GOLDIE:THE EMOTIONS:PHILOSOPHICAL EXPLORATION PAPER: A Philosophical Exploration

by Peter Goldie

Peter Goldie opens the path to a deeper understanding of our emotional lives through a lucid philosophical exploration of this surprisingly neglected topic. Drawing on philosophy, literature and science, Goldie 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 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. He argues that it is only from the personal point of view that thoughts, reasons, feelings, and actions come into view.

This fascinating book gives an accessible but penetrating exploration of an important but mysterious subject. Any reader interested in emotion and its role in understanding our lives will find much to think about here.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

Paperback

First published September 7, 2000

Reviews

[Alina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Certain chapters from this book were wonderfully helpful, in serving as foil for my thought. Goldie's understanding of emotions has much overlap with mine, and figuring out where I differ from him helped me refine my ideas. Chapters 2, 3, and 5 are where the heart of Goldie's view is found. I found the other chapters less interesting and non-essential. Let me summarize these chapters, and then I'll ramble a bit about my responses.

In chapter 2 "What emotions are, and their place in psychological explanation" Goldie introduces his approach to understanding emotions. He sees emotions as complex, episodic, dynamic, and structured. An emotion may involve many different elements (e.g., perceptions, thoughts, feelings), dynamically changes over time, and includes its elements in a structure that is narrative in character. It promotes actions and events, which the emotion becomes embedded within. Emotion and mood are continuous with one another, varying on the front of how particular or specific the object of the emotional state is (e.g., sadness is directed towards some particular event of loss, whereas depression is global and not about any one particular thing.)

Goldie points out that philosophers have typically spoken about the object of emotion in terms of the sort of intentionality we find of propositional attitudes, like beliefs and desires. He wants to challenge that, which he accuses as "over-intellectualizing" emotions. Goldie accuses these philosophers for having an approach which he calls the "add-on" approach. Emotion consists in belief and/or desire, and then the feeling is simply added on top of that. Goldie argues that instead when an emotional feeling is present, it transforms the overall mental and experiential state as a whole. Such states can't be modeled by feelingless beliefs and desires, which are said to be accompanied by feelings.

Goldie argues that the intentionality of emotions is founded in feelings, which are supposed to be nonpropositional and nevertheless are about things in a certain way. The special sort of intentionality found in feeling can be compared to aspect-seeing (e.g., seeing a rabbit-duck as a rabbit, then as a duck): in having an emotional feeling, we see the world for certain aspects. This can happen independently of whether or not corresponding beliefs, which attribute to the world those aspects, hold.

In chapter 3 "Emotions and feelings" Goldie focuses on this concept of an emotional feeling, which he also calls "feeling-towards." It involves bodily feeling (e.g., feelings of muscular reactions, hormonal changes, etc.), but is essentially bound up with content. Goldie wants to separate the feeling that constitutes an emotion from other feelings which are downstream consequences of an emotion. His main argument for the position that this feeling itself has content is that if we fix a bodily state of feeling as nonintentional, and say that it is accompanied by some other intentional state (a traditional propositional attitude), this doesn't capture the phenomenology of emotion experience properly. (I found this argument to be quite lacking; brute appeals to phenomenology are shaky, since we can describe our experiences in different ways, and our descriptions will be biased by our theoretical backgrounds.)

Goldie adds that when a feeling delivers to us that which it is about, it is conceptually indeterminate. We can supplement this with thought and imagination, to figure out more precisely what our emotion is about. Sometimes we can change what our emotion is about by reasoning to ourselves, but at other times, such reasoning seems to be inert (cf. the successes and failures or re-appraisal.) Goldie compares this to seeing an optical illusion; you can believe that the lines are the same length in the Mully-Lyer illlusion, but still they visually appear as having different lengths. Goldie also adds that how conscious we are of our bodily feelings comes in degrees, as well as how conscious we are about what our feeling is about.

In chapter 5 "Expression of emotion" Goldie examines the nature of actions that are expressive of emotions, and distinguishes them from ordinary actions, with a means-end structure, which might be influenced by emotion. This was the most interesting chapter for me. An example of an emotionally expressive action is a person Jane acquires a photo of her rival Joan and scratches the eyes out in the photo. Goldie argues that such actions can't be adequately explained by appeal to an agent having a particular aim or end, and believing that certain means will achieve that. Instead, Goldie posits an ontology of wishes, as distinguished from desires. A wish, according to Goldie, is not an idle desire; it is a desire that does not necessarily promote action, but rather necessarily promotes certain thoughts, imaginings, and dispositions to imagine the desired outcome. Any emotion comes with a primitive wish. Jane's anger at Joan comes with a primitive wish to get back at Joan. This wish thereby produces in Jane the disposition to scratch the eyes of Joan's photo out. So Jane can be said to have the aim to scratch out the eyes of the photo, and belief that in doing so she accomplishes that aim. But this aim is not for the further aim to actually scratch out Joan's eyes, or to actually get back at Joan. Rather, this aim is causally put there by her wish to get back at Joan. Appeal to this wish renders intelligible Jane's desire, in light of the fact that she does not believe that satisfying this desire will actually get back at Joan in any way.

I found Goldie's explanation in chapter 5 interesting, but unnecessarily complex and insufficiently defended. Why posit these heterogeneous categories of wishes and desires? I think the cases can be explained adequately with just appeal to desire. Moreover, I think not all expressive actions are amenable to the same explanation; it's likely a case-by-case situation here. For example, here is one structure of explanation that needs appeal only to desires. Jane desires to get back at Joan, but she cannot do that right now (e.g., because it is socially unacceptable.) This leads to a "build up" of angry energy, which seeks release; as long as Jane feels angry like this, she can't focus on her work and daily tasks. She needs to regulate this pent up affect, just as if you have an itch, you feel the need to scratch it. When Jane scratches out the eyes of the photo, this successfully relieves her of the itchy affect. Why? The "lizard brain" makes it such that seeing the photo can deliver to Jane the overall feeling of Joan's presence (although this is definitely not the same as the experience of Joan's actual presence.) So scratching out the eyes of the photo yields a feeling that is similar to the overall feeling that Jane imagines would be found if she actually got back at Joan. She thereby is relieved, once her body can go through this arc of affective changes. In this explanation, I didn't have to posit anything like a wish, which is distinct from desire. There is a real desire to be relieved of this annoying affect, and it is satisfied by the means Jane takes. There is also a real desire to get back at Joan, but Jane is not aiming to satisfy that in her act here.

Here's another explanation. Jane's general anger at Joan "colors" all of her experience at this moment. When Jane sees the photo of Joan, this object in particular gets "charged" or "colored" by her overall emotion, so that she spontaneously tears at the eyes represented in the photo. It is difficult to say which particular aim Jane held in this action. It is more like a bit of mindless behavior, which is certainly motivated, in the sense that it was caused by her anger. Perhaps all actions are in fact structured by certain aims, but there can be many aims mixed together in a certain action. In anger, Jane might have the overall aim to just destroy something, anything, and that is satisfied by this act. She might also have the overall aim to relieve herself of this pent up affect (as in my example of an explanation above), and that is also satisfied by this act.

As a whole, this discussion indicates that figuring out what intentions were behind certain actions can be tricky, especially when the action is done 'emotionally' or in the throes of passion, and so there was definitely no forethought, no practical deliberation, in which definitive intentions would've been reasoned through and set. This inspires me to think that perhaps there's another way to approach figuring out the intentions behind an action, other than this traditional model based in practical deliberation. When I first read J.J. Gibson on affordances, I felt the vague outline of the idea that actions can be undertaken without any deliberate intent, but still with conscious awareness and intelligibility, in light of what one pre-reflectively experiences or perceives. Goaded by Goldie's analysis of emotion's relation to action, I'm now inclined to think that in the heat of emotion, we may be in such an absorbed and "lizard brained" state that visual or sensory cues of a situation can manage to summon forth the overall affect, that is shared by particular emotion episodes of the past, or those that we imagine we could have, which would involve wholly different objects. For example, the photo of Joan involves visual cues that resemble the actual person of Joan, and this suffices to get Jane to feel the same affect as she does when she's in Joan's presence. In examples of PTSD, firework sounds can suffice to get a traumatized person to feel the same affect as they did when on a battlefield.

When overwhelmed with affect, our mind may spring into remembering or imagining forth the parts of reality in which the past emotions that have this affect happened. Jane may remember moments of bickering with Joan, and a traumatized person may remember certain moments on the battlefield. One may have actual emotions towards these parts of reality, distant in space and time, brought to the present by imagination and memory, in combination with the actual affect triggered by some actual concrete thing of the present, which "symbolizes" or reminds us of those distant parts of reality.

Maybe in ritualistic or symbolic action (or what Goldie calls emotionally expressive action), by undertaking some action upon this concrete thing on the present, this "tricks" the body into changing its affect; the affect is relieved or resolved. Maybe the moment at which these affects are activated, it also "activates" those distant parts of memory, so that by changing this present moment, we can change our sense of what has happened to us, or what might happen in the future—we change these distant parts of reality. What we sense as part of reality drives our motivations and prereflective behaviors; so once those parts of reality are changed, new possibilities of how we live are opened. Ghosts of the past, or self-fulfilling prophecies for the future, can be erased. These are all just very preliminary, sketchy thoughts, but it is fun to think through.

At least this gives us a way of changing the question. Asking after the intentions behind an action is not particularly relevant, when the action is expressive of emotion. Instead, we could ask after the nature of the affect that underlies this action, and what parts of reality does the person behold which provide the charge or intensity to that affect. We could ask after what intentions the person had in those distant parts of reality, and how those may explain the odd aspects the person is seeing in the concrete objects of this present moment. We could ask after what sorts of needs or desires are being addressed in the person's action upon these objects, in light of those aspects of them, which are salient to the person. Asking such questions will bring us back to means-end structures of explanation, but these questions help show how descriptions of means and ends can be very abstract, indeterminate, and encompassing. A photo of someone is not just a photo; and doing something to the photo is not just that. The sound of fireworks is not just a sound; and one does not just respond to that sound, but one's response is towards the parts of reality that are "seen" in, or that are taken as "aspect" of, that sound. I definitely want to think more about this. Maybe Goldie is right to posit "wishes," but I'd prefer to think about these as desires in their most primitive form, before they are expressed propositionally, or are made determinate.

More generally I wonder whether this underlying idea that affect seeks release is okay to use. Is it an artifact of Freud’s theorizing that permeated culture and ended up in my thought, but is misleading? Or is there something to it?

Okie that thought aside. I will insert one complaint about Goldie's approach to explaining emotion. His key notion is "emotional feeling," or "feeling-towards." But this move just kicks the can down the road: what sort of content does such a special mental state have? In what sense is it intentional? Goldie attempts to address this, but I found his answers unsatisfactory. An alternative approach is to lean into intuitive answers for explaining emotion, like acknowledging that emotion involves belief. And then puzzling features distinctive of emotion, not found in paradigmatic cases of "intellectual" belief, may be taken as starting points for complicating our traditional notion of belief, and making progress in refining our definition of belief. In other words, the "add-on theory" is not in principle a bad one. It is bad only if we are dogmatic with respect to certain definitions of belief, desire, and feeling. But we can keep this approach and revise our traditional definitions.

My second main complaint is that, while Goldie is right to emphasize the complex and dynamic character of emotion, somehow he ends up being caught up in the traditional philosophical trap, of attempting to define emotion as essentially consisting in some type of mental state (which he calls feeling-towards.) Why not instead define emotion as a set of synchronized changes found across all sorts of mental states that are relevant to a particular emotional experience? This is the approach that psychologists Scherer and Frijda take, which I've found most promising. Once we define emotion like this, we don't have to worry about analytically defining the type of intentionality found in emotion. It all depends upon the particular emotional experience: sometimes we're aware of our emotion, and identify what it's about, and other times we're just immersed in our experience, where what we see is influenced by our emotion state, and this need not involve our identifying our emotion.

Perhaps there is a universal trajectory of development for any emotion, that starts off with "seeing-as"-sorts of meaning we register from the environment, and that can and often ends up with thought- and imagination-based sorts of meaning. There is ample possibility to work out, theoretically, the essentials of the developmental trajectory of any emotion; and the product would likely show that emotion is not essentially a feeling, belief, desire, etc., but should be defined in terms of the features of this developmental process that are universal and fixed (these features would likely be functional characteristics, given that thinking in functional terms seems to be the most plausible approach for explaining this phenomenon.)

A smaller issue I have with Goldie's account: He doesn't mention agency and freedom one bit. Given that emotion is essentially conscious (something I'm currently arguing for in my work), we're aware of what's happening, when we have an emotion. As long as we're conscious of something's happening, we always have the opportunity to challenge or respond to how things are unfolding. In other words, as emotion dynamically unfolds, we are always responsible for letting things unfold as they do, and for not intervening in top-down ways. (This issue of agency in emotion is something I'm currently thinking about and can't be addressed in full here.)

[aziz · Rating 3 out of 5]

i skimmed the book it was useful and interesting

[Heather Browning · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book aimed at providing an account of emotions, relating them particularly to the narrative structure of our lives or sense of self. There was some potentially interesting stuff here, but I found a lot of it unconvincing or underdeveloped, and I had a particularly hard time relating it to similar work on animal emotions - the highly cognitive accounts discussed here didn't seem to leave much room for exploration of non-human emotion.

[Laura]

this book is hard to read. it is straight up philosophy, so lots of explaining distinctions meticulously. also, every so often talking about previous theories (from the 60s- the 80s) that he's refuting. he likes aristotle's and sartre's ideas about the nature and function of emotions. he's big on emotions' drive being about fitting into a perceived narrative. there's a difference between: the emotion, an emotional episode, a character trait. and then there's the difference between emotions and moods. and how he does NOT believe that belief and desire direct our emotions. this would be overintellectualizing them, which i interpret to mean putting limits on them and not fully understanding them. emotions are always intentional, they always have an object. he includes great passages from proust and tolstoy and a great examples about slimy pudding or killing your hamster by accidental neglect. disgust and guilt, people. more later.

[Usman]

A very well written and articulate journey throught some lucrative ideas about the Emotions.