Emotions / Self-knowledge / Self-Deception /Morality

 Emotions / Self-knowledge / Self-Deception /Morality

We often make the "Cartesian" assumption that if anyone can know our emotions it is ourselves. Descartes said it thus: "it is impossible for the soul to feel a passion without that passion being truly as one feels it." Barely a page later, however, he noted that "those that are most agitated by their passions are not those who know them best" (Descartes 1984 [1649], 338, 339). In fact, emotions are one of our avenues to self-knowledge, since few kinds of self-knowledge could matter more than knowing one's own repertoire of emotional responses. At the same time, emotions are both the cause and the subject of many failures of self-knowledge. Their complexity entails much potential to mislead or be misled. Insofar as most emotions involve belief, they inherit the susceptibility of the latter to self-deception. Recent literature on self-deception has striven to dissolve the air of paradox to which this once gave rise (Fingarette 1969, Mele 1987). But there remain three distinct sources of self-deception that stem from features of emotions already alluded to.

The first arises from the connection of emotion with bodily changes. There was something right in James's claim that the emotion follows on, rather than causing the voluntary and involuntary bodily changes which are held to express it. Because some of these changes are either directly or indirectly subject to our choices, we are able to pretend or dissimulate emotion. That implies that we can sometimes be caught in our own pretense. Sometimes we identify our emotions by what we feel: and if what we feel has been distorted by a project of deception, then we will misidentify our own emotions.
A second source of self-deception arises from the role of emotions in determining salience among potential objects of attention or concern. Poets have always known that the main effect of love is to redirect attention: when I love, I notice nothing but my beloved, and nothing of his faults. When my love turns to anger I still focus on him, but now attend to a very different set of properties. This suggests one way of controlling or dominating my emotion: think about something else, or think differently about this object (Greenspan 2000). But this carries a risk. It is easier to think of something than to avoid thinking about it; and to many cases of emotional distress only the latter could bring adequate relief. Besides, one is not always able to predict, and therefore to control, the effect that redirected attention might produce. This familiar observation alerts us to the role of the unconscious: if among the associations that are evoked by a given scene are some that I can react to without being aware of them, then I will not always be able to predict my own reactions, even if I have mastered the not altogether trivial task of attending to whatever I choose. Where the unconscious is, self-deception necessarily threatens.
This brings us to the third source of emotional self-deception: the involvement of social norms in the determination of our emotions. This possibility arises in two stages from the admission that there are unconscious motivations for emotions. First, if I am experiencing an emotion that seems altogether inappropriate to its occasion, I will naturally confabulate an explanation for it. A neurotic who is unreasonably angry with his wife because he unconsciously identifies her with his mother will not rest confortably with having no reason for his anger. Instead, he will make one up. Second, the reason he makes up will typically be one that is socially approved (Averill 1982).
If we are self-deceived in our emotional responses, or if some emotional state induces self-deception, this may not be merely a failure of self-knowledge. Many have thought that having certain emotions is an important part of what it is to be a virtuous moral agent. If this is true, then being systematically self-deceived about one's emotions will be a kind of moral failure as well.

 Morality and Emotions

The complexity of emotions and their role in mental life is reflected in the unsettled place they have held in the history of ethics. Often they have been regarded as a dangerous threat to morality and rationality; in the romantic tradition, on the contrary, passions have been placed at the center both of human individuality and of the moral life. This ambivalence is reflected in the close connections between the vocabulary of emotions and that of vices and virtues: envy, spite, jealousy, wrath, and pride are some names of emotions that also refer to common vices. Not coincidentally, some key virtues -- love, compassion, benevolence, and sympathy -- are also names of emotions. (On the other hand, prudence, fortitude and temperance consist largely in the capacity to resist the motivational power of emotions.)

The view that emotions are irrational was eloquently defended by the Epicureans and Stoics. For this reason, these Hellenistic schools pose a particularly interesting challenge for the rest of the Western tradition. The Stoics adapted and made their own the Socratic hypothesis that virtue is nothing else than knowledge, adding the idea that emotions are essentially irrational beliefs. All vice and all suffering is then irrational, and the good life requires the rooting out of all desires and attachments. (As for the third of the major Hellenistic schools, the Skeptics, their view was that it is beliefs as such that were responsible for pain. Hence they recommend the repudiation of opinions of any sort.) All three schools stressed the overarching value of "ataraxia", the absence of disturbance in the soul. Philosophy can then be viewed as therapy, the function of which is to purge emotions from the soul (Nussbaum 1994). In support of this, the Stoics advanced the plausible claim that it is psychologically impossible to keep only nice emotions and give up the nasty ones. For all attachment and all desire, however worthy their objects might seem, entail the capacity for wrenching and destructive negative emotions. Erotic love can bring with it the murderous jealousy of a Medea, and even a commitment to the idea of justice may foster a capacity for destructive anger which is nothing but "furor brevis"-- temporary insanity, in Seneca's arresting phrase. Moreover, the usual objects of our attachment are clearly unworthy of a free human being, since they diminish rather than enhance the autonomy those that endure them.
The Hellenistic philosophers' observations about nasty emotions are not wholly compelling. Surely it is possible to see at least some emotions as having a positive contribution to make to our moral lives, and indeed we have seen that the verdict of cognitive science is that a capacity for normal emotion appears to be a sine qua non for the rational and moral conduct of life. Outside of this intimate but still somewhat mysterious link between the neurological capacity for emotion and rationality, the exact significance of emotions to the moral life will again depend on one's theory of the emotions. Inasmuch as emotions are partly constituted by desires, as some cognitivist theorists maintain, they will, as David Hume contended, help to motivate decent behavior and cement social life. If emotions are perceptions, and can be more or less epistemically adequate to their objects, then emotions may have a further contribution to make to the moral life, depending on what sort of adequacy and what sort of objects are involved. Max Scheler (1954) was the first to suggest that emotions are in effect perceptions of "tertiary qualities" that supervene in the (human) world on facts about social relations, pleasure and pain, and natural psychological facts, a suggestion recently elaborated by Tappolet (2000).

Taken from my own notes 2013