Excerpt
Chapter 1, pp. 19–20
Emotions
A Modern Aristotelian View
To understand how mental and bodily factors are united in emotions, I have found it helpful to think in broad historical terms. The history of Western philosophy, it may be said, has been a long struggle first to separate consciousness as a phenomenon in its own right, distinct from the world of which it is conscious, and then to put consciousness and the world back together again, to show the inseparable relationship between them. The topic of emotion is entwined in this struggle, since emotions seem to be both part of the world (i.e., bodily) and part of consciousness.
The most important thinker for my purposes is Aristotle. His account of consciousness is in crucial respects naturalistic and biological, and at the same time non-materialistic (non-reductive). He has helpful theories of pleasure and pain; of desire; of the relation between (practical) reason, choice, desire, and action; and of emotion itself. His view of emotion is partly illustrated in his definition of anger: “Anger is a painful desire for apparent revenge against an apparent unjustified slight to oneself or one’s friends” (Rhetoric II 2, 1378a31–33). For him, emotions involve pleasure and/or pain, desire (thus a tendency to act), and evaluative cognition. He thinks that emotions affect one’s judgment but do not wholly determine it. And he has much to say about the training of emotions through habit and the proper role of emotions in virtue. All of these views I will make use of in my own theory of emotion.
There are, however, some issues on which Aristotle’s views need improvement in light of developments in modern philosophy. The basic one is Aristotle’s view of nous, or theoretical reason. To state it simply and briefly, Aristotle thinks that nous passively takes in the immaterial, intelligible form from sensible objects. He goes so far as to say that, if consciousness is to be awareness of objects in the world, consciousness can have no nature of its own. Thus, human consciousness, rational soul, becomes in its most characteristic activity an effectively supernatural process. Or, looked at slightly differently, the contents of consciousness and the contents of the world, i.e., form/essence/substance, remain undifferentiated from one another.
I will argue that this archaic, naive realism has two main consequences for Aristotle’s theory of emotion. First, while he identifies most of the elements of a viable theory of emotion, he cannot explain how and why these elements fit together the way that they do; an active view of reason is needed to explain this. The main example of this is that his view of pleasure and pain remains unintegrated with his account of emotion. Second, Aristotle’s theory must more fully recognize the material aspects of consciousness, a crucial part of the modern process of recognizing that consciousness has a nature of its own, if his theory is to accommodate Freud’s discovery of subconscious anxiety-defenses. And Aristotle’s theory needs this discovery if it is to account in a consistent way for the deep psychological conflicts that human beings often experience. Developing these modifications to Aristotle’s view will constitute the rest of this book.