Preface
Emotions
A Modern Aristotelian View
Emotions: A Modern Aristotelian View updates Aristotle’s discoveries about psychology and ethics to solve two age-old philosophic problems. (1) Empirically, how do we know what is valuable? In other words, how do we get an “ought” from an “is”? (2) How can we understand human consciousness, with such unique aspects as free will, reason and love, as a natural phenomenon (neither supernatural nor merely physical)? A new philosophic theory of emotion as rooted in biology yet rising to the complex and elevated level of human consciousness is the path to these solutions.
Along the way, we will gain new insights about: pleasure and pain, how action and thought shape each other, practical reasoning, free will, psychological conflict, subconscious anxiety-defenses, the development of virtue, and good vs. evil. Each main point of the book is argued through a series of everyday examples that readers can judge by their own direct experience.
The book begins by recognizing consciousness as a real, biological phenomenon, known primarily by introspection. This combination of both natural science and introspection leads to a non-materialist yet naturalist and empirical approach to the mind. Next, I place emotions in the same general category as physical pleasure and pain. The difference between physical vs. emotional pleasure or pain is that human emotions are largely caused by past, chosen thinking about experiences of persons, objects or events. Just as physical pleasure and pain signal that one’s body is functioning well or ill in some respect, so emotions signal that one’s consciousness is functioning well or ill in some respect. The biological role of the conscious mind is to manage one’s pursuit of goals, and it is this managing activity that emotions signal is functioning well or ill.
In this way, emotions provide indispensable—though fallible—data for rationally determining what is good or bad for one’s life. Competing emotions are processed by (logical or illogical) thinking, with reason’s role being to decide their overall appropriateness for action. And this appropriateness is not at the level of mere material survival, but of the flourishing and virtue of a living being with an expansive, reasoning mind.
Equally crucial, emotions (and physical pleasure and pain) are urges to act. This dual nature of emotion—as both data and action-tendency—provides the link between “is” and “ought.” Reasoning is itself a life-activity that processes not just sensory experience (data about what “is”), but also life-activity generally with its pleasure-pain dimension (data about both what “is” and what one “ought” to do). The implicit basic meaning of the “ought” judgment is: “this action-tendency that I perceive in myself is either consistent with or more causally fundamental in my life processes than my other action-tendencies.” Values are explained as both uniquely personal and either consistent with or contradictory to facts, and thus as being, in different respects, both subjective and objective. And moral behavior towards others is shown to be demanded by each person’s own flourishing life.