposed when hating or in anger to desire to do such a ‘bizarre’ thing as scratch the eyes in a photo of the person they
hate or are angry with.30 Some emotional thoughts and feelings are what I have called primitively intelligible; a thought
or feeling is primitively intelligible if it cannot be better explained in virtue of anything else other than the emotion of
which it is a part. Desiring to be away from the object of your fear is primitively intelligible in this sense, as is desiring
to get your own back on someone with whom you are angry. Desires like these are not at all bizarre; that is why I call
them primitively intelligible. So, in the case of desires like these, I agree that Smith's supplement would be adequate. But
it is not, I suggest, primitively intelligible that someone should desire to scratch the eyes in a photo of a person with
whom they are angry. However, we do, in some sense, find the action intelligible: we sometimes do such things
ourselves and we find it very human when others do them. So an explanation cannot be far away.
Before I turn to a more satisfactory explanation of Jane's expressive action, it will be helpful now to consider what
distinguishes actions out of emotion from expressions of emotion, given that they both ought to be explicable by
desires which are primitively intelligible. The answer, I think, is that expression of emotion combines this feature with
another, one which is not (at least typically) possessed by action out of emotion: expression of emotion is also action
where the means–end explanation identifies the end with the means—where the action is not done intentionally as a
means to some further end. For example, if, as in the example of Chapter 2, Jane hits Jim out of anger, this action out of
an emotion can be explained in a way where the end and the means are not identified, and the action is performed as a
means to a further end: Jane's desire is to get her own back on Jim (a primitively intelligible desire for angry people to
have), and her belief is that hitting Jim is the best means of achieving that further end. That explains why she hit him
intentionally—with the further intention of getting her own back. So the action
30
Smith's discussion involves another example of Hursthouse's, that of a man who, in grief, rolls around in his dead wife's clothes (Hursthouse 1991: 58). His supplementing
explanation, along the lines discussed, is open to the same criticisms; and, it will later emerge, the alternative explanation which I proffer applies to this example equally well.
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out of emotion of hitting Jim is given a primitively intelligible explanation, not by appealing to a desire to hit him, but
to a desire to get her own back on him; whereas Jane's expressive action of scratching the eyes in the photo is done
with the intention of scratching the eyes in the photo, and not with some further end in view, such as to get her own
back on her rival. The reason why one cannot bring in this other desire at this point in order to explain what Jane does
is that we would then be forced into an entirely different explanation of why Jane scratched the eyes in the photo: we
would have to say that Jane desired to get her own back on her rival, and believed that scratching the eyes in the photo
is the best means of achieving that further end. There would be at least two problems with this. First, the action would
no longer be a genuine expression of emotion. And secondly, Jane may be angry and full of hate, but let us not be
forced to assume that she is also deluded.
The sort of explanation I will now put forward for Jane's expressive action will not work for all expressive actions, but
it will work for a good number of them. It involves the idea that Jane has another desire—one which is not ‘bizarre’
and which can readily be made intelligible: she desires to scratch out, not the eyes in the photo of her rival, but the eyes
of her rival.
Imagination and the Wish
Some of our desires are idle, in the sense that we do not believe it is possible to satisfy them; examples would be the
desire to be taller, or the desire to have lived in eighteenth-century Edinburgh. These are sometimes called ‘wishes’. My
use of the term ‘wish’ will not be quite the same as this. In the sense in which I will use the term, when I wish for
something, I desire that thing, and I also imagine, or am disposed to imagine, the desire to be satisfied (cf. Wollheim
1984). In this sense, not all idle desires need involve wishes, as I might not, for example, be disposed to imagine myself
being taller; and not all wishes need involve idle desires, as I might imagine doing something which I want to do, and
which I could, in fact, actually do—hitting someone, for example.
Let us return to the example of Jane. Why does Jane tear at Joan's photo with her nails, and gouge holes in the eyes?
The answer is that
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this action is expressive of a wish: Jane has a desire to scratch out Joan's eyes, and she imagines that she is doing this in
the expressive action. Here, then, we have a real psychological episode, one which is part of Jane's emotion, involving a
desire which is rendered intelligible by further appeal to her primitively intelligible desire to get her own back on her
rival whom she hates and has feelings of anger towards. Consider how natural it is for Joan to say—and to mean—‘I
hate her so much I could scratch her eyes out!’, and, revealingly, she might well say this as she starts to scratch at the
eyes in the photo. As we have already seen, what we should not do is attempt to explain Jane's expressive action of
scratching the eyes in the photo by reference to this desire, to scratch out Joan's eyes, in combination with some belief,
such as the belief that the eyes which she is scratching are actually her rival's eyes, and not a depiction of them; or a
belief such as the means–end belief that, by scratching the eyes in the photo, this desire would be satisfied by her
expressive action. Indeed, if Jane were told that her doing what she is doing actually does cause Joan to be blinded, her
response would very likely be that this is not what she ‘really’ wanted to happen. The civilizing restraints on what an
angry, hating person can do—ethical restraints perhaps, or knowledge of the force of the law—are just what makes
Jane perfectly aware that she ought not to do bodily harm to Joan, thus leading her, on this occasion, to resort to an
expressive action. The symbolic nature of the expression takes place as it does partly because the literal action, as it
were, is not a realistic option (cf. Solomon 1993). Wittgenstein put it like this: ‘Burning in effigy. Kissing the picture of
a loved one. This is obviously not based on a belief that it will have a definite effect on the object which the picture
represents. It aims at some satisfaction and it achieves it. Or rather it does not aim at anything; we act in this way and
then feel satisfied’ (1979: 4).
This explanation in terms of a wish does not imply that Jane could not also have certain perfectly well-grounded beliefs
in this area—that, for example, this photo is a photo of Joan—and this belief can combine with the desire to gouge out
the eyes in the photo. Smith's error is not the postulation of this sort of belief-desire explanation; the error, rather, is to
leave the ‘bizarre’ desire inadequately explained. My approach is to put forward two distinct explanations, which are
not in competition. There is the belief-desire explanation (where the desire is to gouge out the eyes in the photo of the
rival),
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and there is my further explanation in terms of a wish (where the desire is to gouge out the eyes of the rival). They
explain, as it were, different vectors of what Jane does: the action vector and the expressive vector. And the relation
between the two, and between the two desires, is one of symbolic match or correspondence (cf. Wollheim 1991: p.
xxiv). The explanation in terms of a wish can thus be seen as the expressive correlate of the sort of explanation which
would make sense of Jane's action out of emotion, the action of scratching out Joan's eyes, if she were to do such a
terrible thing. By acting out through expressive action, Jane is, in a symbolic way, acting out just what she knows she
ought not to do. So this, I argue, is the way to make intelligible the ‘bizarre’ desire to scratch out the rival's eyes in the
photo, by appeal to the intelligible desire, in the other vector, to scratch out the rival's eyes, and in turn by making this
latter desire intelligible by appeal to the primitively intelligible desire to get one's own back on a rival. The first of these
three desires cannot be made intelligible by appeal to the third without going via the second; what I have tried to put
forward is a way of making that move possible without turning a genuine expression of emotion into something quite
different.
I do not mean that the wishes of which I am speaking necessarily have to be repressed in the Freudian sense. Nor do I
mean that there need be anything like an unconscious belief that the desire which is not acted upon is satisfied in the
expressive action. Rather, I want to be able to account for a spectrum of cases. The repressed is, perhaps, at one
extreme, but there are many examples of actions expressive of a wish that lie towards the other extreme, where we are
perfectly well aware of what we are doing and of why we are doing it: we make a wax effigy of someone we hate and
then stick pins into it; or, much more crudely, we pick up the cushion from the sofa, say to ourselves or out loud
‘Right, that's him!’, and then start to pummel it; or we kick our friend's car in anger at his annoying remark.
There is often some symbolic match or correspondence between the object of the emotion and the object towards
which the expression of that emotion is directed, although this need not always be the case: sometimes one simply
‘vents’ one's emotion on the nearest thing to hand, without its having any symbolic relation to the object of the
emotion; for example, whilst opening your post during breakfast, you read that your bank manager is proposing an
increase in
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charges, and you kick the kitchen table in anger. But many of our expressions of emotion can be such that the object of
the expressive action will bear some significant relation to the object of the emotion. A relation of representation is an
obvious one: the photo, the wax effigy, the cushion. I think we can also make use of an analogy with the tropes of
synecdoche and metonymy to appreciate further possible relations. In synecdoche, the substitution is of part for whole
or of whole for part; and here, analogously, the compassion felt by Raskolnikov for the whole of human suffering is
expressed by his kissing poor Sonia's foot (part for whole), or the love for one person might be expressed by loving
gestures towards people in general (whole for part). Or, in shame, the face is hidden from view when the wish is to
hide completely (part for whole again). In metonymy, the substitution is of a property or relatum of a thing for the
thing itself: the car as belonging to the friend who is the object of our anger; the clothing which the mourner kisses or
caresses as having belonged to the dead lover.31
In actions expressive of a wish where the expression involves civilizing constraints, such as Jane's scratching the eyes in
the photo, there has to be some motivation not to act on the uncivilized desire, although clearly the agent need not be
aware of such a motivation, nor need the motivation impair the spontaneity of the expressive action. Nevertheless,
there is a degree of complexity of thought behind such actions which suggests that not all expressive actions are like
this: there are some which should, in fact, be explained more directly, and with less complexity. In the example of
kicking the kitchen table after reading about the increased bank charges, the explanation could be in terms of a wish,
involving a desire to do physical damage to your bank or to your bank manager (primitively intelligible, as I am sure we
would all agree), but perhaps the better explanation here will be the cruder one of just ‘venting’ your emotion on the
nearest thing to hand. (We should recall here how some other animals—apes and dogs, for example—sometimes
express their anger, much as we do, on what is to hand, and not on the object of their anger.) Without being too
regimenting about this, I think that if there is some relation between the object of emotion and the
31
Here we have the explanation of the example which Smith discusses. The man's action of rolling around in his dead wife's clothes is expressive of a wish: he wants her back
with him (a primitively intelligible desire in someone who is grieving) and he imagines this desire to be satisfied in the expressive action.
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object of expressive action onto which the agent's mind might latch, or if, as in the example of pummelling the
cushion, the agent, so to speak, ‘co-opts’ an object for expression, vesting it in imagination with some such relation,
then it will be likely that the right explanation will be in terms of a wish; and if there is no such relation either believed
or imagined to exist by the agent, then the explanation is more likely to be along Hursthouse's lines, as due simply to
being in the grip of the emotion.
In an action expressive of a wish, there is not just a relationship between the object of the emotion and the object of
the expressive action—Joan and Joan's photo. There is also a relationship between the aim of the desire—to scratch
out Joan's eyes—and the expressive action—scratching out the eyes in the photo. The relationship need not always be
as straightforward as this example suggests. One reason why it need not be is that often, as I have said, we are perfectly
well aware of what we are doing and why, and can knowingly act something out in expression in a much more extreme
form just because we really know it to be harmless to the object of our emotion. Nevertheless, phrases that we often
use on such occasions, like ‘getting it out of our system’ and ‘letting ourselves go’, do suggest that the desires which are
expressed are not entirely civilized. Another reason can be that the object of the expressive action is simply not the sort
of object which would be ‘amenable’ to the preferred manner of expression: for example, if it were an enormous
billboard of Joan, perhaps the best Jane could do would be to throw eggs at it.
This latter sort of reason can also apply to our perfectly ordinary actions, nothing as such to do with our emotions,
where what is to hand for some other purpose is, like the cushion, vested in imagination with a relation to the object of
the emotion. Here the ordinary action becomes, so to speak, infused with expression of emotion. Leaving the room in
a huff, you do not just shut the door, you slam it; arguing with your husband at breakfast, you do not just slice the
bread, you hack at it; angry with the person on the other end of the 'phone, you ‘throttle’ the receiver. In these cases,
there may be no desire to slam, hack at, or throttle the person with whom you are angry; the desire might be more
indeterminately aimed at doing some physical harm to him. In such cases as these, where expression of emotion is, as I
will put it, adverbial, there will be distinct vectors of explanation for verb and for adverb: the perfectly ordinary
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action, picked out by the verb (the door-shutting, the bread-slicing, and so forth), is explained by reference to a belief
and a desire which have no reference to an emotion; and the expression, picked out by the adverb (the violence of the
shutting, the vigorousness of the slicing, and so forth), is explained by reference to a wish.
Much of one's emotional life is expressed in this way: not through action which is solely expressive, but through
everyday, mundane action which is adverbially expressive. But, again, not all such action is expressive of a wish. In
many cases of adverbial expression—cases where the object of expression bears no relation, real or imagined, to the
object of the emotion—the explanation will be less complex, as being due simply to the agent's being in the grip of an
emotion. For example, when a child slams the door because she is told that it is time for bed, this less complex
explanation is, perhaps, the more likely one. And much adult expressive behaviour can be similarly childish and
uncomplex, and explanation in terms of a wish would be over-complicated: in anger, we can simply slam the door, and
this adverbial expression is rendered intelligible by primitively intelligible desires to ‘vent’ one's emotion.
It should now be clear that explanation of expression of emotion as being expressive of a wish should be added as a
real alternative to the armoury of possible explanations of things which we do. Sometimes it will be the right one, and
sometimes not. Consider the following example, where any one of several explanations could be the right one.
Husband and wife are having a blazing row in their drawing room, and, in extreme anger, the husband picks up his
wife's favourite vase and smashes it to the ground right in front of her. Why does he do this? Here are four possible
explanations. The first two are explanations which imply that what is done is not expressive of emotion; the last two
imply that it is a genuine expression of emotion. The first explanation is that the husband wants to show his wife how
angry he is, and believes that smashing this vase is the best way of doing this. (Perhaps the vase is just the nearest thing
to hand; or perhaps he believes that smashing what she holds dear will make it most plain to her how angry he is.) A
second possible explanation is that he wants revenge, and believes that smashing her favourite vase is the best way of
getting it. A third is that he picks up and smashes the nearest thing to hand, which happens to be his wife's vase, and he
does this simply because he is in the grip of anger; there is no further explanation beyond the primitively intelligible
desire
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to vent one's anger. In the fourth, the action is expressive of a wish. What he desires is to smash her (or at least to do
her physical harm), but, given the civilizing constraints which have an at least partial hold on him, the vase-smashing is
something which he resorts to as an expression of this desire and of an imagining that it is she who is being physically
harmed. Which of these four—amongst other—possible explanations is, in this case, the right one is clearly not
determinable on the basis of the information I have given, although much might hinge on the outcome of the
interpretation: in particular, the ethical properties of the action—and of the agent—would very likely vary, depending
on which interpretation is the correct one; and the grounds for divorce might be different also. The right explanation,
as for action in general, will sometimes be fairly easy to find, and sometimes, try as one might, it will not be found, by
agent or by observer.
In Chapter 4, I discussed how some of our psychological capabilities for emotion have an evolutionary explanation:
they are adaptations, having evolved because they were selectionally advantageous for our remote ancestors. Education
of the emotions, I said, is in part education of these capabilities so that our responses come to be appropriate and
proportionate, a process which is often far from completed in the mature person: echoing Myles Burnyeat again, ‘a
mature morality must in large part continue to be what it originally was, a matter of responses deriving from sources
other than reflective reason’ (1980: 80). In Chapter 4, I also discussed how this lack of ‘fit’ between, on the one hand,
an emotional desire which springs out of this sort of emotional capability, and, on the other hand, what is appropriate
and proportionate according to the dictates of reason, can be revealed in akratic action. Expressive action too can
reveal our less than fully educated emotional desires, and here too becoming aware of, and acknowledging, these
desires can be a crucial element in self-understanding and self-control. Many of our emotions, like anger and hatred,
involve aggressive and destructive desires—at the extreme, to kill or destroy; other emotions, like lust, jealousy, and
greed, involve possessive desires—at the extreme, to own or consume exclusively; other emotions, like fear, involve
self-protective desires—at the extreme, to flee or hide. But, as we saw with Jane and the photo, and with the husband
and the vase, our civilization puts satisfaction of these desires—at least at the extreme—out of court. We are restrained
to do the ‘watered-down’ version: what is appropriate
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and proportionate. But, so often, the action which is appropriate is not what we feel, and sometimes say, we ‘could have
done’. The normative pressure towards the civilized response so often seems to be opposed to what we somehow feel
we might be capable of in a less civilized world. ‘Animal blood’, to borrow Robert Musil's evocative phrase (1995:
1306), has its residue in us civilized adults, and this residue is revealed in the emotional desires which are only ‘satisfied’
in an etiolated, symbolic sense through the power of imagination. So, if you can come to realize that a certain sort of
expressive action—perhaps a sort you habitually repeat—is expressive of a rather terrible and uncivilized thought, then
you may no longer see the expressive action as barely intelligible, involving a ‘bizarre’ desire, seeing it rather as a
relatively harmless way of channelling your primitively intelligible and utterly human desires to do the terrible things
which some of our emotions involve. An idealist (Aristotle perhaps) might hold that we should have no need for this
sort of expressive action, as the emotional desires of the ideal agent will, through education, have become thoroughly
appropriate and proportionate. Less optimistically, and more realistically, I maintain rather that one should be aware of
and acknowledge one's expressive actions as being what they are, accepting that the wishes they express and which
serve to explain them remain far from civilized, yet nevertheless welcoming the expressive action as a lot less
uncivilized than the action of which it is a pale shadow. It is, after all, better for everyone that Jane should scratch out
the eyes in the photo of Joan than that she scratch out the eyes of Joan.
Expressions of Emotion Which Are not Actions
We are already in the fascinating territory between bodily changes and action out of an emotion. I turn now to those
expressions of emotion which are not in any sense actions. I have in mind not only facial expressions of emotion (the
smile and the frown, the contortion of the face in fear, the opening wide of the eyes in surprise), but also laughter, the
flow of tears, and the tremor of fear in the voice. They too, like bodily changes, can be causally explained, but they are
not actions, in spite of the fact that we think of them as expressions of emotion, rather than as part of the emotion itself.
In
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respect of this category I am mainly interested in those involuntary bodily movements which are involved in expressing
some emotions. I emphasize ‘involuntary’ in order to contrast them with what we can, and sometimes do, directly try
to do. We can smile in order to give the impression we are glad when we are not; we can smile when we are glad in
order to show that we are; and we can smile because smiling gives us pleasure. But all these ways of smiling are to be
contrasted with the genuine or ‘Duchenne’ smile, which involves distinct muscles which we cannot directly try to
move.
There is a good reason why these bodily movements are thought of as expressions of emotion, rather than as mere
bodily changes, as the discussion of Chapter 4 will have shown. The reason is that their function is to communicate
emotion to others: I can recognize that you are angry by seeing your scowl. Recall here that the claim that we
communicate our emotions through facial expression does not imply intention on behalf of the individual doing the
communicating, so when we say that his spontaneous and genuine smile communicated his happiness, we need not
feel pushed towards postulation of a means–end belief-desire explanation for smiling. A smile would be an action,
explicable like this, only if it were of the sort discussed at the end of the preceding paragraph.
When we smile or laugh as a genuine expression of, say, happiness, do we have a desire to do so, even if a belief-desire
explanation is not available? (In Chapter 4, I discussed an evolutionary, or remote, explanation of expression of
emotion; here I am concerned with the possible shape of a proximate explanation.) I think there is a sense in which we
can be said to want to do such things, but the title of ‘desire’ to capture this sense is really rather honorific. Of course
one might naturally say that one wanted to laugh at the funeral, but then one might equally naturally say that during the
concert one wanted to cough, sneeze, belch, hiccup, or yawn; the term ‘want’ or ‘desire’ here really suggests little more
than an impulse to ‘release’ something. The honorific nature of the title is most plain in those spontaneous, instinctual
expressions which one is hardly aware of having made: the frown and the grimace of worry or anger, the raising of the
eyebrows in surprise. Here there is typically no phenomenology to the ‘desire’ (to allow the honorific title); it typically
only has a phenomenology when one also wants not to do whatever it is—as at the funeral or the concert. There does
seem to be an inner struggle going on at times such as these—one which does not
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necessarily involve irrationality. What I think we have here (at least typically) is a ‘desire’ to laugh, in competition, as it
were, with a piece of reasoning: you think that laughing at funerals is offensive and inappropriate, and accordingly you
want not to laugh on this occasion. It is ironic that the term ‘want’ or ‘desire’ is most naturally used for things like
laughing and sneezing just on those occasions when we also want not to laugh or sneeze, so that the desire cannot be
satisfied or is frustrated; and the term is least naturally used when we simply laugh or sneeze, with no contrary desire.
I said at the outset that my distinction between expressions of emotion which are actions and those which are not was
a crude one. I would like to end by briefly speculating about those expressions of emotion which intuitively seem to be
closer to actions proper than are smiles, frowns, and barings of teeth, but are still some way from being actions proper.
I have in mind such curious behaviour as jumping for joy, scratching your head in frustration, and punching the air in
delight. These things which one does are unlike the genuine smile in that the latter involves a movement of certain
muscles which one cannot directly try to move. But still, surely a genuine spontaneous jump for joy (consider the bodily
movement of a six-year-old on being told that she is going to see Cinderella for a birthday treat) no more involves a
belief than does the genuine spontaneous smile. A belief, say, that you can move your body in a jumping way, serves no
explanatory purpose, and makes jumping for joy too close to the one extreme of intentional action and too far from
the other extreme of mere bodily movement.
Then there is the sort of expression of emotion (and of mood) which is characteristically repeated: scratching a
particular part of your body, fiddling with your clothes or a pen, or crossing and uncrossing your legs. The person who
does this sort of thing is not usually reflectively conscious of doing it, although if you, as it were, catch them at it, they
might say ‘Oh, was I doing that? Yes, I suppose I was.’ But no thought seems to be involved. Most of us have at least a
few such habits (which normally do not reach the point at which they become anti-social or even compulsive); and it is
sometimes rather alarming to encounter someone who has none. Here too, I think, a belief seems entirely out of place,
and even postulation of a desire is rather honorific.
But what is fascinating about some expressive behaviour is just how calculative it can be, even when it is entirely
genuine. For
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example, consider how the character in C. P. Snow's The New Men (cited in Taylor 1986) expresses his delight at some
academic success by time after time trying to throw an eraser up onto a picture rail. Here, I think, we do have an
action—one which, echoing J. L. Austin (1966), we might say was done intentionally, and with deliberation, although not
on purpose. And it is really thoroughly intelligible that one might want to do such a thing—after an academic success
one is capable of just about anything. Less calculative, but nevertheless highly stylized, is the way, for example,
professional footballers and tennis players express their delight in victory. Notably and intriguingly, expressions of
delight are much more stylized than are the typical expressions of dejection in defeat: professional tennis players now
punch the air in a quite different way than they did two or three years ago; but heads hang just as they always have
done. And yet these expressions of delight are also often not without spontaneity. I would like to say that the habit or
disposition to express the emotion is developmentally open to cultural influence in all sorts of ways, but the expression
itself can still be spontaneous; compare the way a trained and experienced parachutist lands—highly trained but done
‘without thinking’. So is punching the air in genuine delight an action? I think it is, although, like the behaviour of the
character in the C. P. Snow novel, not done on purpose. And yet my inclination is to say that hanging the head in
dejection is not an action: this, surely, is much closer to the smile or the frown—if it is genuine, it is not something that
we directly try to do, although we can directly try to control it.
Conclusion
There is, I think, more philosophical work to be done on expression of emotion, including the curious collection of
expressions of emotion about which I have just been speculating, in the grey area between action and mere bodily
movement.32 As a class, expression of emotion is very heterogeneous: some expressions are actions,
32
And I think there is also more ethnographic work to be done; for example, looking back on the discussion of Ch. 4, one now sees how thin are the characterizations of
facial expression in judgement tests, and just how restricted the available explanations in forced-choice judgement tests.
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close to but not the same as actions out of emotion, some are more like bodily changes; some have an evolutionary
explanation, some probably not; some can be explained by a wish, some not; some are done knowingly and with the
greatest of care, some we can be completely unaware of doing. It is hard to see what unites the class, other than the
suggestion that there is no genuine expression of emotion which takes place as a means to some further end.
In this chapter I have been focusing on one specific sort of element of the narrative of emotional episode. In the next
chapter, I will widen the discussion considerably, to consider not just the narrative of emotion, but also that of mood
and character, seeing how and in what ways they relate to each other.
6 Emotion, Mood, and Traits of Character
Introduction
So far, I have been concerned mostly with emotion. I now want to turn to considering mood and character and how
emotion, mood, and character are closely intertwined in the narrative of our lives. This will involve trying to tease out
the distinctions between these three—distinctions which may not be precise but which are nevertheless of great
importance.
I will begin by considering the relation between emotion and mood, and between emotion, mood, and action. I draw
significantly on Robert Musil's discussion in The Man without Qualities (1995). In Chapter 2, I said that emotion and
mood are to be distinguished by the degree of specificity of their objects, and here I want to expand on that point, and
also to consider how emotion and mood can differently influence and be influenced by action in a process which Musil
calls shaping and consolidation.
I then turn to traits, and especially to traits of character, which are, generally, dispositions to have thoughts and feelings
of a certain sort, and thus to act in certain ways. It might seem at first blush that traits are far removed from emotion
and mood, and do not really deserve to be considered as part of the same philosophical work. But in fact, as I hope
will emerge, traits are very closely intertwined with emotion and mood: it is often a subtle matter of interpretation to
determine whether a certain psychological phenomenon is a trait or an emotion or a mood; our traits are shaped by
our emotions and moods, just as our emotions and moods are shaped by our traits; and, of course, many of our trait
terms are to be understood as dispositions to experience certain emotions and moods.
A large part of my strategy in discussing character traits is a defence of our practice of ascribing character traits to
people. This defence
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involves the claim that character trait ascription is essentially personal and normative, just as is our everyday talk about
people in terms of their thoughts and feelings. This is controversial. It might seem, on first blush, that when we ascribe
a character trait to someone—being kind, for example—we are ascribing to them a disposition in just the same way as
we ascribe a disposition to, for example, a sugar cube or a planet; and there is nothing personal or normative about
that. But character trait ascription, I will argue, is not at all like that. Or at least it ought not to be. I will distinguish
between what I will call our default use of character trait terms, and our considered use. In our considered use of
character trait terms, when we ask ourselves, for example, what this kind person ought to do, the ‘ought’ is personal
and normative, just as it is when I am asking myself what I, a kind person, ought to do. (The norms of trait ascription,
however, are not the same norms as those of morality; more on this later.) This idea enables me to bring out a vital
distinction which we make in explaining why people sometimes fail to act as they ought, according to their character
trait: the distinction between justifying reasons and excusing reasons. A justifying reason will, roughly, show that what
you did was, all things considered, the right thing to do; and an excusing reason will not do this, but will give some
excuse to explain why you did what you did. Further, within the class of excuses, I distinguish between non-rational
influences on thinking and undue influences on thinking. An example of the former might be not doing what you
ought to have done because you were drunk; an example of the latter might be not doing it because of someone else's
unduly influential powers of persuasion. I discuss these distinctions in relation to two well-known experiments in
empirical psychology: one concerning Samaritanism—the study of when and why we go to the aid of other people; and
the other Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments.
It is without apology that I bring together in this chapter consideration of emotion, mood, and character. Not only do
they deserve consideration together because they are intimately intertwined in a person's narrative, but also much of
current philosophy of mind is, I think, impoverished due to a concentration on issues surrounding how we gain a
grasp of other people's beliefs and desires, at the expense of neglecting or downplaying these other important parts of
the phenomena: a very significant part of our ordinary everyday discourse, aimed at understanding, explaining, and
predicting the
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thoughts, feelings, and actions of other people (and of ourselves), involves talk of their emotions, their moods, and
their traits. This will therefore be the topic of this and the next chapter.
Emotion and Mood
Although emotions and moods can be distinguished by the degree of specificity of their objects,33 this distinction is not
a sharp one for two reasons. First, emotions need not be directed towards objects which are completely specific in the
sense that they can be demonstratively picked out or precisely described by the person experiencing the emotion. Your
fear on waking in the middle of the night is a genuine emotion, even though you might not be able to say just what it is
you are afraid of: whether it is the strange shape of the shadows on the wall, or the noise which woke you, or the dark.
Secondly, there will always be some degree of specificity in the object of moods, even if the best available description of
that object is ‘everything’, or ‘nothing in particular’. A mood involves feeling towards an object just as much as does an
emotion, although, as I have said, what the feeling is directed towards will be less specific in the case of a mood.
Let me now put some flesh on these observations. The distinction I am drawing between emotion and
mood—between anger and irritability or between fear and anxiety for example—is a distinction which should not be
drawn at the expense of appreciating the fact that typical emotions and typical moods have much else in common;
indeed, it will emerge that typical emotions and typical moods can as well be understood as different varieties of one
and the same emotion.
The emotions, and their place in our lives, constitute a thread which runs through Robert Musil's The Man without
Qualities. This visionary novel, set in Vienna in the period just before the First World War, has as its central character
Ulrich—the man without qualities.
33
Some moods are better understood as illnesses or psychological disorders. My interest is in moods which do not fall into this very broad category: the blue mood rather than
clinical depression perhaps, whilst accepting that there may be no clear dividing line between the two. There is no ground for the claim that emotions and mood are
distinguished by their duration. This rests on the confusion, which I discussed in Ch. 4, between emotion and episodes of emotional experience; emotions can last for years.
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Musil never finished his novel, but we now have in translation those of his posthumous papers which include some
draft chapters, a number of which rework material from earlier chapters. These draft chapters include a lengthy
philosophical discussion of the nature of the emotions, either in the form of extracts from Ulrich's diary or as
considered by Ulrich in assembling his thoughts prior to writing his diary. Clearly, we are not in a position to determine
how much the views expressed about the emotions are Musil's own, but this is not important for my purposes: what is
important is that the views expressed are directly relevant to this chapter. I therefore make no apologies for quoting
Musil at some length. From the wonderfully evocative passages which follow, I want to draw out just two particular
ideas for further discussion: the idea of shaping and consolidation between action and emotion; and the idea, already
mentioned, that emotion and mood are to be contrasted as specific and non-specific emotions. These two ideas enable us
to see how differently action features in emotion and in mood.
An emotion, I have argued, is a relatively complex state, involving past and present episodes of thoughts, feelings, and
bodily changes, dynamically related in a narrative of part of a person's life, together with dispositions to experience
further emotional episodes, and to act out of the emotion and to express that emotion. Your expression of emotion
and the actions which spring from the emotion, whilst not part of the emotion itself, are none the less part of the
narrative which runs through—and beyond—the emotion, mutually affecting and resonating in that emotion, and in
further emotions, moods, and traits, and in further actions. Musil calls the dynamic relation between action and
emotion one of shaping and consolidation:
This idea is based on several notions and considerations. Since I would like to clarify it for myself, let me first go
back to our saying that an emotion brings about a behaviour, and the behaviour reacts on the emotion; for this
crude observation easily allows a better one to counter it, that between both there is, rather, a relationship of mutual
reinforcement and resonance, a rampant swelling into each other, which also, to be sure, brings about mutual
change in both components. The emotion is translated into the language of the action, and the action into the
language of the emotion. As with every translation, something new is added and some things are lost in the process.
Among the simplest relationships, the familiar expression that one's limbs are paralysed with fear already speaks of
this: for it could just as well be maintained that the fear is paralysed by the limbs: a distinction such as the
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one between ‘rigid with terror’ and ‘trembling with fear’ rests entirely on this second case. And what is claimed by
the simplest movement of expression is also true of the comprehensive emotional action: in other words, an
emotion changes not just as a consequence of the action it evokes, but already within the action by which it is
assimilated in a particular way, repeated, and changed, in the course of which both the emotion and the action
mutually shape and consolidate themselves. Ideas, desires, and impulses of all sorts also enter into an emotion in
this way, and the emotion enters them.
But such a relationship of course presupposes a differentiation in the interaction in which the lead should alternate
sequentially, so that now feeling, now acting, dominates, now a resolve, scruple, or idea becomes dominant and
makes a contribution that carries all the components forward in a common direction. So this relationship is
contained in the idea of a mutual shaping and consolidation, and it is this idea that really makes it complete. (Musil
1995: 1269–70)
Thus one should not think of an emotion as a disposition which is fixed, with action out of the emotion having no
‘feedback’ effect on the emotion itself. Emotional experience is, in this sense, more like the unfolding of events in
history than a sequence of events in nature such as the creation of an oxbow lake, for history, like our emotional
experiences, is itself infused with our understanding of ourselves as being located within the process, influenced and
being influenced by it (see Collingwood 1946, esp. 223–4). As Musil suggests, it may not even be possible for the
absolutely ‘completed’ emotion to exist, ‘because it would be so completely cut off inside its own compass that it would
not be able to assimilate any more influences of any other kind’ (1273). Musil continues: ‘But, one now says to oneself,
there never is such a completely circumscribed emotion! In other words: emotions never occur purely, but always only
in an approximating actualization. And in still other words: the process of shaping and consolidating never ends’
(ibid.).
This may seem, if not simply false, at least an exaggeration of how a person's emotion can be dynamically related to
other elements of the narrative structure. Surely it is possible for an emotion to be, simply, finished. But this thought
should become less pressing when we turn to the second idea of Musil's which I want to discuss: the relationship
between specific and non-specific emotions.
He [Ulrich] had a crowd of examples at his disposal: liking, love, anger, mistrust, generosity, disgust, envy, despair,
fear, desire . . . , and he mentally ordered them into a series. Then he set up a second series: affability,
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tenderness, irritation, suspicion, high-spiritedness, anxiety and longing, lacking only those links for which he could
not find any name, and then he compared the two series. One contained specific emotions, chiefly as they are
aroused in us by a specific encounter; the second contained nonspecific emotions, which are strongest when
aroused by some unknown cause. And yet in both cases it was the same emotions, in one case a general, in the other
a specific state. “So I would say,” Ulrich thought, “that in every emotion there is a distinction to be made between a
development toward specificity and a development toward nonspecificity.” [ . . . ] So a specific attitude toward
something corresponds to the specific emotion, and a general attitude toward everything corresponds to the
nonspecific emotion: the one draws us into action, while the other merely allows us to participate from behind a
colourful window.
For a moment Ulrich dwelt on this distinction between how specific and nonspecific emotions relate to the world.
He said to himself: “I will add this: Whenever an emotion develops toward specificity, it focuses itself, so to speak, it
constricts its purposiveness, and it finally ends up both internally and externally in something of a blind alley; it
leads to an action or a resolve, and even if it should not cease to exist in one or the other, it continues on, as
changed as water leaving a mill. If, on the other hand, it develops toward nonspecificity, it apparently has no energy
at all. But while the specifically developed emotion is reminiscent of a creature with grasping arms, the nonspecific
emotion changes the world in the same way the sky changes its colours, without desire or self, and in this form
objects and actions change like the clouds. The attitude of the nonspecific emotion to the world has in it something
magical and—God help me!—in comparison to the specific attitude, something feminine!” This is what Ulrich said
to himself, and then something occurred to him that took him far afield: for of course it is chiefly the development
towards a specific emotion that brings with it the fragility and instability of the life of the soul. That the moment of
feeling can never be sustained, that emotions wilt more quickly than flowers, or transform themselves into paper
flowers if one tries to preserve them, that happiness and will, art and conviction, pass away: all this depends on the
specificity of the emotion, which always imposes on it a purposiveness and forces it into the pace of life that
dissolves or changes it. On the other hand, the emotion that persists in its nonspecificity and boundlessness is
relatively impervious to change. A comparison occurred to him: “The one dies like an individual, the other lasts like
a kind or species.” (1304–6)
And yet, as Musil insists, specific emotions do not simply come to an end:
it was also to be assumed that the impulse for one emotion can always serve for another emotion, too, and that no
emotion, in the process of its
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shaping and strengthening, ever comes to an entirely specifiable end. But if that was true, then not only would no
emotion ever attain its total specificity, but in all probability it would not attain perfect nonspecificity either, and
there was neither an entirely specific nor an entirely nonspecific emotion. And in truth it almost always happens that
both possibilities combine in a common reality, in which merely the characteristics of one or the other predominate.
There is no “mood” that does not also include specific emotions that form and dissolve again; and there is no
specific emotion that, at least where it can be said to “radiate”, “seize”, “operate out of itself ”, “extend itself ” or
operate on the world “directly”, without an external emotion, does not allow the characteristics of the nonspecific
emotion to peer through. There are certainly, however, emotions that closely approximate the one or the other.
(1307)
We have a fairly clear idea of action out of emotion, where that emotion is aroused by a specific encounter, drawing us
into action as Musil puts it. Here (modulo the qualifications of Chapter 2), the emotion and the action can be made
intelligible by reference to certain beliefs, desires, and feelings, typically directed towards the object of the emotion. But
we do not have a similarly clear idea of action out of a mood: moods are generally not specific enough to explain specific
action—that is, action which can be explained by beliefs, desires, and feelings towards. Nevertheless, a mood can be
expressed in expressive action, as well as by expressions that are not themselves actions (such as tears, frowns, and lifted
chins). In Chapter 5, I said that some of our ordinary actions, having in themselves nothing to do with emotion, can
become infused with expression—you slam the door shut in anger and so forth. Sometimes this adverbial
expressiveness, as I called it, is done intentionally and sometimes not. Such adverbial expressiveness is also to be found
with mood: you trudge gloomily up the stairs to bed; you walk to work with a spring in your step. At least typically,
these adverbial mood expressions are not done intentionally. (If they were, then they would normally be explicable by
one of the means–end, belief-desire explanations I discussed in Chapter 5: for example, you trudge up the stairs to show
him that you are feeling gloomy tonight.)
So moods can, in a sense, shape action in this adverbial sense (changing ‘like the clouds’), in spite of the non-specificity
of mood. And moods can also be revealed in other sorts of expression. You are depressed (at nothing in particular),
and you find a banal television advertisement so desperately sad that you weep uncontrollably;
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you are irritable (with no one in particular), and you glower at the pensioner in front of you in the queue who is
fiddling with his change, and you clench and unclench your fist; you are anxious (about everything and nothing), and
you constantly fiddle with your tie to make sure it is straight. That these expressions of mood seem to latch on to some
specific, manifest thing points towards the thought that, for example, the mood of irritability has, as Musil puts it,
‘combined in reality’ with anger at the pensioner in the queue. But as the pensioner recedes into the distance, the nonspecific emotion of irritability continues, not the same as before, but shaped and consolidated by expressions of it and
by the related specific anger felt towards the pensioner. So, moods, like emotions, can show their tendency towards
specificity through their expression. These expressions do not tend to bring the mood to an end ‘in something of a
blind alley’; they tend rather to shape and consolidate the mood, assuaging it a little, perhaps, but not completing it.
Thus, mood can focus into emotion. And, further developing Musil's theme, we can also see how emotion can blur out
of focus into the non-specificity of mood. Specific emotions, Musil said, die in action; but, we might now add, they can
live on in spirit. You are angry with someone, and your anger involves, let us assume, an appropriate and proportionate
desire to get your own back in some way. Now your anger—your specific emotion—might be discharged through
satisfaction of this desire: perhaps you hit the person you are angry with. We might then say that your anger is ‘over’:
you are no longer angry (the emotion has come to an end), because the desires involved have been satisfied. And this
is, at least superficially, correct. But a lot might remain in your mind as a residue of the emotional experience. You may
remember (consciously or unconsciously) the anger; the event might be revisited in your dreams; your daydreams
might involve an imaginative re-enactment of the event, embellished perhaps with some esprit d'escalier; and the ‘specific’
emotion may blur out of focus into non-specific form, continuing to colour your way of thinking of and feeling
towards the world, ‘in the same way the sky changes its colours’ as Musil puts it. This continuation will be most
especially evident where the appropriate and proportionate desire which has been satisfied is, under the surface,
supported by a darker, more forceful wish which is far from being appropriate and proportionate, and which has not
been satisfied,
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except in the etiolated, symbolic sense that it is satisfied in expressive action.
Now, often the desires which are involved in our emotions—even the appropriate and proportionate ones—do not get
satisfied: the person with whom you are angry may be too big or too important to hit, or you may be too proud to
reveal your anger in action (cf. Solomon 1993: 157–8). Your anger may come to an end, yet there may have been no
satisfaction of the desire which was involved; perhaps, as so often happens in life, rather than being satisfied in action
the unsatisfied desire just comes to an end—it withers and dies on the vine. Life simply goes on, other things become
salient, and your anger, of which the desire is a part, is dissipated: a poisonous gas in the clear air. But still the anger
continues to resonate in some non-specific way in your psyche, perhaps to an even greater extent than it would have
done if the desire involved had been satisfied.
This may seem a rather curious question to ask, but nevertheless it is an important one: Just what happens to
unsatisfied desires? The metaphors—withering on the vine, releasing of poisonous gas—are both suggestive of the
notion of a remainder, a residue. Not all unsatisfied desires are like this. Some unsatisfied desires straighforwardly lapse
because they are no longer relevant, given other circumstances. This is particularly so of time-indexed desires, desires
to do something at a time—to go swimming this evening, for example; by the time it gets to 10 p.m., swimming is no
longer an option, so the desire lapses. Other desires which are not (at least not obviously) time-indexed can also
straighforwardly lapse. You might, for example, desire to see a particular film which has just been released; but days go
by, and the opportunity does not arise, and then one day some friends suggest going to see it, and—to your surprise
perhaps—the opportunity is no longer attractive. The desire to see the film had a sort of hidden satisfy-by date (or
perhaps it is better to say that the film had a hidden see-by date) of which you were not aware. But unsatisfied or
frustrated desires associated with the emotions are typically not like either of these sorts of desire: they do not
straightforwardly lapse. Nor do they necessarily regress into a wish. Rather, they can remain (like the withered grapes
and the poisonous gas) as a residue. The desire (and the emotion of which it was a part) may be forgotten, but it need
not be forgotten beyond all recollection. During the day you are offended by some rude remark of a senior
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colleague, and you prudently bite your tongue, holding back the tart riposte. In the evening your husband asks you why
you are in such an irritable mood, and you really have no idea why; perhaps you even deny that you are irritable at all.
And then suddenly the events of earlier in the day come flooding back to you with complete clarity and certainty (like a
name which you have been struggling to recollect—suddenly there in the forefront of your mind): there is no doubt that
this was the source of your irritable mood. The emotion you experienced at the time is over, and the moment for
satisfaction of the desire has lapsed—it is long gone. But the frustrated desire continues to resonate in your soul,
diffused into a general mood of irritability and resentment. Moreover, perhaps your general irritability and resentment
becomes refocused into anger at a different object, your husband, and finds its ‘reasons’ in the way he eats his supper.
One might relate this discussion to Nietzsche's psychological account of the genealogy of slave morality, according to
which the frustrated vindictiveness and anger of the weak finds its outlet in ressentiment. Nietzsche says: ‘Ressentiment
itself, if it should appear in the noble man, consummates and exhausts itself in an immediate reaction, and therefore
does not poison’, whereas ‘the man of ressentiment is neither upright nor naive nor honest and straightforward with
himself. His soul squints’ (Genealogy, First Essay, sect. 10; cf. Solomon 1994). Here we can begin to see how emotion and
mood, shaped and consolidated by action or by inaction, not only interweave with each other, but also with traits. The
person who feels anger towards someone in particular can be left in a mood of ressentiment through frustration of his
desires, and this feeling—now less specifically towards things in general—can itself consolidate into a trait: he becomes
a resentful person, habitually disposed to have resentful thoughts and feelings towards all sorts of specific persons and
things. Similarly, the jilted lover can become bitter and contemptuous of the world, and this too can consolidate into
trait. Moreover, what might begin as an expression of a mood can turn into a regular mannerism (typically not behaviour
of which you are consciously aware), revelatory of a durable trait and not just of a mood: the stoop of the gloomy man
walking in the street, the permanent expression of disgust at all of human nature in the face of the woman on the bus.
As Proust beautifully puts it: ‘The features of our face are hardly more than gestures which force of habit has
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made permanent. Nature, like the destruction of Pompeii, like the metamorphosis of a nymph, has arrested us in an
accustomed movement’ (ii. 565).
These remarks about ressentiment might be interpreted as suggesting that we should positively avoid restraining our
emotional responses, especially our negative ones, for fear that the feelings involved will fester in the soul, ultimately
forming permanent scar tissue. This would be a misinterpretation. I am not counselling uninhibited expression of
emotion; if the prudent thing to do is to bottle up our reaction and control our inappropriate or disproportionate
emotional desire, then so be it. Rather, the thought is that if we do not face up to our feelings and to what we are bottling
up, and recognize them for what they really are, then perhaps, as Nietzsche says, our soul will squint.34
So far I have been trying to show how emotion and mood are related, and how they can both mutually shape and
consolidate action in various ways. I now turn to a consideration of traits, which also are closely related to emotion and
mood, as we have already begun to see. My focus will be on traits, rather than on character itself; a person's character
(or personality—I take the two words to be synonymous) is more than just a sum of his character traits, for the best
description of a person's overall character can involve, or be influenced by, psychological and other factors which are
not character traits (a point to which I return in Chapter 7).
Character Traits
Our practice of ascribing traits to people, especially character traits, is very much part of our everyday commonsense
psychology. Before meeting someone, we want to know what sort of a person
34
Like La Fontaine's fox, almost dead from hunger, seeing the ripe grapes out of his reach:Le galand en eût fait volontiers un repas;
Mais comme il n'y pouvait atteindre:
Ils sont trop vert, dit-il, et bons pour des goujats.
Fît-il pas mieux que de se plaindre?
I answer that he would have done better to grumble—or to bite his tongue. Sour grapes are bad for the soul.
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he is, in order to get some idea of how best to deal with him. When we gossip about someone or just talk about them
when they are not present, we talk in terms of the other's traits. When we know someone, we often search around for
an explanation of what they have said or done in terms of their traits. When we place an advertisement in the lonely
hearts column, we specify our own traits and list the traits that we hope to find in a successful respondent. And when
we want to predict what someone will think, say, and do, we often use our putative knowledge of their traits to enable
us better to achieve this. There is no doubt about the prevalence of the practice.35
Now, in philosophical discussions of commonsense psychology, it is pretty much taken for granted that the practice
works very well—that we are good at gaining a grasp of the content of other people's minds; the philosophically
interesting question is how it works so well. But when we consider trait ascription, as a ‘branch’ of commonsense
psychology, the empirical evidence is, surprisingly, that we are bad at this practice. We are systematically prone to error:
we have an unwarranted bias towards explaining people's actions by reference to their traits; and we tend to make
unreliable predictions of people's actions on the strength of their presumed traits. In short, we significantly
overestimate the role of traits in explaining and predicting people's actions: the so-called fundamental attribution error.
But I want to defend our practice of trait ascription. First, I argue that trait ascription can be essentially personal and
normative. Secondly, I distinguish between our default use of trait terms, which is systematically prone to error, and
which is not personal and normative, from our considered use of trait terms. Thirdly, I discuss how a considered use
of trait terms can be brought to bear on two well-known experiments in this area of empirical psychology—experiments which are often taken to support the rejection of trait ascription, but which I argue can be used to vindicate our
practice. This vindication involves the idea of excuses: these are deployed to explain why we do, on an occasion, fail to
think, feel, or act as we ought, that is to say, in accordance with a prescribed trait.
35
For those who do not want to rely on intuition about this prevalence, there is empirical research available which has indicated that trait terms are used to describe people
much more often than other information is used, such as physical characteristics or demographic information; and the research also indicates that we want to know
information about people's traits more than we want to know this other relevant information (see Ross and Nisbett 1991: 120 for references).
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Most traits are dispositions of a relatively stable sort. But traits need not be dispositions: a trait can be a lack of a
disposition. When we say that a person is thoughtless or inconsiderate, we are implying that he simply lacks the
disposition to be thoughtful or considerate. Some other trait terms are ambiguous: for example, if we say of someone
that he is unkind, this may be intended either to suggest that the person lacks kindness, that he does not have a trait for
being kind, or alternatively to suggest that he is, as we might say, positively unkind, that he has a trait for being unkind;
such a person might even go out of his way to be unkind. In the second sense, the person has a certain disposition; in
the first, he lacks it.36 As Kant puts it (Metaphysics of Morals 384), the ‘logical opposite’ of virtue (+A) is lack of virtue (0),
but its ‘real opposite’ is vice (−A). In what follows I occasionally use this notation of Kant's, as it will help to clear up
confusions: but I will mainly be concerned with traits as a sort of disposition (+A or −A), rather than as a lack (0); I
will also focus on character traits rather than on so-called adverbial traits such as punctuality and cheerfulness.
Whilst accepting that conditional statements cannot provide an analysis of dispositional trait terms (see, for example,
Wright 1992 and Johnston 1993), we can still follow David Wiggins (1987: 242–3) and consider dispositions as being
open to being elucidated by a statement of the form ‘Normally, if for instance——be the case, then——will be the
case’, accepting that neither the ‘normally’, nor the circumstances in the antecedent to the conditional, can be fully
specified. This sort of formulation can elucidate dispositions of objects, such as inflammability or solubility; and it can
elucidate character trait dispositions of persons, such as generosity or kindness: ‘Normally, if person P is in, for instance,
such-and-such a situation, then he or she will——’. But there is, I contend, an important distinction between this
formulation as applied to objects and as applied to persons: they differ in that character traits are personal andnormative.
Let me explain.
Throughout this book I have argued that the personal perspective (first- and third-personal) is fundamental to
commonsense
36
Presence of the suffix ‘-less’ or the prefix ‘un-’ in a trait term should not lead us to assume that the term refers to a lack of a disposition. Nor should the absence of ‘-less’
and ‘un-’ imply the presence of a trait. Austin (1956: 193) suggests there may be some ‘remunerative exercises’ in considering the manner of formation of negative terms.
So far as traits are concerned, my exercises have so far been unremunerative.
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psychology. For example, in Chapter 2 I discussed how someone's emotion and action out of emotion can be rendered
intelligible from his point of view by appealing to his particular thoughts and feelings (beliefs, hopes, desires, wishes,
feelings towards, and so forth). So far as action out of emotion is concerned, this sort of explanation can be said to
show how the action was, from his point of view, the thing to do. (I will return later to this phrase ‘the thing to do’.)
Alternatively, I can explain this person's action in more general terms by stating his motive, and in doing this I appeal to
the sorts of thoughts and feelings which he had—for example, saying that his motive was ambition, greed, selfishness,
kindness, cruelty, or considerateness. ‘Motive’ in this sense is general because, when we state a person's motive, we give
a determinable reason, and this determinable reason can then be specified in terms of determinate thoughts and
feelings. What these determinate thoughts and feelings might be will, of course, depend on the details of the particular
person and the situation in which he is placed, but they are likely to be manifold; a motive in the sense I am aiming at is
not just a single psychological episode of thought or feeling—a belief or a desire or even a relatively enduring
dispositional desire. (When a detective is seeking a motive for a crime, it is the motive in the determinable sense which
he is after—‘jealousy’, ‘revenge’, ‘money’, and so forth.) Clearly, in this sense of motive, a person's determinate
thoughts and feelings need not involve content which contains, de dicto, his motive; for example, your motive may be
kindness, but none of your thoughts and feelings need be about being kind as such or about how to be kind as such.
So in giving a person's motive for his action, we are giving an account which makes it intelligible from his point of
view. Now, to attribute a character trait to someone is more than just to attribute the relevant motive to him on an
occasion, for, as Aristotle and Hume have emphasized, in attributing a character trait to a person, we look beyond his
motive on this particular occasion to there being, as Hume puts it, ‘durable principles of the mind, which extend over
the whole conduct, and enter into the personal character’ (Treatise, 575). So attribution of a character trait to a person,
usually using single words (‘kind’), and sometimes using short phrases (‘kind to children’), is a sort of summary or
shorthand way of describing his relatively enduring disposition to have certain motives in certain sorts of situation. (Of
course, in deliberation a person need not have his trait, as such, in mind as a constraint on his options—‘What should
I, a V person,
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155
do here?’; this point follows on readily from the parallel earlier point about motives.)37
A character trait term, therefore, stands to be filled out and exemplified by a detailed narrative of the person's past,
given in terms of his determinate thoughts, feelings, sayings, and actions on those past occasions where the trait was
manifested. (This is not the so-called Summary Theory, the theory that ascription of a trait to a person necessarily
implies that he had these motives in the past on a fairly frequent basis; cf. Brandt 1970: 25 and Lyons 1993: 5. Traits
are dispositions; and dispositions need not have been manifested in the person's past.) And, being dispositional
properties, traits also are predictive of future motives in future relevantly similar situations, thereby pointing towards
the kinds of determinate thoughts and feelings which the person ought to have, and thus how he ought to act. In our
conversations about people's character, our focus is sometimes on trait, sometimes on motive, and sometimes on
determinate narrative, depending on where it is most helpful to the joint project of moving the conversation forward;
traits are thus not left behind once greater detail is embarked upon: they remain part of the content of the
conversation, capable of being fleshed out in an ever-greater degree of detail.
This personal and normative explication of how dispositional character trait terms can be used is in stark contrast with
subsuming accounts which use dispositional terms. Consider how we can understand a dispositional property of an
object such as the solubility of a sugar cube. We can say, for example, that if a sugar cube is dropped into a cup of hot
tea, then normally, or ceteris paribus, it will dissolve; and if it does dissolve, then it did so because it is soluble. But
solubility is not simply a dormitive virtue; we presume that there is a mechanistic law, referring to the molecular or
crystalline structure of the grains of sugar, which will both explain a cube's dissolving, by subsumption under a causal
generalization, and
37
Adverbial traits and emotional dispositions do not involve a particular sort of motive as do character traits. If I am a punctual person and I behave punctually, I do not have
punctuality as a motive in the same way as I have kindness as a motive if I am a kind person and behave kindly. Rather, I have the habit of doing all sorts of things, out of all
sorts of motive, in a punctual manner, although I will be disposed to hurry if I find I am late. Similarly, if I am an irritable type, I do not have a motive, for example, to make
irritable or unpleasant remarks when the opportunity arises. My remarks about the normativity of traits of character do not apply to adverbial traits or to emotional
dispositions.
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predict the circumstances under which a cube will, normally, dissolve. But, although both reason-giving and subsuming
accounts thus make use of ‘normally’, they do so in different ways (cf. Davies and Stone 1998). This can be seen by the
different senses of ‘ought’ in the two accounts. When we say, of this sugar cube, that it ought to dissolve in hot tea, the
‘ought’ is merely predictive; whereas when we say, of Jane, that she ought to be kind in this situation, the ‘ought’ is not
just predictive, it is also normative: the phrase ‘normative expectation’ is not pleonastic. The personal and normative
perspective captures the essentially Kantian thought: all objects act according to a law, but only rational beings like us
can act according to our conception of a law—that is, according to our conception of what we ought to do (see
Groundwork, 412; it is clear that Kant had in mind here not only the moral law, but laws of thought generally). This
distinction I am making, in virtue of which character traits are personal and normative, finds a place for a response to a
concern expressed by Robert Musil's Ulrich: ‘Think of it, cousin, the laws of personality! It's like talking of a trade
union for lonely rattlesnakes or a robbers' chamber of commerce. What with laws being the most impersonal thing in
the world, the personality becomes no more than the imaginary meeting point of all that's impersonal, so that it's hard
to find for it that honorable standpoint you don't want to relinquish’ (Musil 1995: 516).
It is not a difficulty for this distinction between the dispositions of objects and of persons that we do sometimes talk
normatively of objects and non-normatively of persons. For example, we use ‘ought’ in a normative sense when talking
of artefacts (‘My Volvo ought to start on a cold morning’), and when talking of things like the human heart, but this
use is still impersonal as Volvos and human hearts do not have a point of view; there are no reasons for them to behave
as they do. We also sometimes use ‘ought’ in a nonnormative, impersonal sense when talking of persons: for example,
when a doctor runs his finger along the sole of your bare foot in a particular way, your toes ought to curl up. But here
you are being considered as an object (of medical study) and not as a person doing what, from your point of view, you
ought to do. And some dispositional terms applied to persons, but which do not refer to traits of character, are also
not normative; for example, if I say ‘He ought to catch this ball because he is deft-fingered’, I am not using ‘ought’ in
the normative sense which I am trying to capture.
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It is essential, in gaining an appreciation of my claim that traits are normative, to realize that the norms of character
trait ascription are not necessarily coextensive with the norms of morality. The normative ‘ought’ which goes with a
particular trait will also be a moral normative ‘ought’ only if the trait is a virtue—that is, only if it is a trait of which we
approve. This condition will thus not be met by vices; here, there are norms attaching to the vice, that is, in Kant's
terminology, to −A, but these norms are the ‘real opposite’ of the norms of virtue. For example, one hooligan might
say to another that the second hooligan ought to give the sleeping vagrant a kicking, and here the ‘ought’ is clearly not a
moral one: we think he ought not to give the vagrant a kicking. But it is a normative ought: the hooligan, in deciding
what to do, will be governed by the vicious norms of hooliganism, and it is because he is governed by these norms that
we consider him to be vicious: not just lacking in virtue (0), but having a vice (−A), which involves a system of norms
according to which one ought to do such terrible things as kick sleeping vagrants. Thus, vicious people, as well as
virtuous people, have points of view and can act according to their conception of a law—however misconceived that
conception is. And therefore, adopting the point of view of a person governed by such norms, we can ask ourselves
what this hooligan ought to do, so that, in asking ourselves this question, we are not asking ourselves what the
hooligan morally ought to do; we are just asking what he ought to do from his point of view—that is, from the point of
view of someone who is a hooligan. Furthermore, if on an occasion a hooligan failed to give a vagrant a kicking when
this was what he ought to have done, he would have failed to act according to his trait, just like a kind person who fails
to be kind on some other occasion where kindness is appropriate. I shall return to this point when considering excuses,
for a hooligan might give an excuse on such an occasion, just like a kind person in other circumstances.
Character trait terms refer, not to a single disposition, but to a complex network of dispositions which interlock and
dynamically interrelate in ways that enable the agent both to recognize and to respond to a situation as embedded in a
complex narrative which includes the agent, and his thoughts, feelings, and actions. The agent, as she goes along, can
be deliberating about and responding to the different saliences and opportunities as she sees them, and thus actively
influencing, and being influenced by, the narrative. It
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is therefore an over-simplification to say that a character trait is, for example, simply a disposition, when in a certain
sort of neutrally described situation, to act in a certain way (cf. Ryle 1949), or to have desires of a certain sort (cf.
Brandt 1988 and Harman 1999); it is only through the dispositions to conceive of one's situation in a certain way, to take
certain sorts of reasons as important in deliberation, and so forth, that one will thereby be disposed to have certain
desires and to act in a certain way. For example, a kind person ought to see things in a particular way which is
appropriate to his trait: most people might see that the old lady has dropped her shopping, but the kind person ought
also to see her arthritic hands and her pain in trying to stoop to pick things up; in short, he ought to see that she needs
help (cf. McDowell 1979). (Others, who are not kind, might also see that she needs help; I have in mind particularly the
‘gamekeeper-turned-poacher’—the person who has the recognitional dispositions appropriate to the virtue (+A), but
the motivations of the opposing vice (−A).) A kind person also ought to attach a certain deliberative importance to the
old lady's difficulties; this need not be such importance that it necessarily overrides all other considerations, but it
should at least be sufficiently important that it excludes certain reasons from carrying any deliberative weight—such as
‘I just didn't feel like helping her’. Furthermore, a kind person does not simply recognize situations and respond to
them as she ought; she will also be on the lookout for opportunities where she can be of help. Amélie Rorty captures
these observations well when she talks of dispositions of interpretation, which ‘structure patterns of salience and
importance’, tropic dispositions, which ‘lead a person to gravitate to the sorts of situations that predictably elicit prized
character traits’, and self-activating dispositions, which ‘promote or create the occasions that require their exercise’ (1988:
137–8).
I would add to this self-monitoring dispositions, which lead the person to monitor her own responses as being in line with
how, according to the trait, she thinks she ought to respond.38 This last
38
There is also another sort of second-order disposition, which operates, so to speak, in an opposite direction to the character trait. I have in mind being in a condition where
one disapproves of one's own character trait, considering it to be an obstacle to right thinking and right action, and where one accordingly has a second-order disposition to
reduce or eliminate the influence of the first-order disposition. In cases like these, the normativity of character traits is much less straightforward than in cases where the
second-order self-monitoring disposition operates in the same direction as the character trait. It is on these latter cases that I concentrate.
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disposition is important—more important, I think, than many writers on character and the virtues make out; one often
gets the impression that the virtuous amongst us will glide through life unreflectively doing what the virtuous person
should do, and that to stand back, so to speak, and check whether your motives do conform to the prized trait is
somehow not right. This is not so much idealistic (although it may be that as well) as too general. There are, no doubt,
circumstances and traits where a person should not be self-monitoring in this way: perhaps the trait of having good
manners is best exercised unreflectively, and, in certain circumstances, perhaps one should act out of kindness without
deploying your self-monitoring disposition. But, in other circumstances, it seems entirely right that one's deliberations
should include reflection on one's own prized trait, especially where one is strongly inclined to act contrary to it; it
might be that only through exercise of this disposition can one do the right thing. One might think to oneself: ‘Doing
X would really be extremely enjoyable, but surely it's not what a kind person would do, and I consider myself to be
such a person. Surely Y is the thing for me to do. What would I think of myself if I did X?’ Thus, as Hume would
surely agree, the pride we feel in our virtuous traits, prized as they are, can be a spur to right thinking.39
The dispositions which go to make up a character trait will not only dynamically interact with each other, influencing
and being influenced by the unfolding narrative of thought, feeling, emotion, mood, expression, and action which is
involved; these dispositions will also influence and be influenced by the person's other traits. The nature of these
interactions will have implications, both with respect to the person's overall psychological makeup, and with respect to
whether or not we approve or disapprove of the trait under
39
Hume takes the discussion one stage further in this wonderful passage, where he considers how one can do a virtuous act, having regard to its virtuousness, but with no
virtuous motive. He has just put forward his ‘undoubted maxim’, which is ‘that no action can be virtuous, or morally good, unless there be in human nature some motive to
produce it, distinct from the sense of its morality’. He then goes on: ‘But may not the sense of morality or duty produce an action, without any other motive? I answer, it
may: But this is no objection to the present doctrine. When any virtuous motive or principle is common in human nature, a person, who feels his heart devoid of that
principle, may hate himself upon that account, and may perform the action without the motive, from a certain sense of duty, in order to acquire by practice, that virtuous
principle, or at least, to disguise to himself, as much as possible, his want of it’ (Treatise, 479). What a student of human nature Hume was!
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consideration. A web of dispositions might be a virtue in this person and not a virtue (or even a vice) in another
person, given the different relationships between this trait and the rest of their psychology (cf. Rorty 1988). When, for
example, we ask (as I will in Chapter 8) whether jealousy is a vice, this point will be of great relevance.
Although character trait attributions do stand to be predictive (normatively predictive) of a person's thoughts, feelings,
and actions, it should not be surprising that we sometimes think, feel, and act ‘out of character’: of course, we are all
capable of failing to do what we ought to do; the slogan is ‘ought implies can’, not ‘ought implies will’. A particular
failure on a particular occasion, however, may be surprising to both agent and observer. When this happens, there will
be an explanation of it, although by no means will we always be able to put our finger on just what the explanation is
(cf. Wiggins 1987: 242–3). Where we can provide an explanation, it will, I shall argue, take one of two broadly distinct
forms: it will involve either justifying reasons or excusing reasons.
But before turning to the contrast between justifying and excusing reasons or explanations, and to excuses especially, I
should consider the charges that have been made, especially by empirical psychologists, that our practice of trait
ascription is systematically prone to error. If this is true, as some studies have indicated, some philosophers (for
example Harman 1999) have concluded that the whole business of trait ascription, and of virtue ethics, should be
abandoned. Furthermore, if there really is no such thing as character, then the possibility of acting out of character will
obviously fall away. So for this reason it is best to look at these charges now. The empirical studies will also prove to be
helpful in elucidating the idea of excuses, and thus in showing how our commonsense idea of character can after all be
preserved, in spite of the truth in the charge that much of our practice is systematically prone to error.
The Fundamental Attribution Error
We are inclined towards what has been called the fundamental attribution error (Ross 1977, Nisbett and Ross 1980, Ross
and Nisbett 1991): explaining action exclusively in terms of, or at least with too
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much emphasis on, a person's character and too little on the situation in which he is placed; we systematically fail to
appreciate that situational factors can be highly significant in determining behaviour, as is revealed in surprising failures
of people with supposed traits to act as we predict they should. Let me summarize two well-known studies from
empirical psychology that reveal our errors in trait ascription. The first is a study in Samaritanism; the second is Stanley
Milgram's fascinating obedience studies. Milgram's work often comes up in philosophical discussions of character and
of issues flowing from failure of prediction as to what people will do in a given circumstance; but, in my view,
Milgram's results are usually not considered in sufficient detail, as a result of which the wrong conclusions are drawn. I
will therefore spend some time on this study.
The Samaritanism study is by J. M. Darley and C. D. Batson (1973). Subjects were Princeton seminarians, some of
whom were asked to prepare a talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan, and some of whom were asked to prepare a
talk on job prospects for seminarians. Some from each group were told that they had plenty of time to get to the other
end of the campus where the talk had to be delivered, some were told they had about enough time to get there, and
some were told that they must rush in order not to be late. On the way to giving the talk, each one had to pass by an
apparently distressed colleague on the road. Of those with plenty of time 63 per cent helped, of those with enough time
45 per cent helped, and of those in a hurry only 10 per cent helped. Whether or not the seminarian was about to give a
talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan was not a significant variable; nor was it significant whether or not
(according to responses to a prior questionnaire) their interest in religion was primarily to do with helping others or
with their own salvation. In a variant of the Darley and Batson study, subjects were asked to predict what seminary
students would do in the situation just described. The prediction was that there would be a 20 per cent gap between
those whose religion was concerned with helping others and those whose religion was concerned primarily with their
own salvation, and that whether or not the student was in a hurry would be irrelevant in determining behaviour
(Pietromonaco and Nisbett, reported in Ross and Nisbett 1991: 131). When these subjects were told of the actual
result of the Darley and Batson study, they did revise their estimate of the effect of being in a hurry, but the revision
opened up a gap in prediction of just 18 per cent between those
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in a hurry and those with plenty of time, compared with the 53 per cent gap established by Darley and Batson. So, we
seem to overemphasize the importance of differences in traits in determining action, and underemphasize the
importance of the situation.
Milgram's original obedience study was reported on in 1963 (Milgram 1963). His book Obedience to Authority (1974)
contains the result of this experiment, together with a number of others where experimental conditions were varied.
The experiment essentially involves an ‘experimenter’, a ‘teacher’, and a ‘learner’. The experiment (the original one)
takes place in Yale University, and the experimenter is the man in the grey technician's coat giving the instructions. The
teacher is the subject of the experiment, but he thinks its purpose is to test the effects of punishment on learning
through his administering increasingly severe electric shocks on the learner, who is strapped into a chair at the outset of
the experiment so that he cannot escape, with electrodes attached to his wrists. In fact, experimenter and learner are in
cahoots, and the learner will not be shocked as the teacher believes. (The teacher also thinks it was a matter of chance
which role was allotted to him and to the learner; in fact the lots were rigged.) The learner is given a paired-word
learning task: the teacher is asked to read to him a series of word pairs, and then read the first word of a pair and four
terms, one of which is the correctly paired word, which the learner has to choose by pressing one of four switches in
front of him. The teacher is told by the experimenter to administer a shock of step-by-step increasing intensity to the
learner each time he gets an answer wrong; the first shock level is a mild 15 volts, increasing in 15-volt increments up
to a maximum shock level of 450 volts. The teacher does this by moving a lever on a control panel in front of him on
which the voltages are marked, together with words describing the level of shock, increasing in stages from ‘slight
shock’ up to 60 volts, to ‘danger: severe shock’ up to 420 volts, followed by ‘XXX’ for 435 and 450 volts. By prearrangement, the learner will give wrong answers roughly three times out of four. If at any stage the teacher indicates
an unwillingness to go on, the experimenter gives him a series of pre-arranged ‘prods’ as Milgram calls them, starting
with ‘Please continue’ up to ‘You have no other choice, you must go on’. If at any time the teacher says that the learner
does not want to go on, the experimenter says to the teacher: ‘Whether [the learner] likes it or not, you must go on
until he has learned all the word pairs correctly. So please go on.’
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If you have not heard of this study before, I ask you now to consider what you would do if you were the teacher, and
what you would expect others to do. In some studies, people have been asked this question: each one said, of himself
or herself, that he or she would stop very early, before any serious pain was inflicted, and the predictions of what
others would do were that less than one in a thousand would go to 450 volts; such people, it was thought, would be
psychopaths (Milgram 1963: 375 and 377). In fact, of the 40 subjects in Milgram's original 1963 study, none stopped
before reaching 300 volts, and 26 subjects, 65 per cent of the total, went all the way to 450 volts.40 In one subsequent
study, subjects were told that 65 per cent of people do in fact go to the maximum shock level, and were then asked to
rate these people on scales of warmth, aggressiveness, and so forth. The marked tendency was to rate these people as
having bad traits. So, the explanation of why people went to the maximum shock level was given in terms of their
having a character defect rather than in terms of the situation with which they were confronted, and this was done
regardless of the information that the consensus was to go to the maximum. In fact, when given personality tests,
those who went to the maximum proved to have no significant differences in traits from those who refused early on to
continue with the experiment (Brown 1986: 173).
Thus explanation and prediction of what Milgram's subjects do seems to go wrong. The presupposition seems to be
that we are generally kind people, who would not cause pain just on the instructions of some authority figure, so if,
contrary to expectation, someone does go to the maximum, the explanation must be that they have a serious character
defect. Thus we ‘reverse’ our trait ascription, going from virtue (+A) to vice (−A). This is backed up by another
experiment (done by Bierbrauer in 1973, unpublished but cited in Nisbett and Ross 1980: 121), in which subjects were
told in great detail of how one person went to the maximum shock level, and were then asked to predict what others
would do; again, subjects
40
In comparing the variations with the original experiment, it can be seen that, as the experimenter's orders become more remotely and less authoritatively given, and as the
learner's apparent protests become more salient to the teacher, the level of maximum shock applied, and the number of teachers who go to the limit, both decline. In the
original experiment, the learner was out of sight in the next room and unable to communicate by voice, and was able to make his distress apparent only by pounding on the
wall.
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underestimated the significance of situational influences, predicting that others will act, roughly, as normally kind
people would be expected to act. This underestimation persisted even when the subject himself re-enacted the
experiment by being the person administering the shock. In yet another study (reported in Ross and Nisbett 1991),
subjects were shown a film of the obedience experiment, where the importance of the situation in determining
behaviour was clear, yet, as Ross and Nisbett report, these subjects ‘substantially overestimated the amount of shock
that would be administered when those factors were absent. Thus’, they go on, ‘subjects continued to interpret
behaviour in terms of presumed dispositions, rather than recognising the crucial role that Milgram's particular situation
had played in producing his disturbing demonstration’ (Ross and Nisbett 1991: 132).
So, it seems that we assume wrongly that character trait differences will be relevant in determining action when they are
not. We make character trait ascriptions on the basis of inadequate information. And we fail to revise our trait
ascriptions on the basis of relevant new information. When I first started thinking about the implications of the Darley
and Batson and Milgram studies—as well as innumerable others—I thought it was possible to defend our everyday
practice against the accusation of such egregious errors, essentially on the grounds that our practice is a reasonable one
in normal circumstances—that it is ‘a reasonable heuristic’, as Owen Flanagan (1991: 309) puts it—and that it is not as
demanding of cross-situational consistency as social psychologists sometimes seem to suggest; even though traits are
often picked out by single words or short phrases, it need not follow that they are not implicitly qualified (cf. Flanagan
1991: 291, and, more tentatively, Blackburn 1998: 36–7). Miss Crawford in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park talks of ‘the
never of conversation, which means not very often’; similarly, some trait terms imply an always of conversation, which
means a lot of the time. (Earlier in the same novel, Edmund speaks of girls ‘always acting upon motives of vanity’.) But
on reflection it has become clear to me that we really are prone to error in trait ascription, and that these defences will
not work. We do presume that individual differences in traits will be relevant in determining behaviour when they are
not. We are too quick to ascribe traits and too slow to withdraw them. And we do make little distinction between
stability of traits
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across situations of the same sort, which is a generally reliable practice, and consistency across different situations,
which is a generally unreliable practice (Ross and Nisbett 1991, with references). In short, what I will call our default use
of trait terms in commonsense psychology, often based on scant evidence, is much too crude and inflexible, and our
practice cannot be defended by saying that it is less crude and inflexible than it often really is. In effect, our
presupposition is: ‘cruel is as cruel does’, ‘kind is as kind does’, and so forth. And this is just what the interpretation of
people's behaviour in the Milgram experiment seems to have been: if you go to the maximum of 450 volts, then you
must have a character defect.
My earlier defence was based on how I thought our practice of trait ascription ought to work, rather than on how it
does in fact work in the default use. Something else I came to realize also led me to give up my somewhat overgenerous defence of our practice. I had made an unwarranted step from accepting that trait ascriptions can be
invaluable in our everyday life of interaction with others, which is true, to concluding that our practice therefore cannot
be at fault, which is false. We find that colleague Anne is reliably friendly and Betty reliably tetchy; neighbour Colin is
reliably helpful and neighbour Doug on the other side is reliably difficult to deal with. Cases like these do suggest that
there really is much greater predictability in our ordinary dealings with others than is indicated by the studies of the sort
which I have just been discussing. This can be admitted as a true remark about the stability of these people's behaviour
in the particular situations in which we regularly find them. But we can draw no conclusions as to whether Anne's
behaviour is due to her trait of friendliness as a durable and consistent principle of the mind, or whether it is due to the
precise particularities of her present situation, perhaps different in many unobvious respects from that of Betty. If
Betty were not so overworked, and her room not so cramped, perhaps she would be just as friendly as Anne. And we
can draw no conclusions about how Betty might behave towards her neighbours rather than her colleagues or about
how Doug would behave if he were not so depressed about being short of money and having to sell his house, or
about how any of these people would behave as subjects of the Milgram experiment. What emerges is that default trait
ascription appears to be generally reliable because we generally come across people in roughly the same sort of situation;
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it could well be the regularity of the situation which determines the regularity of a person's behaviour, not the durability
of the disposition of character.41 In our default use of trait terms, when we leap from ‘cruel does’ to ‘cruel is’, we fail to
take on board these words of George Eliot: ‘Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds; and until
we know what has been or will be the peculiar combination of outward with inward facts, which constitute a man's
critical actions, it will be better not to think ourselves wise about his character’ (Adam Bede, ch. 29).
The implications of this might seem all too clear and ominous: if our practice of trait ascription is so error-prone,
perhaps we should abandon the idea of character altogether (cf. Harman 1999). Although, as I now think, our default
use of trait terms is systematically error-prone, I do not think that it follows that we should give up entirely on trait
ascription as part of our commonsense psychology. This would be to throw out the baby with the bathwater. First, not
all trait ascriptions are made on a default basis; some are made on the basis of long experience of a person in all sorts
of different situations. Secondly, as we get to know someone better, our initial default trait ascription stands (or ought
to stand) permanently open to correction and to an ever-increasing degree of detail with regard to the circumstances in
which the trait ought to be manifested. Agreed, if our default use is not so corrected and refined, then it can quickly
lead to prejudice and stereotyping; but this is not sufficient reason to abandon it. And thirdly—most relevant for what
follows—a considered use of trait ascriptions enables us to make out important distinctions which would not otherwise
be open to us, including the distinction between excusing reasons and justifying reasons. Thus, after all, our considered
practice of trait ascription will be vindicated.
41
Cf. Ross and Nisbett (1991: ch. 6). Incidentally, it is in this area that an evolutionary explanation of our errors in trait ascription has been sought (see Ross and Nisbett 1991:
143–4). The suggestion is that our remote ancestors had mostly to deal with the same intimate circle of conspecifics in pretty reliably unchanging circumstances, and it is
here that trait ascription is shown to work very well. In comparison, today we are constantly having to deal with strangers, and particular individuals are encountered in all
sorts of different circumstances, which is where trait ascription has been shown to be so prone to error. So, as with our liking for salt on our food, an adaptation (in this case,
our capability for making default trait attributions) now produces behaviour, in the form of erroneous judgements of others' traits, which is no longer adaptive.
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Excuses
Excuses are a very interesting feature of interpretation—not at all the same as justifications. If, on an occasion where
generosity seems to be appropriate, a generous person does not do the generous thing, a justifying explanation shows
that the generous action was in fact, all things considered, not the thing to do. Perhaps if you had generously given him
the money, he would just have spent it on drugs, so this was not an occasion where you ought to have been generous.
This illustrates the importance of judgement in the exercise of our dispositions of character: it is not sufficient to be
able to recognize and respond to situations appearing to ‘call for’ a generous response; what is also necessary is the
disposition to bring to bear and evaluate in deliberation, prior to decision and action, other relevant and possibly
competing considerations. Consider, for example, an employee who is both loyal and honest, and who has come to
suspect that her immediate boss is misleading the Inland Revenue concerning his expenses. Let us say that she decides
that, all things considered, she should report the matter to the authorities concerned, and that she considers herself to
be justified in her decision. She did what was the thing to do. If we agree with her decision, we will agree with her that
she was justified in not being loyal on this occasion, given the competing demands of honesty. But, alternatively, we
might disagree with her decision that this was the thing to do, and we might do so because we disagree about the
importance which she attached to the relevant considerations: perhaps we think that she was being too scrupulous on
this occasion, or we think that she was letting her ambitions cloud her judgement, or we think that she should have
talked it over with her boss first and given him the chance to come clean; and so our disagreements might continue,
ranging over all the considerations which might be brought to bear in these particular circumstances. But, in
disagreeing with her about her attempted justification, we need not be suggesting that she is not a loyal person (0) or
that she is disloyal (−A): we might accept both that she recognized that on this occasion there were demands of loyalty
on her, and that she was, to some extent, moved by these demands; we might rather be suggesting only that she did
not, in her deliberations, attach sufficient importance to those demands. Of course one suggestion can shade into the
other: the rather uncharitable ‘She might
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claim to be a loyal person, but surely no one who is loyal could have reported him to the authorities in the way she did’
can shade into ‘It might be true that she's a loyal person, but one might question her motives of loyalty on this
occasion; anyway, they weren't enough to stop her going to the authorities’.
An excusing explanation, unlike a justifying explanation, is not aimed at persuading us that the action which the trait
called for was, all things considered, not the thing to do. Rather, it is aimed at showing why a person with the trait failed
to act as, all things considered, she ought to have done: there were excuses. The failure is a failure of your character
trait to be realized either in appropriate motives or, where there is akrasia, in appropriate action; and the excuse will
provide an explanation as to why this happened.
In what general directions might one look for an excusing explanation? One might look towards showing that, perhaps
in spite of appearances, there was something unusual about the circumstances which explains the failure. One such
circumstance might involve what Jane Heal has called non-rational influences on thinking (1995b: 48), where the influences
on your thinking are not reasons in the personal and normative sense, although they may help explain why your
thoughts, feelings, and actions were as they were and not as they ought to have been. The effects of drink and mindinfluencing drugs are ready examples, as well as the effects of being deprived of sleep or nourishment. In such ways,
your dispositions to observe what is going on around you, to deliberate, to decide, to have the strength of will to act on
your decision, and so on and so forth, can be impaired. For example, you may have failed to be kind to the old lady
because you were—unusually for you—drunk, and for this reason you simply failed to notice what you would
normally have noticed: that she needed help. (Note here that an excuse, such as being drunk, drugged, or tired, does
not necessarily get you off the hook—it might even get you on it; excusing explanations are not necessarily mitigating.)
Excuses can also be given for failures in relation to vices, although the phrase can sound rather off-key. Returning to
my earlier example, one hooligan might say to another, by way of excuse: ‘I know I ought to have given the vagrant a
kicking, but I was really very tired that evening.’ ‘You're not much of a hard man then, are you?’ says the other. Here
the failure is a failure to act according to the norms of hooliganism—a failure to do what a hooligan ought to do.
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What I want to focus on in my discussion of excuses is not this source of excuse, involving non-rational influences on
thinking, but excuses which do involve reasons (that is, unlike being drunk, drugged, or depressed, reasons for the agent)
in the form of what I will call undue influences on thinking.42 Someone does X, which is an action done on reasons, but it is
also one which is out of character. A thin explanation seeks merely to explain why doing X was intelligible; another,
thicker, explanation—the excusing one—will explain why he did X even though he ought not to have done it, given
the sort of person he is. The two, although explanations of the same action, thus have quite different objectives, and
will have different content. In particular, the excusing explanation of the sort which involves reference to undue
influences on thinking will often point towards factors which explain why elements of the situation were given more
deliberative importance that they ought to have been; thus the expression ‘undue’ influence, to suggest that the
influence was inappropriate or disproportionate.
It is important in this context to see that intelligibility and interpretability are really very thin notions: in a given
situation, it can beintelligible to do all sorts of thing. (I am concerned here with the sort of intelligibility which is involved
in interpretation and not with notions of ideal rationality; see Smith 1994 and 1998 for one such notion.) The phrase
‘the thing to do’ can mislead here, giving the impression that there was always just the one thing to do, namely what
you in fact did. You did X rather than Y because you decided that X was the thing to do; but if, counterfactually, you
had done Y (there was, after all, much to be said for Y), then Y would have been the thing to do. You lose each other
in New York City: should you go to the hotel where you are staying, remain where you are, go back to the restaurant
where you had lunch together, go on to your next destination, . . . ? (Standing on your head is not one of the things to
do here: not all possible actions can be the thing to do.) Practical deliberation and decision-making can close out likely
42
Heal (1998: 99) mentions excuses in the context of rationality: ‘when a mistake is agreed to have been made we will often look for, and find, a reason why it was made, not
just in the sense of a cause or regularity in its making but in the sense of some excuse which reconciles the mistake with the idea that, even in making it, the perpetrator was
exercising his or her rationality’. I find these remarks very congenial. What I am trying to do here, as I hope will become clear, is to thicken up this notion of excuse by
introducing character as a further normative constraint on right reasoning, beyond a thin notion of rationality or intelligibility.
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alternatives (what William James would call ‘live options’), but, before the decision is taken, any one of the likely
alternatives could be the thing to do, and any one of them would have been the thing to do if that was what you decided
to do.
We must not confuse this notion of the thing to do with a notion which is coloured by the benefit of hindsight. In
retrospect, if I go to the hotel and you go back to the restaurant, then there is a sense in which it can be said that the
thing for me to have done was to have gone back to the restaurant. But this is a judgement made with the benefit of
hindsight. Compare deciding on the move to make in chess, or on the tennis shot to play, or on whether or not to
make a higher offer on a house which you can barely afford: the thing to do is one matter; the thing which is vindicated
in retrospect is another. Perhaps, given that interest rates have subsequently risen, buying that house was not in
retrospect the thing to have done; but still it was the thing to do at the time. Too often examples in the literature are
given where the alternatives are, in some way, simply not rational, being based on some sort of mistaken reasoning (for
example, you ignored the risk of rising interest rates, or miscalculated your earnings). Of course alternatives can be
irrational, and thus not be the thing to do, but the move I want to resist is the move direct from there being one thing
which is the thing to do, namely the intelligible thing which you did, to there being only that one thing which was the
thing to do.
We can apply this thin notion of intelligibility to the Darley and Batson and Milgram examples. If you are in a tearing
hurry and see a person in distress on the roadside, it is an intelligible thing to do to stop and help him, and it is equally
intelligible to press on towards your appointment. There are reasons which can be given for doing either of these
things. If you are a subject of Milgram's experiment, it is intelligible to refuse to administer shocks once you have
reached 150 volts, and (I am sorry to say) it is intelligible to obey authority and go on to administer the maximum 450
volts. Again, reasons can be given for doing either of these things. With just a thin notion of intelligibility, all sorts of
thing, some of them not very nice at all, can be the thing to do. But when we take account of someone's character trait,
the range of things to do, the range of live options, ought to be constrained in his deliberation by the various
dispositions which go to make up his character. Thus, something can be an intelligible thing for someone to do, but
not be the thing to do given that person's character—that is, not be the
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thing to do in the thick sense. But, because these constraints are normative, it is possible for someone to act out of
character—to fail to do what was the thing to do in the thick sense.
Let us assume, then, that someone went to the maximum of 450 volts in the Milgram experiment, and that there were
reasons for his action: there were no non-rational influences on his thinking. This action is intelligible in the thin sense.
But now, if we turn our attention to the agent's character, there are at least four possibilities in terms of the logic of
character trait ascription. I will oversimplify massively by considering just one trait—kindness; things are complicated
enough as it is. The first possibility is that he is kind (+A), and that he has a justifying reason for not acting according
to his trait: on this occasion, being kind was not the thing to do in the thick sense. I will put this possibility to one side,
because it is virtually impossible to see how a kind person's justifying explanation of going to 450 volts might be
formulated. (‘You have to be cruel to be kind’ might work as a justification in some circumstances, but surely not in
these.) The second possibility is that he is not kind (neither +A nor −A, but 0), so all we are concerned with is
justification in the thin sense. If we were to go along with the extreme view that there is no such thing as character, this
would then be the only possibility. A third possibility is that he is kind (+A) and has an excusing reason for acting out
of character. Given his kind character, what he did was not the thing to do in the thick sense; his action was intelligible,
done for reasons, but out of character. And the fourth possibility is that he is unkind (−A): he acted in character, and
has a justifying reason for doing what he did. (The unkind man's justification would, needless to say, not be the same as
the kind man's justification in the first possibility.) This last possibility is the one that we latch on to in our default use
of trait terms (‘unkind is as unkind does’), at the expense of ignoring the other possibilities. I will put this last possibility
to one side too; I do this not because there could not be people in Milgram's experiment which conform to this
possibility, but simply because it is not of interest to my discussion of excuses.43
43
In fact, Milgram tested for the possibility that the reason why most people went to the maximum shock level was their ‘deeply aggressive instincts’. In Experiment 11 in
Milgram (1974), subjects were free to choose their own shock levels. Of 40 subjects in this version, only 2 went over 150 volts, and the mean maximum shock level was 150
volts.
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So we are left with the second and third possibilities for consideration: not being kind (0); and being kind (+A) but
acting out of character. We should, if possible, consider real people here, so to illustrate these possibilities, I will
consider the responses of two of Milgram's subjects, Mr Bruno Batta and Mr Morris Braverman (Milgram changed
their names), both in the experiment and in post-experimental interviews, as reported on by Milgram (1974). This will
show that the epistemology of character traits is not utterly opaque and intractable, although, given the circumstances,
we do have to assume a certain sincerity in what these two subjects had to say.
Mr Bruno Batta went to the maximum shock level in the version of the experiment where the teacher is required to
force the learner's hand onto the shock plate. In this version, the mean maximum shock level was about 265 volts, and
30 per cent went to the maximum. Mr Batta behaved impassively throughout the experiment, deferring at all times to
the experimenter. From the post-experimental interview, it was clear that Mr Batta considered his action of
administering the maximum shock level to be entirely justified: to start with, the learner failed to ‘co-operate’, as Mr
Batta put it; but the primary responsibility, in Mr Batta's eyes, was due to the experimenter: ‘I say your fault for the
simple reason that I was paid for doing this. I had to follow orders. That's how I figured it’ (Milgram 1974: 63–4). Mr
Batta, then, was not looking for excuses, and he had no regrets about what he had done. He had his orders, and his job
was to do what he was told. This was the thing to do, and this he did. Considering the four possibilities I have put
forward, I think we are in a position to conclude that Mr Batta is just not kind (0). There is no evidence to support the
default ascription of his being positively unkind (−A), taking pleasure in his task of causing pain to another person;
and the other two possibilities seem clearly to be out of court.
Mr Morris Braverman is a different sort of person. He was the teacher in a version of the experiment where the learner
was in the next room, and the learner's protests and cries were audible to the teacher. Here the mean maximum shock
level was 360 volts and 62.5 per cent of subjects went to the maximum. Mr Braverman was one of them. But, unlike
Mr Batta, Mr Braverman showed signs of considerable conflict and emotional stress, as revealed in his expressions of
emotion: he laughed uncontrollably, clenching his fist and pushing it on the table. (Milgram reported that signs of
nervousness
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and tension ‘were characteristic rather than exceptional responses to the [original] experiment’ (1963: 375; cf. 376–7).)
Nevertheless Mr Braverman continued to the maximum shock level. Afterwards, he clearly had difficulty in seeing
how he could have done what he did. He said in the interview after the experiment: ‘There was I. I'm a nice person, I
think, hurting someone, and caught up in what seemed a mad situation . . . and in the interest of science, one goes
through with it’ (Milgram 1974: 71). But Mr Braverman is not in retrospect trying to justify his actions; he is seeking an
excusing explanation for doing what he did: ‘My reactions were awfully peculiar. I don't know if you were watching me,
but my reactions were giggly, and trying to stifle laughter. This isn't the way I usually am. This was a sheer reaction to a
totally impossible situation. And my reaction was to the situation of having to hurt somebody. And being totally
helpless and caught up in a set of circumstances where I just couldn't deviate and I couldn't try to help. That is what
got me’ (ibid.).44
I think we can say the following about Mr Braverman, but not about Mr Batta, in spite of the fact that they both
administered the maximum shock, doing it for intelligible reasons in the thin sense—there were no non-rational
influences on their thinking: we can say that, in retrospect, Mr Braverman had an excuse—not a justification—for
what did; that he regrets what he did; that he ought not to have done it; that he thinks less well of himself for what he
did; and that he is, still, a kind person. Mr Braverman is reported by Milgram as making the following very moving
remarks a year after the experiment, in reply to a questionnaire about what he had learned of a personal nature from
the experiment; I find them to be utterly to the point from a person who is giving excusing reasons for an action, but
who is not using the excuses as mitigation for what he did: ‘What appalled me was that I could possess this capacity for
obedience and compliance to a central idea, i.e. the value of a memory experiment even after it became clear that
continued adherence to this value was at the expense of violation of another value, i.e.
44
Mr Braverman's emotional responses—his giggling and so forth—were a sign of the tension he was suffering through being in such an ‘impossible’ situation. Although
Milgram did not carry out skin conductance tests, presumably Mr Braverman's emotional responses also included certain bodily changes: increased levels of adrenalin,
sweating, and so forth. What is important to recognize is that these emotional responses are not non-rational influences on thinking: emotional responses stand to be
assessed for well-groundedness, for appropriateness, and for proportionality.
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don't hurt someone who is helpless and not hurting you. As my wife said, “You can call yourself Eichmann.” I hope I
can deal more effectively with any future conflicts of value I encounter’ (Milgram 1974: 71).
What, then, should we learn about character from the Darley and Batson and the Milgram experiments—and
especially from the latter, which, without apology, I have considered in some detail? We should learn that we should
heed George Eliot's words and not consider ourselves wise about a person's character until we have sufficient
information to do so; in particular, we should not leap to a default trait ascription solely on the basis of how someone
acts on a single occasion. Secondly, we should learn that there can be circumstances in which most people, kind like Mr
Braverman as well as not kind like Mr Batta, will act in a certain sort of way. It may well be a surprise when, like Mr
Braverman, this involves acting out of character—a surprise to them and to us. These circumstances need not be
extreme ones like those referred to by Aristotle, involving ‘conditions of a sort that overstrain nature, and that no one
would endure’ (NE 1110a24 ff.); they can, superficially at least, be not at all exceptional, and this is what can be
surprising. Following on from this last point, we should learn a certain degree of sympathy for the way people can,
surprisingly, act out of character: perhaps we might do the same if we were unfortunate enough to be in such
circumstances. As Kant remarks in a number of places, it is perhaps just a matter of luck that we have not found
ourselves tested—and wanting when tested. Next, we should learn the importance of what I have called selfmonitoring dispositions: in our actions, we should sometimes stand back from the moment at hand and try to view
ourselves as others might see us. This might help us to realize what we are, slowly, getting into. One important factor in
the Milgram experiment was the insidious incremental nature of the required shock levels to be administered; what
started as a harmless experiment turned step by step into something entirely different. (Recall the story of how a frog,
if put into very hot water, will jump out; but if it is put into cool water which is then steadily heated, it will stay there
until it dies of the heat.) And we should learn from our past, as Mr Braverman suggested, as well as from other
people's pasts, as described in history books, novels, newspapers, works of empirical psychologists, and conversations
with friends and acquaintances: how certain factors—being late, or being confronted by an authority figure—can
become
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undue influences on thinking which can lead us to act out of character in ways which we will later regret.
Earlier I told a story of how an employee considered herself to be justified in informing the authorities of her boss's
cheating on his expenses. Let me now end by telling a somewhat different story, this one involving excuses. Here the
employee works for a large, powerful, very dominating, and rather unscrupulous boss—a sort of Robert Maxwell
figure. She is an honest person, and is very worried because she expects that she is going to be asked to sign a
misleading letter to the Inland Revenue about her company's tax position. She decides to wait to examine the letter
before she makes up her mind what to do. Then her boss comes into her room with the letter, ready to be signed. It
really is terribly misleading, and she sees immediately that she ought not to sign it: to do would be a thoroughly
dishonest act. She dithers nervously, and suggests some less compromising wording. He shouts at her, ‘What do you
think you're paid for? To do what I tell you! I'll take all responsibility. Just sign here! There's no time to waste.’ She
signs the letter. Later, she is appalled at what she has done. She cannot imagine how she could have been so pathetically
weak, although she does have an explanation—an excusing explanation, which involves reference to undue influences
on her thinking. ‘You've got to realize’, she says later, ‘he was standing over me, that enormous figure with those fierce
eyes, shouting at me to do what I was told. I felt so cowed.’ The lessons of Milgram do not end in the psychologist's
laboratory.
Conclusion
I hope that this discussion of emotion, mood, and character has shown how closely intertwined they are in a narrative
of a person's life. And I hope that the discussion of character and of excuses has vindicated our considered use of trait
terms. Trait ascription is a practically ineliminable part of our everyday commonsense psychology, and is, at least in its
considered use, personal and thoroughly normative.
In the next chapter, I turn to how we understand others' emotions. Here too, narrative and character will be central.
7 How We Think of Others' Emotions
Introduction
Sometimes it seems so easy to gain a grasp of what emotion another person is experiencing: I just look at her and see
that she is angry with me for dropping the pudding on the kitchen floor; or I see that she is afraid of the gorilla. But
when we reflect philosophically on even these easy cases (no one denies that there are hard ones too), it begins to seem
puzzling just how we do achieve it. Moreover, in gaining a grasp of another's emotion, we often also respond
emotionally ourselves. And this too can come to seem puzzling. There is not just the puzzle here of what it is that
brings about this response; there is also the question of what it is that we are doing when we respond emotionally. We
use all sorts of phrases to describe these abilities, many of them very unclear in their meaning: we ‘know just what
someone is feeling’, we ‘feel for someone’, we ‘feel with them’, we ‘empathize’, we ‘imagine how they feel’, we ‘put
ourselves in their shoes’, we ‘sympathize’, we ‘resonate to their feelings’, our ‘heart goes out to them’, and so on.
My overall aim in this chapter is to clear up a number of confusions about these abilities: by properly distinguishing
one from another; by showing what each ability involves; and by showing the extent to which each ability depends on
the others. Confusions are to be found not only in our everyday thought and talk about them: there are also confusions
in philosophical discussion about them. For example, there is a tendency to run together the idea of ‘catching’ someone
else's emotion with the idea of empathy; a tendency to run together empathy and putting yourself in the other's shoes;
a tendency to confuse sympathy with empathy; a tendency to confuse one or more of these abilities with our more
fundamental abilities
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to understand, explain, and predict others' thoughts, feelings, and actions; and a tendency to assume that empathy
provides in itself a source of moral motivation. To some extent, therefore, I have located my discussion in this chapter
in the context of a debate which is current in the philosophy of mind—a debate about the source of our ability to
explain and predict the thoughts, feelings, and actions of others. Some maintain that this ability derives from
knowledge which we possess (tacitly perhaps) of a theory of the structure and functioning of the mind. This is often
called the theory theory. Others have opposed this view, holding that we in some way use our imagination in order to
simulate another person's thoughts, feelings, deliberations, and so forth, thus enabling us to understand and predict
what he thinks, feels, and does. This is called the simulation approach. (For those readers who are familiar with the debate,
it might help at this introductory stage to locate my position by saying that it is very much in sympathy with that of
Jane Heal, who argues for a particular version of simulation, limited in its scope.)
Let me now briefly outline the structure of the rest of this chapter. I will do so by briefly summarizing what I will be
claiming in respect of five central notions: understanding and explaining someone's emotions, emotional contagion,
empathy, imagining oneself in someone else's shoes (what I will call in-his-shoes imagining), and sympathy. Our
understanding and explanation of others' emotions is essentially personal and normative. Through reason and
imagination, we use the information which we have about another person to, as it were, piece together or fill in the
gaps in the person's narrative by bringing to light the episodes of the emotion in a way which will make the best sense
of this part of his life; ‘piecing together’ or ‘filling in’ the narrative are, in fact, just the appropriate metaphors here. My
discussion will be essentially descriptive and phenomenological, and, being concerned with the person, I will not be
interested in trying to explain, in terms of sub-personal ‘mechanisms’ or information processing, how our
understanding is achieved (cf. the introductions in Davies and Stone 1995a and 1995b, and Stone and Davies 1996). As
the discussion progresses, I will try to show that understanding and explanation at the personal level cannot be
explained by appealing to any of the other four notions which I discuss—emotional contagion, empathy, in-his-shoes
imagining, or sympathy: our abilities to empathize, to imagine ourselves in another person's shoes, and to sympathize
themselves presuppose some
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degree of understanding; and emotional contagion in itself yields no understanding.
To turn to the second notion, emotional contagion, this is neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding emotions
in others; contagion typically does not even involve awareness of what the other's emotion is about. Contagion is a sort
of emotional engagement, as I will call it; I will discuss two other sorts of emotional engagement which are, perhaps, more
easily confused with empathy: emotional sharing and emotional identification.
Empathy, the third central notion, is often confused with emotional contagion, and empathy and in-his-shoes
imagining, two distinct imaginative processes, are also often confused with each other. Empathizing with another
person is an essentially simulationist approach, and involves imagining the experience of a narrative from that other person's
point of view. I thus centrally imagine the other person, as the narrator, with what I will call a given characterization, having
the thoughts, feelings, and emotions which comprise the narrative. A characterization of a person is more than just his
character traits; it also involves other aspects of his personality, as well as non-psychological facts about him. Through
empathizing with another, I can, perhaps, go beyond the imaginative enactment of the given narrative in at least two
respects. First, I may be able to predict his emotional responses, through imaginatively continuing the narrative beyond
my initial understanding of it. And secondly, I may come actually to have emotional experiences of the same sort as the
narrator. Intuitively, then, empathy can be seen as ‘acting in your head’, where the ‘acting’ is of the sort informed by the
Stanislavski school, potentially involving improvisation beyond an initial script; the actor starts with a characterization
of the role he is to play, and then he acts out the narrative, sticking to the spirit of the script, if not necessarily to its
letter.
Empathy thus involves what is often thought of as ‘imagining being X’, where ‘X’ stands for the narrator with whom I
empathize. However, this expression can also be taken to mean the imaginative project which is, I shall argue, distinct
from empathy: that of putting myself in X's shoes (‘What would I think and feel if I were in his shoes?’). Their
distinctness is reflected in the fact that in-his-shoes imagining, unlike empathy, involves the narrator having a mixture
of my own characterization and some of his; empathy, if successful, does not involve any aspect of me in this sense, for
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empathetic understanding is a way of gaining a deeper understanding of what it is like for him, not of what it would be
like for a person with some mixture of his and my characterization. In prediction of other people's emotional
responses, the processes of empathy and in-his-shoes imagining will, in many cases, produce different outcomes—that
is, they will make different predictions. This will apply especially to those cases involving practical reasoning where
characterization goes deep, as I put it: this is where a person's characterization substantially affects his way of thinking,
reasoning, and feeling.
Where characterization goes deep, there are further difficulties in prediction from a simulationist approach. Often the
best we can achieve is a prediction of the sorts of thoughts and feelings a person will have—that is, a prediction of his
motives, and thus of the sort of way in which he will act—in short, that he will act in character; or, rather, that he ought
to act in character (with the ‘ought’ in its now familiar normative sense). Further difficulties arise here because people
sometimes surprise us by acting ‘out of character’, often because of undue influences on thinking. When this
happens—when our imagination fails us in prediction—we are, I shall argue, especially inclined to resort to the default
use of trait terms: cruel is as cruel does. The alternative, more considered use of character traits is required, and I refer
to my discussion of excuses in Chapter 6 to show how to explain failures of prediction.
Simulationists have tended to concentrate on one or the other of empathy and in-his-shoes imagining in order to
explain our ability to make predictions of what someone will think, feel, and do. Both of these processes involve (albeit
in different ways) imagining the narrative from the other person's point of view. I will argue that there are at least two
other sorts of imaginative process (imagining the other peripherally and imagining acentrally) which can enable prediction,
neither of which involves simulation in the sense of taking up the other person's point of view and imagining having
the experiences which that person would experience. In everyday life, undertaking these other imaginative processes is,
I believe, easier, because these processes do not require one to take up the other's point of view; nevertheless, they
remain personal and normative, as the person engaged in the imaginative process does not lose sight of the fact that
the other is a person too, with a point of view, acting as he thinks he ought to.
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Lastly, I turn to sympathy. It is, I think, a sort of emotion, one which involves, through the recognition–response tie,
recognition of, and feelings towards, another's difficulties, and motivation to alleviate those difficulties, as well as
characteristic facial and other expressions. It does not therefore involve having the same sort of emotional experience
as the other (for example, feeling terror when he feels terror), and in this respect it is fundamentally distinct from
empathy. Furthermore, neither empathy nor in-his-shoes imagining is necessary—or sufficient—for sympathy,
although they can increase and extend sympathy by extending and deepening understanding. Understanding is
necessary for sympathy, but, even if understanding is extended or deepened by empathy or in-his-shoes imagining or
some other imaginative project, it is not sufficient for sympathy because recognition of another's difficulties is
consistent with not caring about those difficulties. It is, therefore, vital to distinguish sympathy from these other
notions, not just in the philosophy of mind, but also in ethics. In particular, empathy is not the high road to an ethical
outlook.
I should say something about why I include sympathy in this discussion, for sympathy, unlike the other four notions
which I consider, involves important motivational elements through the recognition–response tie. The first reason I
have already alluded to: I want to show that sympathy, compassion and related notions are quite distinct from empathy
or in-his-shoes imagining. Secondly, it is undoubtedly true that sympathy—and compassion as a sort of
sympathy—can be understood in ways other than the way in which I explain them. In theOED (2nd edn.),
‘compassion’, for example, is given a first sense of ‘Suffering together with another, participation in suffering; fellowfeeling, sympathy’, and a second sense of ‘The feeling or emotion, when a person is moved by the suffering or distress
of another, and by the desire to relieve it; pity that inclines one to spare or to succour.’ A parenthetic note then follows:
‘The compassion of sense 1 was between equals or fellow-sufferers; [compassion in the second sense] is shown
towards a person in distress by one who is free from it, who is, in this respect, his superior.’ The first sense of
‘compassion’ then is closer to what I call empathy, and the second sense to what I call sympathy. I accept that there are
these ambiguities, but my aim in this chapter is partly to show how distinct are the psychological phenomena to which
such terms
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can refer. And my third reason for discussing sympathy is to show the distinctly partial ethical dimensions of sympathy.
Sympathy is not the high road to an impartial ethical outlook.
I now turn to discussing in more detail what is involved in the first of the five notions, namely understanding and
explaining.
Understanding and Explaining Another's Emotions
To understand and explain another person's emotion, we must be able, in the first place, to say what the emotion is
which that person is experiencing. But, given the complexity and the intentionality of emotion which I have outlined, it
is not sufficient simply to be able to say ‘He is afraid’ or ‘He feels fear’. You have also at least to be able to say what it is
that he is afraid of. To do this, and also to explain why the person has the feelings that he does have towards this object
of his emotion, it will be necessary to piece together or fill in the emotion's narrative, which will call primarily on the
faculties of reason and imagination; it does not require that any emotion be felt by the interpreter. Understanding and
explanation is thus third-personal simply in the sense that it is his emotions, not mine, about which I am thinking. But
when we think third-personally, we can do so in at least two ways, as I have emphasized in a number of places already.
First, we can think of someone as a person, like me in having a point of view, like me capable of feelings, and like me
capable of thoughts and actions which are guided by normative principles. This is the personal and normative
perspective. Secondly, we can think of him impersonally, without any point of view, to be considered as an appropriate
object for scientific study, having responses which are subject to causal laws. This latter way of thinking of others is
usually appealed to by the theory-theorist of a functionalist persuasion, defining psychological states as items, in terms
of the causal roles which these items play; as Simon Blackburn puts it, this approach ‘acknowledges no interesting
difference between theorizing in terms of belief and desire, to describe what people normally do, and theorizing in
terms of force and mass to describe what objects normally do’ (1995: 282). The impersonal
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stance, whatever might be its merits for scientific enquiry, is not the stance of commonsense psychology.45
Often the first element of the narrative which we grasp is an expression of emotion, such as a facial expression or an
intonation of voice, as well as one of those bodily changes, such as a trembling hand, which is, in ordinary everyday
life, perceptible. These often yield an immediate and highly reliable grasp of another's emotion, and, to a lesser extent,
their mood and character traits. On such occasions, it is natural to think and say that we perceive embarrassment in the
blush, fear in the trembling, anguish in the sob, and so forth. This phenomenological point seems to me to be both
uncontroversial and important. Here we should recall the discussion of Chapter 4, where I provided an evolutionary
perspective on our capability for communicating emotion through various bodily movements, and in particular
through facial expression. The central idea was that this is an adaptation—it has survived in our species because of the
selectional advantage it conferred to our remote ancestors of being able to communicate emotion to other members of
the species. What is important here is that the survival of this trait presupposes that other members of the species had
the capability for recognizing facial expressions and so forth as being communication of an emotion, and this ability too
will be an adaptation. Given this sort of evolutionary explanation of our capability for recognizing emotion in others, it
is not surprising that this recognition can be achieved very quickly, and ‘outwith’ practical reasoning.
There may, however, remain an epistemological worry: Could it be that the emotion which I so readily attribute to the
other person is, in fact, not felt by him at all? The worry comes in several parts. The first worry is that the person is
pretending, or that what you take to be an expression of emotion is really to be explained in some other way: the smile
is not a genuine expression of emotion, the ‘blush’ should have been explained as an effect of the cold wind and not
part of the embarrassment. This, of course, must be allowed as a
45
There is an important question which I will not consider here: the question of how the personal, everyday, form of explanation relates to the scientific, impersonal
explanation, and whether the latter, so to speak, crowds out the former. This question becomes especially pressing when considering the causes of actions. Hornsby (1997)
provides a subtle and careful discussion of these and related issues. It may well be, as she suggests, that when we take up the impersonal stance, not only do persons and
reasons, as such, disappear from view: actions, as such, also disappear from view; for actions, as such, are things which are done by persons for reasons.
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possibility. The second worry is that it is possible that the other has never had any emotional feelings at all, even
though his behaviour is just as it would be if there were feelings; in other words, he is like Mr Spock. But one must
remember here that, in commonsense psychology, we presuppose that others are, like us, capable of having thoughts and
feelings. If he were not like us in this respect, we would indeed be mistakenly taking this creature or thing to be a
person. The third worry is that it is possible that the other person has feelings but they are of a sort which are radically
different from what his manner of expression suggests: the feeling he has is of, say, joy, but his manner of expression is
one of disgust. This example could be understood in more than one way: I do not mean to suggest that the other
person and I, the interpreter, agree that his feeling is what we both call disgust, but the feeling he has when he is
disgusted is different from the feeling I have when I am disgusted. (The analogous worry about colours is that we both
call the same things red, but what looks red to you looks green to me.) I am not interested in that problem here, which
is part of the more general question of the possibility of a logically private language. Rather, the worry is that, whilst
what he is experiencing really is joy, and it is what we would both call joy, his natural manner of expression of joy is just
different from mine; issues of a logically private language do not arise here. One can put this worry as follows: the
elements which comprise his narrative structure for joy are the same as mine except in this one respect—the manner
of its expression is different. One source of this possibility would be if the manner of expression were significantly or
entirely cultural (just as the Greeks nod their heads in dissent), and the other person was, unknown to me, from a
different culture to mine. Another reason would be if the expression were an involuntary expression of an evolved
capability for communication of emotion, but in this creature the form of the expression—which is arbitrary, as we
have seen in Chapter 4—evolved differently from the way it evolved in the rest of us. This would certainly be strange,
but it is, I suppose, possible.
What this Cook's tour of possibilities shows, I think, is just how much we do presuppose when interpreting others'
expressions of emotion. We presuppose that the other is like us, where the ‘us’ picks out neither the class of rational
beings, nor the class of evolved creatures capable of reason and of emotion. The presupposition is, broadly, that the
other's paradigmatic narrative structure for an
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emotion is the same as ours. We can and do step back from this presupposition where the other is from a different
culture; and here the difficulty of interpretation from manner of expression can become all too evident: the
phenomenology of perception of the emotion in the expression falls away, to be replaced by a process of inference of
which one can be only too aware. And, as one gets more and more remote from ‘us’, the difficulties of interpretation
may finally reach a point where some other, impersonal form of understanding becomes mandatory. But the possibility
that we can be mistaken in these various ways should not lead us to conclude that all we have available to us in
another's facial expression or perceptible bodily change is a ‘symptom’ of the emotion, and that we can never know
what someone is really feeling. Two telling points of J. L. Austin respond to this.
First, Austin points out that the expression ‘know what’ in the phrase ‘I know what he is feeling’ is an interrogative. He
says: “ ‘I know what he is feeling’‘ is not “There is an x which I know and he is feeling’‘, but “I know the answer to the
question “What is he feeling?’“ (1946: 96–7). In Chapter 2, I discussed the ambiguity of the expression ‘know what
someone is feeling’, and the sense which Austin is discussing here is the one that is relevant for understanding—for
being able to say what emotion someone is feeling. Thus, in order to do this, one does not need to be having that
feeling oneself, or even to know what it is like to have that feeling (the second sense of the expression ‘know what
someone is feeling’ which I discussed in Chapter 2). Secondly, Austin says, quite rightly, that, for example, we do not
speak of facial and other expressions of anger as ‘symptoms’ or ‘signs’ of that emotion except when talking of them as
being signs of rising or suppressed anger: the twitch of the eyebrow is a sign of anger; the violent tirade is not (1946:
104–10). These points should not be taken to be suggesting that all there is to the emotion is its expression (the violent
tirade) and its other perceptible manifestations. On the contrary, as I have been at great pains to argue, an emotion
involves feelings, and any true account of emotion cannot ignore feelings; but it does not follow from this that the
emotions are feelings, and everything else (facial expressions, bodily changes, and so on) is at best just a symptom of
the feeling or the emotion. One can easily allow the importance of feelings in emotion and emotional experience whilst
at the same time responding to and defusing an unnecessary misunderstanding about the
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epistemology of others' emotions—a misunderstanding which, to summarize, goes something like this: an emotion is
what one feels (false); only he can experience what he is feeling (true); so I cannot know what emotion he is feeling
(false); all I can grasp are the expressions of the emotion he is feeling and these are only symptoms of the thing itself
(false).
Because bodily changes and expressions of emotion so often are either involuntary or done without conscious
awareness (he is not able directly to control the racing of his heart; he is not aware that he is nervously tapping his foot
under the table), they can be more revelatory of a person's emotion or mood than his actions or what he says, which
can be intentionally deceptive. But, as I have made clear in earlier chapters, not all expressions of emotion are
involuntary, and they can be used to deceive just as much as can other actions and sayings. For example, tears and
laughter can be involuntary expressions of grief or happiness; or they can be voluntary expressions with just as much
meaning as verbal expressions of grief or happiness, and, like reasoned actions and verbal expressions, they can be
insincere or manipulative, like the tears deployed to win over an opponent at a meeting, or the falsely friendly smile to
a colleague on the stairs. However, even when we try to, it is often so hard to hide our real thoughts and feelings: your
false smile can reveal both that the genuine emotion is not felt, and that you are, for some reason, trying to give the
impression that it is being felt. In this context, Stanley Cavell has remarked about ‘what happens when creatures of a
certain species fall into the possession of language and become humans’. He says: ‘As I read Wittgenstein, as well as
Freud, what happens is that they become victims of expression—readable—their every word and gesture ready to
betray their meaning’ (1997: 31).
Knowing what emotion a person is experiencing is, of course, not sufficient for understanding and explanation of that
emotion. A further necessary step in the interpretive project of piecing together the narrative will involve determining
what is the object of the person's emotion and the way he is feeling towards that object, as well as determining what are
the thoughts which he has about it. One familiar process is where we are aware of the circumstances confronting a
person, and we surmise that the person will have certain perceptions, assuming that he has biologically normal
perceptual abilities. But we need to know more than just that: to recall
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the discussion of Chapter 6, a person's emotion, mood, and character can significantly influence not only what he
perceives, but also his way of thinking of and feeling towards what he perceives. We are all familiar with how things can
seem different when we are angry, depressed, or in a particularly bad mood. If I am already angry at having had to wait
so long for the bus, I may tend to see the person getting on in front of me as going especially slowly (just to annoy
me?), and therefore I am likely to have thoughts about him which will justify, from my point of view, my anger towards
him. If I am generally an irritable and impatient sort of person, the person getting on the bus in front of me is likely to
seem to me to be going especially slowly, whether or not the bus is on time. It is only by taking the most simple
example, and then by describing that example in the barest detail, that the importance of mood, emotion, and character
may come to seem irrelevant in determining how a person perceives things to be. There is a further point here, which
can be overlooked through only considering the simplest examples, most barely described. This is that there is often an
implicit assumption that the interpreter is, as I put it above, ‘aware of the circumstances confronting a person’. But
circumstances are not impersonally given, free of interpretation, to the interpreter in the way they are assumed to be in
so many examples. If you are the interpreter, your perception of the circumstances, the way you see things, could be
affected by your mood, emotion, and character, so this too has to be treated as an element of this ‘hermeneutic circle’
(cf. Gadamer 1975). What is salient for you (that is, for you today) may not be salient for the other (that is, for him or
her today), and vice versa.
Further piecing together the narrative, what a person does can be understood and explained as being an emotional
response—‘done out of fear’, for example. But if one is frightened, all sorts of entirely different emotional responses
could be ‘the thing to do’; so, in whichever of these ways a particular person responds, it remains for you to explain
why he responded in that way, rather than in some other way which would have been equally intelligible. Let me return
to the example from Tolstoy's War and Peace, of the incident during the Battle of Schön Grabern, when Prince Andrew
is sent to the battery of Captain Túshin, where there has been terrible fighting and loss of life, to give the order to
retreat. In Chapter 3 I looked at this with the aim of understanding Captain Túshin. Here let us consider the point of
view of Prince Andrew. To remind you, we are told this about him:
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The first thing he saw on riding up to the space where Túshin's guns were stationed was an unharnessed horse with
a broken leg, that lay screaming piteously beside the harnessed horses. Blood was gushing from its leg as from a
spring. Among the limbers lay several dead men. One ball after another passed over as he approached and he felt a
nervous shudder run down his spine. (i. 252)
It would be intelligible if someone responded to this situation and to his fear in all sorts of different ways. It would be
intelligible for someone to give the order to retreat just as quickly as possible, and then gallop back to his commanding
officer (as did another staff officer earlier in the day). It would be intelligible for someone to show his fear and to take
cover. It would be intelligible for someone to stay and help. Tolstoy goes on:
But the mere thought of being afraid roused him again. ‘I cannot be afraid,’ thought he, and dismounted slowly
among the guns. He delivered the order and did not leave the battery. He decided to have the guns removed from
their positions and withdrawn in his presence. Together with Túshin, stepping across the bodies and under a terrible
fire from the French, he attended to the removal of the guns. (i. 252)
If we know Prince Andrew as does a careful reader of War and Peace, we can say to ourselves: ‘That's right! It makes
sense that he would do that. And how much like Prince Andrew to dismount slowly!’ Not what I would have done in
those circumstances, I feel sure, and not the only intelligible thing for someone to do, but nevertheless, in retrospect, a
very understandable response from him. This point about understanding and explanation has implications for
prediction, which I will be discussing when I turn to empathy and other imaginative processes, but at this stage the
main point I want to make is that explanation of a particular person's emotional response requires that one make sense
of why he responded in that way, and to do this it is not sufficient to show that his response was one of a number of
possible responses which would be intelligible for someone—by which I mean for noparticular person; and it is not
even sufficient to show that his response was one which was intelligible for him to make, if this response was one of a
number of possible responses which would have been equally intelligible for him to make.
So, there are many ways in which the narrative of an emotional experience or of an emotion can get pieced together or
filled in from a starting-point of limited information. Interpretation of the elements of the narrative may require us to
look far back into the aetiology
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of the person's character, mood, upbringing, and historical and cultural situation. Furthermore, if we are adequately to
interpret another's emotion, that person's self-interpretation may also be relevant, and this self-interpretation may not
be available until some time has elapsed after the occurrence of what is to be understood and explained. Let me try to
explain this point.
Understanding and explaining your own emotions involves more than just consideration of particular
contemporaneous episodes of emotional experience. As I have made plain, an emotion—as contrasted with an
episode—can last for years. Now, an episodic experience can often be interpreted as being part of more than one sort
of emotion (hatred or anger, love or infatuation), and determination of how the elements best fit together into an
emotion's narrative may require, in turn, determination of how your emotions fit into the most appropriate
interpretation of the rest of your life; the most appropriate interpretation of the former may only be available from the
perspective of an interpretation of the latter. As Freud, in another context, puts it in The Future of an Illusion: ‘the curious
fact makes itself felt that in general people experience their present naively, as it were, without being able to form an
estimate of its contents; they have first to put themselves at a distance from it—the present, that is to say, must have
become the past—before it can yield points of vantage from which to judge the future’ (PFL xii. 183). Consider, for
example, how you might ask whether the emotion you felt on the first encounter with a person was the first sign of
love, or something more like a passing passion. Only time can tell. You might believe it was love. Later—much
later—the loved one has gone away, and your love has waned, aided by ‘coping techniques’ such as keeping yourself
busy in other activities; finally, you might think that your love for that person, now far away, is dead—you are, at last,
over it; yet you can be reminded of it by some trivial incident: hearing a tune; seeing two black cats playing. Is this feeling
which you now have just nostalgia for a love long gone, or is it a glimpse of an enduring attachment, pushed away but
never really ended? Perhaps if you never see the person again, you may never know the answer, but if you do meet
again, an answer might seem very plain. Again, only time can tell. Self-interpretation like this, with a perspective where
the present has become the past, not only affects the interpretation of your past, and present, narrative. As I discussed
in Chapter 4 in relation to Emma Bovary, it can also
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significantly affect the future course of the narrative. If you think it is love, and not something else, then you may come
to think, feel, and do different things. Thus, if we are adequately to interpret your emotional experiences, we need to
know what your own interpretation is; we might not agree with this interpretation (that is a different matter), but what
you think is nevertheless relevant, as it will shape both how you see your own experiences (and this too has to be
grasped by us), and also how the narrative unfolds. So, my adequately interpreting your emotional experience will
involve my interpreting your interpretation of your emotional experience, as it fits into your interpretation of the
course of your life.
To sum up the discussion so far in this section, a person's character, mood, thoughts, feelings, sayings, actions, bodily
changes, expressions of emotion, and self-interpretations, as well as your own emotions, mood, and character, all play a
part in the project of understanding and explaining that person's emotions—and emotional life—in a narrative, often
only achieved through a complex and cautious process of tâtonnement within the hermeneutic circle. (The French word
‘tâtonner’ means to feel one's way, or to proceed cautiously, nicely capturing the interpretive task as I wish to describe
it.)
It has not been part of my intention in this section to give a fundamental account of what our ability to understand and
explain others' emotions is itself based on. I have only tried to show what is involved in this ability: that understanding
and explaining is personal, normative, and holistic; and that understanding and explanation are achievable thirdpersonally (and not impersonally) through the use of reason and imagination, without the interpreter's own emotions
being involved.
However, we do often respond emotionally when another person is having an emotional experience. We can, I will
argue, do so in a variety of ways, and I will try to show just what is involved in each of these ways, how they are related
to each other, and how they relate to our ability to predict others' emotional responses.
Emotional Contagion
Emotions can be infectious—they can be ‘caught’ like colds. This is often found amongst children, where happiness or
sadness can
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be ‘caught’ through laughter or tears. But, as the developmental psychologist Paul Harris (1989) points out, there is
evidence which strongly suggests that contagion is not necessary for emotional understanding in young children. From
as early as five months babies recognize and respond appropriately to different facial expressions without catching the
other's emotion; for example, babies are less mobile when the adult shows anger, and they play less with their toys
when he or she looks sad (Harris 1989: 18). (Facial mimicry in babies starts even earlier—see Goldman 1995a: 196–7
for references—but mimicry is not a matter of responding appropriately to a facial expression.) And from as early as
twelve months babies develop the ability for what is sometimes called ‘social referencing’; this is the ability to recognize
and respond to another's emotion as being towards some other object or event in the environment. But this ability too,
as Harris says, can be exercised ‘without either triggering or depending upon correlated arousal of the same emotion in
the infant. Indeed . . . this latter type of contagious excitation could yield only a limited understanding of another
person's emotion’ (1989: 25). Later on, in the course of their second year, children begin to show sympathy as I
characterize it—that is, to respond, for example, to the pain or distress of their parent or carer in a way which shows
not only that they recognize the other's situation or emotional response, and that they see what sort of self-regarding
response is appropriate, but also that they have other-regarding responses and try to alleviate the other's distress (Harris
1989: ch. 2). Yet, as Harris shows, research with children of this age again indicates that it is not necessary for their
feeling sympathy like this that they themselves feel the same distress as the other.
So, contagion amongst children is not a necessary condition for their understanding others' emotions or for sympathy.
And there is no reason to believe that things are any different for adults in this respect; indeed it seems to me to be
likely that the ability for contagion is one that atrophies as we get older (cf. Scheler 1954: 31). That contagion is not
necessary for understanding or sympathy in adults is reinforced by the fact that there are at least two important sorts
of interpretive case where understanding is achieved without contagion. The first sort of case is where one sees the
situation which confronts a person before he does, and, on the basis of an appreciation of that situation, one is able to
predict how that person will respond emotionally, and thus, when they come to appreciate the
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situation as you do, to understand his emotional response (to know what emotion he is feeling and what the object of
his emotion is). Obviously, in this situation there is no emotion which one can ‘catch’, so contagion is clearly not
necessary for understanding emotion here. The second sort of case is where one's interaction with another person is of
such a nature—confrontational for example—that one can very clearly recognize another's emotion, yet it would be
absurd to presume that one has the same emotion as the other person. For example, if you (imagine here that you are
old and frail) walk into a bar and are faced with an angry and aggressive person coming towards you with a broken
bottle in his hand, the emotion that is appropriate for you to feel is fear, not anger and aggression. It is, I suppose, a
conceivable explanation that one first catches his anger and thus comes to understand him as being angry and aggressive,
and then through deliberation one comes to see that one is threatened and thus to feel fear. But consideration of the
phenomenology and immediacy of this sort of response indicates that a much more likely explanation will be along the
lines discussed in the preceding section, involving our ability to recognize others' emotions in their manner of
expression.
Contagion is also not sufficient for understanding and explaining others' emotions, or for the empathy or sympathy
which might accompany these. Typical cases of contagion neither involve understanding nor result in it. First,
something very like contagion can arise when, for example, we pick up the cheerful atmosphere in a pub or in
someone's living room without the presence of another person. Secondly, and more importantly for these discussions,
even if there are others present, and if we are aware of their presence, what is typical of contagion is that the agent is
not aware of the contagion: the agent takes his experience as original and not as caught from another (see Scheler 1954: 12
and 15). And thirdly, even if we are aware of the emotion as having been caught from another, contagion will not be
sufficient to gain a grasp of what the other's emotion is about, for the emotion can be ‘caught’ without ‘catching’ the
object of the other's emotion. For example, you might start to feel amused when you hear the giggles of two people
engaged in a conversation which you cannot overhear; you might thus be said to have caught their amusement, but you
have no idea what they are amused about.
Contagion, then, is neither necessary nor sufficient for emotional understanding or explanation, and contagion should
have no place
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in a simulationist account of how we achieve these. Robert Gordon has argued for his version of simulationism in a
number of places (e.g. 1995a, 1995b, 1996a, 1996b), and in my view it is best understood as a version of what I call
empathy, but in a number of places (esp. 1996a and 1996b) he appeals to what he calls contagion. However, in
appealing to contagion, to my mind he stretches the notion to the point where it becomes distorted. For example, he
says that there are ‘mechanisms for catching the intentionality of another's emotion—for example, the gaze-tracking
response that transfers one's attention from the other's facial expression to the “cause’‘ or “object’‘ of the emotion’
(1996a: 13). It is no doubt true that, by looking at the expression on her face and then tracking her gaze, I can come to
understand both what is the object of her emotion and what explains her emotion—for example, that she is feeling
angry with me about the dent in the car—but here there is nothing that I have ‘caught’—neither anger nor being angry
with me. Furthermore, I think the notion of contagion would be stretched even if, in other circumstances, I did end up
having the same emotion about the same thing through such a gaze-tracking process. For example, whilst sitting
together on the beach, I see the terror on my wife's face as she looks out to sea. I feel an anticipatory chill of terror
(what she fears I will probably fear too). I follow her gaze and see our son visibly distressed, a hundred yards out of his
depth. I feel terror at his distress. But have I ‘caught’ my wife's terror? I say No: rather, through coming to understand
her emotion (see above), I have come to share her emotion (see below), and I share her emotion because, like her, I
care about our son's well-being. This may be a mere terminological difference with Gordon, but even so, his stretched
use of the word should not disguise the fact that ‘contagion’ in the stretched sense cannot explain our grasp of
psychological concepts or our understanding of others, for Gordon's ‘contagion’, like empathy and emotional sharing,
require understanding, and understanding in turn requires the use of such concepts (see, for example, Fuller 1995,
Stone and Davies 1996, Heal 1995a, and Peacocke 1994 for doubts about what Gordon calls ‘radical simulation’).
If emotional contagion, in the non-stretched sense, does not require understanding of the other's emotion, why then is
it so often run together with empathy and contagion in the stretched sense, which are entirely different notions and
which do require such understanding?
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My answer will not be fully clear until I turn in a moment to empathy, but I suspect that part of the explanation for the
confusion may lie in the fact that contagion is a sort of what I call emotional engagement, and there are other sorts of
emotional engagement which are intuitively closer to empathy, although still distinct from it. I will mention two:
emotional sharing and what, following Max Scheler, I call emotional identification.
An example of the first sort, emotional sharing, I have just provided: my wife and I sharing the feeling of terror at our
child's distress. Another example would be where an audience or crowd, of which I am a member, is emotionally
moved by the same scene or speech, and the sharedness of the emotion may serve to enhance and deepen my emotional
response. In this sort of case, unlike contagion, my emotion is clearly about something, for it is directed towards the
scene or speech, but my sharing of it with another in no way serves to explain my understanding of what it is
about—either in myself or in the other members of the audience or crowd; rather, my realization that the object of
emotion is shared requires my understanding of what the emotion—mine and theirs—is about. The metaphor of
‘contagion’ (after all it is just a metaphor) is quite inappropriate for emotional sharing.
Emotional sharing can itself be of two sorts. The first sort is exemplified when an audience or crowd shares an
emotion in virtue of each member thinking about and responding emotionally to the very same thing—the drowning
son or the missed penalty perhaps. The second sort is exemplified when the members of the audience or crowd think
about and respond emotionally to things which are numerically distinct but of the same type—the folks back home,
perhaps, or memories of first love. (I suspect that the special poignancy of listening with others to popular and familiar
music—‘Save the last dance for me’—can be due in part to its combining into one experience elements of both these
sorts of emotional sharing.)
The second sort of emotional engagement—a limiting case, really—is emotional identification. This takes various
forms, which have in common the fact that, when one emotionally identifies with another, one's sense of one's own
identity to some extent merges with one's sense of the identity of the other, so that there is a sort of draining away of the
boundaries of cognitive and sensory identity (see Scheler 1954: 18–36). This feature is not present with either
contagion or empathy. It is not easy to say just what emotional
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identification consists of, but Scheler gives a number of examples which are, I hope, sufficient to show both that the
phenomenon does exist, and that it is, as I have said, distinct from contagion and from empathy. His examples include:
the identification with a totem or with one's ancestors which takes place in certain cultures; ecstatic religious
identification; a hypnotic subject's identification with the hypnotist; a child's identification with a doll or puppet; a
mother's identification with her child; what he calls ‘mutual coalescence’ in truly loving sexual intercourse; and the
mutual coalescence to be found in the psychology of the group.
No doubt it is true that empathy and emotional engagement (including contagion, emotional sharing, and, at its limit,
emotional identification) have this in common: they are ways that one can come to have an emotional experience of the
same sort as another person. But they are importantly different even if, on occasions, more than one of them can be
present, and even if, on occasions, one of them can lead to another. A discussion of empathy will reinforce this claim.
Empathy, In-His-Shoes Imagining, and Other Imaginative Processes
In this section I will indicate the place that empathy and in-his-shoes imagining have in understanding, explaining, and
predicting the emotional responses of others. It is an important one. However, I will go on to argue that there are
further, distinctly different ways of using our imagination for these purposes. And I will also argue that imagining
another's emotions need not involve any sort of sympathetic response. But to begin with, I will give a general
characterization of empathy (drawing substantially on Wollheim 1984), and then I will go on to compare it with in-hisshoes imagining.
The English word ‘empathy’ is of fairly recent origin, being coined at the beginning of this century (perhaps by
Titchener: see Wispé 1987) as a translation used in aesthetics of the German word ‘Einfühlung’, where the object of
contemplation might be some sort of aesthetic object. But when the term is used, as it now often is, to talk of
empathizing with another person, there turns out to be little agreement amongst psychologists or philosophers as to
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what empathy is, and the term is frequently used with insufficient clarity.
Empathy is a process or procedure by which a personcentrally imagines the narrative (the thoughts, feelings, and emotions)
of another person. There are three necessary conditions for empathy. I will briefly say what these are before going on
to say more about the second and third conditions.
First, it is necessary for empathy that I be aware of the other as a centre of consciousness distinct from myself (cf.
Scheler 1954, Deigh 1996, and Peacocke 1985). Secondly, it is necessary for empathy that the other should be someone
of whom I have a substantial characterization. Thirdly, it is necessary that I have a grasp of the narrative which I can
imaginatively enact, with the other as narrator.46 Thus, empathizing with another is nothing like contagion—nothing
like catching an emotion in the way one catches a cold, for these necessary conditions for empathy are not necessary
for, or even typical of, contagion; as we have seen, one can catch another's emotion or mood without even being aware
of that other person as another, let alone being able to meet the second or third condition.
To explain in more detail what it is to empathize, or to imagine centrally another's thoughts, feelings, and emotions, I
will begin by considering centrally imagining myself as narrator. I will start with an example, then give an explanatory
account (cf. the discussion in Walton 1997; Walton's example is to do with spelunking).
Let us say that, whilst sitting at my desk, I imagine the following: I am swimming in what I know to be waters which
contain jellyfish and other dangerous creatures. I swim into something slippery (is it just seaweed?) which grips my
ankles and impedes my stroke. I strike out for the shore, sensing the grip of the slippery thing getting firmer. I gulp a
huge mouthful of salt water. I realize that I am beginning to lose my strength and to feel panicky . . .
I can imagine such a narrative propositionally—imagining that I am in dangerous waters and so forth—but centrally
imagining is different. The narrative is what I imagine experiencing, and the
46
Wollheim (1984: 74) also has a requirement that the person with whom I empathize is one to whom I can refer. I will shortly give reasons to reject this as a necessary
condition of empathy. My second requirement bears some similarity to another of Wollheim's requirements, that one has, or has the capacity to form, a ‘repertoire of
substance’ for the other (ibid.); I prefer the term ‘characterization’ as it better captures the distinction I wish to draw between this notion and that of a narrative.
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imaginative process will be perceptual. The content of what I imagine will include, for example, not ‘I imagine that I
could be in dangerous waters’, but rather thoughts like ‘Jellyfish have been seen in these waters recently’ or ‘My
strength is going’, with such parts of the narrative representing the contents of the thoughts, feelings, and emotions
which I centrally imagine myself having. It is a consequence of this account that it is not possible for the centrally
imagined narrative to include an item of which, in the imaginative process, I am not aware: that, for example, unseen by
me, a jellyfish is approaching (cf. Peacocke 1985). This is not so of either acentrally imagining or of peripherally imagining
myself. I could acentrally imagine, from no person's point of view within the scene, myself in a situation where, unseen
by me, a jellyfish is approaching. And I could centrally imagine the event from another person's point of view (he is on
the surface, in a glass-bottomed boat perhaps), watching me, and watching a jellyfish approaching me but unseen by
me; here I feature peripherally in what is imagined. The principal contrast is thus between imagining from a person's
point of view in the scene (involving imagining one person centrally and everyone else peripherally), and imagining
acentrally, or imagining from no person's point of view within the scene (see Wollheim 1984: 74 ff.).47
Through centrally imagining myself experiencing the narrative, my thoughts, feelings, and emotions can go beyond the
narrative in at least two respects. First, I can find myself imagining more than is in the initial narrative. These imagined
experiences, beyond the initial narrative, are still, however, only imagined experiences, although what extra I imagine can
be revelatory or predictive of what I might actually think, feel, and do if I were in such circumstances (cf. Walton
47
The fact that acentral imagining involves imagining a scene from no person's point of view within the imagined scene should not be taken to suggest that the imagining is
from no point of view at all. When I perceptually imagine a scene, I must imagine it from a point of view. But it does not follow from this that the point of view from which
the scene is imagined is a point of view of someone within the imagined scene; if it were such, it would be an instance of central imagining from that person's point of view.
For example, I can acentrally imagine someone entering my house which is currently unoccupied; I perceptually imagine, say from a point of view at the end of the hall,
someone unlocking and opening the front door, turning off the burglar alarm, putting their keys on the hall table, looking down the empty hall, and so on. In this way, the
point of view of acentral imagining is something like the point of view of a camera. I am aware that it is controversial whether this sort of imagining is possible (see Williams
1966 and Peacocke 1985 for different views). I think that it is possible, and that the example I have just given proves the point.
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1997). And, secondly, I can find myself actuallyhaving certain experiences, including emotional ones, or actually making
certain expressive movements, bearing some similarity to what is imagined; in my jellyfish example, I might find myself
actually feeling fear, and find that I am sweating, squirming in my chair, and feeling in a jumpy mood (cf. Wollheim's
‘residual condition’, although his notion is not the same as mine). A similar phenomenon can be found in centrally
imagining a remembered event. For example, through imaginatively re-enacting the narrative of a particularly
embarrassing thing I myself once did many years ago, I can, to this day, find myself blushing and feeling
uncomfortable. Compare this, both as process and phenomenologically, with propositionally remembering that I once
did this embarrassing thing; here I am typically left cold.
The extent of the correspondence between centrally imagined and actual emotional experiences will depend on a
number of factors, including: how good I am at centrally imagining; the extent to which I try to enter into the
imaginative process; and the relevant similarity of my current circumstances to those envisaged in the narrative (for
example, compare imaginatively enacting the jellyfish narrative whilst sitting at my desk in London, whilst swimming in
a pool, and whilst swimming off the coast of South Africa). Also, when an imaginative experience is unplanned, it can
be especially vivid (cf. Walton 1990), leading to a greater correspondence; the notion of an imaginative process should
not give the impression that this is something that we necessarily try to undertake. Sometimes a centrally imagined
narrative can come flooding into your mind, and you are momentarily overwhelmed by it; perhaps you then become
reflectively conscious of the experience, and try to focus on the image in order to keep it alive (rather like trying to
maintain an enjoyable dream). There is in this area a close connection between being unreflectively engaged with the
world and being unreflectively engaged in an imaginative process: in both cases, the very act of coming reflectively to
focus on the experience can tend to diminish its vividness. (I will argue that this special vividness of unbidden imagined
experiences applies to empathy just as it does to centrally imagining myself.)
Although in most cases, when I centrally imagine, it will be myself that I centrally imagine—for example when I
imaginatively enact various alternative strategies in order to help decide how to proceed (cf. Currie 1995)—it is
possible centrally to imagine another person.
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This is empathy. Empathizing, or centrally imagining the narrative of another, shares, mutatis mutandis, the above
features of centrally imagining myself, but in addition, of course, the narrator's ‘I’ in the narrative does not refer to the
person engaged in the imaginative process.48 But these features are not sufficient for empathy, as it also necessarily
involves bringing to bear in the imaginative process a characterization of the narrator, which will include facts about the
narrator—not just psychological facts about him, such as his character traits, adverbial traits, emotional dispositions,
and other aspects of his personality, as well as his emotions, moods, and so forth (being kind; being punctual; being
irritable; loving his wife; having a phobia about dogs; being depressed), but also other not obviously psychological facts
about him (being short; being a litigation lawyer; being brought up in 1960s Alabama). This characterization serves as
‘background’ to the project of imaginative enactment of the narrative in the ‘foreground’. Both characterization and
narrative are independently necessary for empathy: without the former, there is no possibility of centrally imagining
another; and without the latter, there is no narrative to experience—at best one might be able only to imagine what it is
like to be that other person. (Analogously, consider how an actor, before he can play a part, needs to have both the
script for the particular scene and background details of the character he is to play.) Although there will not always be a
sharp dividing line between characterization and narrative, the essential distinction can be captured as follows: facts
which form part of the characterization will not also be part of the narrative unless the narrator is to be imagined as
himself currently conscious of those facts (for example, being currently aware that his strength is fading, or that he has
a phobia about dogs).
Those philosophers who argue for simulation often fail to place sufficient emphasis on this most important feature of
empathy: that to empathize successfully one has not only to have the current thoughts and feelings of the other person,
but one has also somehow in imagination to ‘take on board’ the other person's characterization
48
Empathy, which is sometimes loosely described as imagining being another person, does not involve me imagining myself as identical to the other person. Even if this were
coherent, which is doubtful, identity is symmetrical, but my imagining being another person and my imagining that other person being me are different sorts of imaginative
process. See Wollheim (1984: 75–6). But cf. Walton (1990: 28–35) for an opposing view.
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in a way which is effective yet does not directly impinge on the narrative of imagined current conscious thinking and
feeling. For example, if one is to empathize with a kind person, one has to imagine having the dispositions which a
kind person has (interpretational, tropic, and self-activating dispositions) and the motives of a kind person, but without
imagining having, de dicto, kind thoughts, and without being consciously aware of having the relevant dispositions
(unless one is having self-monitoring thoughts). This is no easy matter. The point applies not only to traits of character
(where it is a familiar one); it also applies to other aspects of a person's characterization. A person who is a litigation
lawyer may have dispositions to think and feel in certain ways that do not yet amount to character traits, and again
these ways of thinking and feeling have to be in the background to the empathetic process, not in the foreground.
Again, no easy matter (especially if one has an aversion to litigation lawyers). I will return to these issues later.
That, then, is empathy. Now, in-his-shoes imagining is an imaginative project which is distinct from empathy, although
they are often not distinguished clearly enough in much discussion of simulation theory.49 One simple but fundamental
difference between them is this (cf. Wollheim 1984: 76): if I centrally imagine another person, I cannot, as part of that
imaginative process, imagine encountering that person; but if I imagine myself in someone else's shoes, then I might
imagine encountering that person. An example might help here. Consider a meeting at Number Ten Downing Street
between the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and a delegation of voters. If you empathize with Tony Blair or centrally
imagine the narrative from his point of view, then you would imagine all the members of the delegation (one of whom
might be you) peripherally. Thus, in empathizing with Tony Blair (imagining the narrative ‘from the inside’), you could
not, as part of this imaginative process, meet Tony Blair (any more than in real life you could meet yourself). But now,
as a distinct process, imagine yourself in Tony Blair's shoes: in your imagination, you are the Prime Minister (that is,
you fit that unique description), coming down the stairs of Number Ten as your secretary introduces the delegation to
you. Here as part of this process you could imagine meeting Tony Blair: perhaps in your imagination Tony Blair is one
49
See, for example, Fuller (1995: 19), Gordon (1995a: 63), Currie (1995: 161), and Goldman (1995a: 189). Gordon on the whole makes it plain that his idea of simulation
involves, as he puts it, a transformation not a transportation (1996a).
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of the delegation of voters who has come to meet you, the person who is Prime Minister.
Moreover, in-his-shoes imagining can involve a mixture of characterizations in a way in which empathy does not (cf.
Mackie 1977: 83 ff.). For I can imagine myself in another's shoes with an overall characterization which retains certain
aspects of my characterization as well as bringing in certain aspects of the other's characterization. That this is so can
be seen by the sense of the question ‘What would I do if I were in Tony Blair's shoes?’: the answer need not be
‘Obviously, just as Tony Blair would do’; nor need the answer be one which supposes that I, with all my sceptical views
about the Third Way, am strangely catapulted into Number Ten; in this case I might answer ‘Abandon the Third Way’.
In-my-shoes imagining is also possible, and can also involve a mixture of characterizations. I might try to imagine what
my wise and cautious friend would do if he were in my shoes, whilst not losing track of the fact that it is I—and not my
friend—who is the one recklessly and wildly in love with that girl.
Centrally imagining with oneself as narrator, empathizing, and in-his-shoes imagining can be confused when
considering how we manage to predict the emotional responses of others. One rather famous example where they are
confused is found in discussion of an experiment by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (1982), which is often
raised by supporters of the simulationist view. In this experiment, subjects were told about two people called Mr Crane
and Mr Tees, who were scheduled to leave the airport on different flights at the same time, but who both arrived thirty
minutes after the scheduled departure time. On arrival at the airport, Mr Crane is told that his flight left on time, and
Mr Tees is told that his flight was delayed and he missed it by just five minutes. Subjects were asked who is more upset,
and 96 per cent said Mr Tees. Assuming, as seems right, that this reply was given after some sort of imaginative
process, of what sort was it?
What this imaginative process consists of cannot be empathizing or in-his-shoes imagining, because Crane and Tees
are not people of whom one has a characterization: we have been told nothing about these two people except that they
are both men (not irrelevant, perhaps, but nothing like sufficient to constitute a characterization). What the process
consists of, rather, is centrally imagining oneself (not Crane and Tees) enacting, in turn, two distinct narratives: being
thirty minutes
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late and missing your plane by thirty minutes; and being thirty minutes late and missing your plane by just five minutes.
Although incorrect, it is relatively benign in this case to describe what one does as imagining oneself in the shoes of Mr
Crane and Mr Tees.50 It is benign just because there is no characterization either of Crane or of Tees, and therefore the
outcomes of centrally imagining oneself and of in-his-shoes imagining are the same: narrative and characterization are
both identical in the two processes. But where there is available a characterization of the other, as well as a narrative, so
that all three imaginative processes are possible, the outcomes of the processes can be significantly different, just in
virtue of the differences in characterizations which will be deployed as background to the common narrative. To see
this, consider the narrative for Tees—missing the plane by just five minutes. Centrally imagining myself (as an irritable
person, I will correctly assume) missing the plane leaves the narrator very cross and frustrated. Successfully
empathizing with, say, Mother Theresa (if one can: see below) leaves the narrator serene. The outcome of putting
myself in the shoes of Mother Theresa will depend on the extent to which my characterization persists through the
imaginative process; the outcome could be rather odd and require starting again.
Although both empathy and imagining yourself in another person's shoes involve, in some way, imagining events from
another's point of view, in our ordinary everyday dealings with other people, when trying to predict their emotional
responses, the effects of empathy and of in-his-shoes imagining are likely to be importantly different. As an example of
in-his-shoes imagining, consider what Alvin Goldman (1995b) says when he considers ‘people's intuitive grasp of what
others will find funny’. After rejecting the theory theory version (for reasons which are not relevant here), he then says:
‘More plausibly, I gauge your probable reaction to a joke by projecting my own. (There can be adjustments here for
factual information about interpersonal differences, but this is just a corrective to the basic tactic of simulation)’
(1995b: 84). So, putting this in my terms, the basic tactic of simulation according to Goldman is a sort of two-step
process to arrive, in effect, at what a process of in-his-shoes-imagining would yield. The first step, taking this example
50
Cf. Goldman (1995a: 189 and 1995b: 83) and Walton (1997: 41–2), who describe the Crane and Tees case as in-his-shoes imagining. See Gordon (1995b: 55 and n. 3) for
the alternative, in my view correct, account.
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and assuming that the other person is my teenage son, is centrally to imagine myself hearing this Beavis and Butthead
joke, presumably for the first time, and to introspect to find out whether or not I am amused by it; then the second
step is to make the ‘adjustments for interpersonal differences’ between me and my son. Or consider another example,
one where I ask you to use your own powers of imagination: think of a close friend of yours, who has a much-loved
partner, and then try to predict how he or she would respond emotionally on hearing the news of the sudden and
unexpected death of that partner. Adopting the Goldman tactic, I would first project my own response to news of the
death of my loved one, and then make adjustments. This tactic, in cases where an emotional response is to be predicted,
is surely hopeless: not in the sense that it cannot be made to work, for it can—after a fashion; rather, it is hopeless in
the sense that such a process lacks all the sensitivity and qualities of resonance which an empathetic process can yield.
Think back to trying to predict what Prince Andrew would do in the Battle of Schön Grabern: it is hopeless to begin
by imagining how you would respond, and then make adjustments. Use of in-his-shoes imagining, and, equivalently for
these purposes, use of the sort of two-step process put forward by Goldman, will so often yield the most inappropriate
joke for that particular audience, the most insensitive response to the friend's emotional shock, the most embarrassing
sort of birthday present, the most flat-footed of compliments. And the reason for this is clear: in-his-shoes imagining
tends to retain aspects of my characterization; I might think I have adjusted for all relevant factual differences between
me and the other person, but this ignores the point that matters of characterization are both deep and holistic. When I
am trying to predict what Prince Andrew will do in the Battle of Schön Grabern, what the wedding guests will be
amused by, how my close friend will respond to this tragic news, what birthday present Amanda will be thrilled by, or
what compliment will most put Stewart at his ease, I should ideally not leave aspects of myself behind in the
imaginative process. And, in many cases involving emotions, Goldman's tactic is not even the natural one: it is not
natural first to imagine hearing the news of the death of your loved one, and then make adjustments. What is natural is
to imagine her hearing the news.
What now becomes clear is that it is a mistake for the proponents of the simulation approach to take, as their template
for prediction
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of emotional responses, examples where the other's characterization is not known or is irrelevant—examples such as
Crane and Tees, and the one introduced by Paul Harris (1992): predicting the grammaticality judgements of a fellow
English speaker. Taking this latter example, where what is at issue is command of English grammar, the other's
characterization is not relevant: grammaticality judgements do not go deep. So it is perfectly reasonable to try to predict
whether another English speaker will judge a particular sentence to be grammatical by asking yourself if it is
grammatical (Harris 1992: 124). But if this sort of example is taken as the template, what will happen when
characterization is relevant, as it nearly always will be where emotional responses are concerned, will be that one
continues with the same sort of imaginative process, first centrally imagining oneself and then simply making whatever
adjustments the case seems to demand. This offends against the deep and holistic nature of characterization.
There are occasions when empathy will not be possible. Whether or not empathy is possible, and, if it is possible, what
degree of success is achieved, will depend not only on having the necessary information in terms of narrative and
characterization; it will also depend, as the third condition for empathy implies, on who is attempting this particular
empathetic process. It is thus a feature—an attractive one—of my account that different people will be able to
empathize with differing degrees of success with different people in different sorts of circumstances (cf. Williams 1966:
41). Speaking for myself, I do not find it difficult to empathize with my friend David who has been present at a rugby
match which I have been watching on television. We both enjoy the sport, and we both support the same side. Here I
will be able with considerable success centrally to imagine his emotions as he watches the game, and later as he makes
his way back to the car park. When I turn to trying to empathize with the devout Mary Queen of Scots as she goes to
her execution at Fotheringay on 8 February 1587, I fail completely, and would, I suspect, continue to fail however
much I knew about her and about what happened on that day. Perhaps the Catholic historian Antonia Fraser might
manage just the same task very well. Even where one is familiar both with the person involved and with the narrative,
one might still fail to empathize. For example, I cannot empathize with my friend David as he listens to Bach. Given
that empathy can be achieved with varying degrees of success, as one
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approaches the more successful end of the spectrum, the empathizer will be more likely to find himself going beyond
the narrative in the ways I have discussed, either imagining more than is in the initial narrative, or actually having
emotional responses which correspond to those of the narrative (cf. Wollheim 1984: 79). I can recall that a number of
actors who have successfully played Hamlet have said that they found they had become very depressed; perhaps if one
does succeed in empathizing with such a character, one will tend to find oneself with a Hamlet-like outlook on life.
These last remarks, suggesting that an actor can empathize with a fictional character, imply that one can empathize
with someone to whom one cannot refer, at least in the normal way. (This last qualification is to avoid any difficulties
concerning how we refer to fictional characters.) That this is correct (contra Wollheim 1984) is also revealed in other
examples, such as the following one from my own personal experience. A few years ago, I was walking high up in the
Pyrenees one very hot day, and came across a perfectly preserved Roman road, winding narrowly through the terrain.
Standing on that road, with no one else about and no sign of civilization, I imagined experiencing what it was like for a
Roman foot-soldier struggling upwards in the heat. It seems wrong to describe this as in-his-shoes imagining, or as
centrally imagining myself, for there was surely no aspect of twentieth-century me in the imagined experience. Rather,
it was empathy: one can, in such circumstances, empathize with a narrator as a type; one can think afterwards of the
narrator, perhaps, as ‘that soldier’ or ‘him’, whilst acknowledging that one knows nothing particular about him which
enables one to individuate him from others of the type. Finally, allowing empathy without reference also makes
coherent the project of the detective, seeking constantly to build up a substantial characterization of ‘the murderer’, in
order the better to predict what ‘he’ will do, and thus to find out his identity and be able to refer to him.
On the account of empathy which I have provided, it is clear that one can, through empathy, develop one's grasp of
another's thoughts and feelings, and make predictions about what they will do, although, equally clearly, empathy as I
portray it cannot enable one to gain this grasp from scratch: the fact that having a narrative is a necessary condition for
empathy is sufficient to block this. However, possible as empathy is, the more I think about it, in those cases where
practical reasoning is involved and where characterization
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is a significant issue, the harder it comes to seem. And yet the only other broadly simulationist approach which seems
to be available, that of centrally imagining myself in the narrative and then making adjustments for character, seems to
be inadequate for the reasons I have mentioned. Could it be, then, that simulation is not appropriate for understanding
or for prediction in the sorts of case I have in mind? Perhaps, after all, simulation is only viable in the simple cases such
as Crane and Tees and grammaticality tests, and in those cases where we are trying to predict from someone's existing
beliefs to the beliefs that they will have (for example, from their believing that p, and that if p then q, to their believing
that q); for it is in just these cases that simulation by empathy is not necessary, and the other method will do perfectly
well. However, I think that empathy, though difficult, can be possible in complex cases involving practical reasoning,
although on occasions it will fail to deliver accurate predictions. Such instances of failure in simulation of practical
reasoning through empathy are utterly unsurprising consequences of the limitations of imagination. Let me try to show
why this is so.
Imagination, Prediction, and the Importance of Character
The place to start is with the observation that a deliberative decision that something is the thing to do, or a decision to
try to do that thing, is not logically linked to the reasons for reaching such decisions (cf. Davidson 1970 and Wiggins
1987), although there is—or rather there ought to be—an intelligible link between practical reasons and such decisions:
in citing someone's reasons for his decision, we render the decision intelligible so that we can understand it and can
explain why he did what he decided to do. However, this intelligible linkage—these rational relations—can be broken
because of excuses which involve non-rational influences on thinking. For example, the linkage could be broken
because the person is under the influence of a mind-affecting drug. We could still find such a person's behaviour
intelligible (in the sense of being interpretable, if not rational), for example if we know what it is like to be drugged in
this way. Alternatively, we could come to understand
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his behaviour impersonally, giving a causal explanation of how the drug affects the brain, but this is not to make sense
of him and his actions in the personal, normative way. Simulation alone will not enable us to understand or explain or
make accurate predictions in these cases (cf. Heal 1996), unless we have this prior knowledge of the effects of this
particular drug (knowledge of what the effects are like, or factual knowledge); we can imagine taking the drug, but, try
as we might, without this knowledge we cannot imagine the effect of taking it.
I am especially interested here not so much in these cases, but in those cases where the intelligible links between
reasons and decisions are intact, yet where there are what in Chapter 6 I called undue influences on thinking, leading
people to do what they ought not to do in the thick sense. However, before considering these sorts of case, I would
like to recall a quite general point about understanding, explanation, and prediction which I made earlier in this and in
the previous chapter. This point is that, in many instances of practical reasoning, there can be more than one thing
which is the thing to do. As I discussed in Chapter 6, if you are lost in New York City, you could intelligibly do all sorts
of thing: go on to the hotel, go back to the restaurant, and so forth. Furthermore, even when the range of alternatives
is constrained by a person's characterization, it can still be that there is more than one thing which is the thing to do in
the thick sense. Earlier, we paused when Prince Andrew, at the Battle of Schön Grabern, felt a nervous shudder run
down his spine. Later, after hearing how he dismounted slowly, and helped Captain Túshin move the guns, we saw just
how well this made sense for him as being the thing to do in the thick sense. His thoughts, feelings, and actions were
very much in character. But many other responses would have been in character too. Ignoring this point can lead to a
certain complacency about the adequacy of our explanations. We grasp the reasons which make sense of Prince
Andrew's action of dismounting slowly, and then we complacently sit back, forgetting that there are other possible
actions which would have equally made sense.
This complacency is quickly undermined, to be replaced by humility, when we turn to prediction. For here we are not,
so to speak, given an action to find reasons for; rather, all we are given is a set of considerations, and we are asked to say
which action, out of a range of possible actions that would be intelligible, the agent will
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perform. Imagine you have lost her in New York City and you are trying to predict what she will decide to do. Perhaps
right now she is just two blocks away trying to decide; or perhaps her mind is already made up. Whichever it is, in
trying to predict her decision, you surely cannot be in any better epistemic position than her own, that of trying to decide.
Even if you were able vividly and precisely to imagine having all and only the thoughts and feelings she is having, no
choice is going to leap out at you as obvious amongst her available alternatives, any more than there is an obvious
choice for her as to what is the thing to do. (I exclude here the possibility that you know something about her mind
which is not accessible to her—some subconscious motivation perhaps. I also leave to one side the rather boring point,
peculiar to this example, that you might know what you have decided to do, and she does not.) If I can be forgiven an
analogy, prediction of others' decisions and actions is rather like listening to a Bach fugue for the first time and trying
to imagine what will come next. You cannot really predict just what is going to come in the next passage, although there
are some broad parameters; but once you have heard the next passage, it seems like that was just the thing to hear. We
should in all humility, however, remember that Bach might have written a different passage which would have been
equally the thing to hear.
These observations about the difficulties of prediction do not just apply to examples like the one of being lost in New
York City; they apply equally to examples where substantial issues—ethical ones perhaps—have to be taken into
account in careful and thorough deliberation about what to do, and where the thing to do is not obvious from the
circumstances. In trying to predict what another person will do, it may be possible to gain a grasp of the considerations
which he will believe to have a bearing on the issue, but it is a further task to predict what importance the deliberator
will attach to these considerations. For in his deliberation, this is just what he is trying to decide. So, just as in the
example of being lost in New York City, the predictor is in no better epistemic position than the deliberator. To apply
the phrase ‘moral dilemma’ to such a case can mislead: it can be taken to imply that in such a case one has no more
reason to do one thing than the other—like Buridan's ass. The phrase ‘moral problem’ is better: what one is trying to
do when faced with a moral problem is to decide what importance to attach to the various considerations, and thus
which of the alternatives is the one that you
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have more reason to do. In such cases, the thing to do is not obvious, and there are not two things which are equally the
thing to do. So, in this latter respect, a moral problem is unlike the New York City example.
An attempt at prediction, then, may even at its best only yield up a range of possible responses (cf. Heal 1998, esp. 98).
So it is just here that the notion of motive comes into play. Perhaps all we can predict, at best, is that someone will
respond with certain motives—with certain sorts of thoughts and feelings—and thus will deliberate and decide in a
certain sort of way. The best we can say in New York City is that she will do one of the range of possible actions which
is done with the intention of meeting up with little delay or inconvenience. (This is the beauty of agreed contingency
plans: they narrow down the range of possible actions which are the thing to do.) And, at the Battle of Schön Grabern,
the best we can predict is that Prince Andrew will have the motives that he normatively ought to have, given the sort of
person he is—motives that are sensitive, courageous, aloof, dutiful, and so on and so forth, and thus that he ought to
act in some way or other, each of which could be the thing to do in the thick sense, given that he has these motives.
Prediction at its best, then, will not be very detailed.
What about cases when someone fails to do what they ought to do in the thick sense, because of unimagined undue
influences on their thinking? I will not at this point rewrite War and Peace and assume Prince Andrew shouting out the
order to retreat and then high-tailing it to safety. That would be barbaric. Rather, I will return to the actions of kind Mr
Braverman from the Milgram experiment, whom we considered in Chapter 6. We can, in retrospect, find it surprising
how such apparently insignificant elements of the situation could have had such an effect on his reasoning that he
acted out of character, and went to the maximum shock level of 450 volts. Given Mr Braverman's character, this
action should not even enter into the range of possible actions which would be the thing to do in the thick sense; this is
why we are, in retrospect, surprised and why, in retrospect, Mr Braverman regretted what he did. And, if I had been in
Mr Braverman's position, looking back on the experience I could find it surprising how I had come to do something so
awful (‘I can't imagine how I could have done such a thing!’). There is, then, a failure of imagination: I can in retrospect
find his action understandable and intelligible, but I still feel alienated from him (or from
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myself if it were I who did that thing), and this is because I cannot imagine how he could have done it. I can recite all his
reasons which serve to explain his action, but I cannot imaginatively enter into his state of mind where certain of those
reasons came to have such motivating power, whilst lacking commensurate authority; to paraphrase Jane Heal (1998), I
cannot make my mind sufficiently like the mind of Mr Braverman (or like my mind as it was then, if it were I that did
it). (Of course, I can imagine that he did it, and I can imagine that he did it for the reasons he had; but this is obviously
a different matter.) Another example: soldiers in wartime, many of them undoubtedly good, kind family men, often do
things like rape and murder women captives and shoot unarmed enemy soldiers who have surrendered. They know
why they did it, for they know their reasons, terrible as they were (‘Those people don't deserve any better after what
they've done to us’). But the soldiers still might later each ask themselves: ‘How could I have done it?’ I am sure there
are soldiers who have asked themselves this question time and time again after they have returned to their families with
their guilty secrets. Let me put this essential point as a slogan: intelligibility can outstrip imaginability.
It is when our imagination fails us like this that we are particularly inclined to resort to the blanket, default use of trait
terms, especially morally loaded ones. We cannot imagine how a normally decent, kind person could have done what
Mr Braverman did—how he could have acted out of character. So we revise our trait attributions in two respects: we
deny that he is kind, and moreover, we foist on him a bad trait, which together, in effect, turn his excusing reasons into
justifying reasons. Now that Mr Braverman supposedly has this new characterization, it becomes only too easy to see
why he did what he did. Thus, cruel is as cruel does. And thus, in other circumstances, the criminal court judge is
inclined to say, when someone in the dock has done something which he, the judge, would not, could not, dream of
doing, ‘This could only have been the action of a person who is heartless, vicious, cruel and cowardly.’ Making these
judgements is often, I think, a sort of moral retreat to which we are all prone when our imagination fails us. (We can
also resort to the same practice when confronted with extraordinary acts of moral goodness or supererogation, such as
those done by people who win the Victoria Cross in wartime.) And sometimes we retreat even further, ceasing to see
the person as acting on reasons at all, abandoning completely
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the personal, normative stance, and saying that in doing such a thing he ‘behaved like an animal’ (a curious phrase), or
that he ‘must be pathological.’51
These remarks are not at all intended to suggest that our understanding of Mr Braverman's character should remain
unchanged—that we should continue to think of him just as we did before he took part in this experiment. First, to
think this would be to make the mistake of considering a character trait as a sort of fixed disposition, rather than as a
set of dispositions which are continuously shaped by the emerging narrative of a life. (Again, recall George Eliot's
words: ‘Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.’) Secondly, to think this would be to forget that
Mr Braverman himself considered that he had been changed as a result of partaking in the experiment: as we saw in
Chapter 6, after the experiment he admitted that he had learned something about himself, and about the sort of person
he was, and set himself in future to ‘deal more effectively’ with such situations, so that the motivating power of the
demands to obey would be brought into line with their authority. Thus, the error in the default use of trait terms in
these circumstances is not so much that it revises the assessment of Mr Braverman's character as a result of what he
did; it is, rather, that it revises the assessment in the wrong way—in short, too crudely and simplistically.
Not only can intelligibility outstrip imaginability, but also—another slogan—predictability can outstrip imaginability.
Without knowledge of how people like Mr Braverman typically act in the Milgram experiment, we can expect you to
fail in your prediction of what he would do, as the studies referred to earlier have shown. If you tried to make this
prediction through empathy, the reason why you failed in your imaginative process is that you failed to ‘make your
mind’ sufficiently like his. Now let us assume that you gain knowledge of how people like Mr Braverman typically act
here, so that you could now predict how he will act. Yet still, if you try imaginatively to experience the narrative from
his point of view, having the thoughts and feelings which he, in fact, had, you may still fail
51
I disagree with Blackburn (1995), Davies and Stone (1998), and Heal (1996), who say that a partial loss of intelligibility is possible. There may be a merely verbal dispute
here (Heal seems to take rationality and intelligibility to be equivalent), but the idea of partial intelligibility would be wrong if intelligibility is understood as I take it, as being
essentially the same notion as interpretability, or capable of being seen as the action of a minded person, like me having thoughts and feelings, and like me capable of being
irrational at times.
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to imagine being moved to do what he did. You might have an intellectual grasp of all his thoughts and feelings, but
what you lack is the empathetic ability to have those thoughts and feelings with the special sort of emotionally laden
content which gave them the power they had. It is, for example, one thing to grasp the thought that one is being told
that it is necessary to continue with the experiment; it is a further thing to grasp that thought with feeling and with the
special content which gave it such motivating power that it led him to continue. Mr Braverman's state of mind may be
intelligible, and, with what you now know, his action is predictable (to a degree of probability at least), but you still just
cannot imagine him doing that action for those reasons. Thus predictability can outstrip imaginability.
The lesson from this, I think, is that we should not expect too much of simulation where practical reasoning is
concerned, and where characterization goes deep, and especially where what has to be imagined involves undue
influences on thinking. Imaginability can sometimes be improved if the person engaging in the imaginative project has
first-hand experience of the imagined narrative, but it can still fail in some cases where there is this first-hand
experience (including in particular those cases where the simulator is trying to simulate his own earlier experience).
People can act in ways which we cannot imagine, even though we can find the action intelligible, and, with the right
information, predict it to a certain degree of probability. It is entirely natural that these failures of imagination and the
sorts of undue influences on thinking which I have been discussing should go together—indeed they go hand in glove.
And to demand a specification in advance of just what these influences are and on just what occasions they will arise is
to ask that every element of surprise be taken out of our attempts to get a grasp of what people will think, feel, and do.
Others can and will surprise us, just as we can and will sometimes surprise ourselves.
This discussion of simulation will up to now have given the impression that the only contenders for a simulationist
account are empathy and in-his-shoes imagining. There are, however, at least two other possible processes of
perceptual imagination, distinct from both of these, which can be deployed for the purpose of understanding,
explaining, and predicting others' emotional responses, so long as the necessary conditions for empathy are satisfied.
There are, for example, two other possible ways I can perceptually imagine my friend
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hearing tragic news, other than by empathizing (by centrally imagining her hearing the news), and by putting myself
(with adjustment) into her shoes. I can also peripherally imagine her in the scene (that is, centrally imagine myself
watching her hearing the news), or I can acentrally imagine the scene (imagine from no person's point of view within the
scene her hearing the news). So prediction of her emotional response can be achieved through an imaginative process
without imaginatively projecting myself into her point of view, which both empathy and in-his-shoes imagining require;
for neither peripherally imagining her nor acentrally imagining requires an ability to do this. Although in neither case is
the scene in which she is embedded (the ‘dramatic enactment’) imagined from her point of view, this does not lose track
of the fact that she has a point of view, for she figures in my imagination third-personally and not impersonally, nor
does it lose track of the fact that what matters in the project is her point of view, and her emotional response, not mine.
And, in imagining her emotional response I can thus, in Austin's sense, know what she would be feeling. Because I am
not centrally imagining her, there is, of course, no likelihood that I will come to have, either in imagination or actually,
the same emotions of grief or horror which I peripherally or acentrally imagine her having (except through what I call
emotional sharing); there is, however, a possibility that I will come, in imagination or actually, to feel sympathy for her
grief and horror.
It seems to me that these two sorts of imaginative process, although little considered by simulationists, are not difficult
to engage in, and are frequently undertaken in ordinary life when trying to predict another's emotional response. Will
your wife be cross if you get home late? Will your friend be pleased if you drop in unexpectedly? What is the best way
for your mother to tell your son that you are dangerously ill in hospital? What you do is perceptually imagine their
response; but imagining their response does not involve imagining feeling what they would be feeling. For example,
peripherally imagining your wife's response, by centrally imagining yourself coming home late and being ‘greeted’ by
her, will lead to your imagining how cross she will feel. But this will not involve imagining feeling cross; it might,
though, involve imagining feeling repentant.
Thus, with prior understanding of characterization and narrative, the imaginative processes I have in mind, of
peripherally imagining her in the scene, and of acentrally imagining the scene with her in it,
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can both deepen understanding and enable us to make predictions—at least of the motives she ought to have. (That
prior understanding is necessary for these imaginative processes is no problem for me, because I do not claim that
imaginative processes of any sort are a fundamental source of understanding.) I think that we sometimes use our
imagination in these ways when reading novels. I myself cannot empathize with Prince Andrew in War and Peace
(although I can with Pierre in the same novel). But what I can do is perceptually imagine Prince Andrew in the scene as
depicted by the narrative, either by centrally imagining one of the other characters in the scene (Pierre perhaps), or by
acentrally imagining the scene, imagining it from a point of view occupied by none of the characters in the scene. And
both sets of imaginative process can help me better to get a grasp of what Prince Andrew thinks, feels, and does.
So far in this chapter, I have discussed various ways in which we can develop a grasp of another's responses, including
emotional responses. But thus far this account has been silent on the sort of ethical motivation which can be involved
when one understands another's suffering or distress. What I now want to try to show is that understanding another's
suffering or distress, whether or not through an imaginative process, is not sufficient for ethical motivation: an ethical
outlook towards the world, of which sympathy is one sort, is also necessary. Empathy and the like are not the high
road to ethics.
Sympathy
Sympathy, unlike the imaginative processes discussed above, is an emotion.52 This may initially seem contrary to our
intuitions, but on reflection I hope it will be clear that many features of sympathy are typical of an emotion, and seeing
sympathy as an emotion will throw explanatory light on these features.
Sympathy is an emotion in that it involves thoughts about and feelings towards the difficulties of the other who is the
object
52
There are various sorts of sympathy, such as pity, commiseration, concern, and compassion. Sympathy is sometimes understood as also including emotional responses such
as rejoicing in another's joy, good fortune, and the like. I will not be considering these sorts of sympathy here.
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of your emotion, and motivation to alleviate those difficulties through the recognition–response tie; it also involves
characteristic facial expressions and expressive actions. The thoughts will include recognition that the person (or other
sort of sentient creature) is now suffering, has suffered, or is likely to suffer physically or emotionally, or that she is,
more generally, in some difficulty or other. This rather wide description is intended to include thoughts about all sorts
of thing which fall short of suffering in the fuller sense of that term, but with which one can still sympathize: being in
financial difficulties; being stuck in a traffic jam and made late for an appointment; getting old. Recognizing another's
difficulties in this way is clearly possible without any of the imaginative processes that I have been discussing, although
these processes may well make more assured one's thoughts about the other person, and thus, perhaps, make more
pressing the motivational thoughts involved with sympathy—motivations to alleviate the other's difficulties.
It is entirely mistaken to assume that in addition to this recognition of, feeling towards, and response to another's
difficulties, sympathy also involves undergoing difficulties and having feelings of the same sort as the other person's. (It is,
of course, possible and even likely that when a person feels sympathy he will also be feeling other emotions—fear,
surprise, or grief perhaps. But these emotions are distinct from sympathy in their nature, even if it is not always easy
epistemologically to disentangle them.) Consideration of what it feels like to have sympathetic feelings towards
another's physical pain, say on slamming his fingers in a car door, is sufficient to show this: the feelings you have are
feelings of sympathy, not feelings of pain as of slamming your fingers in a car door. Furthermore, the distinctive sorts
of expression of emotion which are involved when we sympathize with someone else's pain—for example, a distinctive
sort of facial expression and gesture of the hand—are quite distinct from the sorts of expression associated with
actually feeling pain. The sympathetic wince, the frown, the sibilant intake of breath, are simulacra of a response to pain;
they are not pain responses. The whole phenomenology of sympathy is different from the phenomenology of the
experience which is being sympathized with: your feelings involve caring about the other's suffering, not sharing them
(cf. Scheler 1954). As Nietzsche pointed out, if it were true that sympathy does involve shared suffering, this would
serve, curiously, to increase rather than reduce the amount of distress in the world; a problem shared is not,
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on this view, a problem halved, but a problem doubled. This would seem to be at least part of Nietzsche's complaint
about pity as he conceived it (see, for example, Daybreak, book II, §133 ff., esp. §134). What sympathy does involve is
not shared difficulties and feelings, but caring about, and having sympathetic thoughts and feelings towards, those
difficulties. Furthermore, and following on from the discussion of Chapter 3, the content of sympathetic thoughts and
feelings will be distinct: one recognizes another's difficulties in a special, emotionally laden way.
Sympathy is thus quite distinct from any of the imaginative processes which I have been discussing, because these
processes do not themselves involve motivation to alleviate the other's difficulties through the recognition–response
tie; the sympathetic person normatively ought to be motivated in this way, but there is no such requirement with these
imaginative processes. They are consistent with at least three kinds of response which do not involve the sort of ethical
motivation that is involved in sympathy. First, they are consistent with indifference: you can imagine the other's
suffering, yet simply disregard it; or you might empathize with a person who has committed a terrible crime, yet feel no
normative demands to help him, for you think he thoroughly deserves his punishment (cf. Stocker 1996). Secondly,
they are consistent with a response which is the opposite of sympathetic, involving rejoicing in the other's suffering, or
even, like the subtle and imaginative inquisitor, exploiting your sensitivity of the other's feelings to help you exacerbate
his suffering. And thirdly, they are consistent with motivations and actions aimed at alleviation of one's own suffering,
rather than the other's. For example, one might turn away at the sight of blood, or turn off the television to avoid
watching the reports of the latest famine; and if you gave money to the beggar, it would be to get him out of your sight,
it being only an unintended side-effect of your action if this were also to alleviate his suffering. Admittedly, we do also
say sometimes that we act out of sympathy because of our own feelings, such as when you explain, for example, that
you acted to help a person because you felt distressed and concerned. But these feelings are nevertheless other-regarding,
because they are feelings which are directed towards the other's difficulties, and there is thus no question of trying to
get rid of these feelings without regard to the other. It is, in part, these feelings towards, with their special sort of
content, which distinguish sympathy as an emotion, compared perhaps
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with other, cooler and less emotional ethical outlooks towards the world, such as an impartial benevolence; here one
might have other-regarding thoughts and motivations not unlike those of sympathy, but the feelings and content
characteristic of sympathy would be lacking.
So empathy and in-his-shoes imagining are not sufficient for sympathy. Nor are they necessary. You can even
sympathize with another's difficulties where it is impossible to empathize or imagine yourself in the other's shoes: for
example, you can sympathize with the suffering of a dog or a whale.
Sympathy is partial, and there is no requirement internal to the concept of sympathy to correct this partiality. If you
judge that your son A is suffering and, separately, that B—‘an Indian or person wholly unknown to me’, perhaps
(Hume, Treatise, 416)—is suffering equally, presumably you will sympathize with A, your son, and be motivated
accordingly. But even though you might sympathise with B to some extent, as a fellow human being, there is no
requirement internal to the concept of sympathy that you sympathize equally with A and B or be just as motivated to
help B as you are to help A. The partiality of our sympathies thus reflects the partiality of our wider dispositions of
concern towards our nearest and dearest. (I use the word ‘nearest’ partly to encompass the feelings of sympathy we can
have for complete strangers whose difficulties are especially salient to us—the victim of the road accident or robbery,
the passing pedestrian whose shopping bag bursts, or the starving child who I see on a television appeal from an aid
organization.) It is important to appreciate that I am talking here of partiality in sympathetic emotional feelings and
motivational responses, not partiality or bias in the beliefs concerning others' difficulties. Of course there is a
requirement to adopt what Hume calls a ‘steady and general point of view’ in forming one's beliefs about such matters:
as he puts it, ‘In order, therefore, to prevent these continual contradictions, and arrive at a more stable judgement of
things, we fix on some steady and general point of view; and always, in our thought, place ourselves in them, whatever may
be our present situation’ (Treatise, 581). For example, it is a mistake to try to justify your partial sympathy for your son
by appeal to your belief that he is more sensitive and feels pain with greater intensity than does B, for this belief would
be biased and false. But here we can draw the contrast between believing and feeling towards which we considered in
Chapter 3. You might truly
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believe that your son A, and distant B, are suffering equally, but your way of feeling towards your son's pain, and the
content of that emotional episode, will be distinctly different from your way of thinking of B's pain. Here Hume has
great insight. (Although his notion of sympathy is not the same as mine, the two notions do have partiality in common,
and that is what is relevant here.) As he says, even though our discourse requires us to take the steady and general point
of view, forming our beliefs accordingly, the heart does not always follow the head: these corrections to our partiality
‘are not altogether efficacious, nor do our passions often correspond entirely to the present theory. 'Tis seldom men
heartily love what lies at a distance from them’ (Treatise, 583); ‘Sentiments must touch the heart, to make them control
our passions’ (ibid. 586). Nevertheless, ‘tho’ the heart does not always take part with those general notions, or regulate
its love and hatred by them, yet they are sufficient for discourse, and serve all our purposes in company, in the pulpit,
on the theatre, and in the schools' (ibid. 603; cf. Enquiry, 228–9).
The partiality of sympathy can, as one would expect, conflict with the impartial demands of justice. (As Hume put it, if,
instead of ‘confin'd generosity’, men experienced a ‘strong extensive benevolence’ as an original motive, then ‘these
rules [the rules of justice] would never have been dreamed of ’ (Treatise, 495–6).) To take a simple example, it is a
requirement of justice that a magistrate, on finding that it is her friend who is up before her, should declare this to be
so, and ask another member of the bench to take the case. The reason, of course, is that the magistrate's sympathies
could lead her to be partial or biased towards her friend in her judgement and sentencing. But it is a conflation of the
requirements of justice and sympathy to think that the magistrate is wrong to be biased in her sympathies. Why should
she not continue to sympathize more with her friend than with some stranger in a similar predicament, and continue to
do so once she has stepped down from the bench, perhaps helping her friend in some way, and not the stranger? Of
course, in less simple cases the demands of sympathy and of justice may be harder to satisfy at the same time, and it
might be far from obvious which should prevail. For example, what if the only way of getting your friend out of the
terrible trouble he is in is to give him this job in your firm, as is in your sole power (delegation of responsibility not
being possible), in preference to another who is also in terrible trouble but who has marginally better qualifications?
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Some moral philosophers have argued that the ethical standpoint we should adopt is one which essentially involves
considering everyone's (or every creature's) point of view impartially: this is behind such notions as the Golden Rule of
ethics, the Principle of Equal Interests, and the standpoint of the impartially benevolent observer (see, for example,
Sidgwick 1907: 379 ff., Firth 1952, and Hare 1952, 1955, 1963, and 1981; for criticisms, see, for example, MacIntyre
1957, Locke 1981, and Wiggins 1987: essay II). And it has been further argued that the way to adopt this standpoint is
either through empathizing with others or through putting oneself in others' shoes. That is as it may be, and I do not
want to argue the matter here. But I do want to insist on two things. First, any requirement to adopt this standpoint
cannot be one that arises from, or is internal to, the concepts of contagion, empathy, in-his-shoes imagining, or
sympathy; presumably, if there is any such requirement, it arises from our conception of what is just. Furthermore, any
idea that we are motivated to act to alleviate others' suffering because their suffering is, in some way, my suffering is an
idea that cannot appeal to any of the notions (sympathy included) which I have been discussing in this chapter. For
example, Schopenhauer must be appealing to some other, quite different notion when he says: ‘I share the sufferings in
him, in spite of the fact that his skin does not enclose my nerves. Only in this way can his woe, his distress, become a
motive for me; otherwise it can be absolutely only my own.’ Such ‘mysterious’ occurrences, he says, ‘happen every day’
(On the Basis of Morality, §18; cf. §16). Perhaps this notion is one of emotional identification, but if it is, then I too find it
‘mysterious’ how I could share people's suffering in this way, as part of a general ethical outlook.
The second thing I want to insist on is that if there is to be such a thing as an impartial standpoint of justice, perhaps
arrived at using empathy or in-his-shoes imagining, then this can give rise to conflicts in practical reasoning with our
sympathetic feelings. For example, the deliverances of imagining myself, in turn, in the shoes of each person involved,
in order to arrive at an impartial point of view, might conflict with the partial sympathy I feel towards just one of the
people involved—for example, my son. Putting the point another way, the emotion of sympathy, like a number of
other emotions, is related to a sort of character trait, a disposition to be sympathetic, and this is a distinct virtue from
the disposition to be
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just; the demands of these virtues, as we have seen with the magistrate and the employer, can compete in their
requirements.
Conclusion
In this chapter I have looked at a number of ways in which we can think about and respond to others' thoughts and
feelings, including those thoughts and feelings, with their special content, which are involved in emotions. I have said
that contagion has little or no place in understanding. I have tried to show that it is important not to claim too much
for empathy or in-his-shoes imagination, and I have emphasized the difficulties of empathizing where issues of
characterization go deep: intelligibility and predictability can outstrip imaginability. But the notes of caution which I
have sounded on the powers of various imaginative processes to enable us to grasp or predict others' thoughts,
feelings, and actions do not leave the field open for the theory-theorist of a functionalist bent. For understanding,
explanation, and prediction do not involve deploying a theory which is impersonal in the way that theories about
objects are. Rather, the theory, if one wants to call it that, is personal and normative, about what people ought to think,
feel, and do.
In the next and final chapter, I will turn to jealousy—an emotion of particular complexity and, for me, fascination.
What I hope to do by discussing jealousy is to put some flesh on the bones and sinews of what I have been saying in
earlier chapters.
8 Jealousy
Introduction
I hope by now that an overall picture of the emotions, and their relation to other psychological phenomena such as
mood and character, has emerged. In this final chapter, I want to adopt a somewhat different approach, by discussing
just one sort of emotion, namely jealousy. Why choose jealousy in particular? Well, jealousy—especially sexual
jealousy—is an interesting emotion for philosophical study for a number of reasons. First, it is an emotion of
extraordinary complexity. Secondly, jealousy is paradigmatically a passion: as literature and life attest, it frequently gets
out of control. And it can get us into difficulties in all sorts of ways. We take the wrong things to be evidence for and
against our jealous thoughts and feelings; we are susceptible to react—and over-react—in ways which undermine our
own interests; and it is torture to suffer the pangs of jealousy. In these respects, jealousy would seem to be an emotion
we would be better off without. Thirdly, there are various accounts of the aetiology of jealousy which perhaps serve
further to undermine any thought that jealousy could be justifiable, given the world we are in today. And finally,
jealousy is often thought of as a negative emotion from an ethical point of view: whilst a perfectly intelligible emotion
perhaps, and one that is deeply entrenched in the human race, jealousy is, according to this view, nevertheless a vice, an
emotion which ought not to be experienced, not only because it is irrational, but also because it involves treating, or
tending to treat, the loved one as a possession—a thing to be owned. I will argue that, whilst it is true that jealousy can
be harmful in many important ways, nevertheless there is no reason to hold as a matter of principle that jealous
thoughts ought to be avoided. Furthermore, jealousy should, I maintain, only be assessed as part
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of a person's overall character, and, on such a basis, it could even be a trait which it is appropriate to consider valuable
for a particular person to possess.
So, this, briefly, is my purpose in discussing jealousy here: not so much to resolve conclusively any of the deep issues I
touch on, but rather to show how some of the considerations of earlier chapters can be brought to bear on our
commonsense—and particularly ethical—thought about our emotional experiences. Rather than beginning with
jealousy, I will first briefly look at envy, which I touched on in Chapter 2.
Envy
Jealousy and envy are closely related emotions, although they are distinct, at least in their typical objects. Sometimes we
use the word ‘jealous’ where it is clear that it is envy of which we are talking: I might, for example, say that I am jealous
of his cricketing skills, but the emotion I am experiencing here is more naturally understood as envy of the nonmalicious general variety. This emotion involves my thinking that, roughly, his cricketing skills are superior to mine,
and my wanting or wishing that my cricketing skills were better. My envy is therefore focused on something which the
other person has—some property of his—which is the object of my envy. Envy is not just non-relatively wanting more
of something; it is wanting more of that thing than someone else. What I envy will, to some extent, reflect what I value.
Hume, in a number of places in his Treatise, teasingly lists the diverse possible objects of pride: a man can be proud of
his qualities of mind, his ‘wit, good sense, learning, courage, justice, integrity’; he can be proud of his physical
characteristics, his ‘beauty, his strength, agility, good mien, address in dancing, riding, fencing, and of his dexterity in
any manual business or manufacture’; and he can be proud of objects related to him in a particular way, such as his
‘country, family, children, relations, riches, houses, gardens, horses, dogs, cloaths’ (Treatise, 279; cf. 303, 308, and 310).
All of these, and many other things which are possible objects of pride, are also possible objects of envy if another
person has those valued properties, and I do not have them, or I have them to a lesser degree. The envy, as Hume puts
it, ‘is excited by some present enjoyment
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of another, which by comparison diminishes our idea of our own’ (ibid. 377). But, as Hume quickly goes on to point
out, there is also what might be called catching-up envy: someone can envy another person who has less than them of
the valued good, but ‘they perceive their inferiors approaching them or overtaking them in the pursuit of glory or
happiness’ (ibid. 377).
Is envy a vice? Although my focus in this chapter is on jealousy, it will be helpful to consider this question, as it will
help us later to address the same question of jealousy. It will, in fact, be part of my aim to undermine this general way
of evaluating emotions and traits of character—envy, pride, jealousy, and so forth; there is, to my ear, something about
it of ‘the style of the schools and the pulpit’ as Hume puts it (ibid. 297), and I want to try to get to the bottom of why
this is so.
Anyway, let us look at the question. So far as envy is concerned, the first issue is to determine what sort of envy is
being assessed. If the envy is of the non-malicious, general sort, it can be quite harmless so far as the person envied is
concerned, and can be an effective spur for the envious person. When it is said, as it often is said, that envy is a vice, it
is surely envy of other sorts that is in mind. However, it is an important psychological point that we do seldom
experience admiring envy in its pure form. Few, if any, of us can look with completely unalloyed pleasure on the
unqualified success of another—even if it is our best friend—in achieving some success to which we ourselves also
aspire, without any tinge of malice in our envy. As Hume wisely observes, this time in his Enquiry: ‘Very often another's
advancement and prosperity produces envy, which has a strong mixture of hatred, and arises chiefly from the
comparison of ourselves with the person. At the very same time, or at least in very short intervals, we may feel the
passion of respect, which is a species of affection or good-will, with a mixture of humility’ (Enquiries, 248). So if there is
this contingent psychological connection between the harmless and the potentially harmful sorts of envy, then perhaps
we should look more carefully at envy in general. Perhaps all sorts of envy either involve, or are psychologically related
to, feelings of what Gabrielle Taylor calls ‘other-directed hostility and destruction’ (1988: 241), and if this is right, then
it may be appropriate to call these feelings vicious. Yet, as Taylor says, there may be more about envy that makes it
vicious. Considering the saying that ‘envy spoils the good it covets’, she determines that part of its
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truth lies in the notion that it is the valued and envied good itself—like the unreachable grapes—which becomes the
object of the vicious thoughts, rather than the possessor of that good. Furthermore, in adult envy, which requires a
consciousness of self, the good that is envied is wanted not necessarily only for its own sake, but also for the sake of
improving the envious person's self-esteem. Without the background of an insecure self-esteem, Taylor claims, the
other's property would not be envied. So the other reason she thinks the saying holds true—that envy spoils the good
it covets—is that envy tends to be self-defeating by ‘directing attention away from the supposed defect and focusing
[instead] on the other's possession’, leading to feelings of regret and inadequacy, and becoming ‘self-perpetuating and
undermining of the person's peace or happiness’ (1988: 243 and 248). The valued good which is destroyed, then, is a
self worthy of esteem.
Underlying this view of envy is the notion that our own self-esteem should be formed without regard to the
achievements of others. (In this she registers her disagreement with Nozick 1974 and with Rawls 1973.) The ‘should’ is
important here. It might be argued in defence of envy that it is an emotion we cannot help but feel, so we must just
accept it as part of human nature. Perhaps it is true that we cannot help our feelings of envy, but this is no defence of
the emotion: this might be a ‘fact of nature’; but there is also the further ‘fact of nature’ that we are creatures capable of
having emotions, thoughts, and feelings about emotions which we cannot help but experience: we can, for example,
think that envy is not only selfdefeating but repugnant too, and that we ought to do what we can to control our envious
thoughts and feelings. These are responses we can have both towards others' envy and towards our own.
So should we have these attitudes of disapproval towards envy? There may be much in the view that envy, other than
pure admiring envy, can be self-defeating, and when it is, then we would be better off without it. And, furthermore,
there is the wider, ethical criticism which can be directed towards envy: it often, at least when it is not admiring envy,
involves destructive, or at least negative, thoughts and feelings directed towards the envied person, who has done no
harm to the envier other than having what he does not have. So the negative thoughts and feelings, although
intelligible, cannot be considered appropriate, as they can sometimes be with anger for example. This sort of envy has
no defence. But envy need not be
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like this, so it does not follow that envy is necessarily a vice. Indeed, it can be a virtue, for the sorts of reasons which I
shall discuss with regard to jealousy towards the end of the chapter (although I will not argue the point specifically with
respect to envy): essentially the idea is that people—their thoughts, feelings, emotions, moods, character traits, and
personality—should be considered and evaluated ‘in the round’. Separating out types of emotion and character traits
for individual evaluation, in the ‘style of the schools and the pulpit’, should be avoided.
Jealousy
Jealousy need not be personal jealousy: I might be jealous because my wife is spending so much time at her work, for
example. And personal jealousy need not be sexual jealousy: a student might be jealous because her tutor is now
neglecting her philosophical ideas and giving all her attention to the ideas of a new student. But I will concentrate
mostly on sexual jealousy, where there is much to be said. Accordingly, I will use the term ‘lover’ or ‘loved one’ to refer
to the person with whom the jealous person has a relationship, and ‘rival’ for the third person, but I ask you to note
that, in using the term ‘lover’, I am not intending to imply that love is either necessary or sufficient for jealousy.
All emotions are complex, episodic, dynamic, and structured, but jealousy is especially so, often involving myriads of
episodes of thought and feeling, interweaving and interacting, and shaped and consolidated by action done out of
jealousy. Furthermore, jealousy is paradigmatically a passion: jealous thoughts and feelings—and indeed actions done
out of jealousy—seem so often to run away with us. Let me develop these points by first considering the intentional
elements of this emotion.
Jealousy will involve thoughts and feelings towards the objects of the emotion, and the content of these thoughts and
feelings will be grasped in the special emotionally laden way that is characteristic of jealousy. It is often said that the
object of jealous thoughts and feelings is a three-party relation: jealous person, lover, and rival (Ben-Ze'ev 1990, Farrell
1980, Wreen 1989). However, it is also often acknowledged that, whilst the lover must be known by the jealous
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person, the jealous person need not know or have a substantial characterization of the rival, and, furthermore, it is
often acknowledged that the rival (perhaps even the lover) might not even exist, being a product of the imagination of
the jealous person. Moreover, the relationship between jealous person and lover could be a product of imagination;
someone could for example fantasize that he had a relationship with a famous person, such as a star tennis player at
Wimbledon, and feel pangs of jealousy at the appearance of a ‘rival’ in the spectator area. For these reasons, I prefer to
consider jealousy not as a three-party relation, but rather as being directed towards a narrative—a sequence of
events—which can be perceived, remembered, or imagined by the jealous person, and which includes lover and rival,
and possibly the jealous person also, where the rival's identity can be more or less ‘fleshed out’. This alternative view of
what is the object of jealousy has the advantage that it naturally gives, I suggest, a more central role to the imagination:
in reflective, imaginative jealous thoughts the focus of attention of the jealous person can vary over time, at times being
on the lover, at times on the rival, at times on himself as observer or as participant, and at times on the relationship
between the parties; sometimes acentrally imagining lover and rival alone together, and sometimes centrally imagining
himself looking on at them together. We imaginatively dwell on, and return in thought to, different elements at
different times, and this is often combined with the jealous person's urge to know more, to flesh out the detail and
make it more vivid, and even to indulge in fantasy about the imagined events (see Rorty 1980b). As our imagination,
not always in our control, thus varies in its focus, so will the thoughts and feelings which are involved in the emotion.
The central recognitional elements of jealousy will typically include the belief, suspicion, or some other cognitive
attitude that the lover has formed or may form a relationship with a rival, and the belief or suspicion that this
relationship (or this possible relationship) threatens, is in competition with, or may lead to the loss of the jealous
person's existing relationship. Although it has been suggested that, if the jealous person thinks that the rival is better
than him in the relevant respect, then his jealousy will be reduced (Ben-Ze'ev 1990: 506), this suggestion seems to me
to be precisely the opposite of the truth: the belief that the rival is ‘better’ than you typically will fan the flames of
jealousy, not reduce them; in such cases, envy and jealousy can work in tandem to torture you. Even the respect we
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feel for the rival, which, as Hume points out, can be intermingled with envy, can add another turn of the rack: you
envy him for his charm and good looks and you feel contempt towards yourself for the respect and humility that you
feel in comparing yourself with him.
The emotional desires and wishes involved in jealousy will typically include the desire (perhaps an idle desire in the
sense that you see no possibility of its being satisfied) that, in some sense, the perceived threat go away, and, often but
not always, some sort of destructive or harmful desire whose object is your rival, or your lover, or both. So in these
respects jealousy has much in common with fear—fear of loss—and with vengeful anger. Just what the desires and
wishes are will depend on all sorts of thing: the situation, the sort of person you are, your moods. For example, if the
situation is irretrievable—they have gone away and there is clearly nothing you can do about it—you might just wish
your rival dead, and ultimately, perhaps, your jealousy will fade into resignation mingled with grief; if you are a
confrontational sort of person, you might plan a trap, which, if sprung, will lead to a fight; and if you are depressed and
generally have low self-esteem, you might think of suicide.
Jealousy also, of course, involves bodily feelings, as well as feelings towards the object of the emotion. These feelings,
experienced body and soul, are ‘united in consciousness’ (in William James's happy phrase) in being directed towards
that aspect of the narrative which is the focus of your feelings. As the discussion of Chapter 3 will have made clear,
there are degrees to which you can be reflectively aware of these feelings, and, if you are aware of the feelings, there are
degrees to which you can recognize them as being what they are. You can, for example, be jealous of someone for
years without being aware of your feelings; and you can be thoroughly aware of feeling bodily pangs which you do not
recognize as being pangs of jealousy felt towards someone in particular, or even as being pangs of jealousy.
Jealousy is especially episodic: the thoughts and feelings you have are likely to change dramatically over the duration of
the emotion, not only in their objects, but also in the attitude towards those objects: in thinking about whether the
lover's behaviour indicates that her mind is on the rival, you can go from a slight feeling of unease, to suspicion, to
conviction, to doubt, and back to conviction. And imagination and memory play a centrally important part in the
vicissitudes of our jealous ways of thinking of and feeling towards things. Your memories of past events become, as it
were, infused with
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present jealous imaginings and forward-looking fears: some event (involving a handkerchief, perhaps) which then was
not important now takes on in your mind a great and ominous significance; and then a gesture puts you at ease again.
You cannot help but think of her looking at another just as she used to look at you; whether she is in your sight or not,
these thoughts will not go away: over time (sometimes in a moment, sometimes over a longer period) you go from
wanting to see her dead to wanting to have things just as they were. Yet, through all these episodes, the emotion is still
the same emotion, the same complex entity. Being so complex and episodic, it need not be surprising that a person's
actions and expressive activity (verbal and non-verbal) out of jealousy can seem to veer dramatically from one direction
to another in their apparent purpose, for example from abject pleading, to threats, to violence, to arrogant disregard
and back to pleading. The difficulties of self-interpretation at times such as these can hardly be overstated: jealous
thoughts can seem to drive one mad with jealousy. As Dryden has it: ‘Thou tyrant, tyrant Jealousy, Thou tyrant of the
mind!’ (Love Triumphant, act iii, scene 1).
The epistemology of jealousy is really quite extraordinary. The jealous are not only susceptible to thinking ‘trifles light
as air’ to be ‘confirmation strong as proof of holy writ’, as Shakespeare puts it. The jealous are also susceptible to being
unduly assuaged by reassurances from the lover or the rival, or from someone else, welcoming them as longed-for
relief from the torture, when one should reject them as false. ‘Albertine merely gave me her word,’ Proust's narrator
Marcel says, ‘a categorical word unsupported by proof. But this was precisely what was best calculated to calm me,
jealousy belonging to that family of morbid doubts which are eliminated by the vigour of an affirmation far more
surely than by its probability. It is moreover the property of love to make us at once more distrustful and more
credulous, to make us suspect the loved one, more readily than we should suspect anyone else, and be convinced more
easily by her denials’ (iv. 268). This susceptibility, without good evidence, both to doubt and to credulity, is rather like
what happens when you are worrying whether you have a particular disease: every slightest ache or blemish on the skin
is confirming evidence; yet you long to be told that you have not got the disease after all, and you welcome the news
with open arms. Then, suddenly perhaps, as Proust later puts it, when we are least expecting it, the truth ‘gives us its
cruel stab and wounds us for ever’ (iv. 596).
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Because of this extraordinary manner in which an emotion can itself dynamically influence the thoughts and feelings
involved in it, the notion of cognitive impenetrability begins to lose its force. This notion has its clearest application in
those cases where there is, on the one hand, a belief which is arrived at by an appropriate epistemological method, and,
on the other hand, some perception or feeling which is to be contrasted with this belief: for example, believing the lines
to be of the same length and seeing them as being of different lengths; or believing that the snake is not dangerous and
at the same time feeling it to be dangerous. In both these examples the latter state is cognitively impenetrable by the
former state, and the former is presumed to be arrived at in a cool hour and on sound evidence. But with jealous
thoughts and feelings, there really is no relevant cognitive element which one can set up, as being appropriately arrived
at, in contrast to those other thoughts, imaginings, and feelings which are impenetrable by that former cognitive element.
There does not seem to be any relevant standpoint for isolating those beliefs that are appropriately arrived at, and from
which you can, so to speak, build outwards to a reasonable view on whether or not your jealousy is justified.53 As soon
as you ask yourself, in a relatively calm moment, ‘What ought I to believe here?’, you realize you cannot rely on any
cognitive element which bears on the question, because of your tendencies to be both too trusting and too mistrusting
at one and the same time. Whereas, if you know that you have jaundice and know its effects, you can isolate as
unreliable perceptually based judgements that things look yellow and seek out nonperceptually based evidence as to the
yellowness of objects in your environment. And with many other emotions, this sort of isolation is possible too: if you
know you feel fearful of falling over the cliff, it is possible to identify a belief as reasonably arrived at, say as to absence
of the risk of falling given the distance to the edge, so that
53
It may even be an illusion that there is such a standpoint to be taken when we are not in the grip of a violent passion. As Musil puts it, ‘We . . . imagine that the world is
unambiguous, whatever the relationship between the things out there and the inner processes may be; and what we call an emotion is a personal matter that is added to our
own pleasure or uneasiness but does not otherwise change anything in the world. Not just the way we see red when we get angry—that too, moreover; it is only erroneously
that one considers it something that is an occasional exception, without suspecting what deep and general law one has touched upon!—but rather like this: things swim in
emotions the way water lilies consist not only of leaves and flowers and white and green but also of “gently lying there” ’ (1995: 1561).
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you can see that it is your feelings of fear that are cognitively impenetrable. But this often cannot be done when you are
jealous: your thoughts are in turmoil.
Jealous thoughts and feelings lack reason in other ways too. We can be retrospectively jealous, jealous of a person's past
(the terrible nature of which is well brought out in Julian Barnes's novel Before She Met Me). We can have jealous feelings
towards someone we have just met: perhaps I have just seen her, in the words of the song, across a crowded room,
and then I have my hopes dashed by the successes of a rival who has attracted her attention. (Here it is sometimes hard
to say with any decisiveness whether what is being experienced is envy or jealousy, but I think the correct thing to say
in this sort of case will usually be that I am jealous, even though there is no relationship which is threatened by the
rival: the object of my jealousy is a narrative in which I imagine my plans to be already successful, and it is into this
narrative that the rival is intruding (cf. Rorty 1980b).) And, perhaps most of all, jealousy lacks reason in its
inconsistencies. You think that it is all right for you to misbehave, but you could not stand it if she were to do the same.
Some men get more and more possessively jealous the more they misbehave themselves; as the Contessa d'Almaviva
says in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, ‘That's how all modern husbands are! Systematically unfaithful, brilliantly capricious,
and out of vanity all jealousy’.
Jealousy, then, is in many ways paradigmatically a passion. Why do we have this passion? One place to look for an
answer is in the aetiology of jealousy. Let me briefly mention here four accounts of this, each of which, in a different
way, gives a distant source of our emotion, whilst at the same time explaining the differences between male and female
jealousy, including the more marked tendency of the man to experience obsessive sexual jealousy. One explanation,
broadly Freudian, looks back to our childhood—to our early fears of abandonment and loss of attention, and to the
differences between a boy's relation with his mother and a girl's relation with her father (see Rorty 1980b). A second,
broadly political, explanation focuses on social and economic differences to explain differences in jealous thoughts and
feelings (again, see Rorty 1980b). A third looks to an evolutionary account. Cross-cultural studies indicate that male
sexual jealousy is pan-cultural in the human species (as well as being found in other species, including certain sorts of
bird), and that there are all-too-predictable asymmetries between the sexes in
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what normally makes a person jealous, and in what are the normal sorts of things done out of jealousy (see Buss 1988,
cited in Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby 1992: 304). The evolutionary claim is that male sexual jealousy is an adaptation,
as it ‘functions to elevate paternity confidence’ (Daly, Wilson, and Weghorst 1982: 12), because ‘In species with internal
fertilisation and biparental care, males have a susceptibility to mistakes in the identification of their own offspring in a
way that females lack’ (Wilson and Daly 1992: 290). Where a male lacks this confidence that the offspring are his, he
will be less likely to adopt a caring attitude towards that offspring, thus reducing its chances of survival. A fourth
explanation is Hume's. In a passage defending the duties of chastity and modesty in ‘the fair sex’, Hume gives the
following explanation, remarkably similar to that of the evolutionary psychologists, of the differences between the
sexes:
Whoever considers the length and feebleness of human infancy, with the concern which both sexes naturally have
for their offspring, will easily perceive, that there must be an union of male and female for the education of the
young, and that the union must be of considerable duration. But in order to induce men to impose on themselves
this restraint, and undergo cheerfully all the fatigues and expences, to which it subjects them, they must believe, that
the children are their own, and that their natural instinct is not directed to a wrong object, when they give a loose to
love and tenderness. Now if we examine the structure of the human body, we shall find, that this security is very
difficult to be attain'd on our part; and that since, in the copulation of the sexes, the principle of generation goes
from the man to the woman, an error may easily take place on the side of the former, tho' it be utterly impossible
with regard to the latter. From this trivial and anatomical observation is deriv'd that vast difference betwixt the
education and duties of the two sexes. (Treatise, 570–1)
Hume also agrees that the differences between the sexes are pancultural (‘to prove this we need only appeal to the
practice and sentiments of all nations and ages’: ibid. 573), but his explanation for it is not an evolutionary one: chastity
and modesty are, he says, artificial virtues, arising ‘from education, from the voluntary conventions of men, and from
the interests of society’ (ibid. 570).54
54
A similar sort of explanation is to be found in the Enquiry, there specifically appealing to the utility of these virtues (Enquiry, 166–8). However much one admires Hume,
and however much one is willing to accept his views here as typical of his period, his unforgiving attitude towards any ‘deficient’ conduct in women is utterly repugnant: ‘a
woman becomes cheap and vulgar, loses her rank, and is exposed to every insult, who is deficient in this particular. The smallest failure is here sufficient to blast her
character. . . . If a man behave with cowardice on one occasion, a contrary conduct reinstates him in his character. But by what action can a woman, whose behaviour has
once been dissolute, be able to assure us, that she has formed better resolutions, and has self-command enough to carry them into execution?’ (ibid. 196). Hume might here
have considered the ‘utility’ of the number of females driven to suicide or prostitution as a result of this sort of view; his notion of the utility to society of chastity and
modesty sounds to me more like a remark about their utility to men.
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The passionateness of jealousy is revealed not only in its aetiology and in the way jealous thoughts and feelings can be
out of our reasoned control. It can also be revealed in our actions. We can, so to speak, find ourselves doing things: doing
expressive actions such as scratching the eyes in the photo of the rival, and smashing the much-treasured vase of our
wife; and doing actions out of jealousy such as murdering the loved one, the rival, or both (the crime passionnel). These
are often things which we later regret. Why do we get so out of control in our jealous thoughts, feelings, and actions?
Part of the answer, I think, lies in the forcefulness, vividness, and voyeuristic nature of the thoughts and imaginings
which are involved, combined with feelings of passivity and powerlessness. This combination is exceptionally volatile.
Let me try to explain.
Sometimes, in real life, one can observe events unfolding in a spectator-like way, as if the events were taking place on
the stage or on the cinema screen: you see the pedestrian hit by the car just in front of you, and you grasp every detail
of the scene with utmost clarity, and, for a moment, you feel transfixed, powerless, seemingly unable to move. The
scene you observe involving loved one and rival can also have this spectator-like quality: you see the complicit
exchange of smiles across the dinner table, the touch of hands on the far side of the crowded room, the embrace
through the gap in the curtains or even through the keyhole. You are an onlooker, a voyeur almost, and you are
transfixed by what you see: although your role need not be a purely passive one, for there are things you could do
(interrupt, burst in, and so forth), for a moment you feel you can do nothing. Now, assume that you do not actually
observe these things happening, but that you imagine them. You do not do this by empathizing with either lover or rival
(this would surely be unusual); you do it in one of two other ways: by centrally imagining yourself observing the
embrace (through the curtains, say), or by acentrally imagining the embrace. In the latter, you could no more
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change the course of events from within the narrative than you can change the course of events of a film you are
watching in the cinema: your passivity and powerlessness are part of the logic internal to the imaginative process. In
the former you are not logically powerless: you could also imagine taking part, by, say, interrupting or bursting in.
Nevertheless, centrally imagining yourself as observer also has this forcedly passive, excluded, spectator-like, almost
voyeuristic quality: you are somehow transfixed by what you see framed by the curtains, and imagining bursting in
(how unnaturally surprised they would be!) can seem impossible, even if it is not. So often, returning now to ‘real’ life,
when you act out of jealousy, or when you express your emotion in action, what you do is a sort of explosive burstingout of a trance-like condition: what has been pent-up powerless rage at what you see or imagine floods out into
uncontrolled action, destroying the perceptions or images which force themselves onto you.
So far, then, I have tried to say something about what is involved in jealous thoughts and feelings. How should we
assess these thoughts and feelings? One way of looking at this question is to consider the rationality of jealousy. If it
is—or can be—so lacking in reason as I have suggested, perhaps we would be better off without this emotion.
Another way is to consider the ethical dimensions of jealousy. In jealous thoughts and actions, perhaps we treat the
other person in an ethically unjustifiable manner, which involves treating them as a possession. These thoughts might
be reinforced by consideration of the various accounts of the aetiology of jealousy. These accounts—at least the four
that I have mentioned—put our jealous responses in a context which throws a cloud of doubt over them, and they do
so in roughly this sense: the reasons for our being jealous which are given in terms of these explanations can tend to
undermine our own normative and personal reasons for being jealous. I turn now to these issues.
An Assessment of Jealousy
Jealousy might be open to criticism because it involves desires which cannot be satisfied, and these desires arise
because jealousy involves treating the loved one as a possession, as something to be owned; and people cannot be
owned in this way. At the extreme, this possessiveness
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will not only involve wanting to keep the lover locked away (literally or metaphorically) from the attention of possible
rivals; it will also involve wanting control over the lover's thoughts and feelings—these too must not be allowed to
‘wander’. The desire is thus an impossible one to achieve: the more you try to assume control of the lover's thoughts,
feelings, and actions, both when with you and when elsewhere, the more your behaviour will tend to destroy the very
thing you value. The jealousy felt by Marcel, Proust's narrator, is perhaps paradigmatic of this. The problem is not only,
as we saw in Chapter 2, that he sees that, when Albertine is absent, his desire to have her back would not be satisfied
by having her back; but also, when Albertine is with him, there is a constant suspicious dwelling on her thoughts,
feelings, and actions, and these too are insatiable. This is brilliantly captured by Proust in the following passage:
Suffering, when we are in love, ceases from time to time, but only to resume in different form. We weep to see the
beloved no longer respond to us with those bursts of affection, those amorous advances of earlier days; we suffer
even more when, having relinquished them with us, she resumes them with others; then, from this suffering, we are
distracted by a new and still more agonising pang, the suspicion that she has lied to us about how she spent the
previous evening, when she was no doubt unfaithful to us; this suspicion in turn is dispelled, and we are soothed by
our mistress's affectionate kindness; but then a forgotten word comes back to us; we had been told that she was
ardent in moments of pleasure, whereas we have always found her calm; we try to picture to ourselves these
passionate frenzies with others, we feel how very little we are to her, we observe an air of boredom, longing,
melancholy while we are talking, we observe like a black sky the slovenly clothes she puts on when she is with us,
keeping for other people the dresses with which she used to flatter us. If, on the contrary, she is affectionate, what
joy for a moment! But when we see that little tongue stuck out as though in invitation, we think of those to whom
that invitation was so often addressed that even perhaps with me, without her thinking of those others, it had
remained for Albertine, by force of long habit, an automatic signal. Then the feeling that she is bored by us returns.
But suddenly this pain is reduced to nothing when we think of the unknown evil element in her life, of the places,
impossible to identify, where she has been, where she still goes perhaps during the hours when we are not with her,
if indeed she is not planning to live there altogether, those places in which she is separated from us, does not belong
to us, is happier than when she is with us. Such are the revolving searchlights of jealousy.
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Jealousy is moreover a demon that cannot be exorcised, but constantly reappears in new incarnations. Even if we
could succeed in exterminating them all, in keeping the beloved for ever, the Spirit of Evil would then adopt
another form, more pathetic still, despair at having obtained fidelity only by force, despair at not being loved. (v.
109–10)
It might seem that to be in the grip of this ‘demon’ is not something to be desired, and that Gabrielle Taylor is right
that Marcel's jealousy is ‘pathological’ (1988: 247). She says this:
The good to be protected is, initially, the relationship itself. This clearly is spoilt by Marcel's obsession; even if such
watchfulness and deviousness can be tolerated by the other, they cannot yield the kind of relationship needed to
give Marcel what he seems to need. Marcel, wanting all of Albertine's attention, is thereby forced to give all his
attention to her. This in itself is a perversion of his aim. Moreover, as he himself realises, his efforts are quite futile:
there is no way in which he can get the guarantee that Albertine is his entirely. Treating as a thing to be possessed
what is in fact not a thing cannot secure the wanted good. In failing to establish the desired relationship, Marcel also
fails to find a stable basis for his self-esteem and sense of identity. (1988: 246–7)
These points are well made, and I take it that Taylor would apply them not only to Marcel's emotion, directed towards
Albertine, but also to his character trait, to his disposition to be jealous, as exemplified in his feelings towards
Albertine, Gilberte, and a number of other women.
However, I think we should not be too quick. First, we should remember that his jealousy is closely related to his
feelings of love, and these are also possessive in an unsatisfiable way. They are closely related in that
LaRochefoucauld's remark seems true at least of Marcel: ‘Jealousy is always born with love, but does not always
die with it’ (Maxims, maxim 361). This is revealed in the following telling remark of Proust's: ‘There is no doubt that a
person's charms are a less frequent cause of love than a remark such as: “No, this evening I shan't be free” ’ (iv. 227).
And at one point Marcel describes himself as a collector of women, like postage stamps or old snuff-boxes (iii. 405–6).
For Marcel, being without jealousy would entail being without love.
Perhaps he should indeed be without both. But still I hesitate to draw this conclusion, at least for the reasons which
Taylor puts forward. Her reasons do not focus on any possible harm to the loved one, Albertine in this case, looking
rather to criticize the emotion
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as inherently inconsistent or self-defeating (1988: 246 and 247), as ‘the jealous want the other to be both, a person and
a thing to be owned’ (246). In short, it is irrational for Marcel to be jealous.
My grounds for withholding the conclusion, at least for this reason, that he ought not to have jealous feelings are to do
with the sort of holism I have been advocating. Our emotions, moods, and character traits, broadly conceived, can
interweave, overlap, and mutually affect each other. Even apparently insignificant traits, abilities, and habits can
resonate through a person's psyche in such a way that their ‘addition’ or ‘removal’ could have dramatic and unforeseen
consequences for the whole person: the ‘removal’ of what is considered a virtue might, overall, have an effect of
making the character of the person concerned one of which we, for all sorts of reasons, approve more, not less; and
the ‘removal’ of what might be considered a vice might make the person overall less approved of; thought and talk
which involves, as it were, ‘tinkering’ with personality can be an unpredictable business (cf. Rorty 1988). We might, for
example, think that a person would, overall, be a better, or a more dispassionate, or a more virtuous, sort of personality
if he or she were not so shy; or we might, at certain moments, wish of ourselves that we were not so irritable or were
more inclined to be kind. Given the complex, narrative structure of our emotional lives and of our traits, it is, in the
first place, questionable even how coherent this sort of thought and talk is; traits cannot be ‘removed’ like malignant
tumours, or ‘added’ like artificial hips. (It is quite another matter, and perfectly coherent, to try to change: for example,
to try from now on to be more kind or to be less irritable.) But even if the idea is coherent, it remains the case that,
without knowledge of how emotions, moods, and traits are dynamically related within the person's overall personality,
one might be better off if this sort of wishful thinking, like the fabled wishes for untold power or riches, does not come
true. If she were less shy, her self-obsession might be unendurably tedious; if you were less irritable you might no
longer have that Protestant work ethic which drives you along. In this respect, a person's overall character or
personality is best understood on the analogy of an ecological unit—a garden perhaps. A particular feature of the
garden may, considered in itself, be unattractive and undesirable; yet its removal might have adverse ramifications
which overwhelm the advantages. Don't kill off the worms!
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So, applying this holism to our discussion of jealousy, the assessment of a person's disposition to be jealous—of his
character trait—will depend on how this disposition is bound into and blends with the rest of his personality. These
remarks can also be applied, I think, specifically to Marcel. His suffering, over Gilberte, Albertine, and other women,
served for him a purpose which was vital to being the sort of person he was: not just his work, although that too; also
his understanding of such all-too-human emotions. At one point, realizing why Mme de Cambremer was wrong to
express surprise at his giving up seeing the artist Elstir for the sake of Albertine, Marcel says,
Even from an intellectual point of view I had felt that she was wrong, but I did not know what it was that she had
failed to understand: the nature of the lessons through which one serves one's apprenticeship as a man of letters. In
this process the objective value of the arts counts for little; what we have to bring to light and make known to
ourselves is our feelings, our passions, that is to say the passions and feelings of all mankind. A woman whom we
need and who makes us suffer elicits from us a whole gamut of feelings far more profound and more vital than
does a man of genius who interests us. (vi. 268)
I am not concerned here to argue narrowly in favour of suffering for the greater cause of literature. I believe the point
has wider and more general implications which can apply to those of us who do not claim to be artists. Marcel's
feelings, including his inherently inconsistent and self-defeating jealousy, constituted for him a central part of his
conception of himself (and of our conception of him): without these feelings, and the disposition to have them in
different relationships, he would have been a different, and perhaps a lesser, person. Taking the point in this wider,
more general way then, it may even be possible to say of yourself that you might be, in some respect, a lesser person
without inconsistent and self-defeating emotions such as those experienced by Marcel. We should not forget how
strange and surprising it would be if the thoughts and feelings involved in emotions exemplified the ideals of
rationality; how much more appropriate that they be . . . human; and being human does not involve exemplifying the
ideals of rationality. What we should look for and expect from emotional thoughts, feelings, and actions is intelligibility,
and one can be intelligibly
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irrational, at least where the emotions are concerned. We should also not forget how lovable a person can be for their
irrationalities, their inconsistencies, their sillinesses.
I will leave this discussion of pathological jealousy at this point (many may feel I have already gone too far), and
consider how the complaint against jealousy might be further pursued, not on the ground of irrationality, but by
looking at the ethical point: if jealous thoughts can be possessive, then they also will presuppose possessive rights over
the loved one, and these rights are not reasonable ones to claim over people. No doubt they can be possessive and thus
presuppose these rights, and, if this is so, then they are open to criticism on these grounds. (Marcel's jealousy may well
be criticized in this respect.) But, I think, jealousy need not involve treating the other as a possession: it can sometimes
instead involve mutually held legitimate expectations which do not involve treating the lover in an ethically unjustifiable
way (cf. Neu 1980). Let me explain.
Legitimate expectations, as part of a relationship between lovers, can arise in many sorts of ways. For expectations to
be legitimate, they have to stand open to correction for mutuality of understanding, and this understanding can be
either explicit or implicit. If legitimate expectations are explicitly agreed upon by the lovers, such as where there is an
expectation that a given promise will be kept, the expectation plainly does not involve treating the lover in an ethically
unjustifiable way. More interestingly perhaps, legitimate expectations can be implicitly derived in some way from the
manner in which the relationship has been conducted over a period of time. I appreciate that a lot more could be said
about this second way in which legitimate expectations might arise, but I suggest there is a strong intuitive sense in
which, for example, it can be accepted that there are, as a matter of fact, some relationships between lovers which have
been conducted on the basis of an implicit expectation of exclusivity: not necessarily only sexual exclusivity; it could
also include, for example, exclusivity of a certain sort of loving, caring attention. In this sort of case, it is surely
reasonable to say that there could arise mutually held, implicit legitimate expectations of each party to the relationship
that it will continue on this basis of exclusivity. Then jealousy (as well as other emotions perhaps) could be well
founded if these legitimate expectations were threatened.
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Of course, this would only be true so long as the jealous person had not himself already acted against the exclusivity,
like Mozart's Count d'Almaviva; legitimate expectations of this sort are a two-way street.
So far, then, we have seen that jealousy—the emotion—can be, but need not be, irrational or ethically unjustifiable. Of
course, occurrences of irrational or unjustifiable instances of jealousy are not sufficient to condemn jealousy outright as
a type of emotion (that is, to condemn all occurrences of jealousy) or to condemn the trait; nevertheless, Gabrielle
Taylor makes the penetrating claim that jealousy, like envy, is a vice because it tends to be self-defeating. Now, she
accepts that being protective of a relationship may be perfectly justified and appropriate, but in jealousy this
possessiveness will, she says, typically ‘also be a protectiveness of the person concerned. But being protective of a
person in such circumstances is to be possessive of that person’ (1988: 246), and ‘the distinction between
protectiveness and possessiveness is so tenuous that the slide from one into the other would seem in practice to be
almost inevitable’ (247).
One criticism of this argument might be that it involves an unnecessary hypostatization of the notion of a relationship,
thus facilitating the slide from protectiveness of the relationship to possessiveness of the person. But the difficulty with
jealousy that this argument is pointing towards can also be expressed in terms of legitimate expectations. A place to
start is with the plain truth that if one wants to keep a relationship going, or to retrieve a relationship, in the face of a
supposed rival (let us say one wants to keep it going not just for one's own sake, but for the sake of the lover and the
relationship as well), then jealous thoughts, words, and deeds can often be counter-productive, arousing resentment in
the lover. Resentment, perhaps brought about partly by constant prying (however well justified), suggests there is an
issue of freedom here. Consider one way that jealousy can arise: a situation where, before either the rival or jealous
thoughts are in the offing, A and B each has an implicit legitimate expectation L of their relationship. Although L
implies that certain sorts of behaviour on either side are not acceptable, neither A nor B at this stage considers L to be
an unwarranted constraint on their freedom. Now rival and jealousy arrive on the scene, and it is just at this time, when
L comes to
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be tested, that the parties' perceptions of L can become distorted. Jealous A now expects too much of the relationship,
and, by thus over-extending L in his mind, A enlarges the restrictions on what B might see as his or her freedom. No
doubt lover B's perception of L can also become distorted: B now comes resentfully to see L as constricting, at the
limit wanting to be free of the relationship and all the restrictions which L implies; perhaps, given the opportunities
now open to B for a new sort of life, B comes to see the extent of L as less than it was, thus reducing the restrictions
on B which L implied. So, at the very time when L comes to be tested, there arise psychological pressures on both A
and B which can tend to distort perceptions of L in opposing directions. This might suggest that fault lies equally on
both sides—jealous A, and lover B. But—and here is the charge against jealousy—jealousy is an emotion, which, as we
have seen, can dramatically affect the attitude and the content of A's thoughts and feelings towards the relationship
and about L: and they thereby gain a motivating power which exceeds their authority, so that, ultimately, he becomes
possessive of B, the loved one.
This charge, so far as it goes, should be accepted. Jealousy can get out of control: dark thoughts and terrible feelings
which we barely grasp may be involved in jealousy, and it is certainly true that a cocktail of these can be highly volatile.
I have no need to deny these truths. Nor need I deny that the accounts of the aetiology of jealousy which I touched on
earlier all tend, in their different ways, to undermine our jealous thoughts and feelings: you might, for example, come
to think that you are only experiencing the emotion because of the way you were educated (Hume's account), and that
being educated in this way now no longer has the utility it once had, for one thing because of improvements in
methods of contraception; or you might think that you are jealous only because the capability for jealousy was once
selectionally advantageous for our remote ancestors (the evolutionary account), and that it is not advantageous for us,
given, for just one thing, the possibility of DNA testing for paternity. Not only need I not deny these truths; I can also
add that it is important for a responsible, reflective, moral adult who experiences jealousy to know the aetiology of
jealousy, and to know how many ways the emotion can lead one astray from the path of truth and appropriate and
proportionate response, and how one's actions out of jealousy
240
JEALOUSY
can be volatile, destructive of one's own purposes, and damaging to the other's sense of freedom.
So the claim that jealousy is not necessarily a vice does not imply a defence of the jealous person, understood as a
person who leaves his or her disposition ‘unchecked’, as Taylor puts it (1988: 233). I agree that jealousy is a character
trait which should not be left unchecked, because this emotion does tend to get out of control, but this is entirely
consistent with not having a negative attitude towards all experiences of jealousy or towards the capability for having
such experiences. There is no reason, therefore, why we should aim to have no jealous thoughts, or to be incapable of
jealousy, rather than to be a person whose jealous thoughts are well grounded, appropriate, and proportionate.
Furthermore, the person capable of jealous thoughts can be, all things considered, a better person than the person
incapable of jealousy: the lover can find jealous thoughts about himself or herself to be attractive and flattering, as well
as indicative of continuing love. For example, a loving couple might consider jealous thoughts to be an important and
integral part of their loving relationship, where questioning of the partner can be expressive of their love and of their
mutually held legitimate expectations, as well as being expressive of jealousy; and, perhaps, the cessation of such jealous
questioning might be a worrying and important sign that the loving feelings are waning, and that one no longer cares as
one once did:
Kind jealous doubts, tormenting fears,
And anxious cares, when past,
Prove our hearts' treasure fixed and dear,
And make us blest at last.
(Earl of Rochester,
‘The Mistress: A Song’)
One might put the point more cynically: jealousy is the price that has to be paid for there to be a certain sort of love
from a certain sort of person, and one might not wish to be without that certain sort of love from that certain sort of
person. Again, don't get rid of the worms! However, whilst bearing in mind this poem and this invocation, one should
also remember these two things about jealousy: first, it may be necessary for a certain sort of love, but, as
LaRochefoucauld reminds us, it is not sufficient for it; and secondly, jealous thoughts can be torture to endure, both
for lover and for loved one, as well as irrational, volatile, possessive, and destructive.
JEALOUSY
241
Conclusion
I hope this discussion of jealousy—a paradigm of emotion, one might say—has helped to bring to life some of the
themes and arguments of the rest of this book. Jealous thoughts and feelings so easily get out of control, leading us to
do things which are far from being appropriate or proportionate. The reasons of the heart can be like this. But they are
also perfectly intelligible and utterly human.
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Suggested Reading
This list of suggested reading is aimed particularly at those who are fairly new to the topic of the emotions. All
suggested reading lists are, of course, selective, and this one is no different in that respect. For ease of use, I have
included the full reference below, although in many cases the work is also referred to in the Bibliography.
Chapter 1: Introduction
The personal perspective or point of view:
Nagel, T. (1974), ‘What Is It Like to be a Bat?’, Philosophical Review 83, 435–50
, reprinted in his Mortal Questions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, 165–80.
Nagel, T. (1979), ‘Subjective and Objective’, in his Mortal Questions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 196–213.
Nagel, T. (1986), The View from Nowhere, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, esp. chs. 1 and 2.
Hornsby, J. (1993), ‘Agency and Causal Explanation’, in J. Heil and A. Mele (eds.), Mental Causation, Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 161–88;
reprinted in her Simple Mindedness, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997, as ch. 8.
Negal's work is centrally important. (His use of ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ is not quite the same as my use of ‘personal’
and ‘impersonal’.) Hornsby (1993) is especially clear in showing that our ordinary commonsense explanations of
ourselves and of others need not be threatened by explanations from the impersonal standpoint—that is, the
standpoint of the physical sciences.
The normativity which accompanies this perspective:Davidson, D. (1980), Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, esp. essays 12 and 13.Grandy, R. (1973), ‘Reference, Meaning and Belief ’, Journal of Philosophy 70,
439–52.Child, T. W. (1994), Causality, Interpretation, and the Mind, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
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SUGGESTED READING
Korsgaard, C. (1997), ‘The Normativity of Instrumental Reason’, in G. Cullity and G. Berys (eds.), Ethics and Practical
Reason, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 215–54.Davidson's essays and Grandy (1973) argue, in different ways, that our
interpretation of others is an essentially normative process. Child (1994: ch. 2) argues for the uncodifiability of
rationality. Korsgaard (1997) shows how the notion of normativity applies to means–end reasoning—to what she calls
the principle of instrumental reason.
The notions of appropriateness and proportionality:Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, esp. book II, chs. 6–9.Hursthouse, R.
(1981), ‘A False Doctrine of the Mean’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 81, 57–72.Hursthouse, R. (1996), ‘Normative
Ethics’, in R. Crisp (ed.), How Should One Live?, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 19–36.Burnyeat, M. (1980), ‘Aristotle on
Learning to be Good’, in A. O. Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle's Ethics, Berkeley: University of California Press, 69–92.
The central idea here is not Aristotle's so-called doctrine of the mean, but his idea of responding emotionally towards
the right objects or persons, inthe right way, at the right times, for the right end, and with the right reasons.
Finding the right place for feelings in an account of the emotions:Madell, G. (1997), ‘Emotion and Feeling’, Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society suppl. vol. 71, 147–62.Ridley, A. (1997), ‘Emotion and Feeling’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, suppl. vol. 71, 163–76.Wollheim, R. (1999), On the Emotions, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.Damasio,
A. R. (1994), Descartes' Error, London: Macmillan.Maddell (1997) and Ridley (1997) complain that many recent
accounts of the emotions fail to find the right place for feelings. They both insist on the import-ance of what they call
‘feeling towards’; although I use the same term, my account is not derived from, or the same as, theirs. Wollheim
(1999) is important in very many respects, and especially so in its treatment of feelings; see especially pages 117–28.
Damasio (1994, esp. chs. 7–9) develops his well-known theory of ‘somatic markers’; sometimes people with brain
damage can reason perfectly well, but have difficulties making decisions and acting on decisions because of emotional
impairment: the content of their reasoning is not somatically marked.
Narrative structure:Wollheim, R. (1984), The Thread of Life, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
SUGGESTED READING
245
Taylor, C. (1985), Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.The
importance of narrative is emphasized throughout these works.
Chapter 2: What Emotions Are and Their Place in Psychological Explanation
The intentionality of emotion:Kenny, A. (1963), Action, Emotion and Will, London: Routledge, esp. ch. 3.Solomon, R.
(1993), The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life, Indianapolis: Hackett, esp. ch. 5.de Sousa, R. (1980), ‘The
Rationality of Emotions’, in A. O. Rorty (ed.), Explaining Emotions, Berkeley: University of California Press, 127–51.
Oakley, J. (1992), Morality and the Emotions, London: Routledge, ch. 1.This is just a sample; others are referred to in the
text and Bibliography of this book, and in the works cited.
Discussions of specific emotions:Aristotle, Rhetoric, book II.Hume, D., A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. SelbyBigge, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978, book II.Taylor, G. (1976), ‘Love’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 76,
147–64.Taylor, G. (1985), Pride, Shame and Guilt: Emotions of Self-assessment, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Elster, J.
(1999), Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Blackburn, S. (1998),
Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning, Oxford: Clarendon Press.It can be a useful way of gaining an
understanding of the intentionality of emotion to consider what sorts of thoughts and feelings are involved in one
particular emotion. Aristotle's Rhetoric is the locus classicus. Elster (1999) is particularly interesting on shame, and
Blackburn (1998) contains a superb discussion of the moral emotions.
Education of the emotions:Scruton, R. (1980), ‘Emotion, Practical Knowledge and Common Culture’, in A. O. Rorty
(ed.), Explaining Emotions, Berkeley: University of California Press, 519–36.McDowell, J. (1985b), ‘Values and
Secondary Qualities’, in T. Honderich (ed.), Morality and Objectivity: A Tribute to J. L. Mackie, London: Routledge,
110–29.
246
SUGGESTED READING
Wiggins, D. (1987), ‘A Sensible Subjectivism’, in his Needs, Values, Truth, 2nd edn., Oxford: Blackwell, 185–214.
McDowell (1985b) and Wiggins (1987) are not directly concerned with the emotions, but their discussions of
properties such as the dangerous and the amusing are very important to an understanding of the notion of what I call
the recognition–response tie; and they have been especially influential on my thinking on these matters.
Chapter 3: Emotions and Feelings
James, W. (1884), ‘What is an Emotion?’, Mind 9, 188–205.
Stocker, M. (1983), ‘Psychic Feelings: Their Importance and Irreducibility’, Australian Journal of Philosophy 61, 5–26.
Wollheim, R. (1999), On the Emotions, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
Sartre, J.-P. (1962), Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, tr. P. Mairet, London: Methuen.
Deigh, J. (1994), ‘Cognitivism in the Theory of Emotions’, Ethics 104, 824–54.
Pugmire, D. (1998), Rediscovering Emotion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
James (1884) and Stocker (1983) are discussed in some detail in Chapter 3. Wollheim (1999) discusses James and
feelings; see especially pages pp. 117–28. Sartre (1962) is very important; in the first two parts of this short book Sartre
considers and rejects certain opposing views; in part III he develops his own position. Deigh (1994) is a penetrating
survey article which nicely captures the growing resistance to what I call belief-desire accounts of the emotions.
Pugmire (1998) places feelings at centre-stage as I do, although his account is not the same as mine.
Chapter 4: Culture, Evolution, and the Emotions
Cross-cultural studies of the emotions:Russell, J. (1994), ‘Is there Universal Recognition of Emotion from Facial
Expression? A Review of Cross-cultural Studies’, Psychological Bulletin 115, 102–41.Ekman, P. (1994), ‘Strong Evidence
for Universals in Facial Expression: A Reply to Russell's Mistaken Critique’, Psychological Bulletin 115, 268–87.Harré, R.
(1986) (ed.), The Social Construction of Emotions, Oxford: Blackwell.Harré, R., and Parrott, W. (1996) (eds.), The Emotions:
Social, Cultural and Biological Dimensions, London: Sage Publications.
SUGGESTED READING
247
Ekman has carried out extensive cross-cultural studies of the emotions; Ekman (1994) contains references to many of
his other papers. Russell (1994) is useful, both because he surveys the work of Ekman and others in this area, and
because he puts forward an opposing view. Harré (1986) and Harré and Parrott (1996) provide useful collections on
social constructionism.
Evolution and the emotions:Maynard Smith, J. (1993), The Theory of Evolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
Canto edn.Barkow, J., Cosmides, L., and Tooby, J. (1992) (eds.), The Adapted Mind: Evolution, Psychology and the Generation
of Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Griffiths, P. (1997), What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological
Categories, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Blackburn, S. (1998), Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning,
Oxford: Clarendon Press.Evans, D. (forthcoming, 2001), Emotion: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.Maynard Smith (1993) is a concise introduction to many essential ideas in evolutionary theory. Barkow,
Cosmides, and Tooby (1992) is the most comprehensive collection of papers on evolutionary psychology; the
introduction by Cosmides, Tooby, and Barkow is the place to start. Griffiths (1997) is an excellent book; see especially
chapters 3 and 4. Blackburn (1998: ch. 5, sect. 4) discusses with great clarity the various confusions that can arise
concerning evolutionary theory and selfish behaviour. Evans (forthcoming) is a useful introduction to the whole topic,
including evolutionary issues.
Chapter 5: Expression of Emotion
Darwin, C. (1889), The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, with an introduction, afterword and commentary
by P. Ekman, London: HarperCollins, 1998.
Hursthouse, R. (1991), ‘Arational Actions’, Journal of Philosophy 88, 57–68.
Solomon, R. (1993), The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life, Indianapolis: Hackett, ch. 6.
Darwin (1889) is now getting the attention it deserves, thanks largely to the work of Ekman and others on expression
of emotion; Ekman's introduction and commentaries are helpful. Darwin's three principles of expression are set out in
chapters 1, 2, and 3. Darwin also gives a wealth of examples of facial expression. Hursthouse (1991) is discussed at
length in Chapter 5. Solomon (1993) is strongly influenced by Sartre (1962).
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SUGGESTED READING
Chapter 6: Emotion, Mood, and Traits of Character
Mood:Ryle, G. (1949), The Concept of Mind, London: Penguin, esp. 98–104.Kenny, A. (1963), Action, Emotion and Will,
London: Routledge, esp. ch. 3.Gosling, J. C. B. (1965), ‘Emotion and Object’, Philosophical Review 74, 98–104.Crane, T.
(1998), ‘Intentionality as the Mark of the Mental’, in A. O'Hear (ed.), Current Issues in Philosophy of Mind, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 229–51.Davidson, R. J. (1994), ‘On Emotion, Mood and Related Affective Constructs’, in P. Ekman
and R. J. Davidson (eds.), The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental Questions, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
51–5.Ekman, P. (1994), ‘Moods, Emotions, and Traits’, in P. Ekman and R. J. Davidson (eds.), The Nature of Emotion:
Fundamental Questions, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 56–8.There is little work on mood in the
Anglo-Saxon philosophical tradition. Gosling (1965), attacking Kenny (1963), argues that moods do not have objects.
Crane (1998) puts forward the opposing view, which I espouse. Davidson (1994) and Ekman (1994) are not
philosophically directed, but are worth considering.
Character:McDowell, J. (1979), ‘Virtue and Reason’, Monist 62, 331–50.Flanagan, O. (1991), Varieties of Moral Personality,
Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press.Morton, A. (1980), Frames of Mind, Oxford: Clarendon Press.Brandt, R. B.
(1970), ‘Traits of Character: A Conceptual Analysis’, American Philosophical Quarterly 7, 23–37.Ross, L., and Nisbett, R.
E. (1991), The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology, New York: McGraw-Hill.Harman, G. (1999), ‘Moral
Theory Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics and the Fundamental Attribution Error’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society 99, 315–31.McDowell (1979) argues that what is the right thing to do should be understood from the
perspective of the virtuous person, and that his or her capacity to see what is the right thing to do is uncodifiable.
Brandt (1970) is a justly famous analysis of traits of character, and Flanagan (1991) is excellent; see especially part IV.
Morton (1980) is also excellent; see especially chapter 6. Ross and Nisbett (1991) is the best place to look for empirical
studies which cast doubt on our ordinary conception of character traits.
SUGGESTED READING
249
Harman (1999) concludes (wrongly, as I argue in Chapter 6) that character traits and virtue ethics are doomed.
Chapter 7: How We Think of Others' Emotions
On theory theory and the simulation approach:Davies, M., and Stone, T. (1995a) (eds.), Folk Psychology: The Theory of
Mind Debate, Oxford: Blackwell.Davies, M., and Stone, T. (1995b) (eds.), Mental Simulation: Evaluations and Applications,
Oxford: Blackwell.Davies, M., and Stone, T. (1998), ‘Folk Psychology and Mental Simulation’, in A. O'Hear (ed.),
Current Issues in Philosophy of Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 53–82.Carruthers, P., and Smith, P. (1996) (eds.),
Theories of Theories of Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Stone, T., and Davies, M. (1996), ‘The Mental
Simulation Debate: A Progress Report’, in Carruthers and Smith (1996) (eds.), Theories of Theories of Mind, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 119–37.Heal, J. (1996), ‘Simulation and Cognitive Penetrability’, Mind and Language 11,
44–67.Heal, J. (1998), ‘Understanding Other Minds from the Inside’, in A. O'Hear (ed.), Current Issues in Philosophy of
Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 83–99.Austin, J. L. (1946), ‘Other Minds’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society
suppl. vol. 20, reprinted in his Philosophical Papers, 3rd edn., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979, 76–116.Harris, P.
(1989), Children and Emotion: The Development of Psychological Understanding, Oxford: Blackwell.Davies and Stone (1995a
and 1995b) and Carruthers and Smith (1996) are the most useful collections. The introductions to these collections by
Stone and Davies are good places to start, as is Stone and Davies (1996). The simulation approach in Heal (1996) and
Heal (1998) has greatly influenced my views. Austin (1946) is a classic. Harris (1989) discusses the development in
children of the ability to recognize emotions in others.
On imagination and empathy:Williams, B. (1966), ‘Imagination and the Self’, British Academy Annual Philosophical
Lecture; reprinted in his Problems of the Self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973, 26–45.Peacocke, C. (1985),
‘Imagination, Experience, and Possibility: A Berkeleian View Defended’, in J. Foster and H. Robinson (eds.), Essays
250
SUGGESTED READING
on Berkeley: A Tercentennial Celebration, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985, 19–35.Wollheim, R. (1984), The Thread of
Life, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Williams and Peacocke are centrally important introductions to what
imagination involves; as Peacocke (1985) is, in part, a response to Williams (1966), the Williams should be read first.
Wollheim (1984) is the source for the notions of imagining centrally, acentrally, and peripherally; see especially chapter
3.
Chapter 8: Jealousy
Rorty, A. O. (1980), ‘Jealousy, Attention and Loss’, in A. O. Rorty (ed.), Explaining Emotions, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 465–88.
Taylor, G. (1988), ‘Envy and Jealousy: Emotions and Vices’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 13, 233–49.
Daly, M., Wilson, M., and Weghorst, S. (1982), ‘Male Sexual Jealousy’, Ethology and Sociobiology 3, 11–27.
Buss, D. (1988), ‘From Vigilance to Violence: Tactics of Mate Retention in American Undergraduates’, Ethology and
Sociobiology 9, 291–317.
Rorty (1980) and Taylor (1988) are outstanding philosophical discussions of jealousy. Buss (1988) and Daly, Wilson,
and Weghorst (1982) discuss the idea that male sexual jealousy is an adaptation.
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Index
acentral imagining, see imagination
action out of emotion; explanation and understanding 12,
37–47, 186–8; prediction 9, 179, 200–13; contrasted with
action not out of emotion 40–3, 79; contrasted with
action expressive of emotion 128–9, 138–9; akratic action
out of emotion 115–21; shaping and consolidating 141,
144–8; action and mood 141, 147–8
adaptation and emotion, see evolution
add-on theory, see feelings
affect programs 100, 103, 105–6 see also evolution
akrasia 7, 86, 110, 111–21 see also appropriateness and
proportionality
Alston, W. P. 18
anger 23, 24–5, 37–40, 79, 93–4, 134–5
appropriateness and proportionality 3, 11–12, 23, 28, 31, 34–5,
44–5; related to cognitive impenetrability 74–6, 108–11;
involved in expression of emotion 124–5, 130–1, 135–6;
mood, character and unsatisfied desires 148–50; undue
influences on thinking 169–71; in jealousy 239–40 see also
intelligibility
Aristotle 24, 27–8, 76, 113–21, 174
Armon-Jones, C. 72, 92
Austin, J. L. 33, 139, 153, 184
avocado-pear conception of emotion, see evolution
Barkow, J. 96, 106
basic emotions 7, 87–8, 89, 99–101, 104–6 see also evolution
Batson, C. D. 161–2, 170, 174
belief; belief distinguished from feeling towards 18, 71–8;
belief and direction of fit, see direction of fit; role of belief
in explanation of emotion and action 20–3, 42–3, 45–7;
role of belief in explaining expressive actions 125–9, 138
Ben-Ze'ev, A. 224, 225
Blackburn, S. 37, 99, 111–12, 118, 164, 181, 210
Bloom, P. 98
bodily feelings, see feelings
Brandt, R. B. 155, 158
Broadie, S. 114
Brown, R. 163
Budd, M. 20, 60
Burge, T. 29
Burnyeat, M. 114, 120–1, 135
Buss, D. 230
Butler, J. 118
Calhoun, C. 71
Cavell, S. 185
central imagining, see imagination; empathy
Chalmers, D. 41
character 8, 23, 86, 141–2, 151–75; normativity of trait
ascription 142, 152, 153–9; fundamental attribution error
160–7; default use of trait terms 152, 165–6, 179;
character and understanding 185–9; character and the
difficulties of prediction 179, 205–13; excuses and acting
out of character 142, 152, 160, 166, 167–75; characterisation, empathy, and in-his-shoes imagining 179,
198–205; virtue and vice 153, 157, 160, 167–8, 171–5,
220, 222–4, 232–40
262
INDEX
Chesterfield, Earl of 88
Cicero 87
cognitive impenetrability 6, 74–8, 86, 110–11, 228–9 see also
appropriateness and proportionality
cognitivism 24
Collingwood, R. 145
component analyses 88–90
concepts; conceptual abilities 29; concepts of emotioninvoking determinable features 30–2; concepts of emotions 33–4, 86; cross-cultural studies of concepts of
emotions 86–95; concepts of commonsense psychology
and of science 85–6, 101–6
consciousness; consciousness of bodily changes 52–5;
reflective and unreflective consciousness 6, 62–9, 159
contagion of emotion 9, 178, 189–94
Cosmides, L. 96, 97, 106
Crane, T. 16
cultural diversity and commonalities in emotions and emotion
concepts 85, 86–110 see also concepts; evolution
Currie, G. 197, 199
Daly, M. 107, 230
Damasio, A. R. 52, 107
Darley, J. M. 161–2, 170, 174
Darwin, C. 95–7, 110–11, 117
Davidson, D. 18, 38, 112, 205
Davies, M. 156, 177, 192, 210
Deigh, J. 72, 195
Dennett, D. 96
Descartes, R. 87
desire; desire and direction of fit, see direction of fit; role of
desire in explanation of emotion and action 23, 36–7,
42–3; role of desire in explaining expression of emotion
125–9, 137–9; desire distinguished from feeling towards
18, 78–81; primitively intelligible emotional desires 42–3,
96–7, 118–19, 128–9; Aristotle and desire 113–15; power
and authority of desire 118–19; desire and wish 129–36;
unsatisfied desires 149–51 see also imagination; appropriateness and proportionality
developmental openness or plasticity, see evolution
direction of fit 24–6, 72
disgust 73–4
Dostoyevsky, F. 67–8
education of the emotions 5, 28–37, 48, 106–9, 125; education
of the emotions and cognitive impenetrability 110–11;
education of the emotions and akrasia 111–21, 135–6 see
also concepts; appropriateness and proportionality; recognition-response tie
Eilan, N. 41
Ekman, P. 89–91, 96, 100, 104–5
emotion; contrasted with emotional episode 12–14, 68–9,
104–6; emotion and conceptual abilities 29–36; see also
concepts; explanation and understanding 12, 20–8, 37–47,
177–8, 181–6, 188–92; prediction 9, 178, 179, 200–13;
contrasted with mood 8, 17–18, 143–7 see also belief;
desire; feelings; imagination; action; expression
emotional engagement, sharing, and identification 178, 193–4
empathy 9, 178–9, 194–204, 218; contrasted with in-his-shoes
imagining 180, 199–201; contrasted with sympathy 180,
194, 215–16 see also imagination
envy 22–3, 26–7, 221–4, 255–6
evolution; adaptationist explanations of emotions 95–8,
106–7, 118–19, 229–30; cross-cultural studies of emotions
INDEX
86–95; developmental openness or plasticity 7, 85, 95–101,
108–9; against the avocado-pear conception of emotion
6–7, 85, 99–101 see also concepts; expression; education of
the emotions; basic emotions
excuses, see character
explanation of emotion and action out of emotion, see emotion,
action
expression of emotion 7, 123–40, 150–1, 182–5; facial
expression and evolution 89–91, 94, 97–8, 100–1, 182
factive emotions 22
Farrell, D. 18, 224
fear 17–18, 21–2, 30–1, 35, 36, 46–7, 61, 62, 66–7, 75–8, 107,
110–11, 186–7; fear conditioning 115–16
feelings; bodily feelings 6, 51–7, 63–5; feelings towards 4, 11,
19–20, 41, 58–83; see also belief; desire; against the add-on
theory 4, 40–1, 50, 82; knowing what someone is feeling
32–4, 183–5; feelings involved in action out of emotion
39–41; feelings involved in sympathy 214–15; feelings
involved in jealousy 224–7
Firth, R. 218
Flanagan, O. 164
Flaubert, G. 88, 109–10
Fodor, J. 98–9, 101
Foot, P. 33
Freud, S. 119–21, 188
Friesen, W. V. 89, 96
Fuller, G. 192, 199
fundamental attribution error, see character
Gadamer, H.-G. 186
Gardner, S. 33
Gibbard, A. 31–2
Goldman, A. 190, 199, 201–2
Gordon, R. 22, 52, 192, 199, 201
Gould, S. J. 98
Green, O. H. 18
Griffiths, P. 48, 52, 89, 95, 96, 98, 103, 105, 107
Hare, R. M. 218
Harman, G. 158, 160, 166
Harris, P. 190, 203
Heal, J. 168–9, 177, 192, 206, 208–10
Hobbes, T. 87
Hornsby, J. 182
Hume, D. 17, 23, 48, 76–7, 154, 159, 216–17, 221–2, 230
humiliation 43–5
Hursthouse, R. 126–8, 133
imagination; perceptual imagination and feeling towards 20,
73–4; desire and imagination 80; imagination and wish
129–36; in-his-shoes imagining 9, 199–205, 218; central,
acentral, and peripheral imagining, and empathy 178–9,
194–205, 211–13; imagination, prediction, and character
200–13; imagination involved in jealousy 226–7, 231–2
intelligibility 3, 21–3; contrasted with rationality 43–5, 210;
263
contrasted with appropriateness and proportionality 23;
intelligibility and ‘the thing to do’ 169–71, 206–8;
intelligibility and imaginability 208–10 see also appropriateness and proportionality
impersonal perspective, see personal perspective
intentionality; the intentionality of emotion 4, 11, 16–28, 51;
the intentionality of mood 17–18, 143; borrowed
intentionality of bodily feelings 6, 54–7 see also belief;
desire; feelings
internalism in ethics 37 see also recognition-response tie
Izard, C. 89–91, 97
James, W. 52–5, 63, 67, 68–9
jealousy 9, 14, 56, 220–41
Johnston, M. 153
Joyce, J. 43–5
judgement tests 88–91
264
INDEX
Kahneman, D. 200–1
Kant, I. 153, 156, 174
Kenny, A. 13, 18, 20–1, 52
Kitcher, P. 97
Kövescses, Z. 94, 96
LaRochefoucauld, F. Duc de 234
LeDoux, J. 107, 115–16
Lewontin, R. 98
Locke, D. 218
love 14–16, 25–6, 36–7, 42–3, 56–7, 80, 88, 109–10
Lutz, C. 32
Lyons, W. 18, 33, 155
McDowell, J. 30, 31, 52, 158
MacIntyre, A. 218
Mackie, J. 200
Marks, J. 79
Maynard Smith, J. 107–8
Milgram, S. 161–5, 170–5, 208–13
modularity 98
mood 8, 23, 141; mood and emotion 17–18, 143–7; mood
and action 141, 147–8
Morsbach, H. 91
motive 38, 154–5, 164, 208
Mourelatos, A. P. D. 13
Musil, R. 136, 141, 143–8, 156, 228
narrative and narrative structure 4–5, 11–16, 35, 42–5, 69–72,
85, 109–10, 142–3, 144, 177, 181–9; paradigmatic
narrative structure for types of emotion 33, 92–5,
102–6; character and narrative 151–60, 185–8, 235–7;
empathy, imagination, and narrative 178–9, 194–9;
jealousy and narrative 225–6
Neu, J. 237
Nichols, S. 76
Nietzsche, F. 150–1, 214–15
Nisbett, R. E. 52, 152, 160–6
normativity, see personal perspective; character
Nozick, R. 223
obedience experiments 142, 162–5, 170–5, 208–11
Ortony, A. 100
Orwell, G. 78
over-intellectualising accounts of emotion 3, 5, 12, 22, 39–46
paradigmatic narrative structure, see narrative
Parrott, W. G. 48
Paul, R. A. 121
Peacocke, C. 33, 192, 195–6
peripheral imagining, see imagination
Perry, J. 60
personal perspective or point of view; contrasted with
impersonal 1–2, 12, 41, 82–3, 181–4; third-personal
contrasted with impersonal 51–2; normativity of the
personal perspective 2–3, 30–1, 103–4; personal perspec-
tive, normativity, and character 153–60
Pinker, S. 98
Pitcher, G. 18
Plato 113
Platts, M. 24
Plutchik, R. 96
point of view, see personal perspective
prediction of emotion and action out of emotion, see emotion;
action
pride 17, 23
primitive intelligibility, see desire
Proust, M. 25–6, 56–7, 150–1, 227, 233–7
Ramsey, F. P. 111–12
rationality, see intelligibility
Rawls, J. 223
recognition-response tie; conceptual relation between recognition and response 11, 45–7, 81, 86, 102–3; feeling
response 36; motivational response 37–8; recognitionresponse tie and internalism 37; education of recognition
and response 11–12, 28–37; failure to respond 35–7;
recognition-response tie and sympathy 215–16 see also
concepts
reflective consciousness, see consciousness
resentment 149–51, 238–9
Rey, G. 33
INDEX
Roberts, R. 71
Rorty, A. O. 158, 160, 225, 229, 235
Ross, L. 152, 160–6
Russell, J. 87, 90–6
Ryle, G. 158
Samaritanism 142, 161–2, 170, 174
Sartre, J.-P. 20, 58–9, 65–6, 77, 125
Scheler, M. 190, 191–4, 195, 214
Scheman, N. 92
Schopenhauer, A. 218
Scruton, R. 20, 22, 30, 72
Segal, G. 98
Sidgwick, H. 218
simulation 177
Smith, M. 42, 127–8, 132, 169
social constructionism 92, 94
Solomon, R. 24, 99, 130, 149
Sousa, R. de 33, 96, 97, 119
Spinoza, B. 87
Steward, H. 13
Stocker, M. 42, 49, 52, 54, 59, 62, 63, 68–9, 215
Stone, T. 156, 177, 192, 210
Strawson, P. 84
Symons, D. 97, 107
sympathy 9, 180–1, 190–1, 194, 213–19
Taylor, C. C. W. 139
Taylor, Charles 32, 109
Taylor, G. 18, 21, 24, 43–5, 222–3, 234–5, 238–40
theory-theory 177
Tolstoy, L. and War and Peace 14–16, 70–1, 186–7, 206–9
Tooby, J. 96, 97, 106
Turner, T. J. 100
Tversky, A. 200–1
Tyler, W. J. 91
understanding of emotion and action out of emotion, see
emotion; action
value and emotion 31–2, 48–9
virtue and vice, see character
Walton, K. L. 195–8, 201
weakness of the will, see akrasia
Weghorst, S. 230
Wierzbicka, A. 91
Wiggins, D. 31, 104, 153, 160, 205, 218
Williams, B. 31, 32, 37, 52, 72, 80, 126, 196, 203
Wilson, E. O. 22, 108
Wilson, T. D. 52
Wilson, M. 107, 230
wish, see imagination; desire
Wispé, L. 194
Wittgenstein, L. 20, 123–4, 130
Wollheim, R. 14, 20, 22, 25, 52, 129, 131, 194–9, 204
Wreen, M. 224
Wright, C. 153
265